Another day in the life of an Access instructor

Today I watched my group of seven Access students struggle through their first test. They are a motley bunch of unique individuals. Four paralegals, and three business students, all women. The paralegals sit together in a row. The business students sit alone, far away from each other and the paralegals. I'm not sure if that is significant. I stood at the back of the room, trying to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.

Today, J., a heavyset girl with porcelain skin, was hunched over in pain from a gall bladder attack. Drama being her middle name, I'm not sure how much of her ponderous movements and expression of suffering was for my benefit and how much was actual pain. Next to her sat her friend, dark-haired M., blazing through the test at a fevered pace. (Later I discovered she didn't do half the work. I heard from another teacher she is planning to drop out to get married and live on an army base. I hope she won't need any job skills there.) Next to M. sat K., tall, heavy, immature, and on probation for cheating. It's difficult to think of anything else when I see her: cheater, there goes the cheater. By the window sat A., the best student in the group, possibly in the entire cohort, maybe in the entire school. She certainly has the best attitude. If every student were like A., what an effortless pleasure this job would be.

In the back sat C., alone in more ways than one: the obvious lesbian, wearing men's shirts, and carrying a huge head on her tiny thin body. She is my favorite in the group, although we rarely speak. An older gal, R., sits in the back on the other side by the printer, bashing her way through the test as if to demonstrate her competency. I'm standing behind her. I can see what she is doing. She finds her way eventually, but competency isn't the word I would use to describe her process. The last business admin, the blonde M., is a forty-ish round apple-shaped bubble of energy perched on stick legs.

Blonde M. finished the test early. She trotted up to me, waving her printouts, and said, "Our other instructors always let us leave after we finish a test. Can I go?"

I'm not sure what rankled me, the fact that she felt like she was exempt from the request at the end of the test that students stay to work on their lessons, or that she thought I should knuckle under to the pressure to let students leave early because other instructors apparently do. I could have said, sure, go forth and prosper, grasshopper, but I didn't. What I said was, "You need to be here for a certain amount of time in order to get credit for the class period."

"I have to take my son to a doctor's appointment," she protested.

"What if the test had taken you the full two hours?" I asked. "Would you have stayed to finish the test?"

"Well, yeah!"

"Well, then why can't you stay now?"

She gaped at me, looking a lot like a goldfish I used to have, except less orange.

She trotted off to have a cigarette, slightly miffed. I leaned against the table at the back of the room, silently urging the rest of them to hurry up and finish. One by one, they did.