The French Teacher

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

“Aujourd’hui, vous allez présenter vos présentations. Vous avez cinq minutes pour lire et étudier vos phrases, d’accord? Alors, allez-y.”

The middle school students understood hardly half of the French, but they still nodded at their teacher. They poured over their notes on how to introduce themselves and how to talk about their birthdays and the things they liked to do, and their lips quivered as they silently repeated to themselves their French sentences over and over again.

“Hey,” one girl whispered to a boy next to her. “I hear he’s going to be here today.”

His face lit up. “Really?”

“Qui parle?! Est-ce que tu voudrais présenter premièrement?”

The students ducked their head down.

“Well, the five minutes I gave you guys to study your sentences are up anyway. Are you guys ready to present?”

Everyone looked away, trying to avoid locking eye contact with their teacher. They knew that whenever their teacher used English, something serious was going to go down.

“Well, before I call on someone, I’d actually like to introduce another person first. A special guest, and some of you may already know him. He’ll be here to listen to your introductions because he wants to get to know you, and after you guys introduce yourselves, he’s going to teach the class.”

The students shot nervous glances to each other. Guests usually meant older adults in business suits, the kinds of people that made them nervous.

“Alright, can our special guest please come out?”

A crash, and then a sudden slam startled the students in their seats. All heads shot to the back corner of the room to investigate the intrusion.

“BONJOUR CLASSE!”

The students stared in awe.

I closed the doors to the closet behind me and marched forward. I stood there, my face beaming, my hands placed on my hips, and the morning sun shining through the blinds against my face. I glanced at Trung, who stood at the front grinning, and then I looked at the students. Their lips slowly curled to a meek, but happy smile.

I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.”



One Week Earlier

2 in the afternoon. Trung stood at the white board readjusting the class agenda while his students slowly trickled through the door and sat at their desks. When he finished, he turned around to see Lilly raising her hand.

“Que voudrais-tu, Lilly?”

“Wasn’t Brian a French major?”

The eighth graders looked up from their notes at the sound of the name. A few seventh graders new to Breakthrough this summer glanced around confused.

“Who’s Brian?”

“He taught at Breakthrough last year!” Lilly answered. “And he taught the year before last one’s too. He was my dance teacher and my crew leader.”

“Yeah, he was my dance teacher too,” another student added. “He was pretty much one of my favorite teachers.”

Trung saw the excited looks on his students’ faces, and he tried to cut them off before this conversation went any farther. “Alright, classe, sortez vos—”

“Remember when he sang Boom Boom Pow at celebration night last year? He said the ‘s’ word!”

Murmurs erupted into excited chatter as students recounted their favorite memories of one of the “coolest” and the least teacher-like teacher from the past two summers. Trung sighed as he dropped his shoulders and leaned up against the whiteboard. He smiled. Damn it Brian, you still somehow manage to cause disruptions even when you don’t teach at Breakthrough anymore.

“Trung, why isn’t Brian back?”

“Yeah, what’s he doing right now?”

“Well...” Trung paused to think up of an excuse. “Brian really wishes that he could’ve been back. Trust me, I talk to him every day, and he’s sad that he couldn’t be here for his third summer. He’s just...he’s really, really busy this summer with...important stuff.”



2:10 in the afternoon. I dragged my shirtless self out of my bed and into my desk chair. I felt like browsing porn on Xtube, so I did. Guy jacks off in the library? ...ew, he’s fat and hairy. Next. Asian man gets it in both holes? ...is that a bald spot on the back of his head? Next. Then I did my thing, wiped up my mess, and crawled back into bed. I needed twenty more minutes.



After all the students departed on school buses at 4 PM, Trung retreated to the staff room to wait for the staff meeting to start. One of this summer’s new teachers approached him to ask a question.

“Hey Trung, who’s Brian?”

“Brian?”

“Yeah, my student Timmy says I remind him of one of last year’s teachers, Brian. Is that a good or bad thing?”

Trung chuckled. “It could be good, it could be bad, it could be both.”

“Speaking of Brian,” Doug, a veteran Breakthrough teacher of three previous years joined in, “Why isn’t he back this year, Trung? I really thought he was going to come back. He should’ve. What’s his sad excuse?”

“Well...” Trung didn’t want to divulge all the reasons in front of a new teacher, so he tried to think of a temporary one to use until he could discuss the actual reasons with Doug later in private.

“He’s just really busy with his studies.”



4:15 PM. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of stale Honey Nut Cheerios and my laptop when I couldn’t believe what I found online: two hundred pages of philosophy. The best philosophy ever, the kind that I could spend all night reading and commit to memory. I read the title of the book to myself out loud, “The Philosophy of...The X-Files. Fuck yes.” I began to read in my head. I would like to say—and, dare I say, want to believe—that the divergent approaches embodied in the characters of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are a bit analogous to those of two giants from the history of philosophy: Plato and Aristotle... This was fucking amazing.