originally posted Jun 14, 2018 on Patreon⭕

Mr. Reginato had been teaching 10th-grade advanced mathematics for a very long time.  A very, very long time, but the old paper records were long since gone and, since students enjoyed his class, he didn’t seem to be a line-item on the pension fund, and the school’s test scores in mathematics grade 10 and above had always been superb – or at least as long as people knew Mr. Reginato had been there – nobody was going to talk to him about retiring.

As a matter of fact, they were paying him, it appeared, approximately $100 a year, which absolutely couldn’t be correct, but that was the number that the accountant had in her files, and nobody really wanted to ask her any questions either.
All this meant that Mr. Reginato got to do what he wanted, as long as those test scores and assessments kept coming back positive.

And that meant that Mr. Reginato taught geometry very carefully and very thoroughly to year after year of bright tenth-graders, keeping his eye out all the time for those who had a special flair.  And when he found one, oh, maybe one every decade if he was lucky, he made sure that they got all the teaching they might possibly need.

And then he and Mrs. Corrielus, the librarian, (who was making a whopping $300 a year and had been there a bit less long than Mr. Reginato, but after all, it had taken him time to get a library built) made sure a specific set of books fell into that student’s hands.  Two years later, in almost every case, the student would get a very quiet gift of a golden compass and a pencil which drew in starlight and dreams.

The School Superintendent, who knew only that his school district did not get the flu, chicken pox, lice, measles, mumps, or any of the more pernicious diseases, did not even look askance at these gifts.  After all, test scores are test scores.