Brad Shurmantine lives in Napa, Ca., where he writes, reads, naps, and tends three gardens (sand, water, vegetable), seven chickens, two cats, and two bee hives. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in Mud Season Review, Loch Raven Review, and Catamaran; his poetry in Third Wednesday, Delta Poetry Review, and Blue Lake Review. He backpacks in the Sierras, travels when he can, and prefers George Eliot to Charles Dickens, or almost anyone. Website: bradshurmantine.com.
Different Drummer
by Brad Shurmantine
No one asked questions when he routinely asked, Does anyone have a question? No one came after school for extra help, though Gary constantly reminded his tenth graders he was available. But one morning Sarah, a quiet girl who sat somewhere in the middle of her row, came up after class and said she needed help with her essay. Gary hadn’t yet formed an impression of Sarah, but once or twice he had felt her eyes drilling into him.
“Come at lunch,” he told her. “I’ll be happy to help you.”
That day he hurried through lunch in his classroom, his eyes constantly shifting to the door. He was beginning to think she might have stood him up when she appeared. She hesitated in the doorway. “Come on in,” he told her, in his hearty teacher voice. He was genuinely glad to see her, to feel needed. She left the door open so he didn’t have to mention that.
He seated himself in a student desk opposite her and re-read the comments he had made on her rough draft, an interpretation of All Quiet on the Western Front, which the class had just finished reading, or pretending to read. She studied him with her dark eyes and waited for him to speak. Sarah was one of his honors kids who usually smiled at his jokes and seemed to get it. She was on track, coasting along, quite possibly headed for UC Berkeley. Her essay was nothing special, but she demonstrated what she was asked to demonstrate; if she fixed the mechanics and elaborated a little it would earn a solid “B”. And he liked her. She was bright and respectful and never caused a distraction, never jammed the smooth-working machinery of his class.
Gary gave her feedback on how she could revise her thesis, deepen her ideas, move the essay into the “A” range, but while he talked he noticed Sarah wasn’t completely with him. Her eyes darted around and she shifted restlessly in her desk. Eventually she stood and moved to the window as he attempted to draw her attention to the many sentence fragments disfiguring her writing.
“Sarah, where are you going? We’re not done. I want to talk to you about these sentence fragments.”
“That’s OK. I’m not interested in that.”
“You’re not interested?” Her flippancy irritated Gary. He felt bushwhacked once again by a student’s indifference. “You make the same mistake over and over, and I can show you how to fix it, but you’re not interested?” She stared blankly back at him. “OK. Are we done then?”
Sarah turned away and looked out the window. Then she swiveled around and faced him, as if she had made a decision. “Not really. I’ve been wanting to ask you about this book you made us read.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know why we read it. What was the point?”
Gary had heard and answered this question so many times he was instantly annoyed. “I told you. It’s a classic of western literature. It’s an important book for Americans to read. If more of us read it, maybe we wouldn’t get into so many wars. We’re a very warlike country, you know.”
“I know that, Mr. Daniels.” Sarah snapped at him. “I know very well we’re a warlike country. My brother died three years ago, in Somalia. He was a Ranger.”
The revelation punctured his annoyance. “I didn’t know that, Sarah. I’m very sorry.”
“You wouldn’t know that. It was big news at the time, local hero, but everyone’s forgotten. No one talks about it anymore.”
Gary suddenly remembered a lunchtime conversation in the department office. Teachers were talking about the military recruiters walking around campus, and someone said something about a student they snagged who died in Mogadishu. “I think I did hear about one of our students killed in combat. That was your brother?”
“That was Tim. Famous graduate. He wasn’t an honors student. He was a football player, and a hellraiser. He was way older than me but he was a great brother. I really loved him. He was the star of the football team in my eyes, and when he joined the army I was proud. I gave a speech about him in fourth grade. So, Mr. Daniels, you think if my brother had been in your class and read this book he would have joined the army?”
Her question unsettled him. Gary frequently wondered whether he was making a difference in his students’ lives. It was a scab on his heart he kept picking at.
Sarah had wandered around the room as she spoke and now stood behind Gary’s desk, looking up at one of the posters he had pinned to the wall. Thoreau gazed sternly down at the class, advising them, If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
“I have no idea, Sarah. He probably did read it. Lots of teachers teach it.”
Sarah laughed harshly. “He didn’t read it. Most kids don’t read these books, not even in our class. We get the notes. We pass around the movie.” Then she softened a little. “I read the book, just so you know.”
