WILL YOU STILL NEED ME?
He couldn’t make his mind up with the results of the pupils’ questionnaire and his old teacher’s words about ‘the same-old same old’ and ’generation gap’. He was upset that not a single one of the eighty pupils wanted to be like the teachers at their school, or even mentioned any redeeming features. In his heart, he hoped one or two would, but they hadn’t. A few days before the next regular parent’s meeting, he went up to the director’s office and knocked at the door
‘Come in, Andrey Ivanovich, come in, dear,’ the director said in a hospitable voice. She was a self-assured, 40-year old woman trying to look younger than her age. ‘Any good news for me?’ asked she with a winsome smile.
‘Not much… But no news is good news’, he wanted to avoid idle chit-chat like ‘Could I hand out a questionnaire for parents tomorrow? ‘What are you researching? Tell me and I answer all your questions! It’s no use in studying anything! What’s the point in your wasting time?’’ She gave a sarcastic laugh and raised one eyebrow.
‘Here is a rough copy of my questionnaire. Would you have a look later, please?
‘Of course, no problem’, she looked though the questions and shrugged. ‘Is there anything new in here? Okay, leave it as it is. Parents think the school is nothing but a left-luggage office – they check their kids in first thing in the morning and collect them in the afternoon and I’m sure that you’ll come to the same conclusion one day. So, don’t worry about the parents. Enjoy your evening!’
‘I will enjoy it, don’t worry, I’m fine and I’m sure you’re right’, he tried to reassure her, but she’d already looked away as if telling him to go. He left the office and went downstairs to his room to print enough copies of his questionnaire for the evening.
Next morning passed by quickly and he had plenty of routine paperwork to sort out in the afternoon. The evening began with parents coming to the kid’s classrooms and he spoke to most of them. The adults appeared to follow the Director’s description and had that ‘so what’ expression on their faces. Very few of them asked questions, but didn’t react following his answer. He sighed. Two more classes left, both were the fourth year – 4a and 4b. His tie felt tight, so he loosened it. Enthusiastic? He was tired and wasn’t going to fool anyone.
‘Good evening my dear parents,’ he began with just a trace of a smile. ‘Your class is the biggest that I teach with fifteen children in it. I have a son in the school myself and my daughter will start her first year this autumn, so what I will tell you now is as a fellow parent who’s been coming to these meetings for six years. I always hoped, deep down that I’d hear something good about my child. I knew he was lazy simply as he is the same as I was. I knew he didn’t listen in his lessons and that he was stubborn. But I really wanted to hear good things about him, so that I felt good about myself. So, I’m only going to tell you good things about your little ones – if you don’t mind, of course.’ No-one did, but one mother held up a hand and asked, ‘Could you explain why you’ve been learning transcription for so long? All of us learnt English words by heart in three or four lessons and you’ve been teaching them for six weeks, so why has it taken so long?’ she pursed her lips and tossed her head nervously. She was around thirty, with a tight skinned face. He sighed and shook his head slowly. ‘Patience and tolerance’, he thought to himself as the ‘I-know-you-think-you-know-better-than-me-but-let-me-explain’ game began. She pretended to be Mrs. Aggressive; he pretended to be Mr. Polite. He nodded when she made an unnecessary and malicious comment, but he’s used to it by now. However, one more thing attracted his attention. There was a simple conversation between a man and a woman either side of the one he was talking to. Their discussion filled the air between him and his opponent, so he couldn’t help but hear.
‘Galka, do you remember how we learned? I think we were taught Okay as I could communicate with foreigners afterwards. Do you remember the teacher who taught us? She had two children in the school too – two wankers.
‘Yes, the cow!’ she nodded. ‘But she was so demanding and a strict disciplinarian.’
‘Yes, she was. Remember how she shouted at you when you had the cheek to bring in your cat?’ she gave a giggle.
‘Yes, I do! She was cross with me and I didn’t get on too well with her after that’, his memories brought out a little excitement.
‘What was her name?? Odd, I can’t remember…’
‘Me neither, er, no, I can’t, but who cares anyway?
‘She was good, she held us in her grip,’ his eyes shone with excitement, he shook his fist at someone invisible and gave a strange laugh
Whilst their words sank in, Andrey Ivanovich froze for a few seconds and missed the woman’s second question. Those two had ruined his concentration completely. Not that he wanted to stay in his pupil’s memory forever, but he was disappointed by their words. He was ambitious and hoped he did the great job for the kids. Meanwhile the woman was asking him something else and he had to react – finally, his attention recovered. Half an hour later, he left the classroom accompanied by sighs and yawning behind him. These things happen and they happen to teachers as well – he wanted to sit down and have some tea, but the game wasn’t over yet.
