Love and Ruination: An Engaging Tale of Two Clashical Christian Schools
Chapter Four
Avery’s first several weeks at Riverfront just flew by, making a whooshing sound as they went. His first week there was the teachers’ reserved time for final preparations—classroom, materials, and final lesson plans—and which Avery used to schedule a get-acquainted meeting with each one of the teachers. He did not talk shop with any of them at all, except to answer the occasional question. The bulk of each meeting was simply to listen carefully to each teacher’s life story. A couple of them were new hires, just out of college, so they didn’t have much of a life story yet, but they still appreciated the gesture nonetheless.
The experienced teachers were really grateful that he appeared to be concerned to draw on their expertise . . . he had not arrived at Riverfront full of his own pedagogical ideas and nothing else. “How do we really do it?” seemed to be one of his questions. More than one of them left his office with the sentiment this is going to be really good floating around in their mind somewhere.
There were glitches and uh oh moments of course, both with a handful of the faculty and at least one student. But Avery had budgeted for such in his mind, and because of his prior experience with life in a high school, he even had a pretty good idea of what sorts of “here it comes” moments he was going to have to deal with.
It was during this time that he first encountered Imogen Thracknell, the student body president, and all-round shoe-in for the role of valedictorian. School hadn’t started yet, and yet there she was, on the premises. She was this shoe-in, as just mentioned, because she had most of the secondary teachers snowed and buffaloed, and they were the ones who voted on who the valedictorian would be. The nay votes regarding Imogen were strongly held, but not strongly voiced, because the minority of teachers who saw through her did not trust themselves to start talking about it. They were conscientious Christians and were afraid that they would start sinning if they said anything at all. This is just another way of saying that she exasperated them out to their fingernails.
Close behind was their exasperation with their fellow teachers who could not see through her radiant smile, with teeth straight enough to be a theorem out of Euclid, and white enough to be an advert for Crest. That smile, incidentally, would always show up somewhere in all of the school’s promotional brochures.
The second day before classes were to start, Imogen shimmered into Avery’s office right before lunch, in order to introduce herself. She was friendly and polite, and quite composed, but there was a significant amount of hauteur and entitlement going on. It was three inches under the epidermis, but it was three inches under every square inch of her epidermis, and Avery could still see it plainly. She gave off sort of an aura.
He had already heard about her from several teachers, and their reports had been enthusiastic and positive. She was gorgeous in a narrow photogenic way, and her sense of entitlement was such that she simply assumed her rightful place on all the school’s promotional brochures. She was a 4.0 student, but—truth be told—it was a “will-that-be-on-the-test?” kind of smart. She did not care anything at all about any of the subjects, and only used the study sheets as the ladder where she would climb up so that she could see where she was going. And where she was going was “far.”
Imogen was too young to be a sociopath, but she had all the natural talent for it. She was going to go places, which is the way she expressed it to herself, and to date had a pretty good record of betting on the right horse, the kind of horse that would get her there. Her instincts were good, but not infallible, as she was shortly to discover.
She only stayed for five minutes, as her drop-in was simply a courtesy call—like a duchess calling on a new tenant at one of the cottages on the edge of her estate—and when she departed, all warmth and smiles, Avery shook himself. He felt himself in the presence of a new adversary. That was going to be a problem. But then . . . Avery realized that he could use her as a kind of litmus test in evaluating the wisdom of the faculty. Who saw through her, and who did not? He made a mental note to make good use of that.
A few minutes later, the thought passed through Avery’s mind that he was perhaps being a little unfair to Imogen. He had only just met her, and they had only talked for a few minutes. But then he reflected on that talk, said nah to himself, and shook himself again.
He also encountered his old friend from his previous school, the issue of turf boundaries. The problem was that a first-rate classical school needed to attract teachers who were first-rate also, those teachers being truly dedicated to their subject area. Your choir director had to be all about music, and your Latin instructor had to be all about Latin, and your history teacher needed to eat, breathe, and sleep history. This is what enabled them to attain to any real mastery of their subject. The Latin teacher really knew Latin, and the choir director had perfect pitch in a world where nobody else did. This meant that they were not only dedicated to their subject while they were acquiring mastery of it, but they were also continually dedicated to it—with an all-consuming love—after they were hired by your school. And after they were hired by your school, they began to have encounters with the other faculty, those whose all-consuming love ran in other directions, in other grooves entirely.
Now the nature of all-consuming love is that it wants and needs more hours in the day than the schedule ever permits. It wanted and needed more authorized homework hours. And all of this meant that the headmaster had to be enough of a generalist to be able to persuade each of the faculty that he knew something about their precious, and truly valued it, while at the same time keeping peace between his departments. The situation was as vexed as that time that Solomon said what they needed to do was to cut the baby in two, but not nearly so simple as that one. There was no actual baby, no actual sword, and yet the dilemma seemed similar somehow.
So on the Wednesday of that first week, Avery also had his first encounter with the choir director, and became aware of the feud that had been simmering between him and the Activities Director. The choir director was very good at his job, probably better at it than he should have been, and the AD was not very good at his job, and probably worse than should have been allowed. But nevertheless it had been allowed by the previous headmaster, and there had been a serious of embarrassing double bookings and other ball drops. One time a basketball team from a town thirty miles away showed up at the gym, ready to play, only to find a dance in progress, with all of Riverfront’s team out on the dance floor, not dressed for any kind of basketball game. The game had been cancelled because of the dance, and the AD had meant to notify the other team but somehow hadn’t gotten around to it. The AD was quite apologetic about it, but there it was anyhow.
Avery had been informed of a few of these stories, and suspected that the AD would be the first staff member he was going to have to fire. That would have happened a lot earlier, but he was married to the previous headmaster’s niece. You know how these things go. I do, thought Avery. I do.
But the big problem in this particular go around was that the AD was in the right, and the choir director was the one being the pill. The choir director had written the AD an email, seeking to reserve the gym for a concert. The AD had replied, also by email, a remarkable occurrence, replying that same day, making it doubly remarkable, saying that this wouldn’t be possible as the gym had already been reserved for a senior/alum fund-raising basketball game. The choir director had not seen the reply, or perhaps had. He had ignored it, and scheduled the concert anyway.
Flyers had been printed up, and the office was about to mail them out, when Avery’s secretary saw the conflict and flagged it to Avery. Avery thanked her profusely, and made a mental note concerning her worth to the organization. She was a strikingly beautiful red-head—named Miranda of all things—and her intelligent beauty had been a particular affliction to her professionally. She had always worked for Christian men, and Christian men, particularly the married ones, would always bend over backwards to make sure that they showed her no favoritism at all. The end result of that inverse bigotry was that Miranda had quite a collection of sticks, all of which had a short end.
Having been alerted by Miranda, Avery then dropped a note to the choir director saying that he would have to pick another date.
The choir director protested, loudly and at length, in Avery’s office. The AD was called in, and he produced his email reply to the choir director, astonishing everybody, and so Avery stuck with his decision. He watched the two men depart with some melancholy, knowing that the choir director, persnickety as he was, was going to win state-wide competitions, and thereafter get a hefty raise, and the AD, as affable and as nice as he was, was going to get the sack.
This really is a vale of tears, Avery thought, and turned back to the stack of papers on his desk.