new year, new revelations

I was nervous about going into school today. For the past two years, I have had crazy schedules. When I say crazy, I mean CRAZY. Last year, I began the year teaching Japanese for a month. For the record, I don't know Japanese. I was so excited about the new year that I didn't want it to be ruined with news that I'd be teaching, oh I don't know, home economics, in four different classrooms. (Yes, for the past two years, I have also had to rotate between five different classrooms for the five periods I teach. With three minutes in between classes, there's no need to go to the gym to get your cardio in when you're hauling a projector, books, binders and lessons up and down a flight of stairs in a race to get to your classroom before your students).

So I get to school, and I find out YES! YES! YES! I'm teaching ALL high school English! And in one room! Cue the score! Joy! I take the napkin my principal has written my schedule out for me on, grab a donut with another napkin and run up to my room. And I find....Room 307.

Ms. Bell, who had 307 the past 8 years, is a hoarder. Have you heard of that story of the two brothers who lived in a brownstone and who filled it up with stuff so thoroughly that they only had tiny hallways in between mountains of stuff, and that one day, something shifted, I don't know, maybe one of the 14 pianos they had buried, and they were killed when everything collapsed in on them. This is Ms. Bell's room. You pull off a poster, and there are three more layers of posters underneath. She had walls, literal walls, of stacks of photocopies. On top of each stack sat a stuffed animal. I filled a 10 gallon trash bag full of stuffed animals. On top of the back book shelf lay six layers of t-shirts as decoration. Not a total of 6 t-shirts, but 6 layers of t-shirts. I don't think the windows had ever been opened because each time you picked up a poster or a t-shirt or a stuffed animal, a mushroom cloud of dust burst into the air. And it was my job to clean it all up.

Of course, when I finally get my own room, this is the one I get. The bigger question? Everyone knew about Ms. Bell's room. EVERYONE. What they didn't know? Every single time I complained about not having books last year, it turns out Ms. Bell was to blame. There are more books in her room than we have the library, because she's stolen them. There are more books stacked and piled and hidden by t-shirts than there are in the book room. The 50 copies of Hamlet I bought myself last year? She had 40 copies. That's when I got mad. Not at the fact I had to clean out her insane room. That I found over 400 books that had never been read, whose front cover had never been even opened. At first she was the old lady in Absalom, Absalom! hidden in her room for the past decade, hoarding nicknacks and stuffed animals and magazines and photocopies. Now she was the reason why our students come back saying they're not prepared for college reading because they never read any novels during the year.

Why was she allowed to stay?

I needed a bottle of wine.