work | Thornfield Hall

There is always bad coffee in the teachers break room.

Impulsiveness runs in the family.

One of us (a man) quit his job and moved to California when he did not get the promotion he wanted. It’s a sad story: he never got another full-time job, but worked as an adjunct and at a varety of other part-time job jobs.

California is expensive – and, my God, there are wildfires, getting worse all the time – so he lived in a run-down ranch house, basically a shack, in need of paint, a new roof, electric wiring, and “extensive remodeling.” Should one live in a yurt instead, or move back to Nebraska, where it is cheap? One good thing happened: he started to write poetry.

I, too, am impulsive. There was the year I swore I would quit my job if Clinton were elected. (I’m a Democrat.) Nobody took me seriously. They thought I was joking about workplace burn-out.

I was completely in earnest. During a poetry reading I had been recruited to work at a posh prep school. Really. These things happened to me. Poetry readings, coffeehouses, 10K races: these are the places where intellectuals persuade you to take bad jobs.

At this school, I encountered full-scale sexual harassment for the first time. I don’t mean flirtatious colleagues. Among my teacher friends there were flirtatious Latino men, who were kind, helpful, and not in the least threatening. They were good guys.

But three nasty boys dominated one of my classes, among them a football star on a scholarship. During a unit on Ovid, I gave them a writing assignment to retell a myth, setting it any time or place, with dialogue.

I read and enjoyed the papers on the bus. I scrawled: “Very creative!” “Brilliant!” “You made me laugh. Thanks!”

Tucked in the bottom of the stack were three horribly obscene papers, myths rewritten in the form of violent rape scenes.

We are not talking Ovid here. Scholars argue about Ovid’s intentions in myths like Daphne and Apollo. Does Apollo try to rape Daphne? An out-of-shape, ridiculous Apollo runs after Daphne begging her to run more slowly so he can catch up. Daphne seems more pissed off than frightened when she prays to her father and begs to be transformed into a tree. She is, after all, an acolyte of Diana. Is it tragic, or wonderful to turn into a laurel tree? The real culprit in this myth was Cupid, who shot an arrow of love at Apollo and an arrow of repulsion at Daphne.

The violent scenes written by these three boys were the stuff of horror movies and aimed at me. I was sickened.

Here’s what happened. The assistant head was indignant and apologetic, and took me into the headmaster’s office. He, too, apologized to me, but took no disciplinary measures against the boys, much to the horror of the assistant. And then a few days later I was called in to the head’s office to talk to the football player’s mother, who did not apologize for her son, but blamed me.

“You shouldn’t have given them that assignment.”

“I didn’t give them that assignment.”

The teachers were horrified. They apologized to me and were shocked that the boys weren’t expelled. And they mentioned a comparable school where students were expelled for lesser crimes than this.

And then I made the mistake of showing the papers to a “friend,” a person I didn’t know very well. She turned immediately frosty. “I hoped you would be happy at this job. Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

“No.” I got up and left.

And then Clinton got elected. I was overjoyed. I quit my job.

An impulsive win!