Busy Old Fool, Unruly Sun
he cigarettes helped a little.
Dr. Herbert Sanders always smoked two cigarettes before facing his fourth period class. He knew his Advanced Placement senior English students would never have suspected him of such a vice at his age, and that thought made the last few draws from his second cigarette seem especially pleasurable. Then again, perhaps they would find humor in his cigarette's being an English brand they had never heard of. After all, hadn't they found humor in everything else he did?
Sanders liked to keep the shades pulled down in his classroom. Hamlet was difficult enough without having to deal with the distraction of some ill-mannered student shouting a four-lettered obscenity from the courtyard. A Midsummer's Night Dream elicited not so much as a smile from the seniors. But when Howie Rothman shouted "Sanders blows!" from the courtyard, the class howled for five minutes. Now even on the sunniest days, the windows remained closed and the shades down.
Herbert Sanders felt like the butt of some enormous joke whose punchline he never could understand. Several weeks earlier there were giggles from the back of the room when he had read Othello's accusation to Desdemona just before the Moor strangles her. Jason Rossi had mumbled something about wondering if Othello were bald also. Giggles again last month when several students had walked past the snapshot of Emily on his desk. Not one of them had bothered to ask about how his wife's surgery had gone after her most recent hip operation. He had told the seniors he would be absent for a week, and all Joel Robbins had asked was whether that meant Friday's test would be canceled. That remark had brought on more giggles.
He thought briefly of Emily and her suffering. So much pain, while he was in Room 215 playing straight man. What did his fourth period see in him that was so damned funny? Where was the humor in a man trying to earn a living so that he could relieve some of his wife's pain?
Maybe Herbert Sanders, like Romeo, was simply fortune's fool. Maybe his story, like Macbeth's, was just another tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Whether his life of humiliation had been meant to be or not to be was a question for another day. He dismissed his thoughts as much ado about nothing.
He had scheduled the Julius Caesar test today. That meant he wouldn't have to force another Shakespeare lesson on his students and watch that glazed look come over their eyes.
"Eight months with these kids," Herbert thought as he straightened his tie. "Eight months in the same classroom, five days a week, forty-five minutes a day. And I feel like a complete stranger to them." He took one long draw from his cigarette and patted it out just as the bell rang. Fourth period had arrived.
Few students had been seated when he entered his classroom, but as if on cue, each found his seat within seconds. A thick silence filled Room 215 as soon as Dr. Sanders walked into it. Fortunately no one had tampered with the window shades today, and each had remained down. The windows were down too and the room felt a bit musty, but that was a small price to pay for some peace and quiet.
"Clear your desks, please."
He kept his instructions simple and concise, for Herbert Sanders did not believe in wasting words. He passed several neatly stacked piles of examination questions down each row. "Do not turn your examination paper over until I instruct you to so."
No giggles this time. Good.
The senior class began its test. Herbert had made sure that his first test question would challenge their understanding of Julius Caesar to the limit.
"Explain Cassius' comment to Brutus, and how it relates to Cassius' character when he says to him 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. ' "
Herbert had always believed that if one had mastered the Shakespearean quotation, then one had unlocked the secrets of the universe. As a testimonial to this belief, posters of the playwright covered the walls of Herbert Sanders' classroom. Each poster contained a quotation from the immortal Bard that unlocked another secret.
Years ago Herbert would have taken this time to scan the classroom like a walking radar system that never failed to detect those eyes that wandered where they did not belong. But after close to thirty years of teaching, he had developed a distant early warning system that was just as infallible in detecting student cheaters. Without fully looking up from his paperwork as he sat behind his desk, he knew by the practically invisible-to-the-naked-eye movement of Joseph Robbins' head that he had caught another one.
"Robbins! Joseph Robbins!"
The boy had the look a deer might get when caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Herbert said nothing, just curled his index finger at him in a motion that meant the time had come to receive his punishment. The long-haired senior sheepishly approached the teacher's desk.
"Paper, please."
Best to do it quickly, Herbert thought, as he crunched the boy's paper into a neat wad and dropped it into the wastepaper basket alongside his desk. He recorded a zero in red ink into his grade book and told Joseph to take his seat without once looking him in the eye. Nor had Herbert looked at any of his other students today, and that thought suddenly made him feel uncomfortable. He felt the sudden need to look at the faces belonging to the names in his records book. He looked up at his class and studied the faces struggling to comprehend whether Brutus was, indeed, such an honorable man.
Herbert's radar system detected something different this time. Yet it had also been there for a long time. It was something he had chosen not to notice in the darkness of a classroom where the sun never shone. Herbert felt that, somewhere deep inside, he had always known what it was. It lurked in the eyes of his students, behind the politeness of their responses to him in class. It hid in the corners of their mouths, mouths that seemed always on the verge of breaking out into uproarious laughter. It was most palpable on report card days when the silence fell heavily in his classroom and lingered. And on test days, like today . . .
Herbert Sanders considered the punchline to the mysterious joke that had been shared by three decades of students who had sat in his classroom. He had seen their opinions of him scrawled on their desks, and he had heard them whispered under their breaths and shouted through the window from the courtyard outside. The realization took a moment to register as it spelled itself out on the chalkboard of his mind. Suddenly, there it was in big, bold letters . . .
Dr. Herbert Sanders knew with absolute certainty that his students hated him.
Great Birnam Wood had finally come to Dunsinane Hill. The time had come for Macbeth to draw his sword on Macduff.
Sanders rose from behind his desk, and stepped out in front of it.
