Sit Down and Shut Up by Cinque Henderson

Author:Cinque Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CROSSING THE RUBICON

I went home to my mother’s house for Christmas. I was starting to feel that I’d made a terrible mistake—that in just a few weeks I’d be a full-time teacher, completely responsible for a classroom of tenth-graders at Countee Cullen, and I simply wasn’t prepared. I’d never thought of teaching full time when I first started subbing: rather, my intent was rising early a few days a week as a way to force me to better organize my life. But something had happened in the process. The strange combination of civic duty my parents instilled in me, my natural curiosity and concern for the world I was being increasingly drawn into, and, frankly, the fact that I enjoyed teaching (even on days I was royally cursed out, provided those days were few and far between) had brought me to the point where I’d be the sole person in charge of guiding a roomful of gems, knuckleheads, and assholes in a tenth-grade World History class for at least three months. All I wanted to do was back out, but it was too late.

At home, eating my mother’s food and sleeping on my mother’s couch, I asked her advice from a lifetime of teaching. She was happy to know I too was teaching now, even though I had kept from her the worst of what I’d experienced. I didn’t want to worry her too much. She had always encouraged me to be a teacher, but I was not nearly as excited about it as she. Schools had changed since she had worked full time in the high school I went to as a kid, and she certainly had a sense that things were not what they once were. Even in the rural South things were getting out of hand, and my mother had gotten out before it got too bad. I asked her why she had wanted to be a teacher in the first place: it was her teacher in elementary school where her father had been the school custodian. After school was over and all the kids went home, my mother stayed behind to help him clean, wiping down her classmates’ desks, washing the chalkboards, sweeping the floors. She’d had a reading disability as a young girl, and it embarrassed her to be the only child taken out of the class each day to get the help she needed to improve. Then one day her teacher gave her a book called Wings for Per. “I think you’ll like this, dear.” It was based on a true story of a young boy, living high in the mountains of an unnamed European hamlet, who, upon seeing the eagles flying overhead and out to the sea, dreamed, like all children, of one day being able to fly himself. Then war descends on his country, destroying his mountain paradise. As Per escapes by fishing boat and hides from the enemy in the caves high above his village, he vows to return one day and set his tiny village free.

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