We Are All Such Humans Here

Importance is as importance does, and in my case, I wasn’t important at all. The way I lost my job was as muddled as it was all too clear. I could recite poetry, but I wasn’t very good. I taught ninth grade English, and my students were uniformly bored, unhappy, and sporting lousy standardized test scores. But as any right-wing nut job with a podium will tell you: lousy teaching is hardly the reason for a teacher to be fired. Besides, my younger colleagues liked me well enough and maybe appreciated the way in which I made them look good by comparison, and as it turned out, my firing had nothing to do with the classroom. Instead, I got caught, pure and simple, having withdrawn funds from a field trip account, funds that I fully intended to repay but hadn’t quite gotten around to doing so. There were bills, and then there were more. Repayment would have taken some time and money which I didn’t have, and when one of the guidance counselors smelled a rat, my time was finally up. My principal, a kind, grandmotherly sort, gave me the choice: I could resign, or I could go out swinging, in which case, the police would be involved. I’d still be fired, but I’d also suffer the indignity and shame of a criminal record and a loss of my down-the-road pension. I refused union intervention and resigned. But I told Ellen I’d been fired for being a less than satisfactory teacher because the truth was too tawdry and embarrassing to admit.

“Since when do they fire lousy teachers with twenty-plus years of service?” Ellen said when I told her. “You must be the first.”

She was perplexed, and she had an idea that I wasn’t telling her the whole story, and I could tell that she suspected something else, inappropriate touching or sexual innuendo or a dinosaur moment when I might have said something acceptable only in 1986; there were so many crimes I could have committed. But I never gave in, not to her and not to my equally puzzled parents. Maybe my one act of character.