2. Ben
Two weeks into his eighth year of teaching, Ben Rogers felt himself starting to hate the kids already. Through his career there had always been one or two kids that Ben didn’t care for. But this year was different. He had an entire bushel of rotten asshole kids raised by obnoxious sitcoms. Ben was fed up. If he wasn’t being bombarded with paper work from the county dealing with unfair expectations based on the desire of teenagers to learn, he was attending meetings that would require him to shave at least three times to not have a full beard by the time they were done to discuss the new programs sent down from the county that were only slightly different from last year’s programs, but with an entire new lexicon of abbreviations for him and his colleagues to pretend are really important. Ben supposed that every job was like this. The people actually doing the work are always being slowed down by the people that have to justify their non-jobs that paid better than his. High school was really no different from a big corporation in that way.
It wasn’t that Ben really hated all of the kids this year; he knew that deep in his heart it was really only two or three or thirty that truly vexed him, but they were really annoying. That wasn’t really new; what felt different was the inordinate amount of hangers-on and lackeys to those two or three or thirty that wouldn’t be so bad on their own. Unfortunately, the county would not build a high school with three thousand individual classrooms, so the students would have to be grouped in twenty to thirty. Thus insuring a healthy ratio of assholes to toadies for each teaching period. Ben sat at his desk preparing for the next period, 9th grade language arts; he had graded their papers yesterday and had considered driving off the bridge on his way to work this morning. They were awful. The majority of kids couldn’t put together a sentence, never mind an original or interesting thought. Early in his career, he would include creativity into his rubric for grading. This led to lower grades because kids generally just repeated what they heard on television or read on the internet or fashion magazines. He supposed that they learned it from their parents, except for the reading. Very few of Ben’s students would ever admit to have any reading materials in their home. When parents or the odd student would show concern for grades and inquire about the low grade for creativity, he could never understand their confusion. Didn’t they know they were just repeating what the news said or some bumper sticker they read on the ride to school that morning? The grades were so low that Ben had to quit using red pen to grade. All that red on the pages made it look like a crime scene. It wasn’t so much that they made mistakes, it’s that they continued to make the same simple mistakes over and over. It didn’t matter what he taught; his students never seemed to learn or think for that matter. He couldn’t figure out how to make it count for them.
Ben’s students had no problem finding the attention span to play Nintendo for nine hours straight, but they lacked the attention span to listen for five minutes to learn the difference between their, there, and they’re. Ben once asked a special education expert from the county why that was. She told him that the brain released a chemical when it was something enjoyable to the person, and they were able to sustain attention. Ostensibly saying to Ben that kids will pay better attention to things that they enjoy. It was his fault for not playing a kazoo out of his ass while juggling and farting the bass line to ‘All the Small Things,’ which would have been considerably difficult with the kazoo firmly lodged in his rectum, when he was teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet #3’ to ninth graders. Apparently, ninth graders require a clown and penis puppetry show to accept the gift of knowledge. Ben held back pointing out that she was an idiot spouting obvious things; he knew that he would have to sit through a meeting then to justify her job that undoubtedly was on a higher pay grade than his.
It wasn’t just his job that had Ben at odds. He wasn’t sleeping. He would often wake in the middle of the night with a freezing, almost paralyzed sensation in his body. He was awake, but couldn’t move. This had happened to him frequently through the past few months. It wasn’t until last night that Ben had put it together that his night time paralysis had been preceded by the same recurring dream. In his dream, Ben is kneeling on a large covered amphitheater stage in front of a throng of people showered in sunlight. He had that kind of knowledge in a dream where you are not told, but you just know. He knew that they were wearing turbans and screaming things angrily. Not so much at him, but more like to him. Like this would somehow please him. They are going absolutely manic for him. The sun slinks down the horizon and its rays hit him directly, and he rises to reveal gold armor that shines brilliantly. This brings the crowd of turban wearing screamers to a border euphoric swaying and chanting. In his dream he isn’t happy. There is just a stoic look in his eyes that lends itself to a steely resolve that Ben didn’t think he possessed in his semi-coherent waking hours. This dream didn’t exactly upset him; it was more of a comfort. Ben felt that the calm determined face that he held in the cacophony of the crowd was somehow a reaction to the brick wall of teenagers that he tried to coerce into caring about anything other than themselves.
This peculiar lack of sleep led to Ben being up more, and when he was up, he ate. It wasn’t like he was eating full turkey dinners every night, but cookies and leftovers tended to get polished off most nights. This late night binging started to cause him to pudge up. He told his wife that he felt like it was his responsibility as a good husband to gain more weight than his beautiful bride when it came to pregnancy, and so far he has been true to his word. This weight gain affected the two things that were favorite de-stressors sex, and jiu-jitsu. Ben had been a serious martial artist for years. He always liked being athletic, but never felt like he fit in with the meatheads in school. Jiu-jitsu had been an appealing alternative for a teenaged Ben that didn’t really conform to the football team, and he had continued through his twenties. Now, he barely could find the time or effort to go to training once a month. Sex was not verboten with pregnancy, but with his weight gain and his miserable life at school, he and his wife had barely spoken since school started a month ago. With nothing to relax him and little to no sleep, Ben could understand why his work and home life were suffering. He didn’t think he was at a breaking point, but one was definitely around the bend. He was thirty now and finding out that maybe he wasn’t cut out for adult life.
Ben Rogers felt old, tired, and ineffective.