Mr. Banner sighs as he looks up and down the aisles. Fifteen-year-olds, the boys as big as men and the girls as much trouble as their mothers had been before them.
Mr. Banner is fifty-five and burnt out. With no prospect of other employment, he is doing time until pension day.
It’s the same thing every class. The pupils – he refuses to call them seniors in the modern manner – disrupt: anything rather than try to learn. He turns to the whiteboard and behind him fights break out. Now he faces the class and a dozen arms are shoved up. ‘My calculator doesn’t work’ (she has taken out the battery). This one hasn’t got a pen, that one has no ruler. It takes fifteen minutes to solve these non-problems.
Time is a treadmill that ticks away until at last the class ends.
Mr. Banner is long in the tooth; he knows the problem is not his alone. There is no teacher in the entire school – young or old – who really gets to teach. Why does he bother, why do they bother coming to school? Let them go to work when they are thirteen.
If this were a feel-good TV movie, on the day he retires former pupils would line up to tell Mr. Banner how he has changed their lives. He’ll leave that nonsense to the recruitment commercials on television.
The bell shrills and form 4D rush to the door. There’s a moment of respite until form 3D comes hurtling in.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 