This is a rather lengthy piece and takes a fair amount of time to get into.
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Teacher's Pet
"All right, time's up. Turn in your tests." The four high school seniors who were taking my college credit course in American history had very diverse reactions. The test was a ball buster that wasn't meant to be completed within the two hours they had available to them. Three of the four groaned, hastily scratching out last minute essay answers. The fourth smiled. She had finished her exam ten minutes before and was re-checking the multiple choice. All four of these kids were excellent students, but Landrie Souther was extraordinary.
I knew what the results of the tests would likely be before I graded them; the Stephens twins would land in the mid-to-high "B" range, Jeff Lawton would land anywhere between a "C" and a solid "A" depending on how much weed he'd smoked last night, and Landrie would secure the high A. Landrie had such a substantial GPA lead in her class that she had already been declared valedictorian. These results wouldn't hurt any. It had been the same way from the first time she'd shown up as a transfer her junior year, and I it would undoubtedly continue when she enrolled at Stanford in a few months. It was one of the sadder days of my teaching career because it would end my time with Landrie, who was hands down the best student I'd ever had.
My name is Tyler Stevens, I'm the head of the history teacher at Perry high school. We're a mostly rural district not too far from Kansas City, a mix of farms and new developments built for escapees from the city. We're a very family-oriented community of mostly Protestant farmers and the doctors, accountants, teachers, truckers and grain elevator operators who serve them. My parents and their parents before them taught in the schools here.
I knew I was going to be a teacher from when I was young. When other kids were reading Dr. Seuss, my parents had me reading the Young Americans biographies. They weren't pushy, just enthusiastic. I caught the bug at a young age and kept it all the way through high school and college. In fact, history and cross-country were all I cared about in high school. And girls, of course. I graduated summa cum laude at KU, so I had plenty of offers coming out of college, including a decent graduate assistant position, but I wanted to come home. It wasn't a compromise to me, it was a calling, and a good one.
My ten-year career has been solid, I like to think. The first year was a chrome-plated bitch. Like most good teachers I thought about quitting, but also like those same good teachers, I didn't. I got my masters through KU's remote class system at the end of my fourth year. When old Dolph Reems retired five years ago, I became the history department head and two years ago, I became our cross-country coach. Each of these steps came with a small bump in pay as well. I'm not rich but I I'm comfortable and as a single man have plenty of latitude to do what I want in my free time.
I've always loved competition. Perhaps it was a holdover from my days as a runner or being competitive over grades, but if I was doing something meaningful, I wanted to test myself against others in it. When I inherited the responsibility for the inter-scholastic history team from Dolph it gave those competitive urges a place to flourish. Dolph was good teacher, but at the end of his career he was a tired one. While this was understandable, the team had gone to seed. We had not finished with a top ten finish in years.
Building the team required identifying students who had the ability to compete, getting them interested in competing, and then training them up. As a practical matter the team was limited to seniors, because the test covered both World History and American History and only the seniors had taken both by the end of their junior years. By encouraging new members, working them hard, and cycling out the kids who wouldn't make the necessary commitment of time and energy, we gradually improved our finishes from eighth place in our first year, fourth place in our second, to first place in each of the last three. The trophies in the back of my classroom were a tribute to what those kids had done, and it gave the upcoming kids something to shoot for.
I was building the cross-country team the same way. I'd never led from the back and had never really stopped running, so when I met my guys at 6;00 every morning, they were racing to beat me. When they were lifting for core strength, they were lifting to beat me. So far no one had. We just placed fourth in regionals for the first time in a decade and I have three returning seniors next year, so I expect us to do even better.
My success as a teacher wasn't matched in my personal life. I'm not bitching, believe me. I've got good friends, good colleagues, and a great family and I live in a community where I'm known and respected. But meeting that "certain someone," hell, even meeting that "interesting someone" had proven to be a big challenge.
I dated extensively in college, even to the point of talking about settling down with the girl I was with my junior year. But she had dreams of moving to one of the coasts and pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, and that just wasn't for me. Since becoming a teacher I've dated from time-to-time, but nothing steady has developed. Recently I've pretty much stopped looking. There have been plenty of lonely nights, but I covered for them with ball games at the school, class preparation, and outings with friends and family. I believed that the right woman would come into my life at some point. I still do.
