From First to Last: A Teacher’s Tale
Fifth Period: Is This the Fun Part?
For Lunch Break of a Teacher’s Tale, please see:
After my espresso I retraced my morning approach to school with head raised high. The sky was pallid blue and the traces of clouds mirrored the lightness of my body below. I reentered the building with a bounce and made preparations for 5th period.
In the teacher’s lounge, I made amends with the copier. She was responsive to my touch and rattled off 15 copies of a worksheet titled, “On Second Thought”. The exercise was for my 8th grade creative writing class. We would not have to think too hard, only rehearse strategies in revision. I brought a copy of another student’s first draft, a piece of narrative writing taken from a year prior. It was my practice to hoard all my students’ unfinished work, and to their chagrin, recycle it as lesson templates for the future. In this fashion, the students produced my composition and grammar textbook. The sentences they often corrected had nothing to do with Egyptian pyramids nor Darwin’s theory of evolution. They did have to do with teenage breakups, the latest in Louis Vitton handbags and Rooney’s exploits on the pitch. Our textbook was free and compiled on a weekly basis in the student’s chosen method of organization. If the practice were to catch on, there would be no need to factory produce textbooks and no reason to employ institutional lackeys who did not enjoy teaching. A sinister smile crossed my face.
I reentered room 3. The students were groggy. They had their drawn out arms laid across the desks.
“Hel-looo Mr. Kras-nerrrrr,” they recited feebly.
Some picked themselves off the tables.
“You’re not mocking me are you?”
“Of course not.”
Polish students were trained to amplify the teacher’s routine entrance by providing a sing-song rendition of his or her name. At our school, they sang with such strained harmony as to barely conceal scorn. I had stopped the practice in my first week at the school, with this class. They were in the 5th grade then.
“But you still sing for other teachers?” I asked incredulously.
“The ones who like it,” Artur B said.
“I don’t want to know.”
I would be spending my last half of the day with the 8th grade, one period of creative writing and a final period of literature. The group had a unique temperament: boisterous, but not as cuddly as the 6th grade; insightful, but not as cooperative as the 11th grade. They were in between. The appropriate term is adolescence. They were transforming, literally, and could be the most frustrating class to stand before. But then again, they were often the most rewarding.
“There will be two parts to this lesson,” I began. “We have to do the boring part first. But there will be a fun part later.”
Ola glared at me from the corner. She sat in Filip’s seat by the window. Like him, she needed her thoughts to breathe. She painted her fingernails black and defied her softened blonde features with a seen-it-all attitude.
“Sure,” she said skeptically. “You’re just saying that to keep our attention.”
“I am just saying that to keep your attention. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a fun part. There will. I promise.”
The group was mulish. The zapiekanki would take some time before it could digest and become wisdom.
“I’ll make this easy,” I said while approaching the board. “All we have to do is make a list of all the editing symbols I’ve drowned your papers in over the years. You should know them by heart.”
“Is this the fun part,” Artur B quipped.
“Actually, we can make it kind of fun.”
“How?”
“By coming up to the board and drawing the symbol.”
“Oh, wow,” Marta said, dripping with feigned displeasure. If one needed to witness the symptoms of clinical apathy, they need look no further than Marta Gawron.
In fact, the diagnosis suited the 8th grade as a whole. There was Artur B, so called to distinguish himself from Artur L, and to save teachers the trouble of pronouncing his last name. Artur B was Marta’s primary antagonist. He was growing like bamboo and spoke without any interior voice telling him what was appropriate. Marta took the opposite approach. She didn’t contribute to class discussions except to stunt them. She was growing at the same gangly rate as Artur B and their height was an apt metaphor for their cumbersome intellects. Both could see into windows not available through the level curriculum. They were easily restless and their internal classroom battles mirrored those of a middle-aged couple who forgot the source of their attraction.
Ola and Marta sat in opposite corners and made for blonde contraries. Ola’s face was rounded, Marta’s squared. Ola’s hair was ironed straight and came to an edge at her chin. Marta’s was clustered and grown long below the shoulder blades. They had been part of the same small class since the first grade and may have grown too familiar for each other’s liking. They had a similar need for individuality, but where Ola was a rebel, Marta simply held the opinion that her peers were stupid.
