In the last 10 days, I’ve slept in 5 different hotel rooms, a haunted mansion (long story), a near-stranger’s house (an immensely kind near-stranger), and a boarding school dorm room. In other words, I’m homeless. (At least until Wednesday.) I’ve moved to a new state and started a new job with less than 24 hours notice. It’s been a long week.
Of course it would happen that after the months and months I’ve waited for a job offer—the thousands of miles I’ve traveled, the dozens of hours of interviews, and more false alarms than I want to count—of course I would get two job offers on the same day. And of course that day would be less than a week before school started.
I got an email from one school last Monday to arrange phone and Skype interviews. I got a phone call from the second school on Tuesday. They wanted an in-person interview. “School starts on Monday so…Can you be here tomorrow?” So I packed in an hour then drove the seven hours to Tennessee. I interviewed for half of the next day and then was offered the job. I did a Skype interview that night (at 10:00pm in a hotel room) and was offered another job.
I thought I’d decided, then I changed my mind, then I changed my mind again. I slept some and changed my mind some more. Then on the way home the next morning, I called The Webb School, a boarding school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and told them yes. I got home Thursday afternoon, crammed as much as I could fit in my car, and headed back to Tennessee the next morning. I made it to Bell Buckle with a couple of hours to spare before I had to greet the new students and their parents in my classroom (my classroom!) and act like I knew exactly what I was doing. One parent looked me up and down and said, “And you’ve taught before?” which I think I handled rather well.
This last week has been surreal. I’ve successfully completed my first week as the new 9th grade English teacher. I’ve found an apartment in Murfreesboro, about 30 minutes away, that I get to move into on Wednesday. I know most of my students’ names. (I know fewer of my coworkers’ names.) I’ve been mistaken for the English department chair’s daughter three times. (She’s in 9th grade.)
Bell Buckle, Tennessee, is not the place I ever imagined myself teaching. I imagined myself on the East Coast. I imagined New England in the fall. I imagined snow boots. I imagined a Harry Potter-style dining hall.
I did not imagine fireflies and instantaneous downpours. I imagined an equestrian team, but not being surrounded by more horse farms that I’ve ever seen. I did not imagine a school that believes in “seersucker Thursdays” (only before Labor day, of course) and has a shooting club. I’ve spent the last 7 years almost always having the most southern accent in any classroom. (Which is saying something, seeing as how my accent is maybe a 10th as strong as anyone else’s in my family or hometown). Here I have no accent.
Some things are what I imagined. The students dress formally for class—imagine the Chilton uniform in Gilmore Girls, but with less plaid. We have chapel every day and sing the alma mater in Latin. In my 9th grade class, we’re reading a book that I read in my 12th grade AP class. Tuition costs nearly as much per year as my undergrad tuition. During school breaks, teachers lead student groups on trips to France, Italy, Japan, and Cuba.
For now, I’m trying to plan more than a day ahead and actually read the books before my class does (they already had the reading list before I was hired). And even though it’s not exactly what I imagined, the fireflies are nice. The mountains are nice. The students and faculty are so nice it makes me nervous--I think I've had a dozen strangers offer me a place to stay and help finding an apartment. I had forgotten this level of kindness and hardly know what to do with it. Everything is pretty nice. Being here is pretty nice.
