The Ghost of Classes Past

A few weeks ago I had to attend a training session at the university on creating English lessons on iPods for our new high-tech language lab. Meetings are one of the things that we teachers are expected to do without pay, and in our free time. 

In the beginning, I resented this kind of thing, especially because my driving time is two hours round-trip. The meeting inevitably starts a half-hour late, and once it does, everyone begins asking inane questions or sharing past experiences of theirs that are of no benefit whatsoever to anyone else. You end up with a two-hour session that could have been communicated in fifteen minutes or even by email. And as you begin fishing for reasons to leave early, you realize that a few people seem to be enjoying themselves. Like this is the only social interaction they ever have.

Finally, I decided to skip any meeting where I wouldn't personally profit from what was being discussed. Which has been most of them. If input is needed, I send my contribution ahead of time by email, along with my excuses. But when the iPod training was announced, I thought, "Maybe this time I will actually learn something." I made the long drive into town, showing up at the meeting place fifteen minutes late, so as not to be the first person to arrive. I wasn't the first. I was the second. Out of ten.

The other teacher and I hung out for a while until we spotted one of the heads of department, who said that our tech guy and the Mac trainer had gone to lunch at Buffalo Grill and may be a little bit late. An hour later, all ten teachers were sitting around waiting for the missing tech trainers. "I'm not going to smile and say, 'Oh, that's OK'," grumbled Tania. "I'm always too polite. This time when these guys show up I'm going to tell them what I think!" "Me too," I said, trying to show some solidarity.

Long after the scheduled meeting time, the trainers walked in. "Well, you finally made it!" said the head of department to the men as we filed into the training room silently. That wasn't good enough for me. I walked up to one of them and said, "Do you know what time the meeting was supposed to start? You kept us waiting an hour and a half." "But our training classes this morning ran a bit late, and we had to go to lunch!" the sheepish twenty-something boy protested feebly. 

"You had to go for a two-hour lunch at Buffalo Grill? I ate my lunch in the car during my hour's drive here. Couldn't you have just bought a sandwich across the street and started our class on time?" The boy looked at me in shock, as if I had just uttered the most offensive of gastronomic blasphemies, and walked away to skulk behind his computer. "I consider this the height of rudeness!" I called to his retreating figure. He shrugged his shoulders at me, looking surprisingly frightened for an on-the-defense Frenchman. "That's the way to tell him," Tania said, emerging from her hiding place behind me.

I stayed an hour and then drove back to Restigne to pick up Max from school. It had been just enough time to learn one or two new tricks, but certainly not worth wasting half of my precious day-off.

Afterwards, I learned that the guy I had chewed out was the new audio-visual support technician for ours and a few other departments, and the other, older, man was a traveling trainer sent by Apple as part of our purchase of the iPod teaching system. I suspected that the trainer had insisted on being taken out to lunch, and that it probably wasn't our guy's fault at all. Except for the fact that he could have grown a backbone and told the traveling trainer, "No". But he was really young after all, I mused to myself, and I didn't have much of a backbone at work at his age either.

The next week I was in the language lab when the young technician walked in. I gave a polite smile and nodded my head at him as he talked to the lab monitor. Then he made his way over to me. I decided that whatever he said, I had to stand my ground. I wasn't going to be a pushover and apologize. He looked at me uncomfortably and said in French, "Were you a teacher at the University of Blois around three years ago?" "Um, yes...?" I stuttered, completely thrown off. He nodded, gravely, as if confirming his suspicion. "You were my English teacher."

I was speechless. You mean, my students don't drop into a black hole of non-existence as soon as they walk out of my classroom? The thought that they actually went on with their lives after I got through with them was a troubling revelation. And the thought that they could show up years later and be my audio-visual technician was even more disturbing.

"I was?" I finally stammered. "I have so many students, it's hard to remember everyone," I replied feebly, racking my brain for any memory of his face. Was he one of the bad guys I threw out of class? Was he the one I lost my cool with and said, "Are you planning on chatting for the rest of class, or are you going to finally shut up?" drawing laughter and "Oohs!" from the rest of his classmates. No, I had a very slight memory of an extremely shy guy who sat at the back of the class hoping I wouldn't call on him. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least he wasn't stalking me, waiting for his moment of vengeance.

I forgot my grudge, and began chatting with him, congratulating him at landing such a good job right out of university. Now I see him from time to time, and give him a smile and a wave. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't upbraid him again if he made me wait another hour and a half. And he must know that too. Because every time he says, "Bonjour", I see a little glimmer of fear in his eyes. Oh, yes. I've become the scary schoolmarm.