There was a man and woman standing in the dimly lit corridor – obviously someone’s parents. They had a look that said they wouldn’t let him get off easily. There was a little girl standing behind him that he didn’t recognize initially. The woman was large and unimpressive, dressed in black and grey knitwear. Her face was more readable – she wanted blood. The skinny man, her husband obviously, didn’t move and kept his head down. Andrey Ivanovich tried to put a pile of A4 paper under his arm and grabbed his jacket with the other hand. That’s why he lost advantage and had to listen to the woman who began to speak first.
‘Andrey Ivanovich, we are Ira Alexandrov’s parents’, she pointed at the girl. ‘We need to talk to you – would you mind?’ she didn’t wait for his reply and the only thing he could do was shrug. ’You probably know that our daughter was absent from school for a long time. We are very ill,’ he stopped himself from smiling. He wondered why all women always say ‘We’ about their family… ‘Our daughter said that you demand she has homework for all of this period. Is this right?’ she added, sharply.
‘Very true’, he answered quickly.
‘But that’s simply not fair’, she boiled with anger.’ I’m also a teacher and I’d never punish my pupils this way’.
‘Nor me’, he said, but the woman didn’t hear him.
‘I’d never do this, so why are you asking for so much from her? I can’t believe it. I’ll bet you’ll be visiting us at home until we finish this school, as we are really ill,’ she was getting really angry now.
‘She’s back at school now’, he said, tiredly, ‘so surely she’s okay now, thankfully’.
‘But you still insist on here doing all this homework?’ she shouted.
‘Yes, I do. Look, last September, your daughter and her classmates were given a test. The result was terrific. She tried to work hard at every lesson she was in, but she was only here six or seven times. So, how do you think she can learn anything?’
‘It doesn’t matter how many times she was here, it’s your attitude that matters!’ the woman cried.
‘Look, if truth be told, she’s not a handful like some of the others. For example, Rychkov or Gagokhiya. She’s a good girl, but I can’t see how she’s doing until she does the homework. They’re really short and easy, so don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, please. Do you understand?’
‘I do, it’s you who doesn’t!’ she didn’t want to calm down. ‘We’ll make you suffer the way our daughter is now!’
‘Okay. Mrs. Alexandrov, do you sit down for a meal every day?’ he asked.
‘What a stupid question, what are you driving at?’ one more odd reply women give. She looked at him sheepishly.
‘Okay, let’s try this another way around. If you’re locked in a room from your first birthday and never spoken to, would you be able to learn from the silence around you?’
‘What are you on about?’ the woman shrugged, annoyed. ‘Can’t you make yourself clearer?’
‘If you think your daughter can be taught English at home, fine, teach her yourself, no problem’, he said.
‘I can’t teach her. Her father learned English at school and it’s his job now’, she nodded towards the man still searching the floor. Suddenly a small shadow appeared from behind her and a weak voice said,
‘Mom, I can learn these limericks and poems. They’re short, so it’s not difficult’.
‘Be quiet!’ her mother said, shortly, ‘you don’t need to do as much because you were ill’, her face changed so many times, he thought that all ‘teaching mothers’ or ‘mothering teachers’ could never treat their children as equally as the other pupils.
‘So, you can give her the highest grade you want then. Why not? And you don’t need to come to the school to talk to me then, right?’ he offered.
’Why aren’t you saying something?’ she asked her husband angrily.
‘Er, I think silence has it’s uses’, the man muttered.
‘Okay, I understand. We’ll arrange a meeting with the director and find another way to solve this problem’, she said in a very ‘matter-of-fact’ tone. ‘I don’t have to stand for this any longer, let’s go’, she barked the command to her family and they disappeared into the darkness.
The day never seemed to end and he just wanted his bed, with a cup of black tea with lemon. After the useless talks and meaningless explanations, sulking and complaints, it was good to think about things like this again.
The following morning was no easier than the previous one, just another nightmare. New instructions from the District Administration arrived and the headmaster decided to make all teachers aware of them during the longest break. She failed, of course. Emotional speeches resulted in emotional feedback, so their break was spoilt and the teachers just went back to their lessons. In the afternoon, he had an after-school club where volunteers learnt to touch type in English. The idea was to see if this could help them learn English on a long-term basis. So, time passed quickly and after the last pupil left, dusk descended and he exhaustedly looked through the window. He had no wish to look through the parent’s tests, let alone enter them for analysis. He shut his laptop down and made his weary way back home.
