Christmas is coming, and with it, the end of Mel Saraceno's first semester as a teacher at Tampa's Robinson High.
Gone are the daytime flutters about being at the front of the room. Gone, too, are the nighttime dreams where he stood naked before his students.
He's got the drill down and his hopes high. At 56, he has another career, another avenue of experiences opening up to him.
For 28 years, Saraceno was an ear, nose and throat surgeon. The pressures were lousy, but the money was good. He made more than $300,000 a year.
He turned his back on his career because he saw the burnout in his colleagues' eyes, he says. He didn't want to be next. He wanted to chase one of those dreams that become so urgent in midlife.
He paid off his house. He sold his practice. He went back to school at the University of South Florida and started over again as an undergraduate. Next he pursued a master's degree in English literature. He decided to teach.
Saraceno did not pick an easy school. He picked Robinson, which got a D grade from the state in its most recent rating of academic performance.
Saraceno was drawn to the school, where he teaches ninth grade English and 10th grade reading, by its charismatic principal, Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy died suddenly of heart failure last month when he was all of 39. His death makes Saraceno's eyes tear up. The two men shared a passion for lighting the minds of kids who pass through Robinson's halls.
They are not ordinary kids. Some struggle with big burdens. Fractured families. Nobody steady to look up to. Poverty. That may help explain Robinson's rating in school achievement.
Saraceno sees past the grade.
"A lot of these kids have excellent dreams," he says. "They just have trouble getting there."
He uses a word you don't often hear in a classroom, at least not in high school. Comfort. Sometimes what his students need most is someone to listen, he says, someone who, in the act of listening, gives comfort. He tries. Even when the kid is on his way to jail, Saraceno tries.
He is a smallish, wiry man who speaks with the enthusiasm of all teachers starting out, and of the best teachers throughout their careers. At the moment he's trying to get his students interested in literature.
But to kids raised on hip-hop and hanging out at the mall, the melancholic suburban tales of John Cheever are a hard sell. Nevertheless, Saraceno has assigned a Cheever story to one of his classes.
I visited Saraceno's classroom Tuesday. I met a boy who wants to attend the Air Force Academy and a girl who wants to be a child psychiatrist. But what caught my eye most were the kids who kept their heads down on the desks, as though they regarded the class as a chance to snooze. Surely, I thought, a steady experience of this behavior, this magnificent lack of interest, would sap the energy and enthusiasm of even the most stubborn and resilient adults. Like Saraceno.
"To be such an inherent, important part of the community is a powerful experience," he says. "It's hard to give up. It's hard for a lot of teachers to give up - even though they treat us sometimes like janitors."
It is impossible for Saraceno to avoid comparing the old days, when he was a doctor, to these. Yes, the pressure is gone, but he sees one unmistakable parallel. To do their jobs properly, both doctors and teachers must have strong, significant relationships with their patients or pupils, one at a time.
The expectation, in Saraceno's mind, is identical. The money, of course, is not. He wasn't complaining, but it's worth noting: His teacher's salary is one tenth of what he made as a physician.
"What's more important?" Saraceno asks. "Saving a person's life from disease or saving a person's life from ignorance? They ought to be exactly the same."
Mel Saraceno, doctor turned teacher, figures he has eight to 10 years to devote to this second wind of a career. Just think. All those kids, all those minds, waiting, just waiting to meet up with him.
