One of the hard and ugly facts that all English teachers need to learn is that we are weird people. We are not normal. Most of America comes home after work, puts their feet up on the Barcalounger, grabs the trusty remote and goes a searching for their favorite Simpson’s rerun. English teachers turn the TV off, throw the Rolling Stones onto the CD and cozy up to a nice pile of papers. Then, once the papers have been dispatched, we grab the book of the moment and sink into that.

Before I realized that I was an English teacher, I had a rough go of it. All through my first two years of high school, I roared through books. My Uncle Jim would bring a stack of books with him every Wednesday when he visited and we would trade. My Uncle, the priest, and I would read the James Bond books, Travis McGee, Fletch, Spenser, and any other piece of best seller, bedrooms-and-bloodstains trash that would make it through the used book stores. We dropped a lot of money going through a book a day.

I realized pretty quickly that most other people didn’t do this. My classmates came home after school to watch the Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family, and the Stooges. They played pick-up basketball in the park and Pac Man in the sub shops. I had my nose firmly buried in a book. As a result, I had precious few friends.

Most groups aren’t interested in readers, I found. High school groups, where everyone must sit in the front seat and talk at the same time are very social. Your friends tell you how much you are worth. On the other hand, reading is a solitary activity. It is even anti-social. When you read, you immerse yourself in a book, sinking all the way to the bottom. Other people pull you away from that undersea world, back to the surface. So, I didn’t want all of them disturbing me and they don’t want to be with a silent, distant blob. So, I had a fairly lonely three years.

During the summer of my junior year, however, I went away to a summer program at Milton Academy called the Massachusetts Advanced Studies Program (MASP). Once there, I learned that the same dork habits in high school that drove everyone away brought a whole new bunch of people to me. I found myself in the midst of intensely bright people who argued a lot, traveled a lot, knew a lot and valued books. We had all read Kerouac, Kesey, and Hunter S Thompson. We knew how to hop a train, how to avoid electro-shock and how to load a shotgun while drunk. For the first time in my adolescence, I was in the midst of a group where I really belong.

I have forgotten all of their names now. For a year or so, we kept up with each other, and then time and college swept up us away. In the end, their names weren’t important; it was the group. Because that same group reformed on my freshman floor around 2 AM most mornings, after we had tired of playing floor hockey. I stood around bonfires at graduate school with that same group. That same ever changing, ever the same group is made up of English teachers. Thank God I found a place for me.