Ola sat next to her closest playmate, Gosia, the class beauty and rechargeable laughing machine. Gosia could be counted on to take no subject seriously, from Anne Frank’s secret annex to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. She sat with her energetic legs bundled into her chest or conversely sprawled out across an empty chair. Her only confessed care was for dance. But if she had a passion for it, she kept it hidden from her classmates.
Other students filled out the ranks: Artur L, a recalcitrant who flustered easily when called on; Mateusz, a hip-hop devotee who rambled aloud his thoughts; Christina, Divya and Lily, the “good students troupe”, who reminded me of my homework assignments when I couldn’t place them; Stefan, a genuine boy who burst out when he spoke and was pitted as the class clown.
One by one I called on the disembodied to detach themselves from their chairs, shake off the rust and write an editing symbol on the board in bright green ink. The first set of symbols was for mechanical errors, things Nurse Ratched would harp on: run-ons, fragments, missing commas, apostrophes, capitalization. Pronoun reference. Misspellings. Ad absurdum. There were symbols for insertions, deletions, reorganization and new paragraphs. The board filled up with the students’ haywire script.
“Have you ever noticed how your handwriting reflects your personality?” I asked while studying the evidence. “Look at Artur L’s for example. It looks like computer code. And Artur B’s looks like a guy who hasn’t cleaned his room in four years.”
They started loosening up.
“And then Divya’s,” I pointed. “Hers looks like she cleaned her room this morning. And will again this afternoon.”
She blushed and flashed very white teeth. The class as a whole tolerated my humor. They understood it was not meant to demean. Rather, it gave them a license to wield their own.
“Is this the fun part?” Ola poked from her corner.
“Not yet. We have to move onto the second set of symbols. Hang in there.”
She sighed.
“These are not used to indicate errors, but rather areas for improvement, right? They’re content related and the most important part of the drafting process. The first draft is only written as a means to get to this stage. Writing is all revising.”
“Yea, yea, we know Mr. Krasner,” Gosia undercut me. “You’ve told us like a thousand times.”
“Does it ever sink in?” I questioned. “If I didn’t force you to write a second draft, would you?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“We don’t like to write.”
“You don’t like to work.”
“Whatever.”
Gosia giggled in her insecure manner, assuming the class’s voice.
“What are the content areas? Let’s go. You first Gosia.”
“Why me? I don’t know. There are none. It’s perfect the first time.”
“Gosia, do you really believe that the pirouette is perfect the first time around? How many times do you have to practice it before it’s perfect?”
“But that’s dance Mr. Krasner,” she drawled.
“What’s the difference?”
“One of them is fun.”
“Fun for you, maybe. But I’m afraid dancing is not much fun for me.”
I lurched forward, my feet and hips following songs of antagonist conductors. My point was made.
“Oh God, he’s dancing,” Marta said. She covered her eyes.
“But maybe with practice I could learn how to dance?”
“No Mr. Krasner, it’s hopeless.”
“Is this the fun part?” Ola asked again. She was no longer smirking.
“Is it the fun part Gosia?”
“No,” she said while giggling.
“You mean the practice part, right? The work part? That’s not fun at all. But the pirouette itself?”
“Sure, whatever,” she conceded.
“I’m trying to make a point.”
“We know.”
“What is it then?”
“My God, is it so difficult?” Artur B interjected.
Marta finished for him: “Your point is that you can’t do anything well without practice and no one likes practice but we have to practice to do anything well, unless it’s something we don’t like. Then we don’t have to do it.”
All this was spoken while Marta adhered to the principles of adolescent posture: her falling torso held upright at the jaw-line by the heel of one palm, the elbow planted firmly into the table.
“That’s not exactly my point Marta. That’s what I’m up against. The ‘have it your way’ generation. Look at you guys. You’re becoming more like Americans every day. I think you might have been better off under Communism.”
“Sure,” Marta bit dryly. “The ‘have it one way’ generation..”
“At least work was a virtue,” I argued with American nostalgia. “Now it’s mostly about having, isn’t it? Do you know how to work? Gosia, is work important?”
