Front of the Class by Brad Cohen

Author:Brad Cohen [Cohen, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-57139-9
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

I was still getting by with my work at Camp Alterman when I got a call from a principal who wanted to interview me later that same day. This would be approximately my eighteenth interview.

“Sure,” I said, thankful I was still keeping the suit hanging in my car. I drove out of camp and found a nearby church parking lot where I could change clothes.

By the time I pulled up to the school I was already running through the usual interview questions in my head. How will you work with slow readers? How will you communicate with parents? At this point, I knew the routine so well that the answers spilled out of me on command. Even so, there were now only a few weeks until the school year began, and I still wasn’t any closer to landing my first teaching job.

I always drove to each interview with the air conditioner on full blast, hoping to keep from showing up looking rumpled. Mid-August in Georgia can be stifling. Still, no matter how hard I tried to remind myself of the importance of appearing relaxed, I knew that desperation is hard to camouflage.

When I arrived for the interview, my tics were especially rough. As I turned off the ignition, I chomped down hard, and from deep in my diaphragm came a loud “Fa … fa!”

I kept extra pens in the car, as biting on a pen sometimes helps to settle my nerves. So I pulled out a green plastic pen and bit down on the cap. It seemed to help a little and the vocal tics took a pause. There wasn’t any more preparation that could be done. Ready or not, it was time to go inside.

From the moment I entered the building, I realized this school felt different from the others. My first clue was that the hallway was dimly lit. Also, in the summer, schools typically smell of cleaning solvents and fresh paint, but here there was a musty odor. It generally smelled of neglect.

“May I help you?” The secretary smiled at me as I walked to the front desk. She could see I was there for an interview, wearing my winter blue suit in the middle of summer and toting a portfolio bulging with certificates, awards, and newspaper articles.

“Hi. I’m Brad Cohen,” I said in my most confident, upbeat voice. “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with the principal.”

She asked me to take a seat, but as soon as I sat down I knew it was only a matter of time before my everpresent companion would start to act up. And while I could temporarily keep the barking, yipping, and chomping at bay by physically struggling to stifle the tics, by suppressing them while I waited for the interview, there was a real risk that they would explode out of me at some point during my conversation with the principal.

The first yip slipped out as I squirmed in the hard chair, trying to get comfortable. The secretary flinched. She looked around and up at the ceiling, trying to find the source of the noise.

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