When Your Teacher Waits Tables: Go Rams!

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Scott City High School Class of ‘07 was a graduating class of about 60 people. There had been more of us starting out. But naturally, some decided to uphold the long-held family tradition of dropping out. I blame the local radio station that could never let go of the 70s. Twenty-eight years after its release, Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ just rang too hot in my colleagues’ ears. 

Scott City High School would have been more aptly named Scott City School. Drop the high. It was, after all, just one school. On one end, you started at the kindergarten and elementary school. Then, there was the middle school in the middle, and the high school, conveniently on the other end. It was built like a timeline. Those of us that attended from kindergarten through 12th grade got to spend all 13 years in the same building, just moving a little further down the hall each year.

Many people loathe high school from the depths of their formerly zit-covered souls but I quite enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong, I would never go back to the torment so innocently named ‘adolescence’. But I had to be an adolescent no matter where I was and that wasn’t my school’s fault.

The fact that Scott City School was not sitting atop pillars of academic excellence was part of its charm. As long as you had a pulse and stuck around, they would let you don the cap and gown. I knew a kid that missed 40 days his senior year and I’ll be damned if they didn’t give that absent S.O.B. a diploma. 

I did a little traveling as a teacher. And of all the institutions I worked in, I never found an establishment as loosey-goosey with children’s education as Scott City School. From public schools at the end of the earth in Patagonian Chile to a one-room schoolroom in the jungly Talamanca mountain range of Costa Rica—I always found myself looking at the curriculum like, “Damn, two language electives and your teacher has a MASTERS?! Must be nice.” 

There was just no money at the little hillbilly school in SC. None of the funds floated down the Mississippi River our way.

We spent Chemistry watching the CSI series. For American History (a college-credit course, mind you) we watched good ol’ Denzel Washington in his 1989 hit, “Glory”. Great movie. I would know, I saw it three times that year. In current events, we got a copy of the day’s local paper and we were simply expected to sit there and read it. Most of us napped. 

I learned some things, though. My teachers for math, biology, English literature, and art were young enough that they hadn’t thrown in the towel, yet. They were still motivated by the hope of getting a job at a better school after serving their time with us. 

One of these standout rookies, Mrs. Brown, taught a creative writing class. The moment I fell into her plastic chairs, I was in love. We did standup and improv; wrote eccentric poetry with newspaper clippings; and analyzed the lyrics by our favorite bands as if they were Tennyson or Chaucer. She let me and a couple of friends present our final group project as a script that we acted out and recorded on a hand-held video camera, and she played the video for our classmates. The script didn’t make much sense. It was something about a witch that was eating teens in the woods. And before you think we ripped off the Blair Witch Project, you must know that the witch’s character was actually a homeless person—plot twist—and my character’s name was Bulbasaur. But it didn’t matter that it stunk to dweeby teenage heaven. We had a blast on a school project and our silly creativity was rewarded with a good grade. 

I was always an English lit nerd that enjoyed the delicious torture of iambic pentameter and ye olde English. But for my comrades that didn’t aspire to memorize a Lady Macbeth soliloquy, Mrs. Brown validated modern music, movies, and TV series as the creative labors they are. She made writing and literature accessible to students that had a distaste for both. 

But don’t let me fool you into thinking that she was some kind of love-the-children beatnik. Mrs. Brown was also an uptight disciplinarian dressed like your stereotypical, conservative-but-sweet kindergarten teacher. She had a happy trigger finger that was quick to pull the plug on the fun stuff and quickly insert all the soul-sucking tasks that high schoolers hate as soon as we acted out. She had ‘go to the office’ ready in the chamber. 

But I adored her. She encouraged me to join the speech and debate team where she teamed me up with a young man that was my polar opposite and potential nemesis. I couldn’t decide if I would kill this loudmouth jock before or after suffering total humiliation in our first debate. The topic was multilateral diplomacy. The debate team was my first dance with real research. I identified as the artsy-fartsy, angsty grunge teen. I was an immature, pissed-off poet that watched the Simpsons, read Silvia Plath, and listened to Sonic Youth. What business did I have researching and debating bilateral vs multilateral diplomacy? To my surprise, Mrs. Brown brought us home on bus after bus with trophy after trophy in hand. She expanded my identity. I was now an outspoken researcher and a decorated force for logic (still angsty, though). I also learned my debate partner was a hell of a guy.

And her mission to inspire kept injecting me with hit after hit of self-esteem-boosting surprises. 

Mrs. Brown labored over my poetry, essays, and short stories as if she were on a mission from HarperCollins. She filled the margins with praise and notes as if the assignment I whipped up over the weekend were the next New York Times bestseller.

She entered my writing in contests that I sometimes won! 

She recommended books she thought would speak to my 17-year-old soul regardless of an R rating. 

Have you ever had a person that believed in you? Do you know what that kind of encouragement, support, and love does to your self-esteem? 

She meant the world to me.

—

A few years after graduating high school, I ran into one of my old high school teachers and we started catching up. I asked if she knew anything about Mrs. Brown and how she was doing. 

