Teachers

Abstract

Teachers Peter Schmitt (bio) for Susie Zurenda Archbishop Curley High School 2nd Period Typing: Mrs. Altman To stop us looking at our hands, still used to hunting and pecking, Mrs. Altman always brandished a pool cue, whacking our knuckles or temples when regrettably we glanced down. She liked to lean in over shoulders, especially boys’—she hadn’t been keen on coeducation—and was known to sometimes drape one enormous breast on each side of a young man’s neck; and routinely alarmed us by showing at our favorite beach in an ill-fitting bikini. And yet to claim that her teaching made little impression on me (apart from my formative skull) would not be at all accurate, for while I’ve never had the skill to type 60 words a minute, still my fingers can find their way around a keyboard (and I don’t look down!), and even to this day [End Page 449] I recite to my own students her line, “When in doubt, put them out”— quotation marks, and how they flank commas and periods (and how we misuse them!). At least I think it’s what she meant, when she, bending over me, in a throaty voice to ensure my comprehending, spoke those words in a low-cut blouse. 3rd Period Math: Mr. Donahue His was the one class you arrived early for, but not for a seat up front: Mr. Donahue, a chain smoker with yellow teeth, was a lisper and a spitter, and could manage, on a good day, trajectories of several feet. “Ith juth math, kidsth!” he’d stop and say, from a cloud of chalk at the board, from which rain would routinely fall. On breaks he’d rush to a closet housing science lab chemicals and light up—or fill up, it seemed. He lived in a lean neighborhood near the Pussycat Theatre and adult bookstores, where cars slowed for men and boys—you do the math. Whose company after hours he kept, though, we couldn’t care less, too intent on torment in ours— [End Page 450] spitballs would return the favor, paper planes ever flattening against the board, and one morning when the waterworks were jetting with particular force, volume only rarely seen, Paul Moschell (nice Jewish boy at a Catholic school), who’d come in after the bell, finally, exasperated, picked up his textbook and held it, open, there in the damp front row, above him like an umbrella. “Goddamnith!” Donahue shouted, and swatted the textbook away, then turned right back to his figures, as if it happened every day. [End Page 451] Peter Schmitt Peter Schmitt is the recipient of the 2012 Julia Peterkin Award in Poetry from Converse College. His several collections of poems include Renewing the Vows. Copyright © 2012 Johns Hopkins University Press