Fall 2008

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September

by Michael Ernest Sweet

September is a predictable month, at least for me. This September began like the last five. Someone asked, “How old are you?” – 28. Someone else asked, “Are you married?” – No. And then it happened all over again in the next class. No, I am not a student, I’m a teacher. For ten months some thirty adolescents and I call room 3222 home. There are no other adults, no colleagues. In this sense, I work alone. Of the four walls, two are painted in a dull green ready to receive my scrawl, “Mr. Sweet” in chalk. Seven bold letters which remained more than a week before being carefully wiped away making room for Milton and the Mad Hatter. One of the other two walls is windows—four windows, three with blinds and one, the only one that opens, without. In the corner, a wooden desk and chair—uninspiring and cold, its drawers lined with yellow construction paper. On top, nothing but a couple of pencils and an Oxford English Dictionary—tools of my trade. Behind the desk, university degrees hang in the dim glow of a table lamp brought from home to add warmth. In the air, whiffs of freshly sharpened pencils and floor wax. Once again, I’m back in the classroom and it’s the first day of school.

At 8:20 a bell rang, students came in and were amazed that I allowed them to choose their own seats and that they face each other. I try to imagine what I would want as a student and work hard to provide it as a teacher. It’s difficult. There were interruptions from the P.A. as the principal welcomed everyone back, and as he did, I realized that I was indeed back, once again. And, once again, I wondered if I was in the right place, if I had chosen the right career. Once again, I went through my “first day” of work and all the associated anxieties. I thought of all those years of college and how my former classmates are now in board rooms and BMWs, and about little things too, like how they have phones and computers, ergonomic chairs and business cards. I do not. I considered also how they have one “first day” of work and then are freed from these anxious deliberations. I am not. Each September I return to begin anew—again.

After school I went to a staff meeting in the same room where I had watched a little out-spoken man retire only two months before. A room where he was granted but a few minutes, while clutching a glass pen holder bearing his name in brass, to sum up fifty years of changing lives. Fifty years! Remembering how I had listened intermittently while trying to imagine myself up there struggling to find words sufficient to end a career, I asked myself, “Is this where I will retire? Is this the room where I will begin and end the next thirty years of my life?”

At 2:45 I, once again, left the building for the first time this school year and began my fifty minute commute home. First, I considered the day’s events and made judgments about the success of my “first day.” Then, as I switched buses my thoughts shifted back to that big question: Have I chosen the right career? I watched people parking SUVs and imagined what that might be like. I saw others dressed in suits and ties made especially for them. Oh, what luxuries life could offer! Finally, as I passed the tree-lined streets of multi-million dollar mansions I will never have, I was reminded of the poem in my wallet. The one I always carry. I remembered how that cocky teenage boy, our soccer captain, flicked it onto my desk one spring day before bolting for the door. How I nearly cried as I read it, silently, in front of my next class. And, once again, I fought back tears as I unfolded the little white paper in front of a dozen fellow commuters and read amid the multilingual chatter of a Montreal bus:

…Thank you for being simply the best!
A passionate teacher, your devotion is rare.
You are the person I most admire,
the person I would most like to be.
You will be a part of all I do,
When I need strength,
I’ll look inside for you…

Finally, the bus stopped and I carefully folded the poem into its original creases and placed it back in my wallet. Reaching the steps of my building, I unlocked the door to my tiny studio apartment in the heart of downtown. But before I went in, I stopped to answer my question. I thought about my friends and their cars, houses and tailor-made suits. I thought of law firms and bank firms, of mahogany desks and glass elevators. I considered the student loans sitting in the mailbox—seemingly part of a teaching life. I thought of my grandmother too and the hundreds of silent teary-eyed former students who lined the street in front of the funeral home to wish her farewell. Then, I felt a little tingle of energy, a slight shiver as I whispered to myself, “I love September!”

Michael Sweet is entering his sixth year of teaching high school English in Montreal. He is the founder of LearningforaCause.org and Poet Laureate for the Monarchist Society of America. Michael has recently been appointed to a three year term with the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.