Norton Johnson hated to be inside on a day like today. It ran counter to every impulse in his body, and it was on days like this that he seriously considered taking the Board up on their offer and retiring.

There was no way he could retire, though. He turned back toward his class, stared out at the blank bored teenage faces before him. These kids needed him. They didn’t know it, but they did. The other teachers in school might think of him as a dinosaur, a relic from an earlier age, but he knew that the only way these students would ever learn anything, the only way they would ever overcome the lax parenting and media overstimulation that was their world, was through someone who cared enough to hold their noses to the grindstone. Straight teaching. That’s what they needed. Lectures, notetaking, reading, essays, tests. Not this “cooperative learning,” not the current fads of the current educational “experts.”

He’d been here before. In the late sixties, early seventies. When teachers had “rapped” to their students. When one of the English classrooms had had beanbag chairs and pillows instead of desks. When students had been allowed to design their own course curriculum and grade their own papers, giving themselves the scores they thought they deserved. He alone had resisted that foolishness, had insisted that there was nothing wrong with the tried and true methods of teaching to which he’d been subjected and that he’d been successfully using for years.

He’d been laughed at then, too. But those days had come. And they’d gone.

And he was still here.

The current educational fallacy was that facts and dates weren’t important, that students were better off learning “concepts” rather than information, and he was determined to wait out this trend as well, to remain at the school, to continue on as department chairman until this too had passed.

Still…

He looked wistfully out the window. The air probably smelled like fireplace smoke. The slight breeze rattling the trees was probably brisk and cold.

He forced himself to continue on with his lecture.

The fact was, as much as he hated to admit it, his mind wandered more often these days than it had in the past. He was not senile or unfocused or unable to concentrate. It was not that. It was simply that his priorities now were different. Intellectually, his work remained paramount, but emotionally his needs were shifting. He no longer received the same satisfaction from teaching as he had before. He sometimes found himself wanting to gratify simpler, more basic desires.

The verities of old age.

Norton glanced up at the clock above the blackboard. The period was winding down, so he gave a short talk on Mengele and Nazi experimentation and, as always, there was an appreciable increase in the level of attention paid by the class.