Class Dismissed

Class Dismissed

By Kevin M. McIntosh

Released July 1, 2021

STUDENT GIVES TEACHER THE FINGER, screams the Post headline after Patrick Lynch slams his classroom door on the hand of Josh Mishkin, the learning-disabled son of two NYU professors. Josh’s injury casts Patrick, thirty-year-old son of the Midwest, down a New York City rabbit hole of Board of Ed bureaucracy and union politics. Transformed into an unwilling celebrity by his fellow inmates in that teacher purgatory, the Rubber Room, Mr. Lynch is suddenly more “at risk” than any of his students. Now he must fight his way back to his classroom at Marcus Garvey High School and reclaim the affections of his social worker fiancée, all while wrestling the legend of his late father, Superintendent Lynch, the pride of Peterson’s Prairie, Minnesota.

Kevin McIntosh’s short stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Tribune, Jabberwock Review, Potomac Review, and have been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. He has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and Blue Mountain Center, and is a thirty-year veteran of public school teaching in Oakland, New York City, and Greater Boston. He lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts.