The Death Of A Teacher
And what it taught me about Empathy
--
It’s late spring, 2008. I’m a senior. I’m sitting at my desk in Mr. Orin’s 5th-period Zoology class, trying my best not to inhale through my nose. The room smells of dissected dogfish, as it has since February. It’s a pungent, sulfurous smell, which, in it’s emanation, vibes probably unintentionally well with the room’s faded brown walls.
The desk I’m sitting in — a front row job selected specifically for me, by Mr. Orin — is an ergonomic nightmare: obtuse, unforgiving, uncooperative. As I shift my weight, searching in vain for a sitting-position that’s pain-free, I take time to scan the rest of the students, curious as to whether they’re as bored as I am. They are, although a few seem more than bored — as in, they look depressed, faces slack, eye sockets drooping, dogs who’ve lost hope their owners are coming home.
“Mr. Moore please turn back around.”
I do as I’m told; things are tense right now. Every ten seconds or so, the silence that Mr. Orin has forced upon the class is spliced by a faint, light-red BEEP, like that of a smoke alarm that needs new batteries. Despite 10 minutes of persistent questioning, Mr. Orin has still not been able to locate its source.
“I need to know who hid the device that is beeping, and where it is,” Mr. Orin says, again, visibly perturbed. He’s leaning against his desk at the front of the class, his face a worn catcher’s mitt, one big wrinkle. He has his arms crossed expectantly before his chest — which is hollow, I’m quite certain, his chest is, save possibly for cobwebs and pennies and cracker jacks.
Crickets.
“If I don’t find out where it is,” Mr. Orin cautions. “We won’t be taking this test.”
Again, nothing. Mr. Orin hasn’t yet seemed to grasp that not taking a test doesn’t quite qualify as a viable deterrent.
“I don’t care — ”
BEEP!
Mr. Orin inhales deeply, pursing his lips.
The sound is coming from the ceiling. I know this because, roughly 10 minutes earlier, when Mr. Orin’d left the room to go get the scantrons for the tests, I’d decided it would be a good idea to stand up on my desk, gently lift up one of the grey, mineral fiber ceiling tiles, and tenderly flip the cell phone I’d found at lunch roughly five feet in the direction of the middle of the class. The phone had been preset, ingeniously, to emit that faint but thorough beep every ten seconds.
I’d thought it would be funny.
“I’ll say it one more time. We won’t be taking this test until someone acts like an adult, remembers that the world doesn’t revolve around them, and realizes that their actions are stupid and immature and are hurting everyone else in this — ”
BEEP!
Once it becomes clear that no one will fess up, and because the final exam must be taken, Mr. Orin phones in the vice principal and surrenders control of his class. The students file out one by one to go take the assessment in the gym.
The room smells of dissected dogfish
Mr. Orin watches everyone leave from the lonely perch of his desk, against which he still leans, arms still crossed. For most of the students, as they leave, he offers an apathetic smile, accompanied by a thinly wounded “good luck.” The students know the luck is being offered not just for the assessment they’re about to take, but for the life they’ll be stepping into, after high school, as this is the last day of class, and so most are appreciative, and some are even apologetic. It’s a relatively important “good luck,” so far as “good lucks” go.
As I make my way out of the room, however, Mr. Orin offers me no sort of perfunctory gesture. Instead he stands, shuffles to block my path, and locks eyes with me in a way that reminds me why it’s called eye contact. My stomach drops — that sharp interruption of intestinal confidence. I stop walking. I manage to retain the eye contact, but I’m unnervingly conscious of how much I’m blinking. A few seconds pass. No words. Then something weird happens: our contact morphs into something more like connection, and between us there forms an invisible tunnel, a clear, twisting cylinder of ocular communication. Through this Mr. Orin informs me, silently, that he knows it was me who put the cell phone in the ceiling; and, moreover, that he resents me for how big of a douche bag I’ve been in his class this year. The sentiment is unmistakable. I register it very clearly. More seconds pass. More silence. I can feel my brain working over this new information, neurons firing, approaching something like awareness. At the same time, though, my stomach is twisting and coiling, filling up with battery acid.
Eventually, I drop my eyes and leave without a word, too scared to talk, just wanting very much for the twisting and coiling to stop.
I never see Mr. Orin again. And I don’t feel guilty about either my trick with the cell phone or my behavior in Mr. Orin’s class until I graduate college and in some sick twist of cosmic justice find myself training to become a first grade teacher. By the following August, 2012, I am in charge of a classroom of about 30 very excitable and energetic six-year-olds.
I do a lot of thinking, and reflecting, that first year of teaching. I think longingly about college, about how much easier life had been back then. I think a lot about my students, about their lives. And I think about the teachers I’d had back when I was in school. Of the teachers I think about, I think about none more often than I do Mr. Orin.
I find thinking about Mr. Orin painful, my memories of his class barbed with shards of guilt that feel unusually sharp. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I try my best all year to ignore it. It’s a strategy that proves semi-sustainable up until the summer, when I return home to my parent’s house in California for the summer break. I walk through the front door and plop myself down on the couch, ready for some hard-earned relaxation. It’s then that I hear the news from my mother: Mr. Orin, my 5th period Zoology teacher, has died. He’s shot himself.
For weeks after learning of his death, I was haunted by the memory of my last afternoon in Mr. Orin’s classroom. I’d close my eyes, just for a second, and there I was: surrounded by the brown walls, the dogfish smell, standing before Mr. Orin’s disappointed face. All of it so vivid, the regret in high resolution. A kind of noxious despair would bloom to life in my gut, accompanied by a certainty that I was, irredeemably and inconclusively, a bad person. I’d always thought of myself as a good person, someone who tried doing the right thing, and who apologized and repented upon realizing I hadn’t. But I’d been an asshole to Mr. Orin, and I’d never apologized nor come close to repenting.
One thing that’s become clear to me, as I’ve drifted further and further away from the day I heard about Mr. Orin’s death, is the importance of thinking and behaving empathetically. I equate it now to simply being a good person. In this way, empathy feels like the most important thing.
Mr. Orin, in some ways, singlehandedly impressed upon me the importance of empathy. Ever since he died I’ve tried practicing empathy more consciously in my own life.
It became clear to me early on that empathizing with other people — working to understand their perspective or interpretation of things — is difficult. This is because empathizing is a skill, and like all skills, your ability only improves with practice. I disliked Mr. Orin when I was a student because I thought he was an unreasonable and somewhat mean teacher, but I had absolutely no understanding of what being a teacher was actually like. Nor did I try to acquire such an understanding. Not once that year did I stop to think about what Mr. Orin’s life might be like, why he might not have appreciated the jokes I made in class, why he sometimes seemed impatient. I had no appreciation for empathy, nor did I possess any kind of conscious ability to empathize.
As soon as I did, I realized how fucking awful I’d been. And I resolved to never think or act so solipsistically again.
Did you enjoy this story? Please consider clicking the little heart so more people can see it :)