Two days later, it was Friday and he was in a better mood. He had one lesson off in his timetable, so there was time to type in the parent’s test results, sort them and reach a conclusion. It doesn’t require to be a scientist to do this job quickly. When the spreadsheet was filtered, he saw the results and had to look twice at them. Then, he scrolled up the table and made sure none of the data had changed and there was nothing missing. It was correct. Seven out of fifty parents used English whilst on holiday or elsewhere, only two used it regularly, translating with a dictionary. The formula on the screen appeared cruel – 3.57% used with dictionary and 12.50% on holiday. It meant they didn’t use English – and even didn’t need to - for ten or even twenty years after school. He felt for his mobile, but changed his mind. The bell rang. Talking to Anna Ilyinishna would take a long time and he didn’t want the kids to hear.
At last, the lessons finished. As the bell rang, a girl came up to his desk – it was little Ira Alexandrov.
‘Can you check my work, Andrey Ivanovich?’ she asked in a gentle voice. Her anxious eyes took up most of her face.
‘Sure‘, he said in embarrassment – he didn’t expect she could have done so much, so quickly. ‘What can I do?’ He looked for the homework list sitting somewhere in amongst the books on his desk.
‘I’ve got mine’, she said and handed the unfolded page to him. ‘My father gave it to me and asked that you mark each cell with any comments and sign it, please’, she added. He took the sheet and looked at it. The day before, he’d handed out quite a few of them to each parent. There were yellow marks on hers, made by her parents with a felt-tip pen. He looked up and wanted to question her about it. However, she considered his raised eyebrows as a signal to speak. When finished, she pointed at the first yellow mark and said, ‘Amend this one please’. Whilst doing so, she inhaled deeply and carried on reciting, checking herself. Half an hour later, she cleared seven exercises, one by one. Andrey Ivanovich was nodding, silently. Eventually, the girl finished and sighed with relief.
‘That’s all. My written exercises are in the notebook’, she pushed it towards him. ‘Four so far and I’ll do the rest by the end of next week’. Her thin lips made a fragile smile.
‘How…’, he was about to say ‘the hell’, but stopped himself. ‘How did you manage to do so many?’ he asked with astonishment.
‘My father helped me’, she answered happily. ‘They aren’t long or difficult and we didn’t want to tell my mom about that and decided to give it a try – and it appears to have worked’.
‘It has indeed’, he nodded and caught a glance of the monitor. He had to make sure he didn’t forget to enter her results into the electronic class record. ‘Well done, Irina. Your dad should be proud of you.’
‘He’ll be really pleased’, her face radiated happiness.
‘Like father, like son, but can roll aside farther,’ he said in Russian.
‘Pardon?’ she asked with surprise.
‘Well, there’s a proverb in English that I mixed up with a joke. Basically, when an apple falls from a tree, it doesn’t roll away far from where it lands. Got it?’
‘Not really’, she muttered.
‘Okay, let me explain and make you laugh – then you’ll get it. When I did something wrong, my mother used to say ‘the apple never falls far from the tree’, but the English version is ‘like father, like son’. My mother meant that I was an apple and my father was the apple tree that I fell to the ground from. She wanted to say that I had inherited all the worst habits from my father. I disagreed, of course, and always added ‘it may fall to the ground, but it rolls farther away,’ he saw her smiling with little sparkles in her eyes. ‘You see, you’ve got it now!’ She nodded and he continued, ‘your father learnt English at school but just never used it. Now he wants to help you as much as he can and to achieve more in your life than he has done. It means that he wants you, his apple, to fall to the ground and keep on rolling instead of being stuck where you are. Got it?‘
‘Now I understand’, she replied with a beaming smile.
‘Good’, he looked at the monitor again. There were still two figures – 3.57% and 12.50%. ‘Percentage, percentage’, he mumbled with a forced smile.
‘I’ll do my best to clear everything – 100%’, the girl promised.
’I wish you could get even more’, he said.
‘How could I, Andrey Ivanovich?’ she was shocked. ‘You can’t cheat Maths. Two two’s are four and I can’t get more than 100%, can I?’ she was so serious, he couldn’t argue and smiled. She didn’t know what he was thinking about.
‘OK, you’re right, you can’t Irina. Take your exercise book and run along home. Make your parents proud – and best regards to your father.’
‘Thank you very much, teacher’, she said and left the room. He turned to his laptop and gazed at the two figures.
‘You can’t cheat Maths, or life’, he sighed in silence and pressed the shut-down button out of sheer force of habit. He wanted someone to come in and show him some pity. Suddenly, he felt scared that one day he’ll regret the amount of time wasted in this school looking for something he didn’t really want. He was exhausted and couldn’t guess whether this little girl would break the cycle of ‘we’ve-never-used-the-language-even-though-we-learnt-it’ figures or whether she, or anyone else in his class, would remember his name five or ten years later, let alone twenty or thirty. His brain was about to shut down, when a good old song came to him from deep in his memory:
Will you still need me,
Will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty four?
‘Highly unlikely’, he sighed. The last electric spark flickered and died in his mind. Another day reached its end. Time to go home again.