I was expecting to hear, “Pregnant with her second baby and she’s begun a theatre program!” 

But instead…

“Oh, Caitlan. You haven’t heard? She’s no longer at Scott City. She got fired. Rumor is it was some kind of drug addiction. I think it was bath salts?! An awful mess. All very sudden. I heard she’s divorced and her husband got the kid.” 

I was too confused to continue the conversation. I felt as if I had just heard a rumor about myself. Why would anybody say such nasty things about me? 

We said our polite goodbyes. I was clenching my jaw. My head throbbed out the excuse, “this damn small town and the fucking gossip that gets so out of control”. I refused to believe it.

—

About a year after that, I’m at a greasy diner with a friend from the university getting cheap coffee and a BLT. When the server approaches, it’s Mrs. Brown. 

Does she being here confirm the rumor? If the rumor is true, what does that mean for the part of me that she built? 

I panic but there is nowhere to run in a booth. 

She acts like she doesn’t recognize me.  

And I act like I don’t recognize her. 

But it’s impossible that we don’t know each other. She looks exactly the same if not better. She doesn’t look like a Florida bath-salts-bender mugshot. 

The curt communication, tension, and refusal to make eye contact indicate that we both know that we both know.

We’re being polite but it’s torture. Why am I treating her like this? Why is she treating me like this? What the hell is this?! She isn’t my ex! Rod Serling must have been in a corner by the counter, looking at a camera and narrating, “Two people that have spent countless hours together are about to cross paths in a diner and act like total strangers while making wild assumptions about one another. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

It was as if she knew the rumor had reached me. What emotion aside from shame would keep her from approaching me with a smile and a hug? Why else would she be weird about having a different job? For all I knew, it was a second job. Many teachers have second jobs! (insert USA chant, here). There is nothing inherently shameful about waiting tables. Hell, I was a server at another shitty diner when this happened. That couldn’t be the reason I received the Artic’s coldest shoulder. 

But if that’s what she was thinking, she was right. The rumor had reached me. And even if I hadn’t believed it, I was starting to.

Have you ever had someone that once encouraged, supported, and loved you… suddenly act like they didn’t know you? Do you know what that does to your self-esteem? 

—

But was it really the part about being ignored that upset me? I doubt it. I’m not that good of a person. There had to be something selfish and shallow to it. 

I think I was more upset that the rumor could have been true. Something about your hero serving you a sandwich in cold silence (shrouded in a cloud of rumors) will crap all over your rose-colored memories. It made everything feel like a lie and my frail identity as a creative even more fraudulent. 

Compliments from my teacher meant something. But compliments from a dope fiend server meant shit. That’s how delicate my self-esteem was. 

Yes, I hear myself. It was gross to feel that way. I was young and dumb and taking it personally. Who was I to judge? My family tree has more addicts than leaves. I would walk out of there and into my restaurant job where I would crack jokes with my stoner work friends without batting an eye. My good friend seated across the table, sipping coffee and eating fries, was a former user turned educator!  

Let’s not even get into my own shadowy youth and its romp in the hay with recreational narcotics.  

I was a hypocrite. But you can understand. Everybody has sex but they don’t wanna know their mom does it.

I still felt betrayed. I grew up surrounded by addiction in our speck of a town: aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, friends’ family members, and even my softball coach. Et tu, Brown? My education and the teachers that encouraged me gave me hope I could break free from the grip of the vices I had been bred for. But seeing her there, everything she had given me, including my hopes for a better life and ‘being somebody’ was sucked away. 

I sank into the seat and tried to make myself small. 

I explained to my friend why I was being weird and she listened with raised eyebrows. We would normally sit there for hours, downing multiple cups of coffee, shooting the shit, contemplating the cosmos, and discussing how our imaginary meaningful work was going to change the world. But I couldn’t stand the thought of Mrs. Brown returning to the table repeatedly to fill our mugs. I was reminded of where I came from and how hard it was to escape. How can you talk bright futures when a more likely fate keeps coming back in an apron? 

We ate, left a generous tip, and I sprinted to the door. 

—

The experience haunts me to this day. But no longer for the same reason. Now, it’s because I can’t believe I treated a friend like shit on my shoe, based on a rumor. I mean, Christ, if it was true, she probably just had a rough year in her late 20s! Heroes make mistakes.

I let my own insecurities get in the way of reconnecting with a woman that meant so much to me—and maybe when she needed kindness the most. I wish I would have acted happy to see her. I wish I would have smiled, looked her in the eye, and said her name. A simple, ‘how have you been?’ would have been enough. I could have even introduced her to my friend. If the rumors were true, they had a lot in common, just in a different order.

Mrs. Brown, if you ever read this, I’m sorry I believed a rumor. And even if there were a tiny bit of truth to it, I don’t care if you once did lines of coke off the Pope’s asscheeks. That doesn’t take away from everything you gave me. I am eternally grateful! And the next time I see you, even if you are on trial for murder, I will acknowledge that I know you and you did great things for me.