Sometimes the broadcasting game can be a struggle. I think I knew that long before the fall of 2014, but that’s when the message really hit home for me. I was more than four years into a career as a professional sportscaster but as another baseball season wrapped up, I found myself with essentially nothing to do. In my early seasons calling minor league baseball games for the Windy City ThunderBolts, I was so happy to have a professional broadcasting gig that I really didn’t care what I did for money in the offseason. I bounced around from bartending to babysitting to painting houses, comfortable in the knowledge that I had my dream job waiting for me come spring.

Over the previous year, though, I had decided that it was time to become serious about my broadcasting career and that meant not being content with only working in the industry five months out of the year. I had begun to pick up the occasional high school or college game but not nearly enough of them to make a living, so with the prospects of a dreary, unemployed offseason staring me in the face, I fell on my sword and did something I promised myself I would never do: I applied for my substitute teacher’s license.

Substitute teaching is a pretty common side job for freelance sportscasters like me. The schedule is flexible and occurs entirely during the day, freeing you up on evenings and weekends when there might be a game to announce. And if you’re going through a dry spell broadcasting, you can almost certainly find teaching work five days a week if you want it. I knew all that and I knew plenty of people in similar positions to me who were doing it, but I also knew that it wasn’t for me. I had nothing against the profession itself but I wasn’t interested in any aspect of teaching and knew there would always be another way to make a living, so I had long ago vowed that I would never go that route.

Easier said than done. I was out of ideas. In the months since ThunderBolts season ended, I had found precious little to get excited about. My biggest hobby was getting rejected from jobs I had applied to. The number must have counted in the 100’s by then. Full time jobs, part time jobs, contract positions, none of them seemed to want me and my consistent failure had begun to affect me mentally. To avoid constant depression, I tried to set small goals for myself each day, but as many of them were job related, the goals really just reinforced my depression. I felt sure that if I allowed myself to, I would never leave the couch, so I made a rule that forbade me from watching TV before 3:30 each afternoon. (That was when Jeopardy came on. I’m only human.) I also forced myself to get out of the house each day no matter what, but since my bank account was basically empty, that often just meant walking around the neighborhood. Still, it was better than nothing.

Eventually, tired of rejection and having lost quite enough fictional money playing along with Jeopardy, I began applying for substitute teaching positions. Though I considered this a great sacrifice, there were only so many concessions I was willing to make. For instance, if I was going to do this, it was going to be at the high school level, no lower. I wasn’t thrilled about spending my days surrounded by school kids to begin with, but if I had to, it would at least be a group with whom I could have real conversations about topics that interested me. I sent in applications to all the local high schools and waited to find out where I’d be going first.

And then I got a very familiar response: nothing. It was bad enough to get no response when applying to broadcasting jobs but now, in my mind, I had debased myself by trying to get a job I never wanted, and I was essentially being told that I wasn’t good enough even for that. By now, the bitter Chicago winter had set in and I couldn’t even take my daily walks to try to regain my composure. I had never felt worse about myself.

Then, one day in February, about three months after I had begun applying at schools, I received a phone call from District 201. They wanted to put me on their subs list. I was so excited that I forgot I never actually wanted this job. Also, I had no idea what schools were in District 201. It didn’t matter; I was finally going to have something to do.

Shortly after, I was called for my first assignment: a French class at a high school that was only a five-minute drive from home. The proximity was great. The subject wasn’t. “I don’t know any French,” I told the woman on the other end of the phone, but she assured me that it was just for a couple of days and all I had to do was follow the lesson plans. I was going to be OK.

I wasn’t totally comforted, but what else was I going to do? It was my first job offer in ages. I’d have taught Advanced Quantum Mechanics if they’d asked me, which incidentally, I knew exactly as much about as I did French.

In preparation for my first day, I received exactly no directions, save for where to park and where to check in when I arrived at school. I was to go to the attendance office to pick up a key to my classroom and a roster of students. I figured that’s where I would also receive my instructions for the day. Nope. All I got was the aforementioned key and roster. “But what do I do?” I asked, imploringly. “You take that key and put it in the doorknob,” the woman behind the desk told me. “Then you turn it and it opens the door so you can go inside. Then you’re in your classroom.”