There was always the opportunity for an illicit romance in school. The stories were legend of this coach or that teacher being caught on a date in a nearby town with a student several years their younger, even rumors of teachers trading sex for grades. I understood the temptation of dating a student much more so that the outright sex for grades business. In my view the teacher who'd trade sex for a grade ought to be prosecuted, then gelded. While I understood how they could happen, I felt that a romantic relationship between a teacher and student was a recipe for disaster. The risk was just too great that the student lacked the maturity to have any perspective in the matter, not to mention that if the relationship went sideways it would be the teacher who was blamed and stood to lose his job. And nine times out of ten it was a "him."
There were plenty of students over the years who had shown interest. These very awkward approaches became almost scripted. The girl "stood just a little to close" or "stared just a little too long" in the words of Bonnie Raitt. You could see them scouting out the class as it filtered out, waiting back for a chance to be alone with you, see the incredible anxiety as they approached you, the faltering, awkward words, the blush. My rule was to be kind but firm. I didn't want to send the girl off crying, but I also wanted it to be crystal clear that I wasn't open to a relationship. After the first year or two teaching, I developed a sixth sense for attraction problems coming my way. I quickly developed a "hands off" reputation amongst the students that discouraged these advances. That was just fine with me, at least it was until Landrie's senior year.
Landrie's family moved into our school district from Florida just after she turned eighteen. Her transcript indicated both that she was a fabulous student, and that she was a year older than here peers. Those didn't jive. Students this bright don't get held back, they get advanced. I then learned that her family had worked abroad in the far East when she was very young and that she had contracted some sort of serious wasting tropical disease. They'd licked it with the help of modern medicine, but Landrie had been held back a year because of it.
She was a wicked good student. Not just smart, but diligent, funny, and a subtly strong leader. I use the Socratic method to teach, asking the kids questions concerning the subject matter to put them in the catbird seat of learning and make them responsible for acquiring and holding onto the material. It also helped them learned to speak in public and under pressure, which was an added bonus. I realized about a month after her arrival that, had she wanted, Landrie could have answered every single question I posed. For a short time, she did just that. Then, seeing the rolling eyes and hearing the cat-calls, she came to understand that other students needed to be involved too. So, after a couple of weeks of answering virtually every question asked of the class, Landrie just quit raising her hand, forcing her fellow students to come front and center in the learning process. Once they adjusted, she would pop in from time-to-time and answer the questions too difficult for her peers, or that particularly interested her.
Landrie also happened to be stunningly beautiful. I distinctly remember the first day she walked into my class about a week after we started the school year. Every boy in that class bore a "deer in the headlights" look. She was perhaps no more than 5' 4" with a figure I would describe as more athletic than petite. She had strong tapered legs, a narrow waist that broadened out to a lovely plum-shaped bottom and breasts that were somewhere between a "B" and a "C" in size, but an A+ in shape. She had large green eyes with a hint of occidental shape to them, a pert little nose and full pouty lips. Hers was the kind of face that was so beautiful that it undid you. It was good sport to watch the poor boys in the class as they tried to avoid, often unsuccessfully, tripping over their own tongues in even their most low-key exchanges with her. I had sympathy because I wasn't too far removed from the way they felt.
Right after she transferred in, she approached me and asked to sit for the tests to make the competition interscholastic history team. I had an open-door policy, I told her, but warned that it would be tough for her to make the team because she hadn't taken American History. To my surprise, Landrie easily made the team, making the fourth highest score on the exam without ever having taken any formal course work in American History.
I had Landrie in honors AP American History as a junior, of course. Perhaps it was reaching the magic 18 year so early, but she changed rapidly, as did the way I saw her. Landrie had tried out for and made the cheerleading squad. This was remarkable because cheerleader assignments were won on popularity and looks alone, and while Landrie was gorgeous, she was a complete unknown to our students. She'd won the competition by showing extraordinary skill. Evidently Landrie had trained as a gymnast for years and was just as serious about that as she was her studies. Suddenly, she was "the" girl on campus that everyone wanted to be next to, especially the boys.