"Put down your pens . . . Stop writing . . . "
The words came out almost against his will, perhaps because they had always been there impatiently waiting to be spoken. Although he looked directly at his class, he seemed as if he were looking past it.
"Stop writing . . . please." He seemed to struggle with his next words. They seemed directed more to some unseen Hamlet's ghost than toward the class, and he mumbled the words as if he had been unaware that he had been speaking at all. The forced smile he attempted became a sneer. And in that moment something inside Herbert Sanders went snap.
Someone giggled nervously from the back of the classroom, but the muffled laughter abruptly stopped when Dr. Sanders stepped forward to Charlene Dampling's seat. He looked down at her with an expression that was more smirk than smile. Although he spoke only to her, he spoke loudly enough for even those in the back row to hear.
"You, Charlene . . . I imagine your opionion of me hasn't improved with the call I made to your parents last week. The one they told me would keep you grounded all this month? Isn't that correct, Charlene?"
Charlene stared vacantly back at him. Perhaps she was being diplomatic. Or perhaps she had remembered her borderline average in Dr. Sanders' class.
"And you, Harry . . . I'm sure you haven't forgotten the three football games you didn't play because of that talk I had with Coach McCafferty?"
Harry Guthrie smiled back at Dr. Sanders like a kid from the special ed group. But then Harry always had that same idiot grin on his face.
"And the rest of you . . . for detentions spent copying something as meaningless as Hamlet's soliloquy on the folly of his existence . . . For the humiliations you endured in my futile attempts to awaken your sleeping minds in the presence of your colleagues . . . For the moments of supreme torture I inflicted upon you in my erroneous belief that this course might matter enough that it could stir the gray matter in your heads which passes for brains . . . "
"Herbert Sanders, you are an old fool, " he thought. "You have spent your life tossing pearls to swine. "
For all these years he had been like Shakespeare's King Lear trying to outshout the storm. And so it seemed appropriate that he speak Lear's words aloud to thirty uncomprehending students.
"'How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.'"
Thirty students gawked back at him in confusion.
Herbert felt very faint. Opening the windows had suddenly become the most important thing in the world. He needed air and he needed to see the sun. He snapped each window shade so loudly several students flinched in their seats, opening the windows as high as each would go. Sunshine washed over the classroom, and Herbert closed his eyes to feel its warmth. A breeze blew several papers from his desk, but Herbert made no attempt to pick them up.
Below in the courtyard, a group of students on their lunch break enjoyed their moment in the sunshine. Herbert Sanders listened to their laughter, and he envied them. They would have laughed at Lear's storm, not tried to shout it out of existence.
"'Busy old fool, unruly sun . . .'" he whispered. Like that idiot orb in the sky he had gone through the same meaningless paces every working day of his life.
Herbert turned and walked ghost-like past the students' desks to the back of the room. He reached for the poster that showed a smitten Romeo extending an outstretched arm to his Juliet as he stood below her balcony. Turning to his class, he whispered, more to himself than to anyone seated before him. "'Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!'"
For a moment he had the strange impulse to rip the poster from the wall and tear it to shreds. Instead, Herbert carefully removed the staples with his fingernail and neatly rolled the poster into a long tube.
He walked over to Melissa Duncan, a pretty bespectacled girl who had consistently received A's in every one of her tests, and who sat in her seat mouse-like for eight months without once raising her hand.
"For you, Miss Duncan," Herbert said in a voice barely above a whisper. "'Fair and wise is she; the heavens such grace did lend her.'" He placed the rolled-up poster on her desk.
Melissa Duncan looked at Herbert, looked down at the poster, and looked up at Herbert again. For the first time in eight months, although it lasted for only a moment, Herbert saw Melissa Duncan attempt a smile.
Joel Robbins made a sudden move as if his seat had been lined with hot coals, but instead he limited his movement to an uncomfortable squirm.
Sanders walked over to the poster showing the agonized faces of Lord and Lady Macbeth, whose souls had waged war upon themselves. "'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly,'" he muttered, and again he carefully removed the poster from the wall. But it was not a clean tear and a piece of Macbeth's torn crown still clung to the wall. Sanders stood for a moment looking at it as if it held some secret meaning for him.
He walked over to Joel Robbins' desk and placed the poster before him. Joel looked down at it as if Herbert had placed a snake in front of him.
"'Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat.' Don't bother to write it down, Mr. Robbins. Just think about it."
He walked to the other posters and pulled each one down, leaving them in heaps upon the floor in the back of the room.
"A little gift from me to each of you. You may want to choose among these carefully. For myself, class, 'I will instruct my sorrows to be proud.'"
Not one student moved as he left the posters in heaps on the floor all around the room. The entire class seemed frozen in their seats, but he paid them little notice. The thought of them seated there with their mouths open afraid to look at him gave him a strange sense of satisfaction.
He kept that image in his mind when he left his students sitting behind their Julius Caesar tests and, without taking his briefcase, walked out the door. He took only a few steps before he stopped and turned to listen for the roar of laughter he felt sure was coming. He waited for an entire minute outside the door, but the laughter never came.
Herbert closed his eyes, and for a moment he could have sworn he heard the faint sound of heavy paper being unraveled.
. . . the sound of his students retrieving the posters he had left for them.
"'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?'" he whispered. If Bill Shakespeare had no answer, then Herbert Sanders was not foolish enough to search for one.
"Class dismissed," he whispered softly, looking at the open doorway to his classroom.
Dr. Herbert Sanders turned his back on Room 215 and disappeared down the hallway.
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