Page 10 of The Teacher

“Okay guys, who can tell me about what Romeo and Juliet is about?”

Absolute silence greets me as I scan the classroom in front of me, searching for an answer amongst my many students.

Awkward, uncomfortable silence.

“No answer?”

Yep. None.

The group of eleven-year-olds of my English class stare dumbly back at me, their eyes aimless and their attention lacking. Clearly, Romeo and Juliet isn’t as catchy as their Tik Toks and PlayStations. Clearly, their teacher is not as interesting as a streaming gamer on YouTube.

Okay, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

Monday. At school. It’s the first day of trying to teach a class full of bored children the intricacies of one of the finest pieces of literature and it’s already started off on an awkward footing. Great.

So much for eager minds and all that.

No one raises their hand. No one even seems remotely interested in what I’m saying out here in front of them. This is just another stupid class to them, but to me this is Shakespeare.

Shakespeare.

The finest wordsmith to ever live. The man who made me fall in love with the English language and reading and poetry and plays. I want these kids to feel the same passion I do, to change their lives in the same way mine was changed when I first read the man’s work.

I know what I have to do. I’ve got to juice this up, make it appealing to the Snapchat generation.

Do your thing, Sandy. Be a good teacher.

I take a step forward into the middle of the classroom, just ahead of the whiteboard. All the kids, sitting at their little desks, stare back gormlessly at me.

A captive audience. Literally, they can’t leave.

Time to let my inner actress shine.

Let’s launch into this. Let’s teach them a love of words.

I don’t even hesitate.

“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

Nothing. No response to my Oscar-worthy performance. One girl starts doodling on her notebook. The boy next to her starts to rip his up.

Right, fine, I’m no Judi Dench. I can live with that. Maybe.

“No? Okay, let me try another line,” I say to my bored onlookers. I lift my arms up dramatically like a melodramatic Shakespearean stage actor and bellow out the next few lines. “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake. It’s everything except what it is!”

The loudest applause I get is a cough from someone in the front row. I think it’s Nick, he’s usually always absent due to some cold. I put his cough down to his allergies and not to a deep understanding of Elizabethan playwrights or an appreciation of my dramatic performance. Everyone else looks like they’d rather be in after-school detention than sitting in here listening to their twenty-five-year-old teacher slowly go crazy over lines written four hundred years ago. And who can blame them?

It’s not exactly the life-changing education I thought I’d be giving out as a teacher.

This is hopeless. I’m a terrible teacher. I can’t even raise a laugh at my pathetic acting display.

This is the same classroom where I learned to love Shakespeare nearly a decade ago, and now I’m teaching it in the same space. This is the same school I was sent to for my own education.

Poseidon’s Academy.

One of the most elite schools in the country. Every student has to wear the special uniform of the Academy. Tie and blazers. I can’t believe I get to teach at the same place I used to be a student at. In some ways it’s great, in others it’s strange. There’s a lot of memories in these rooms and hallways.

A lot of memories containing Skipper Deep.