OK, I don’t think she was actually that dismissive of me. She just kind of sneered. I did feel that stupid though. When I got to my classroom – The door opened! I guess these key things really do work. – I thought finally this would be where I received my marching orders, but there was nothing on the teacher’s desk. Or, more accurately, there were loads of things on her desk – books, papers, folders, glitter for some reason, all scattered about completely unorganized, but no lesson plans. The school day was almost ready to start and I didn’t know what I was doing. In a panic, I called the district office that had offered me this gig but it was too early in the morning. They weren’t in yet. As the first students began to roll in, I started to realize that I was sunk. I would have to punt that first day and hope I received a little more guidance the next one.

After the bell rang to begin the day, I stood in front of the class and greeted them with a hearty “Bonjour,” expending my entire French vocabulary in the first three seconds of the period. “My name is…” I started before realizing midsentence that high school students don’t call their teachers by their first name. “…Mr. Bonadonna,” I quickly audibled. I was 27 years old. It was the first time I had ever referred to myself that way, an oddly professional address for a guy who had no clue where he was or what he was doing. I wrote the name on the board and left it there the entire time I spent in the class, but that didn’t stop half the students from calling me “Teacher” because they just couldn’t remember my name. 140 students and I learned every one of their names but they couldn’t be bothered with mine – and it was written on the board!

In those opening few moments of my first class, I realized that the only approach I could take would be to level with the students and tell them I wasn’t actually a French speaker but that it would be OK because I’d only be there for a few days anyway. I asked them what they had been working on and learned that they hadn’t even been in class for two weeks. Apparently, the school had been searching that whole time for some patsy–err, substitute teacher, to take over the class. The regular teacher was out on medical leave and nobody knew why or for how long she’d be away. I later found out that due to FMLA, the school wasn’t even allowed to ask what the issue was, so literally no one at the school was aware of what was going on. Even more confusingly, no one seemed to know what her name was. I heard two different options from a variety of sources. I eventually gathered that she had recently gone through a divorce and may have reverted to her maiden name. But maybe she didn’t. To protect her anonymity…and because I still don’t actually know what to call her, I’ll leave both names out of this story.

Being back in a high school classroom for the first time in nearly a decade was unsettling. I didn’t like high school the first time around but now there was the added threat of an uprising. I was ostensibly in a position of power but I sure didn’t feel it. I told the students to use the period as a study hall and then sat nervously hoping there wouldn’t be any problems. The kids annoyed me (to be fair, everyone annoys me) by constantly pulling out their phones and talking too loudly instead of studying, but there was no harm done and the first few periods went by uneventfully.

At lunchtime, Carol Medrano came in to the room. She was a former student and longtime friend of my father’s and now, evidently, was a teacher here. I was thrilled to see her. Up until that point, I felt like I was on an island that had no communication with the rest of the world. She told me that she had seen my name on the sub list and wanted to drop by to say hello and see how I was doing. I told her I was doing terribly and explained the situation. She immediately sprung into action, coming up with a discussion topic and an assignment for the class. She didn’t know French any better than I did but France had been in the news a lot recently because of a terrorist attack in Paris, and she felt that could be a good way to tie in to the class. I was in no position to argue. “Just make sure you don’t let the students know you can’t speak French,” she said before leaving. “It’ll be like sharks smelling blood in the water.” Uh oh.

The next day we actually had a pretty good classroom discussion and I gave the follow-up assignment to work on in class the day after. That covered two full days of my sentence in purgator–uh, I mean, job. As the end of the week approached and I amazingly looked forward to spending my afternoons on the couch again, I received another phone call from the district office. They wanted me to stay an additional week. I shuddered but then remembered they were paying me, so I agreed to stick it out. Anyway, I had an ace up my sleeve. I had discovered that there was a closet full of French and French adjacent movies in the classroom, so I picked out the longest one I could find – Les Misérables – and planned to show it during the week. At 45 minutes a pop, that flick could carry me through nearly four full days.

