In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

80 Coach Powell was a light-skinned, middle-aged man with a gravelly voice like low-grade sandpaper. I’d heard he had a proclivity for flirting with the young teachers. At the school’s pre-year retreat, I’d seen him corner a new teacher who’d just graduated from a local college. Powell got two feet from her, lowered his eyes and mumbled something, and she’d smiled and shrugged and backed away. “He creeps me out,” she said to me later and nodded in Powell’s direction. Still, I wanted to like Powell; he undertook the challenge of coaching both football and basketball. Though the swampy football field paid tribute to an era of Southwestern Sabers’ ferocity that had long gone, and though our team was usually under-outfitted and under-conditioned (panting at halftime, their tongues hanging out as Powell preached), Powell’s pursuit of a bona fide athletic program was admirable. Ours was a school building toward which a funeral-parade of teachers’ cars inched up Font Hill just five minutes before the bell rang to begin the day; only ten minutes after the final bell rang, these same teachers would have left right along with the kids if the administration hadn’t enforced a new rule: stay in the building at least ten minutes after school ends. Don’t you teachers have lessons to plan? they asked. Or copies to make? Or something? Among this “not-one-minute-past-I-have-to” atmosphere, Powell stayed late. Well after the other faculty had left, and upon a torn-up field behind the penitentiary-style school, Powell taught his boys football. On the indoor basketball court during winter, he drilled them in lay-ups. During the day, he taught something, though I never knew what. The unknown subject seemed less important to him than his coaching, a priority that was evidenced in his daily attire of swishy athletic pants and matching swishy zip-up jacket. Powell showed up in my doorway one day while I was seated at my desk, planning a lesson. “Hi, Ms. Kirn,” he said in his gravelly voice and smiled. He walked into my room, his each step embellished by the swish of his pants. Chapter 6 Barely Passing barely passing 81 He said he wanted to discuss Marcus Gordon, one of the guys Powell planned on coaching for basketball season. “How often does Marcus come to class, Ms. Kirn?” When the big, broad-shouldered, high-towering stranger named Marcus entered my room for the first time, we were well into the fourth week of school. I was put off by the man-child’s physique. Really? You’re a ninth grader? And really, after a month of school has passed, you’re now my student? He was missing two of his front teeth and wore heavy gold chains around his neck. I led his man-sized body to a desk and wondered if his legs would fit beneath it. As I figured out how to catch a kid up on almost a month’s worth of school, Marcus sat quietly. “You’ve got a lot of work to make up,” I said. “Yeth, ma’am,” he said in a surprisingly high-pitched lisp. But his courtesy was more surprising: people at Southwestern rarely said “ma’am.” “You’re really behind,” I warned. Still, he nodded. He studied the several weeks’ worth of handouts that I gave him and we laid out a plan for catching him up to the rest of the class. “I’m a do my work, Mith Kuhn.” “So he comes to school?” Powell asked. “Sometimes.” “But when he comes, does he do his work? I nodded. “When he comes.” “So then why did you give him an incomplete on his report card?” “Because,” I said, “he missed three straight weeks in a row and many more days after that. And he never makes up what he misses. Actually,” I started wondering why I hadn’t given him an F. “Mathematically, I think he earned a fifty. I was being kind with the Incomplete.” I was still holding out for a mini-miracle, waiting for a flood of Marcus’s “make-up” work to pour gloriously onto my big teacher-desk. “Ms. Kirn,” said Powell, now taking on the condescending tone of some cross-examining TV lawyer. “What do you give a student who never shows up to your class?” This was a good question. It seemed to...

Share