The blind man had taught part-time for three years to supplement his disability Elsa Peretti Teardrop set from Social Security. He tutored individuals and small groups in French, Spanish, Italian and, very occasionally, Latin, and though he held no classes, he was generally at the school for half the day and sometimes served as a substitute teacher. He was given conference periods and a free hour. For the first year, he was content to think that, despite the awkwardness in having constant daily contact with so many sighted young people, he was making a contribution, however small. He didn't have the ease with his students that many faculty seemed to have - joking with them, arguing or teasing and cajoling, using their nicknames, identifying who they "hung with," what music they listened to and knowing the multitude of stars on the cable tv programs they favored. Around the students, he felt awkward and very self-conscious, stiffly frozen behind a protective screen of protocol and 1837 Collection Lock Necklace Set distance. He was, he knew, absolutely no fun - they'd never say about him, as they did one of his colleagues, that he was "one cool dude," but he'd believed that being respectful and business-like established an appropriate setting for learning.
One day when he was talking to the payroll clerk about his W-4 deductions, she said, casually, "Too bad the check you get isn't as big as the check we get." He asked what she meant. She told him that because of his special circumstance his position was funded by grants from various governmental agencies. So the school got Paloma's X Earrings and Necklace Set-five dollars an hour for him, even for conference and free periods, and then parents of his students kicked in another fifteen dollars an hour for individual lessons. As if Return to Tiffany Heart Tag Charm Set she'd been indiscreet, she backpedalled. "Of course, you know, with the handicapped it's different." She spoke as if in sympathy with his blindness or to suggest that the presence of the handicapped suspended normal rules of fairness. She might've been trying to transform what sounded like fraud into charity, though the school was the beneficiary. They got fifty dollars per hour for him; he got fifteen dollars per hour from them.
Also, he hadn't been there long before he suspected that he and the Asian-American and the African-American teachers, both female, comprised the institution's efforts to teach the students about diversity, injecting it into the student body in this small, harmless dose. He overheard some colleagues make veiled, resentful Tiffany Sevillana Set to affirmative action (since he was blind, both faculty and students often acted as if he were deaf as well), and these complainers kept careful track of their colleagues' pedagogical practices and mistakes.That he was being used and scrutinized unjustly leached his innocent pleasure in the job. The school profited by his labor, but the personnel subtly encouraged him to feel beholden to his brother-in-law and to the administration for its Christian compassion.
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