Teacher of the Year - 2012 ABNA Entry

From watching schmaltzy Hollywood movies, Laura Quagliata grew up convinced that teaching was a noble profession. But after four years of serving as a poorly-paid lecturer of Bonehead English at Sunshine State University, a burnt-out Laura greets her first day of fall semester 2004 with a resolution: either she'll find a tenure-track position at a "real college" next year, or she'll leave the teaching profession altogether. Yet the moment Laura enters her first class, her resolution wavers. Among the motley crew of predictably lazy pupils--who seem to ask "I got out of bed, what more do you want?"--sit a small group of exceptional students that Laura comes to call her "Lovelies" and a handsome deaf boy named Gil Rivieres. Laura's warm relationship with her Lovelies--and an increasingly flirtatious e-mail correspondence with Gil--leads her to want to teach forever. Yet her trials with two troublesome students--a star baseball player who plagiarizes John Updike and a peevish wannabe novelist--cause her to swill too much wine every night and threaten her already-tenuous position with her supervisor, Dr. Arlene Butsavage. Will Laura voluntarily leave teaching--or will she be "butsavaged" out of Sunshine State and forced to move back home to Woonsocket, Rhode Island to listen to her aging parents bicker over whether to watch re-runs of Lawrence Welk or Liberace? Will she lose her best friend and fellow teacher Laura2 over a petty professional quarrel? And will she eventually fall for her downstairs neighbor, a cheerful emergency-room nurse named Cosmo Politano? Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 2004 hurricane season, Teacher of the Year proves that maintaining a good sense of humor is the only coping strategy available when some forces in life--such as Love and Big Weather--knock us clean off our feet.