The Final
The Final
The teacher noticed the boy sitting in the back corner nearest the window hadn’t yet picked up his pencil. Looking at the clock, nearly twenty minutes had passed since he had passed the test booklets out to the class. During those twenty minutes, Mr. Daydreamer sat comfortably at the last window, looking out the window.
The rest of the class heads down, feet on the floor, some crossed, some splayed, others with socks showing where heels had lifted themselves out of the shoes in concentration, but not Mr. Window watcher.
The teacher, getting up from his seat, quietly walked the rows checking the students’ progress. “Fifteen minutes, students, you have fifteen minutes to finish.” He stated in his firm but fair teacher’s voice. While walking up and down the rows of chairs, he noted the sound of pencil on paper. The smell of pencil shavings and perspiration punctuated the tension and silence. Reaching the front of the room, he turned in time to observe the daydreamer pick up his pencil and begin writing relaxedly. Not wanting to disturb the students further, he returned to his desk, silently lowering himself into his chair.
It was Friday afternoon, the end of the day, and not soon enough, the end of the school year. These students would soon be leaving, graduating, and moving on to the lives they dreamed of or deserved. Who knows who will be the winners or losers? Looking up, the clock had ticked off another five minutes.
The tension was accompanied by rising humidity, which penetrated the classroom, and the sun flooded the room. “Students, you have ten minutes. Start wrapping up your thoughts. Go back, recheck your spelling and punctuation, and carefully cross out or erase where necessary.
Several students began to stir in their seats. The scurry of erasures punctuated the room here and there. Sighs and shoulders, backs and legs are being shifted. A few students were furiously writing, turning pages, scurrying to make up for their lack of content. Please write me a joke, or do your best to insult me. I promise to give you a couple of points for creativity, he thought to himself. Thinking over the long hours this weekend, he would be spending correcting these piles of cramped handwritten, some nearly illegible papers, brought on the migraine that had been threatening since early this morning.
Looking up again, “Five minutes until all pencils down.” Mr. Corner Daydreamer was engrossed, without tension or resignation written in his body language. His pencil seemed to skip over the page as the clock ticked down. Growing curious, what could the boy have found to write about staring out that window? An essay on the moral underpinnings of nineteenth-century America wasn’t the most interesting of essay subjects. To keep his students from cheating and sharing the essay question, he had randomly picked one of ten subjects from a box on his desk for each class. He couldn’t face reading, marking, and grading 180 papers, belaboring the same dry, tired question.
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“Time, ladies and Gentlemen. Could you put down your pencils and close your booklets? Grades will be posted on the classroom door on Monday at 8:00 am. For those of you who pass, congratulations on graduating, and good luck on whatever path your lives may take. For those who didn’t pass, I will see you this summer retaking US History.”
The students left their seats and filed out of the room. Several students offered an off-hand goodbye. Two girls hugged him, promising they would miss him, and spoke quietly about how they had enjoyed his class when the classroom had finally emptied.
The teacher walked to the back of the school, contemplating whether to make his way to the teachers’ lounge through the crowded hallway to pick up a cup of coffee before sitting down to the pile of essays waiting to rob him of the coming weekend. Deciding that he wasn’t up to fighting the crowd of students and the smell of gym clothes in paper bags going home for the first time since school began, he started picking up the test booklets. Commencing at the doorway, he worked his way up and down the rows. Without realizing how much he anticipated glimpsing into that last booklet, the daydreamer with the fast pencil’s booklet, as he worked his way to the last seat.
Setting his burden of pamphlets on one of the desks, he wedged himself into the daydreamer’s seat, giving himself a chance to view what the young man had found so fascinating. Looking out the window, he could see nothing of interest at first, then his eye was caught by a pair of pigeons nesting on the ledge hidden from all but this one seat. In the nest, he could see the bare heads of two nestlings. As he watched, one of the parents flew onto the ledge, and two heads instantly became two open mouths, eyes disappearing behind the void leading to their ever-empty stomachs. Watching the adult stuff, whatever baby pigeons eat into the peeping chicks, the teacher forgot the pile of tests waiting to be graded. The pigeons settled with a ruffling of feathers into the nest, the two tiny bald heads hidden in the soft feathers, as his mind returned to the classroom.
His migraine had subsided. Opening the window next to the desk, he took a deep breath. He had forgotten how much he loved the sweet sunshine smell of June. Picking up the booklet before him, he opened the cover page. Written in a relaxed hand, he read. I don’t know what the Eighteenth-century Americans understood. But the Twenty-First-Century Americans have grown to believe that the purpose of life is to work. They have forgotten that the task of life is to live.
The teacher put on his jacket and walked out of the classroom into a new life.