The plan worked great until the end of the week approached and I received another phone call. They asked if I could stay even longer. I sighed, “How much longer?” “Until April,” was the response. This was still February. The woman on the other end of the phone didn’t specify when in April, but even in a best case scenario, we were looking at 5-6 more weeks. It was time to put my foot down. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “ The first time we talked, I told you that I don’t speak French. Now I’ve been teaching this class for two weeks with no guidance and no support and you want me to stay another month?” It was true. If it weren’t for the fact that I knew one of the other teachers by complete happenstance, I wouldn’t have had any interaction with a single employee of the school since I started there except for the woman who handed me my key and roster each morning. The administrator told me that she would look into getting me help and hung up. I hadn’t actually agreed to stay on as teacher but somehow I got the feeling that my lack of an outright refusal meant that I was in it for the long haul.

And so, now I was an actual French teacher. I went to the library after school and checked out every book I could find on speaking French for dummies. I got some Rosetta Stone tapes and listened to them every chance I got. Whenever I had a broadcasting gig, I spent the entire car rides there and back repeating “Voulez-vous manger quelque chose?” or “Où est la rue Saint-Jacques?” (If I ever go to a French speaking town, I really hope there’s a Saint Jacque Street there.) Each afternoon, I ate lunch alone in my classroom, listening to those tapes and trying to build my French vocabulary through a mouthful of ham sandwich. My only companions were the mice who frequently came out of hiding once the students were all gone and joined me for a meal while assuredly becoming the envy of all the other mice in town for their ability to now speak fluent French. When I informed the school that the classroom was infested with rodents, I was told that it was my responsibility to keep my classroom clean. My classroom? Well, if that’s how it was going to be…I brought some mousetraps from home and killed three or four of them over the next few weeks, feeling a little bad that I had robbed the mouse world of some of the more cultured of their species, but after all, I had to keep my classroom spotless.

When it became clear that I was going to be around for a while, I made a genuine effort to get to know my students better. I went around the room and made everyone tell me an interesting story about themselves and then agreed to answer whatever questions they had about me. That ate up a whole day!

The help that was promised to me by the administration arrived in the form of one of the school’s other French teachers, who dropped off a huge stack of worksheets, enough to get us through a few weeks. She returned once more later in the semester to help me teach object pronouns, which I was assured were the most difficult but perhaps the most important element of French grammar. For my part, I had spent weeks trying to understand object pronouns (which don’t exist in the same way in English) and when I tried to introduce them to my students, one of them openly laughed at me. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “Everything you’re saying is wrong,” he said. “Do you want to explain it then?” I offered. “No,” he said. “I don’t know any of this stuff. I just know you’re doing it wrong.” I guess that’s what I get for trying.

My students were all in their third year of French class, so their vocabulary was much broader than mine was, but after the first month, I think I actually had a better grasp on the grammar than most of them did, so I felt like I was able to legitimately help them with their work, if not outright instruct them. I handed out the worksheets that had been supplied to me and they were always good for eating up a chunk of time. Plus, whenever they were doing their work in class, I had extra time to study. I didn’t want them to get bored with their work, though, so I tried to switch up the routine as much as I was capable of. Sometimes, instead of talking about the French language, we discussed French history or literature. I grasped on to everything I had ever learned about the culture from books or documentaries or cartoons – who knew all those hours watching Pepé Le Pew and Klondike Kat would pay off?

I was a fraud. I knew it and the kids knew it, but somehow we were mostly able to look past that obvious fact and get through each day. Every night when I returned home, it felt like I had been through a 12-round boxing match. I was exhausted and battered but I had survived. Whenever I relayed my French class exploits to people outside of school they always seemed to respond the same way: “Those poor kids.” Poor kids? What about poor me???

I refused to buy in completely to the idea of being a teacher and so, made no long-term lesson plans. That meant that every morning I had to figure out what I was going to do that day as I made my way to school. It was as if my brain wouldn’t allow me to think about the horrors that lay ahead until the front door to the house closed behind me. Then, on that 30 second walk to my car, I would panic, trying to come up with something, anything that would get me through the day.

When the worksheets were going stale and I didn’t have any insight to give them on grammar, I always had the movie cabinet, which I dipped into more often than I care to admit. One morning, when I was feeling particularly uninspired, I dug around and found a documentary on Marie Antoinette that looked interesting. I didn’t want to just put it on for them with no explanation, though. Then they’d know I was phoning it in and that would give them license to act up. To guard against that, I spent ten minutes scanning Marie Antoinette’s Wikipedia page before class and somehow turned that into a 30-minute lecture on why this film would be beneficial for them to watch. Eating up 30 minutes also meant that the documentary would take a whole extra day to finish. Score one for me!

