For over a decade, in June and July, I have taught summer school. This is not connected in any way with the public school system. It’s one of those storefront supplemental schools found all over Asian neighborhoods, whether SF’s original Chinatown, or the working, less touristy versions in Oakland and out on San Bruno. Almost all of my students are either Chinese immigrants, or the children of Chinese immigrants. I teach three classes, grammar and punctuation Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday, reading comprehension Tuesdays and Thursdays, grades 3-4 at 9:00 am, high school seniors and sophomores at 10:00 am, and middle schoolers at 11:00 am.

It is exhausting. I always come away wondering how teachers who do this full-time manage.

I love teaching. Last year was especially rewarding. For my middle-schoolers, I’d brought in a copy of Harriet the Spy and read to them for the last fifteen minutes of class.

I’d wondered if thirty 21st-century working class Asian-American kids immersed in online media would enjoy a story about a pre-internet 20th century, wealthy white child. My gamble paid off. They loved it. When I got to the moment when Harriet comes upon her friends reading her notebook, students gasped and looked at each other in horror. “But she wrote PRIVATE on the front!” one of the girls exclaimed, while the student next to her nodded, her eyes indignant. “They shouldn’t have read it!”

Best of all, one day I walked into my high school classroom and saw one of them reading Harriet the Spy. He’d checked it out of the library. I asked him about it. “My sister’s in your other class,” he told me. “All she talks about at dinner is this book. I want to know what happens next.”

This was wonderful, but even then, I wasn’t sure about coming back this year. When I started teaching summer school, I was in early middle age. Now I’m at an age younger news reporters sometimes call “elderly” and these classes are physically demanding. I am on my feet the whole time, have to stay alert to keep control of classes as large as thirty kids (The high schoolers are a minority) and invariably catch something one of the children have brought in. A roomful of children is a petri dish. Every year it’s been harder on me and it’s taken me a little longer to recover, even with the thermos of throat-coat tea I keep with me. Last summer, I ended up with a cough I didn’t shake until mid-September.

“I don’t think you should go back,” Michael said.

Will I? That question looms even larger now. In May, I usually get a phone call from the school’s headmistress about coming in to teach. Will I get that call this year? Will the school re-open this summer?

And if they call me, what will I say?

Yes. I think I’ll say yes. If they’ll have me, I will.

I think.