1409: Part 23

The weekend came and went, and with it, time to think.

Kristina had reached an agreement with herself; she would return to school on Monday, stick it out until Parents Evening, and only then decide what to do next. She was trying very hard not to decide beforehand what she was going to do; she was determined that it would be a considered decision, but not one she had made her mind up about days beforehand.

Parents Evening was Thursday; today was Monday. That gave her three full days and most of a fourth to prepare herself and figure out what was going on — whether she could continue surviving the way she had been, or whether it was time to bow out gracefully and try to do something else.

Kristina couldn’t help but see the second option as a failure somehow, but in a long conversation with Maxine, she had learned to at least entertain the possibility that it might, in fact, be the right thing to do. Regardless of whatever sense of “duty” she had; regardless of whether or not it meant that all that time she’d spent training had somehow been wasted; if it was the right thing to do, it was the right thing to do.

But no. She wasn’t going to decide one way or another until after she had made it through Parents Evening, at which point she would make her mind up once and for all, and then try her best at whatever she decided to do next.

It felt like an attainable goal. It was just three and a bit days, after all — perfectly doable.

She stepped into the school grounds on Monday morning feeling oddly positive and detached. She dimly heard a few children jeering at her as they saw her, but she successfully ignored it and walked into the building, through the corridors and down to her classroom.

The room was just as she’d left it. The papers were still on the desk, though in her absence at least the piles hadn’t grown any more. The book of music was still on the piano, so she took a moment and indulged herself in flamboyantly performing a couple of favourite pieces to no-one in particular. She looked at the clock; it was time for the staff briefing, but she didn’t feel like going today. Instead, she just waited for the inevitable.

There was the bell for registration; the gradual calming of the noise outside. There was the second bell for the end of registration; the gradual crescendo of talking, laughing and shouting as the children returned to the hallways of the school, then the diminuendo of them entering the classrooms and beginning their lessons.

She noticed that the noise she expected outside her own door was nowhere to be seen. Where was 7C?

She stood up from the piano and walked outside; no-one was in the open area outside her room. How odd. Had she missed something important?

She returned to her room and rummaged through the papers on her desk. Eventually she found her answer: year 7 was on a field trip today, and as such their normal lessons would not be taking place. All teachers who would normally teach year 7 were expected to be available for cover lessons.

Kristina looked at the date on the memo; it had gone out last week, and had seemingly just got buried amid all the other piles of paper on her desk. Fortunately, it didn’t appear to matter too much; no-one had come to fetch her for cover today, and so she smiled at the prospect of a free period, and resolved to get up to date on marking some of the books she’d neglected for so long.

She’d had good intentions for marking, but had somehow never managed to stick to them. The school had rather exacting standards as to how books should be marked, with particular attention paid to things like spelling and punctuation, and an overly complicated system of marks to denote various things about the things students had written. In her first few weeks, Kristina had stuck to the marking scheme rigorously, but over time had determined that whatever she wrote, whatever she pointed out with her pens — red or green, she’d tried both — it was, more often than not, summarily ignored by students, so much so that there were children in year 9 who were still writing answers to questions in textspeak and completing homework with printouts from Wikipedia.

She opened the first of a stack and sighed at the sight of the owner’s clumsy handwriting and poor spelling. She flicked through the pages, admiring her seeming dedication to the job in the early days of the term, spotting the cut-off point where she’d simply stopped marking books and begun the path she was on now — the path of never being able to get caught up, ever.

She closed the book and returned it to the stack, then returned the stack to its customary spot on the windowsill. Marking had waited this long; it could wait for another day, and besides, the attainment levels for music were so poorly defined that she had proven on several occasions already that she could pretty much make up the results for her students based on what she knew of their personalities and work ethics and still be complimented on her rigorous marking and solid tracking of their attainment — just so long as they didn’t take a random sample of her exercise books, of course.

Oh God, she thought, sitting down at her desk. I really am an unsatisfactory teacher. I can’t be bothered with any of this shit.

But did it matter? That’s what she wasn’t sure of. She still held the somewhat idealistic view that teachers should be people who inspired and imparted knowledge, not people who filled out forms. It shouldn’t matter that she hadn’t used the school’s secret code for showing when someone had misspelled something or failed to put a comma in the right place, because she had it where it counted — she had heart and soul, and she wanted these kids to learn about music.

It wasn’t that simple, of course. Her mind drifted back through numerous lessons, and it naturally fixated on all the times where she’d spent more time shouting at the class than actually imparting knowledge or helping them out. She saw the faces of the few industrious, committed children in even the most unpleasant classes, and worried that they felt disappointed in her.

Then she saw Sian’s face, looking at her supportively. If Sian understood what she was going through, didn’t it follow that other students would too? Not necessarily, she thought, since Sian was a special case; she was far more mature than many of her peers, and she was rare in that she clearly saw her teachers as real people rather than automatons purely designed to make the life of teenagers difficult.

Kristina sighed and laid her head down on the piles of paper on her desk. The positivity with which she had arrived at school this morning was draining out of her by the second, and she was becoming more and more convinced of what her decision would be come the end of Thursday.

Her door opened, and a child she didn’t recognise walked in.

“Miss?” she said. “Um, I think you’re supposed to be covering our class?”

Shit, Kristina said to herself. They must have doled out cover assignments during briefing. Bollocks. Fuck. Shit.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll, uh, be right there. What class is it?”

“8A,” said the girl. “We’re doing Maths.”

“Okay,” said Kristina. “I’m sorry, no-one told me, I…” She stopped herself, realising that the child probably didn’t care, and that the class probably welcomed the fact they had been without a teacher for twenty minutes.

She gathered her things and turned to the girl.

“All right,” she said. “Ready to go.”

“Uh, miss?” said the girl. “Your nose…”

Kristina put her hand to her nose, which she now noticed was feeling a bit strange. When she looked down at her hand, it was covered in blood.

Oh shit, she thought. Great timing. Just perfect.

“Let me get you a tissue,” said the girl, running out of the door.

Kristina tipped her head back and pinched the bridge of her nose, unsure of what else to do; it had been a long time since she’d had a nosebleed, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember how to fix it. When the girl came back, Kristina took the sheet of paper towel from her and held it under her nose. Before long, it was stained a deep crimson with her blood; the girl passed her another as Kristina tossed it aside.

“Can you go to Reception, please,” said Kristina from behind the tissue. “I… don’t think I’m very well. I’m going to need someone else to cover your class.”

“Okay,” said the girl. “Get better soon, Miss.”

Then she was gone.

Eventually the bleeding stopped, and Kristina looked down at the bloody tissue in her hand.

“Nothing is worth this,” she said out loud. “I’ve got to get out of here.”