You enter the building from the parking lot. It is 3:30 and all the students have gone home leaving behind them the smell of stale cigarette smoke and pachouli. You hear Vern, the building engineer, downstairs talking. Vern has somebody trapped in conversation and it will be at least twenty minutes before his target starts to back up the stairs nodding and smiling as Vern’s voice follows him. He will be blocks away and Vern will finally look up from whatever he was working on, smile, and go back to it.
You turn to the left and climb the narrow stairway. Two people could pass each other if they climbed sideways. The banister wobbles as you make a sharp turn at the landing and climb to the second floor which is also the top floor. The wooden planks creak as you walk down the hall to the classroom at the end. The door is open and the afternoon sun is shining through the wall of windows in front of you. Flats of plants are being started on the bookcases under the windows and the shades are all up except for the one with a broken spring. It has been flipped up and over the bar at the top of the window.
Vern hasn’t begun his cleaning so the two heavy duty ash trays on the tables are so full of butts they shake and start to fall onto the table when you bump it. And bump it you will. It is really four eight-foot-long folding office type tables pushed together to create a large classroom work area. Around the table are gray metal folding chairs with Taylor Elementary printed on their backs. Every piece of furniture in the room is from some other school except Ralph’s green office chair on wheels. Ralph is the lead teacher/principal and the door to his office is on the north end of the room. His chair, it seems, is fair game.
Tacked or taped on the plaster board wall next to office door are poems, essays, pictures and two of the memos sent to all the schools in the district from the central office:
Teachers must use the bulletin boards provided in your classrooms.
There may be no tacking or taping of papers to the walls.
Below that someone has scrawled, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
On the east wall are bookcases topped with three-inch deep cardboard containers and a large aquarium . The boxes contain student folders. Written on each folder, along with doodles and drawings, is a student name. The aquarium houses six exotic Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches, each of which is at least as large as your fist. They are hissing and making little tapping sounds on the glass. Maybe they miss the students who sometimes take them out to run races on the tabletop. So far no eggs have appeared but, as we noted, they are exotic and might not want to mate in the Iowa climate.
You squeeze into a chair and look the papers left by the Scott’s poetry class-maggie and milly and molly and may by e. e. cummings has been mimeographed in smudged purple ink.
An encyclopedia on the table is open to the page about cockroaches and it looks like a student is copying phrases from it as a “found” poem.
There is a candy wrapper and three empty Pepsi cans on one end of the table. This is balanced by two Mountain Dew cans and a potato chip bag on the other.
And then, of course, the ubiquitous full ash trays.
Vern comes in to clean and tidy up and get things ready for the staff meeting tomorrow. Ralph will bring in a chart with the names of the students and a record of their attendance during the week and the teachers will briefly discuss each student and then decide who will visit those who might need attention and/or encouragement. You chat with Vern for awhile before backing out of the room and the lingering scent of patchoui, down the stairs, and out to your car.
Metro East moved into a new building in the early eighties. Student enrollment jumped to over 600 students. Smoking is no longer allowed in the building. Equipment is up to date and the furniture is solid and new.
There’s just one thing.
I haven’t smelled any patchouli in years.
Sometimes I miss it.
Note: The image at the top of this page by kristinwiki is public domain. [Source]