Gary felt exposed. He hitched up his metaphoric pants. “I’m aware kids don’t read. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All I can do is give kids the opportunity to learn. If they throw it away, that’s on them.”
“What did you want us to learn, Mr. Daniels? That war is bad? That the military sucks? Was that your big plan?”
“Sarah, why are you so angry? I don’t have a big plan, other than to get you guys to think.”
“But we don’t think, Mr. Daniels. You think. You think for us.”
She had moved behind the teacher lectern and stood there, surveying the empty desks. Gary felt acutely under attack. She had hit him in a soft spot, her punch had landed, but he stifled the impulse to lash out at her. He settled back in the cramped desk to hear her out.
“This book… this book… has devastated me. All I do is cry, because Paul is Tim, Paul’s my brother. But then I come to class. Every day it’s the same thing. You start off summarizing what we were supposed to read the night before, and then you ask some questions, and when nobody has anything to say, except Stacy of course, you start answering your own questions. You say very interesting things, Mr. Daniels. You’ve obviously given this book a lot of thought. And I see what you’re trying to do. How you’re trying to open our eyes, change our minds. You’re no Kantorek, that’s for sure. Except, really, you are.”
Gary was listening quietly, recognizing the hard truth of her words, but this shook him and he challenged her. “You think I’m like Kantorek, Sarah? I’m cheerleading for the military?”
“Well, two kids in our class, Brandon and Monica, are already talking about the academies, snagging one of those nominations, what classes they need. They take good notes and know just how to answer the questions that will be on the test. They’ll write just what you want them to write. Like this essay. My essay sucks, it’s awful, I hated writing it, and do you know why? I was forcing myself to write what you wanted me to write. You told us to write an essay about how war ‘dehumanized’ Paul. My brother wasn’t dehumanized, Mr. Daniels. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, excuse me. He was never more alive and happy than when he was a Ranger, with all his buddies. You didn’t know him. Dehumanized. I don’t want to write about your bullshit.”
The girl’s anger stung. The feeling he had somehow betrayed her, let her down, began spreading like a fungal stain in his heart.
“What do you want to write about, Sarah?”
“Something that matters. Like his mother. You called her a stock character, and we whipped right through that chapter. It didn’t seem to interest you much, how she grieved for her son before he was even dead. Just a weepy old woman. But she felt everything, and she kept it inside. She let Paul live his life, and she let him die. She didn’t argue with him, tell him he was dehumanized. I want to write about a mother’s grief. My grief.”
“Of course you can write about that, Sarah.” Gary didn’t know where this was going. He just wanted to help this girl, who seemed like a runaway train. Slow her down, keep her from jumping this track she was on. He had a sudden, familiar intimation that he had never been more than a station manager, keeping the lobby tidy and the clock wound. Not a teacher. How many times had he pushed those thoughts down, swallowed them like bile?
“Or that graveyard scene. It took me a day to read that chapter. Those men, those boys, crawling into caskets for protection, pushing corpses out of the way. That’s pretty much how Tim died. He was killed during a mortar attack. Bombs raining down on him. The paper said he was a hero but he was just blown up. I want to write about that too. He was a hero, but not because he died. He was my hero. He paid attention to me. He loved picking me up when I was a kid, and blowing raspberries on my neck, but he always put me right down when I struggled.”
“Sarah, you don’t have to write what I assigned. We’ll figure out something you can do.”
“Just tell me why you assigned it.”
“I’ve told you, Sarah. Every time I give you guys an assignment I tell you why. This is what you’ll have to do in college. I’m trying to prepare you for that.” Like a goddamn station manager, he thought. Make sure you don’t miss your connection.
Sarah scoffed. “Who says I’m going to college? Of course I’m going to college, but I’m not going to take any English classes. I’m going to be a doctor, Mr. Daniels. Here’s some news for you: I’m going to be a doctor, and then I’m going to join the military. I’m not worried about my literature classes. I’m worried about organic chemistry.”
I don’t know these kids, Gary realized. Not one damn thing about them. How can I teach them like I’ve always taught them?
“Yeah, I’m going to patch up all the kids slaughtered in all the wars this fucking country wages all over the world. I’m going to save all the Tims. All the Tims who sit in all the classrooms and are told what to think and spit it back out. It’s not just you, Mr. Daniels. It’s everyone. You sit up at the front of the class and tell us the answers and we bubble them in. It’s all just a big machine. We’re all processed and packaged and shipped off to Wall Street or Mogadishu.” The fight had gone out of her. She seemed overwhelmed by the future awaiting her.
