Poverty, Part II

Here are some passages from a short story I'm working on about a teacher who writes a "sext" intended for his wife, but accidentally sends it to a student.

When, he didn’t know exactly, but he had committed to the long slog of educating the poor. At the end of each week, he felt heavy and gray with work, a layer of it on his skin, the same layer you’d get if you stood in the shoulder of I-5 for a week. He dissolved his layer with beer and vodka-sodas. On Fridays, after dinner with his wife, he met up with friends. On Saturdays he healed from his healing by running in the morning and watching DVR in the afternoon and falling in and out of sleep while looking at the sky from his window. On Sundays he graded and made lessons, preparing for the flood of teenagers that awaited him like the American masses we see in a cellphone ad. At 6:45 AM on Monday, he opened his classroom door to the effects of unprotected sex, materialism, the resignations that come with 2^nd-generation poverty, Islam, videogamestextingtelevisionFacebookbooklesshomes, knowing three languages but not how to write, puberty, rebellion, self-disappointment, self-aggrandizement and the varied parental understandings of how life works, it all flooded into his classroom and flushed over him, slammed him to the ground and swept him around. He swam to the top, bringing students with him, and they floated up there together in this sea speaking of topic sentences, comma splices, metaphors, and why writers write, waiting for rescue and wisdom, or just for the 2:45 bell. Then they flooded out of his room until Tuesday. Then he caught one of his two buses and over the next hour the setting changed from Samoan kids playing ukulele on the grass next to a basketball court to hipsters sitting outside of a coffeeshop.

And

A few months back, he greeted his friends at the bar with fist-bumps. Once several years ago when he was upset with the Power and Privilege they had, but failed to recognize, he invited them to his school in a vitriolic e-mail: “You don’t know who I am if you don’t see the kids I work with, and you don’t know how lucky we are.” But he regretted the email hours after sending it and followed it with an email telling them to ignore the previous email, which they did easily; they simply didn’t read it. And now: he thinks nothing of the ideas of Privilege. (He’s just thankful to have a job in this economy.) But he does remember the term, Privilege, and it conjures up a different era for him. It conjures up UW girls walking down the Ave. in skirts and pale, wintry legs.