I had been working as a professional sportscaster for five years by this point but I don’t think I ever truly believed I was capable in that role until I taught French class. Whenever I needed to vamp about French diplomats or important battles in French wars or some other obscure topic, I always found a way to keep talking long enough to get through a class without babbling too much and turning away the students’ interest. One day, I was on Google and noticed that the daily doodle was celebrating the anniversary of the Eiffel Tower’s completion. That was perfect. I knew a little about that history myself and how it tied into the 1893 World’s Fair, which gave me a chance to teach a little local history and pretend it was relevant. I filled an entire day with that.

As this was happening, more and more, I was becoming ingrained with the school. When the basketball team was playing in the sectional finals, I made sure to be there. When one of my students told me she was going to be in the school play, I bought my ticket. My dad even came with me and we enjoyed a fine production of West Side Story. When another student was selling cookies for a rugby team fundraiser, I happily bought a box. OK, that had less to do with school pride than with the fact that I really wanted to eat some cookies, but still…

Over time I learned that I was becoming a little too much a part of the school. One day, a student relayed a story in which my name came up during her chemistry class. “Oh, Mr. Bonadonna,” the chemistry teacher said. “Is that the new French teacher?” To my horror, the student apparently replied yes.

After weeks of going to the office every morning to collect my key and roster, the woman behind the desk (whose name I never learned, but that’s OK, she never asked for mine either) looked at me quizzically and asked, “Why do you keep coming in here every day?” I didn’t understand the question; I couldn’t get into the classroom without the key. She pressed on, “Why don’t you have your own key by now?” Apart from the obvious answer that she hadn’t given me one, I desperately didn’t want my own key. My stop in the office each morning was the only interaction I had with any school administrator, no matter how brief or insubstantial. If I could go straight to my classroom every day, it would feel like I had no supervision whatsoever and that was terrifying. She gave me the key anyway.

One morning, a student sat at his desk grinning like the cat that ate the canary. When I looked at him, he tauntingly told me that he knew my first name. Who cares? was my first thought, but I played it coy. “Oh?” I responded. “Yes,” he said. “Take a look at this.” He was holding up his report card. Under French, it listed his grade and “Teacher: Terry Bonadonna.” It didn’t say “Substitute Teacher” or “Interim Teacher” or “Local Boob.” No, it said very simply “Teacher.”

“That isn’t good,” I said.

“No, no, it’s OK,” the student reassured me. “They put all the teachers’ first names on here.”

It struck me as strange that this guy was so interested in my first name when I would have gladly told him had he ever asked, but much more than that, I was worried about this whole report card thing. I had been walking a tightrope all semester trying to keep this class just barely on the right side of legitimacy but if any parents complained about their kids’ French teacher not knowing French, the whole thing could blow up with me at the center of it. I had no idea that my grades were going to be listed on a report card that way. A few weeks earlier, the school’s IT guy had taught me how to input grades after the administration told me I had to give the students some kind of formal feedback. I very openly told all classes that as long as they turned in all their work and showed an honest effort, they would all get A’s. There would never be a test and there would never be homework, so as long as they spent their class time wisely, it would be the easiest A of their lives. Still a fairly high percentage never turned in any work and I had no choice but to fail them. I felt I was justified in grading their effort if not their language ability, but I’m sure an angry parent wouldn’t feel the same way.

Shortly after the report cards came out, I got a note that a student’s mother wanted me to call her. I dreaded the call all day, but when we talked, it turned out that she wasn’t interested in yelling at me. She was simply calling all of her son’s teachers to see how he was doing. I gave her a CliffsNotes version of my story and explained that if he just turned in his work, he’d get an A but that he spent most class periods sleeping. When she responded angrily, I was relieved to find that she was mad at her son and not at me. I truly am a selfish man.

On a Thursday night in mid-April, more than two months into my tenure as French teacher, as I was preparing to go on the air for a college softball broadcast, I got a phone call from an unrecognized number. I considered not answering, but I thought it might be about the broadcast, so I figured I should check. It was the school’s real French teacher. She told me that she was on her way back to class and that she would be at school either the next day or the following Monday to resume her teaching. She was just calling to find out how far along we were in our lessons. I told her we had made it to Chapter 7 in the textbook. “Oh, that’s not very far,” she said, perturbed. I told her I had to hang up because I was about to go on the air, so we never finished our conversation and she left it in the air as to whether she was going to show up at school the next day.