Gary glanced up at the clock: five minutes until the bell rang. Five minutes to pull this girl out of the fire. And his career—pull that out of the fire too. While Sarah talked she had paced nervously around the classroom and now stood again beneath Thoreau’s humorless face. He hears a different drummer. Not the drums of war, or the bell that startled them every fifty minutes and caused the kids to rise like zombies and file from the room, resurrected. Sarah wanted to hear a different music. He must help her hear it, somehow.
“Sarah, sit down. Come over here and sit down. We’ve only got a few minutes to figure this out.” The girl hesitated but made her way back to the seat opposite Gary. He waited until she had settled herself and locked her eyes on his. She was spent, but her eyes were still angry.
“I have no doubt you’re going to be a doctor. But you have to go to college for that, and college is worse than high school. In college you’ll have to do all the shit I’m making you do, even more of it, and do it well. You can’t become a doctor unless you can write an interpretive essay.”
“That sucks.”
“Maybe it sucks but that’s the way it is.” Gary knew he was right about this. He didn’t like the system, but he could teach kids how to work it. He had something real to offer them, if he could find a way to get them to take it.
“Writing essays isn’t that hard, Sarah. It’s easier than what you’ll have to do when you have a man’s severed leg in your hands. You’re angry with me. Well I get angry too, when I see the crappy essays you guys turn in.”
“We have to want to do it, Mr. Daniels. We just don’t want to.”
“But you want to write about Paul’s mother, right? Or heroes, what makes a hero? Those aren’t the choices I gave you. Somehow you wiggled out of my web and found your own choices.”
A glimmer of light dawned in her eyes, and she sat up a little straighter. “So what do I do?”
“You ask yourself a question about the book that matters to you, and try to answer it. That’s all I was trying to get you to do.” He considered where he had gone wrong, how he had lost her. “The problem was the questions. They weren’t your questions. They were mine.”
It was about helping kids discover their own questions. He didn’t know how to do that. Until now he had worked, and worked hard, on presenting his subject matter so lucidly and thoroughly it would penetrate the densest skulls, like rain sinking into a dry savannah. He had engineered his lessons to break down the crust of their little brains, his lectures showering down and pooling up, creating a fervid swamp where tadpoles darted about and snakes slithered through the muck until ideas emerged to crawl and walk hunched over and then upright. The teachers he most admired when he was a student had been like that, and they had reached him. But he wasn’t reaching Sarah.
She sat looking inward, turning over what he said, while he continued feeling his way down the dark path opening before him.
“Sarah, the question has to be a good one. The questions are the hardest part. Think of one. Come back tomorrow and we’ll take a look at it.”
“I’ll come back this afternoon. Will you be here?”
“Oh I’ll be here. They don’t let me leave this place until 3:15.”
Gary never left at 3:15. He had too much work to do. But many of his colleagues were raring to go at the end of the contractual work day. Plenty of times he had bitterly observed them streaming from their buildings, queuing up in the faculty parking lot. Like the goddamn pits at Le Mans.
Sarah stood to leave, then paused. “I don’t want to write a boring essay, Mr. Daniels.”
“Then don’t be boring. Write from your heart.”
The bell rang, startling them from their brief moment of communion. Sarah smiled softly, and left the room. Gary looked up at the ceiling and slowly exhaled. His eyes traveled across the room and landed on Thoreau’s scowling visage. Thoreau was his hero, and he felt a great weariness, a sinking sense of failure, that he couldn’t figure this thing out, how to teach. Sarah had shown him a way, and he’d claw in that direction for a while. It might work for her, but would it work for others?
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Sarah’s brother heard military marches, John Phillip Sousa. Who was Gary to criticize or scorn those sounds? Every kid had to find their own music, and he had to get out of their way, teach them to listen. They had no questions because he never taught them how.
And the music a real teacher steps to, what was that? He had strained to hear it, but he could not pierce through the Top 40 Hit Parade constantly assaulting his ears. The way everyone taught. The lecture notes, worksheets, writing assignments stuffed into manilla folders and passed around at lunch. They all did the same things. They tried to help each other, but they were really, each one, alone.
Gary sat in the silence that followed the horrible bell and fought to listen.
Copyright 2024 by Brad Shurmantine