For twelve years, I was an elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

One hundred eighty school days each year.

Five years teaching kindergarten.

Six years teaching fourth grade.

One year teaching fifth grade.

The simple definition of teacher is one who teaches. But the reality of what it means to be a teacher is so much more.

The new English teacher—the fourth one in less than three years—looked like a punky Tinkerbell.

She wore her starlight blonde hair pulled into a bun, big oversized glasses perched on her upturned nose (the kind of cute nose I always wished I had) with a dainty twinkling stud. Despite her scarf, a tattooed comet of Fall Out Boy lyrics flowed across her shoulder with a spray of falling stars.

One of my students, a poet, works at a gas station by night. I picture her under the fluorescent lights, composing sonnets and slam poems (her favorite), reading them aloud to the empty store in rural New Mexico, where only a few cars pass by. When the door chime rings, she stows her notebook under the counter and straightens the array of potato chips next to the cash register.

I hear the retching vomit and feel my breasts seize up. Even the mechanical waves of my pump can’t drown out the sick splattering on the linoleum floor under fluorescent lights. I’ve never understood fluorescent lights in schools. Research says they stress and strain, and yet they populate our buildings as if the sun might disappear one day.

I still dream about the band room at Paul Revere Junior High, sixty years later. I see you now, sitting at the cluttered desk in your little office. The new school just opened and my mother insisted I join the band, even though I had been playing the clarinet only a few months. I was thirteen and in the eighth grade, a porky, insecure, introverted kid.

Probably a polar bear was not a good choice
for my first attempt at whittling.
A hamster would have been simpler
and avoided the multiple leg fractures.
“Don’t worry, girl. No problem,” Mr Taylor said,