Lunch with Teal
With a blue pen in one hand and a green apple slowly turning brown in the other, Summer Teal, English teacher, sighed as she scribbled, “not enough support” through a student’s essay. From underneath her desk, you could see her painted toes wiggle inside a pair of black flip flops. Her pen scratched the paper one last time, and she tossed the essay aside. Only 239 English papers to go.
A student walked in and greeted Teal, to which she replied, “What’s up, Buttercup?” But the cheeriness in Teal’s reply did not match the squinting of her eyes which had not left the words of the next essay. So immersed was Teal in the paper that she didn’t see the student set down her backpack and take out a Cup Noodles.
“Can I use your microwave?” the student asked.
Teal flipped to the next page, her brow furrowing deeper and deeper. “Go right ahead, sweetie!” she chirped.
It was lunchtime but Teal didn’t even realize it. The music from the quad entered her room, almost beckoning her to come outside and join the dancing students. But as she rested her cheek on her hand and bit into the apple once more, the thesis in her hands seemed much more attractive than the beats from outside. Her pen again swept across a page and Teal tossed the essay into the pile. 238 to go.
Another student came in and offered Teal a cinnamon roll. Despite the obvious iffy quality of the roll, Teal excitedly accepted it and asked for another roll, this one for a student who had who had forgotten to bring lunch. The next essay was one and a half pages of illegible writing and ink stains. But Teal bit off a corner of the cinnamon roll and dove right into the paper. At times she nodded her head or tilted it slightly to the right as she marked up the margins with comment after comment. Then the pen scratched the paper one last time. 237 left to grade.
Teal worked through the essays quickly, but read through them as if she had all the time in the world — as if she would never be interrupted. But then she was.
A student walked in asking about a missing assignment on Parent Portal. Immediately, Teal withdrew from her essay and tended to the student. She started a conversation with him (“What’s your hardest class this year?”), and they smiled and laughed and complained and sighed. Teal explained an assignment, then wrote a comment on the essay. She cracked a joke, then tossed the essay aside. Her ability to shift focus from student to essay, then student to essay, was like watching a tennis match, a sort of back-and-forth that captivated the crowd every second.
The stacks of papers on her desk littered the surface from edge to edge. Her lunch — the half-bitten cinnamon roll, the browning green apple, a cup of tea, and two bottles of water — sat among the papers, creating a symmetry between food and work. The desk seemed both messy and organized at the same time.
Again she met with her essays. The two talked and frowned and smiled and sighed. It was either a very good essay or a very bad one. And as she worked through the papers, her expressions morphed, her toes wiggled, her brow furrowed. 236. 235. 234.
Then her phone went off. Teal glanced at the screen, then returned to the essay, but then glanced again and exclaimed a loud “Yes!” Pen in hand, she replied to the message which was from a customer who had ordered 70 handsewn ornaments from Teal and wanted to thank her. (Teal has been running a nonprofit sewing business since 2009.) She smiled and claimed that this message made her whole day. Then she set the phone down and returned to the essay.
Lunch was almost over, but Teal didn’t even realize it. “I just start teaching whenever students come in and sit down,” she joked.
After a few more essays, she looked up at the clock and noted that it was ahead. She turned back to the essay in front of her, jotted down some comments, but then immediately stood up, intending to fix that clock. Soon she was standing on a chair, prying the clock off of the wall. Then she set it to the right time, made a joke about clockholes, and went back to her essays.
The student sitting behind her started talking about an author and a book-signing and tattoos and Teal responded in between the comments she wrote on the essay. The tennis match never stopped. She tossed essay after essay into the pile, took a bite of the cinnamon roll — the apple completely abandoned now — and then heard the bell ring.
Teal looked up at the clock. “Talk about a boring lunch period.”
