Emily Hall
A Lesson Plan for Teaching on the Air Force Base
“Introduction to Literature”
Week Three
21 September 2008
6:30 p.m.
When you drive onto the Air Force base to teach your night class, you’ll find a young soldier draped over the visitor’s booth. He’ll have an ashy cigarette pinched between his teeth and a pair of sunglasses low on his nose.
You’ll try to hand him your instructor’s pass, but he won’t look at it. Instead, he’ll lean towards you and croon in a confident voice, “Don’t you know your class was cancelled? Come spend the night with me instead, baby.”
It’s best to just wait him out. Look pointedly at the gate, where another soldier stands with a heavy gun and a neutral expression.
Eventually, when you stay quiet for long enough, the guard will realize you won’t flirt back. His boyish face will slide into a grin, and he’ll wave you through the gate.
6:35p.m.
Drive past the barracks whose windows have always reminded you of toothless mouths and continue past the church that’s used by both Catholics and Protestants, thanks to a swinging wall that allows the congregation to see either a crucifix or plain cross.
You know this base well, not because you’ve taught here often—you’re an adjunct teaching a general education course that no one else wanted--but because you lived here as a kid. Every morning, in that rundown duplex, you’d sit across from your dad in his crisp uniform, eating oatmeal while the planes climbing into the sky rattled your spoons.
Thirteen years later, this base still looks the same, all cut-to-regulation grass and Brutalist buildings.
Only the service people have changed. The turnover rate on this base is high, so you don’t recognize a single person. When you reflect on this later, it’ll remind you of how bodies must replenish themselves cell by cell to stay alive.
6:45 p.m.
Park near the trailers that serve as your college’s satellite campus. Think about how these trailers were once white, but now they look like piles of dirty snow, shoved to the side of the street and forgotten. Remember that your trailer’s not all bad, though. There’s A/C, and a good-sized chalkboard that wipes clean.
Inside the classroom, there’s no instructor’s desk, so lay your anthology on one of the long, wooden tables. Pull out the syllabus that all non-tenured instructors are required to use, and the broken piece of chalk that floats faithfully around your bag. You’re covering part of Kafka’s Metamorphosis tonight, so find the right page in the book.
7:00 p.m.
Begin class. Because there are only seven students, you don’t need to take attendance.
Enjoy, truly, the sound of the onion skin pages slipping over each other as your students find the reading. Start your discussion, focusing on characterization. Recall that the man in the front, who’s always on time even though he drives all his colleagues to their respective trailers, will try to speak the most. Don’t get annoyed, though, he’s just excited. Meanwhile, try to draw out the woman in the back. She hunches down at the table, camouflaging herself in a puddle of her fatigues, but you know she has good ideas about perspective.
8:30 p.m.
You’re at the halfway point, so give your students a fifteen-minute break. As they walk to the vending machines, you’ll wonder if your lecture was rambling. You’ll really want them to understand Kafka’s ideas about work and absurdity, but your students may only smile politely, their faces lined from seeing so much combat.
They’re shy and respectful, these students, but they open up during break because you shared on the first night that you grew up in the military.
Tonight, one of them will explain that he just finished his second tour in Iraq. And that sometimes Marines have to go through de-escalation training after they leave the front lines because they otherwise might snap and hurt someone. Your student finished this training feeling like he never needed it. His friends, meanwhile, felt that they did.
“I never, ever would have signed up for this, had I known,” he will confess, hands gripped around a sleeve of crackers. “I just want to get this degree and get the fuck out of the Marines.”
After he says this, the classroom will fill with silence. Know that this silence is okay.
8:40 p.m.
Re-open discussion of Metamorphosis.
9:00 p.m.
Startle when “Taps” plays over the intercoms on base. Because this base is the largest military mortuary, it plays every night at this time, but it still takes you by surprise. Your students will stand up to face the window, where an American flag snaps under a spotlight.
The trailer’s floor will bow and shiver as another plane brings more bodies. The students must stand at attention, but you only have to place your hand over your heart. As you feel your pulse under your palm, you’ll remember your friend’s brother, who, when asked about his work on this base, could only turn gray and murmur, “Pieces…sometimes they come back in pieces.”
9:05 p.m.
Start review for the exam that’s the following Wednesday. This time of night, all of you are worn out, so try to be as animated and encouraging as possible.
10:10 p.m.
End class. Remind the students to read Wordsworth’s poems about orchards and clouds for Monday. Hand back their papers and pick up the ones they just wrote. Stuff them into the bag alongside your dwindled chalk. Clean the chalkboard and jiggle the door when you leave so you know it’s actually closed.
10:25 p.m.
While walking to your car, be ready for your name to be called by your quiet student. Stop abruptly and listen when she says,
“Hey, I got a 68 on that paper.”
Immediately soothe her, remind her of extra credit, the upcoming exam.
“No,” she’ll say, shaking her head. “I wanted to thank you—yeah, I know that’s weird. But I’ve taken a few classes here and sometimes the professors don’t even show up. Or they give us all A’s. I thought you would too. It feels kinda nice, though, to be treated like a normal student.”
Release your jaw, which has tensed up because your student believes her experience is normal. Assure her that she makes good contributions in class, she just needs to bring this into her papers. Wish her goodnight when she thanks you, and secretly wish other, better things for her too.
10:30 p.m.
Walk to your car and rest the papers on the passenger’s seat. As you drive back to the gate, think about how you’ll grade the essays tomorrow when you’re back on the main campus teaching freshman composition. Because you don’t have an office, you’ll have to sit in the campus café between classes, even though doing so makes you feel exposed, just as did when you were once a broke undergraduate student there. While sitting at one of the tables, the students around you will sip lattes and laugh about their upcoming vacations. And you’ll try to lean into the soft jazz playing over the café’s expensive speakers, hoping it’ll finally smother the cries of warplanes.
Emily Hall's prose has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, Gooseberry Pie Lit, 100 Word Story, The Disappointed Housewife, Blood Orange Review, Cherry Tree, Wild Roof Journal, and Short Reads. A member of The NBCC, her book reviews have appeared in places such as Necessary Fiction, Portland Review, Heavy Feather Review, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. She's a prose editor for Pictura Journal, has a PhD in contemporary Anglophone literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and lives in NC with her husband.
