How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas

Author:Camille Bordas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

I decided it was time to focus on school and getting smarter. My German had reached a plateau that year. Herr Coffin was less encouraging than he’d been, even though I was still among his best students. One day after class I decided to speak to him directly, ask him if he thought I had what it took to be a German teacher. I’d never talked to any of my teachers one-on-one before, the way my siblings had done since kindergarten. I believed only great students were allowed to stay in the classroom after the bell to chat with teachers while they packed their satchels. I believed details about the day’s lesson were discussed, points of view exchanged, extra reading suggested. But then in junior high I’d started seeing kids even dumber than me linger around after French or math hours. Did they think they were smarter than they were? Why did teachers allow their five-minute break between classes to be wasted on mediocre students? What did they have to say anyway? I’d asked Simone what she thought about this and she’d said that “regular kids” were only interested in talking about themselves, so she assumed the only reason they went to a teacher after hours was to seek advice about their future in a way they believed to be humble but was in fact a conspicuous play for attention, a way to verify they’d been noticed in spite of their lack of academic promise. “Even worse than that,” Simone had said, “they talk to a teacher in the hope that the teacher’s detected something unique about them. They know they suck, but they’ve been told everyone has a purpose in life, so they want to find out what theirs is. They think teachers have the means to decode the particular ways in which a student sucks and make them correspond to a career path the student should engage in. They think their sucking at something automatically indicates they’ll be good at another thing.”

I didn’t think I fell into the category of students Simone had described. I didn’t suck at German, and I was planning to go to Herr Coffin with a reasonable question, not for a pat on the back. I wanted his honest opinion. As I walked toward his desk, though, after everyone else had left the classroom, I became nervous about what Herr Coffin would say. What if I didn’t have what it took to be a German teacher? What else was I remotely good at?

“Herr Coffin,” I started, and I stopped awkwardly right there because I didn’t know if I should address him in German. He spoke French and allowed it in class now sometimes, when we did translation from German texts into our native language, but still. I would make a better impression, given the question I wanted to ask him, if I put it in German. Or would it just sound like I was trying too hard? As far as I knew, no one had ever stayed beyond the bell to talk to him.

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