The Month That I Taught English, We Had Prisoners Running through Our Backyards
WINNER! Best Essay Prize
MARGARET DOWNEY is a trained secondary English teacher, who has spent the past few years living in an area of New York that is so rurally upstate, most people from Albany have never heard of it. Margaret now resides in Copenhagen, where she works in a child development office at a study abroad institution for American college students. She spends her spare time reading, writing, traveling, and playing with her coworkers’ children. “The Month That I Taught English . . . ” is her first publication.
ON MY FIRST FRIDAY as a long-term substitute teacher in a high school English classroom, the middle school science teacher’s chinchilla went missing. “Please keep an eye out,” the secretary announced on the intercom before the first-period bell rang. The all-staff email I received had an attached photo of the small gray creature with the text: He doesn’t bite, but he runs fast. My students claimed that the chinchilla was ancient and probably escaped to find a place to die, but by the end of the day, I saw the eighth graders still roaming the halls with brooms and butterfly nets, hopeful: “I think he’s in the boiler room—let’s go!”
The next day, my first Saturday in town, roadblocks were set up at the single stoplight, and police officers patrolled the streets with guns. “Search underway for two murderers missing from state prison in Dannemora,” the local news station reported online. We were thirty miles
