After Life by Andrew Neiderman Read Free Book Online Page B

Lee could appreciate how much personal interest
    Andersen had taken in his students. Some had kept in touch with him as
    long as fifteen years after graduation, and many had still been asking
    his advice as recently as a week before he died. Obviously he had had
    more than their respect, he had had their affection, too.
     
    As Lee read through a dozen or so of these letters, he began to
    experience the particular sort of nostalgia only someone who had been
    teaching a long time feels.
     
    Without ever having had these students, he longed for the likes of them.
    From the tone of the letters and the references to events and memories,
    Lee conjured up a picture of an altogether different sort of school and
    community. There was a closeness, a comradeship, a sense of extended
    family that simply didn't exist today.
     
    He had to smile at what the boys in the letters considered their
    difficulties. They were mostly insignificant compared with what
    occurred in present times. Absent were any references to problems with
    drugs and alcohol.
     
    Only an occasional letter here and there mentioned a broken family.
    These letters were written before the age of divorce.
     
    Apparently Kurt Andersen had had a nice singing voice and, especially
    during his younger days, had often been persuaded to sing at school
    dances. Lee was sure Andersen had had far more than his share of
    teenage girls with crushes on him, but even back when he was a young
    teacher, he had probably handled the problem with a fatherly maturity.
    Lee saw it in the way the girls had written to Andersen years later,
    thanking him for his advice and his sensitivity.
     
    What large shoes to fill, Lee thought; and yet Kurt Andersen had been
    the kind of teacher Lee had always wanted to be. From the records on
    Andersen's discipline problems and the way he had handled them, Lee
    could surmise that he had been a firm man, but a fair man. Not that he
    had had many problems up until the last year or so. About then there
    was a dramatic change.
     
    The file marked Discipline was much thicker for the last couple of
    years, and the problems cited were far more serious. Andersen had
    caught boys selling dope in the locker rooms; he had caught boys
    stealing, not only from each other, but even from him. Reading the
    report on one such episode, Lee could sense Andersen's shock and
    outrage. Students were crossing lines heretofore thought inviolate.
     
    When Lee reached the record of the last six months, he noted an
    increasingly frustrated Andersen, frustrated not just with his pupils,
    but with his administration, especially with his principal. The
    correspondence between them had become quite heated. Andersen was not
    only disappointed in Henry Young's handling of the cases he had referred
    to him, but in the dispositions, which, Lee had to admit himself, were
    far too lenient.
     
    Students who had committed rather serious breaches of conduct were let
    off with mild warnings. Everyone seemed to receive probation or a
    gentle slap on the wrist. The most severe punishment Lee could find,
    even for physical violence, was a day's detention, and even that was set
    up at the boy's convenience. Apparently Andersen had reached the point
    where he had decided not even to bother referring his disciplinary cases
    to the principal; he handled them himself by meting out detention and
    remaining after school or having the boys do things like police the
    school grounds, whitewash walls, clean equipment.
     
    On one occasion, however, it appeared as if Young were reprimanding
    Andersen for doing just these things.
     
    After being assigned a task as punishment for defacing a locker, a boy
    had complained to the principal and the principal had informed Andersen
    that having the boy clean the locker room was too severe. He claimed he
    had given the boy a good talking to and that would suffice.
     
    In his angry but tempered reply, Andersen reminded Henry Young that the
    gym and the locker