Miss Terry Consuelo Guerra
As a school teacher, you will simply have to accept that, no matter what you do or say, some students are going to love you, and some students are going to totally hate you. You can’t control that. The only thing you can control is how you feel about them.
She came into my classroom that first day in August, and I knew from the very first glance that she was one of a kind. She was very angular of feature, standing, walking, and sitting in a very stiff and upright posture. She did not bend easily, in body or soul.
She insisted on having a front seat so she could learn, and I had to move one of the other girls who really didn’t care where she sat so that Miss Terry could have a front seat. She was a note-taker who constantly noted practically everything. I think she even noted down some of my jokes in the precise order that they were told. Disorder had no place in her world, and she did not tolerate disorder even from a teacher.
And Miss Terry Consuelo Guerra (not exactly her real name) never smiled and never laughed. So you can guess what my primary objective was whenever I had her intense little face in front of me. She hated it whenever I made her smirk or lose control of a slight giggle. And the few times I ever got a real, unguarded smile out of her, she was absolutely beautiful.
The little raven girl would often snipe at me when she answered in class. She often told me that my discipline was too lax, that the lessons weren’t ordered in a way that was efficient, and that I really wasn’t as funny as I thought. And I didn’t let that get to me. I know from faculty lounge conversations that she often got on the nerves of almost all of her other teachers. But I unconditionally loved her. And I know I got to her more than merely once or twice. If we were keeping score, I was winning. But we were not keeping score, and I let her think she was completely in control of her own education.
Her senior year in high school, she and another girl whom I loved and was also graduating came back to visit my seventh-grade classroom.
“You know, Mr. Beyer, looking back on junior high, of all the teachers I had, your class is really the only one I remember. I liked your class.”
Naomi, the girl who came with her, was also a little shocked by Terry’s pronouncement. But she quickly added, “You were the best teacher we ever had.”
“Well, I don’t know… Yes, I guess you are right,” the raven girl said.
“Thank you, that means a lot coming from you,” I said. “By the way, who are you again?”
Her eyes got wider. “You don’t remember me?”
I laughed. “I tried hard to forget you. But it didn’t work. You are Homero’s little sister. You were one of the best students I ever had, Terry.”
The smile I got from that lame joke was the best one.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
Telling Teacher Stories
Here’s a secret that is only a secret if you are one of the well-over-six-billion people that don’t know I exist; I loved being a public school teacher. I taught for 31 years. 24 years of that was in middle school. I taught more than 1000 different seventh graders. And I loved it.
Please don’t reveal this secret to any mental health professionals. I like my freedom. And I am really not dangerous even after teaching that many seventh graders. I promise.
But it has left me with a compulsion. I confess it is the reason I write humorous young adult novels and why I continue to write this blog. I have to tell teacher stories or I will surely explode.
I have to tell you not only about the normal kids I taught, but the super-brainy mega-nerds I taught, the relatively stupid kids I taught, the honor students, the autistic kids, the kids who loved to sleep in class, the classroom clowns that tried to keep them awake, the kids who loved my class, the kids who hated my class, the times I was a really stupid teacher, the times I achieved some real milestones for some wonderful kids, the kids I still love to this day, the kids I tried really hard to love, but…. (well, some kids not even a mother could love), the drug dealers I had to protect my class from, the kids who talked to me about suicide and abuse and horrible things that still make me cry, the kids I lost along the way, and, well, the list goes on and on but this is an epic run-on sentence and the English teacher inside me is screaming at the moment.
You get the idea. Like most writers… real writers, not hacks and wannabees, I write because I have to. I don’t have a choice. No matter what it costs me. And what do I have to talk about in writing except being a school teacher and the almost infinite lessons that experience taught me?
I loved being the rabbit holding the big pencil in the front of the classroom. And that metaphor means, as crazy as it sounds, I loved being a teacher.
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