(Before reading this, it's strongly recommended you first read Teaching Her A Lesson by Ice Bear/Svarbardling. The events of this story take place after that one. This story has permission from the original author. All characters are over 18.)
"Hey, long time no see, Mr. C! I thought you quit?" One student (Michael? Mikey?) said as he walked into class.
"No. Just had some... uh... personal matters that took priority. Family business, you know."
"Oh damn. Something happen?" He asked with genuine concern.
"No, no. I mean..." I really should have put more thought into my excuse, "I'd rather not talk about it, if you mind."
"Yeah, no sweat. Well, welcome back."
The only reason I was coming back into this school was that I had run out of sick days. Somewhere around the last Christmas break, I'd decided that teaching just wasn't for me. I didn't know what it was I wanted to do with my life, but I'd had enough of noisy, disobedient children. I'd had enough of 'teaching to the test'. And I'd had enough of this boring, small town where nothing exciting ever happened.
It was the last week of classes. A bad time for a math teacher to be coming back, but whether they had me or the substitute, it was all the same material from the book, the same problems, the same methods. Honestly, if they were going to have math taught in this way, they could program a robot to do it.
That was the longest conversation I had the whole day, not counting the argument I'd gotten into with a Miss Tabitha Hutchings about the proper way to solve Sinusoidal Functions in the AP Calculus class in the middle of the class while I was doing my best to help them review for a Final I hadn't had much of a hand in teaching them.
By the end of the day, I just wanted to pack everything up, get home, and start looking for a new job. If I was being honest, it probably wasn't the school. It was me that was the problem. Sure, I was good at math. I'd graduated with honors. I could talk about the implications of if N = NP for hours. For heaven's sake, I'd wasted a solid three years of my life studying the Fröberg conjecture!
But I was straight up garbage with regards to teaching the subject. I'd just never learned to see the work from their perspective, and when it came to something as dense and unfamiliar as math, that meant that most of my explanations and advice were damn near useless. Of course they'd start to tune me out.
As the students of the day's final class finished filing out of the classroom, there was a buzz in my pocket. I took out the phone and checked the message.
Remember, I need to see you in my office after school.
From Louisa Barbour.
I felt my stomach clench. I'd skipped two weeks of school without giving more of a reason than "I need some time off". I wasn't going to tell them I used that for a vacation down to Florida that ended up with me spending most of my time in the hotel room, followed by another week inside my own house getting caught up on the past fifteen years of video games. Apparently, there was a Baldur's Gate 3 now. And it was using the Fifth edition of Dungeon and Dragons? When the hell was Fourth edition?
But even before the last two weeks it was obvious to me at least how much I'd been phoning it in. Of course the rest of the faculty would notice. Sure, I was going to quit at the end of the year, but the psychological pressure of being fired first wasn't something I was looking forward to. I didn't know why Louisa was handling this, though. Must be a new policy. Or maybe...
"...maybe it's about something else entirely," I muttered to myself as I walked down the emptied out halls.