When she wasn’t there, I thought that meant there was a good chance she would be back on Monday. I had been with my class for a while, so I didn’t want to disappear on them. I told them there was a chance that this would be my last day and that it had been a pleasure getting to know them. One of the students raised his hand. “Does this mean we don’t have to do our assignment that’s due Monday?”

I told him that if I were there I’d collect it. If not, it was up to their real teacher. “So, we don’t have to do it, right?” He asked.

I narrowed my eyes and said, “I guess you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?” He stared blankly up at me and asked, “Did you just call me a punk?”

I called the district office to find out what they knew about this teacher returning to work and they told me that they didn’t know anything about it. She hadn’t contacted them. I didn’t know how that was possible. “Why did you give her your number?” they asked me.

“I didn’t give her my number,” I said. “You did.”

They responded that they would never give out a substitute’s phone number without his permission. To this day, I have no idea how she got ahold of me.

It was weird leaving school that Friday. After my conversation with the district, I was fairly certain that I would still be teaching the class on Monday, but not so certain that I wanted to leave any of my things there. I packed up all of my stuff and said goodbye to the students as though I would never see them again, then I went into the weekend not knowing what Monday held.

I never heard another word from the teacher or from the district office. When the new week rolled around, I was still the French teacher and class went on as usual. Eventually, though, I did have to go. Baseball season was coming up and I was returning to the ThunderBolts, so I wasn’t able to see my class through to the end of the year. A new teacher had been lined up to finish the last few weeks and I had a chance to meet with her briefly before my last day. She had been a sub in various classes around the school throughout the year and told me that she wasn’t fluent in French but that she could speak it conversationally and that was probably why they had assigned her here. “Trust me,” I said. “That’s not a prerequisite.”

When I told my students who their new teacher was, a few of them who knew her from other classes groaned. “She won’t let us swear or use our cell phones in class,” one student moaned. Exasperated, I replied, “I’ve been telling you for months not to do those things!”

“Yeah,” he said. “But she actually won’t let us.”

In saying goodbye, I wanted to sum up our time together somehow. I apologized to them for not actually teaching them much French but indicated that I hoped they got something out of the class.

“If there’s just one thing you learned here,” I said, “I hope it’s that it is almost never advantageous to act like a two-year-old.” This was perhaps a negative message but one that had been punctuated the day before, when one student stormed out of the room screaming after I had told him to pick up a piece of paper that he had thrown on the floor and put it in the garbage can.

I continued, “If there’s a second thing, I hope it’s to always keep an open mind because you never know when you’re about to learn the most important lesson of your life.”

One of the students yelled out, “What would the third thing be?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but the answer was obvious: “Object pronouns!”

After the last class was over, two of my 140 students approached me and thanked me for trying anyway. I appreciated it. That’s exactly what I had done. I tried.

It was frustrating to leave knowing that I had made probably no positive impact on any of these kids’ lives. That’s probably the worst thing you can say about a teacher, but I guess I wasn’t a real teacher. As I moved into the next phase of my life, I tried to take some of my own advice. Life isn’t always what you expect it to be but that shouldn’t stop you from keeping an open mind. When those kids chose to take French instead of Spanish or German, they probably figured they would get to learn some French and when I signed up to be a substitute teacher, it definitely wasn’t with this in mind. But I remembered how aimless my life had been just a few months earlier, when I couldn’t get hired to do anything, and it made me grateful for my time at school. I realized how valuable it is to wake up every day with a purpose, no matter how ridiculous that purpose is. It would be a lie to say I enjoyed any part of my French teaching excursion, but when it was over, I couldn’t deny how much happier I was overall than I had been before it all started.

Since then, I’ve gone through high times and low times in my career. It’s the nature of freelancing, but I’ve never allowed myself to get quite so down as I was before that French class came along. It’s amazing how something as simple as making a fool of yourself every day in front of a room full of teenagers while you’re trying to speak a language you don’t understand can turn your life around. But now, nearly a decade later, I can finally admit for the first time: I’m really glad I had that experience.