Another Day

Ms. Finch briskly walked to the cafeteria to buy her lunch and tried to avoid thinking about the
busy afternoon ahead of her. In her mind, she scanned her lesson over and over, trying to figure out how
to teach it best. She thought,” Are they really going to pay any attention?” Without realizing it, she had
spoken out loud.Next to her, she heard another voice, “ Of course not, don’t be so naive.” She sighed. Did it have to be Mr. Williamson?“What?” she said, as she muttered a curse under her breath.He responded,” You’ve only been teaching here for a few years, so you’ll eventually learn to not
be so idealistic.” Ms. Finch muttered something in irritation and started to walk in the other direction. She had to give this class a chance, but something had to give.

When she reached class, she immediately checked her email and did not see anything urgent. She started the lesson, as usual, struggling to keep their attention. All of a sudden, there was an announcement on the intercom. She was startled to see that the students were actually listening to the intercom. As she returned her mind to the announcement, the voice boomed,” Shooting threat, stay inside your classrooms until asked to leave.” The students glanced around at each other in fear. Ms. Finch could practically hear the fear in the heavy silence of the room. She should be doing a teacher’s job and trying to help the students feel better. There was no way the students could see Ms.Finch’s doubt, not at this time. Why had she even become a teacher? She could not even control them on a normal day, so how could she keep them calm now? Opening up her computer, Ms. Finch fired off an email, trying to take apart this situation. A normal day was exhausting enough as is. All of a sudden, “Ms.Finch, Ms. Finch, Ms. Finch” echoed from around the room. One of her students walked up to her desk and asked,” Ms.Finch, what do we do? What is the shooting threat?” Of course, she had to pull herself together. The student looked at her and repeated her question.

Ms. Finch worked up the courage to open her mouth and said,” Absolutely nothing to worry about, Kate. Go on back to your seat and work.” The student nodded unconvincingly and walked back to her desk. The thud of Kate’s shoes reminded Ms. Finch of her own mental tightrope walk. As she floundered in her thoughts, a notification on her computer brought her back to reality. The email mentioned an online threat and that students would be supervised until it was determined that it was safe. She relayed the message to her students and put her head down on her desk in exhaustion. Her shoes were worn and dusty, and her dress was a wrinkled purple. She shook her head and stood up. It didn’t help if the teacher was scared. Hesitantly she said,” Kids, time to work on a project” and on cue, the expected groan and irritated expressions came.

Continuing to speak, she shared the details of the project, including coloring and what work to show. The students got to work slowly, and she thought she should scold them. However, she understood that projects were normal, and being normal was very hard at this moment. Looking around the classroom, she realized that everyone was shuffling around in boredom and trying to avoid work. She pleaded with her students,” Work as much as you can, we’ll be out of here soon.” The kids clearly didn’t believe her, and she could practically hear the eye rolls around the room. They always found something irritating about an assignment, but this was less than usual for some reason. Maybe the students just wanted to keep themselves busy. Over the course of 10 minutes, they settled themselves into the assignment, and a veil of silence descended upon the room. Knowing her students though, she knew it would lift very soon. Listening to the absence of noise was unnerving, and eventually, one of her most reliable class clowns stepped in to fill the empty space. He whispered something to his friend and that friend laughed out loud. It sounded like someone had rung a very resonant bell in a library. All of the other students glanced up and stared at that student until he looked down to avoid their glances. A ping sound came from near her, and lo and behold, she had received a text message. All her relatives were wishing her a happy birthday. Laughing bitterly to herself, she thought,” It’s just been a wonderful birthday hasn’t it?”

Finally, she received an email informing her of the threat. Ms.Finch summarized the content of the email to the students. All of this trouble was because of an ill-advised social media post, which was honestly slightly annoying. She stood up to speak to the students,” Kids, you can go to your final class in an hour.” She settled back down to her self-pity and started to respond to all those congratulatory birthday messages with the same over-enthusiastic thank you. Time seemed to pass faster than she thought. She didn’t deserve this special day, not when she was failing at doing her job and helping her family. She couldn’t earn the respect of her students no matter how much she tried. To make things worse, she felt rather lonely in the suffocating apartment she shared with her cat. Her students continued to work away half-heartedly with an extremely close eye on the clock. An hour later, the students filed out of her room, with their multicolored backpacks and bouncy sneakers. For the first time in a while, she felt that she at least did not give up at the first sight of another miserable mishap in her life. She sighed in relief and sipped her coffee as her throbbing headache slowly eased. As the final bell rang, the hallways seemed to echo back two soothing words: Happy Birthday!