Damien Galeone

Twice a semester, we have to teach a full Saturday. This day starts at 9 and ends at 5:15 – in teaching hours, it’s ten hours of class.

Saturday is a day for lying back and eating small pieces of fat out of a bag. It’s a day for lazily reading until the vixen of sleep lures you back into her warm, fluish embraces. It’s a day for taking an aimless walk that ends at a place that sells beer. But alas, this Saturday I was forced to be in the ten-hour club.

In terms of the semester, the ten-hour Saturday is like the big boss you have to beat before you can get to your Christmas break. And it’s a doozy.

I arrive in the dark to find notes on my desk and more emails than a decent human deserves on a Saturday. I whimper. My colleague comes walking across the hall with another piece of paper. No doubt I will be observed by the president. He informs me that one of the students will be there online but with no camera.

“He can show up in a Santa Claus costume for all I care.”

“Yes,” he looks back at the note, “but he will be there with no camera.”

My classroom computer needs an update on MS Teams. I attempt this, but my uselessness with technology and computers takes on a Laurel and Hardy aspect when this attempt is made in Czech. I believe at some point I access the Voynich Manuscript. The IT guy shows up and I pop off to the bathroom to let out a quiet stream of expletives that would stun a team of carollers in their path. After my last string of F-bombs, I put on a smile.

“Good morning!” I shout to the students as if I’m Arsenio Hall and these folks respond with laughter and smiles and shouts as if they are, indeed, my Dog Pound. We begin. There’s a little hesitancy. We have to spend 10 hours together and we are sizing each other up. I make some jokes that allow them to decide I am not a local representative of the Gestapo. They eagerly engage in the coursework so that I decide they are not La Résistance. Together, we move forward amid a jungle of collocations and future forms.

The first break comes. The students chat and laugh. I fiddle with an upcoming exercise and count down the minutes to the next class.

Saturday work reminds me of my old bartending days. I worked three nights a week and one day and the money was solid – it couldn’t get better than that. Until, that is, you were walking into work while everyone else was walking out of work. Until, that is, you were going to a place to work where everyone else was going to a place to relax from work. When I began teaching lo so many eons ago, I became one of the day people. I went to bars at night to sit and relax instead of to stand and work. I understood the misery behind the barman’s eye twinkle. And what comes along with being one of the day people is not working on a Saturday. It’s a systems failure.

There is no worse class on this day than the second. The first class is the start – there’s adrenalin; there are tasks like sizing each other up; there is abundance of material; I am new, they are new. The hallmark of the third class is that at the end of it comes lunch – an hour of sitting and not talking. The fourth class is the last class when anything meaningful happens and the fifth class, of course, is the last.

But to get to the third, fourth, and fifth, we must get through the second. You are a castaway who has found a map in a bottle telling you there is a better island nearby and so you are swimming from Island One to Island Two. The second class is the deepwater channel between those islands; the time when you can’t see either island.

In the second class there’s still energy, but it’s lined with terror. We’ve left the safety of class one and we have so much time ahead of us. The students get edgy. I clump them into little groups. The room begins to take on a dank and heavy atmosphere. I sense despair, but there’s a chance it’s just mine. When the tension gets too much, I tell them a funny story about my dog. They explode into laughter. All is reset for a moment. However, with some time left in the class, I press forth with a writing task. They let out a gasp (likely imagined) and look at me as though I have betrayed them (not imagined). I am not their buddy; I am their teacher. We leave silently for the second break, sweat patches stain our underarm areas.

It’s clear now we are not buddies, we are on a lifeboat together. We need to get to the other island. Should I propose fun and games for the rest of the time? Part of me wants to – but it’s the part of me that would be divvied between survivors after a straw drawing: the weak part. No, they need a language leader, someone to deliver them to lunch with little notice of the time and drive forth by task. They muddle back into the room with sheepish eyes and hooded lids.

We accomplish class three with grammar. I barrel forth into it with no hesitation. I am eyeing my sandwich and chips (it’s also Cheat Day). Grammar has clear steps and a context that it must be undertaken within. I provide all. I allow no deviation. The students gnash and wail. A woman cries and holds close a picture of her family. I make her talk about them in the future context. Just when they don’t think they can take it anymore, I do a little error correction and there we are – at lunch!

There’s a picture of everyday, normal people being rescued during WWII. The photo was snapped just as they realized they were walking into the savior arms of the Americans and not the other side. Relief. The pre-onset of joy. These are the faces I see walk out of the classroom to lunch. Had the camera been reversed on the observer, the face would have shown the same twofold.

I eat my sandwich in silence. I eat my chips in silence. Someone nears my door and I see two shadows that in the movies means Anton Chigurh wants his money. I pause mid-chew and stare. The shadows disappear and I wash down my sandwich with a coke. Saturday workday or not, Cheat Day will be observed. My Snickers bar delivers me to a state of pure euphoria.

Which is exploded by class four. The students have been making merry and it’s clear that the hardest thing they have ever done in their lives was muster the energy to come back to class after lunch. They sit.

“I know, I know,” I say. “We’re almost there.”

It is not lost on me that these folks are studying. I am getting paid to be here, they are here because they want to learn. I have respect for them already, but with this revelation I want to walk around and give them fist bumps. I restrain myself.

By the fifth class, the students are no longer speaking English but rather a proto-language that was grunted over mammoth carcasses by warring tribes of early hominins donning furry getups. I too do this. I want to be home with Burke, the dog, the cat, and Shed Danson – our Christmas tree who has been named after his most prolific verb.

When the class ends, the students are out of their seats before the last syllable comes out of my mouth. “Bye” they seem to shout as they trail out of the door in what may be easily referred to as a stampede. I walk down the steps in joy if not blind. I meet Burke at our local bar for some beers before dinner. The bartenders and waiters are yawning their way into their shift, which will end in 5 hours. Oh well, I think, at least I’m not in the Saturday night club anymore.