“Only if I like what I’m doing.”
She looked towards Marta, deferring to her witticism.
“Is it possible for me to teach you how to enjoy writing?”
“No one can teach us that.”
“Well, that’s true actually,” I said while leaning against my desk. “But I don’t want you guys to be professional writers. That’s not my intent.”
“Then why do we need to learn this?” Marta asked.
“Because writing is like dance. And dance is like writing. It’s about moving from point A to B in a beautiful way.”
“Ohhh,” Artur B said unimpressed.
“But Mr. Krasner,” Gosia cracked, “you can’t dance. Why should you think we can write?”
It was an apt retort.
“Maybe I can dance, only I’ve forgotten how. Maybe you’ve only forgotten how to write. Maybe all anyone knows how to do these days is sit in a chair and be entertained. Look how well you all do that now.”
I surveyed their drooping forms as with a baton.
“You need to learn how to return to something. To one thing, over and over again, until you get inside it, beneath all the layers of fat. You spend all your time on short-term attention. Only it’s not even attention — it’s preoccupation. You browse something then leave it. Scan something then leave it. Write something — “
“Then leave it,” Artur B spoke again in exaggerated tones. “We get it.”
“Then leave it. It’s not very satisfying, is it?”
“That’s not quite true Mr. Krasner,” he now reasoned. “I’ve been playing the same game of Combat Mission for the last month. I’m on level 9 right now and if I get through it, I‘ll have my all-time high score.”
He realized he was being clever.
“What you’re saying applies to gaming,” he followed. “You have to return again and again and again to get better.”
“Great. I wish I never brought it up.”
“Jesus,” Marta said exhausted. “Can we just get through this already. What does gaming have to do with writing?”
“A lot,” Artur B continued. He was getting warmed up. “It’s what I do to avoid writing.”
I decided to seize on the remark.
“And what do you all do to avoid writing? I’m sure everyone will have an entertaining answer. Mateusz?”
He propped up in his chair and spoke in his usual perplexed drone.
“Well…..I dunno. I don’t have just one thing. There are lots of things I can do to avoid writing.”
“Taking out the trash?”
“No, no,” he chuckled, “that’s not one of them. I would probably write to avoid taking out the trash.”
“Well, I’m glad to know writing doesn’t dwell beneath household chores.”
“Actually, it does,” Marta said. “I would clean my room to avoid writing.”
“And the bathroom?” I progressed.
“I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned the bathroom. You’d have to assign something pretty big.”
“Like a research paper?”
“I’d clean the toilets before approaching that.”
“Maybe I should coordinate my assignments with your parents. They can text me when it’s time for an extended essay, like when your room begins to smell.”
“I play basketball,” Stefan out of the blue.
“Huh?”
“Stefan, really?”
The laughter in the room raised a couple decibels. Stefan pressed on with wide-eyed enthusiasm.
“Yes really. I play basketball to avoid almost anything. My mother has to call me on my cell phone to get me back home. I lose track of time. I can play basketball forever.”
“That’s great Stefan,” Artur B said sardonically. “Please, tell us more.”
“Well, I really like basketball. I like Carmelo Antony. He’s my favorite player.”
“Carmelo Anthony,” I corrected.
“Carmelo An-thony,” he stressed. “Of the New York Knicks. They’re my team. I’ve told my mom that we have to go to Madison Square Garden one day. We usually go to Washington D.C. so it’s just a train ride away. She promised.”
His classmates were ready to make jokes at his expense but I interceded.
“I’m guessing all of you have things you like very much, which is what Stefan is saying. Or at least something you dislike the least.”
Ola, Gosia and Marta all glowered my way.
“Stefan, how often do you practice basketball?” I asked.
“Every chance I get. I’m outside every day after school shooting jump-shots. I even play in the snow.”
“So you must play very well.”
“I’m not bad.”
“And your English papers? Your stories?”
“They’re pretty bad sir. You give me mostly C’s. I wish you’d give me something higher.”
“But I don’t give grades Stefan. You earn them. How much time did you spend on your last paper?”
“What was the last paper?”
“I don’t remember myself. Christina?”
Christina, the essence of diligence, filed through her customized textbook with delicate thumbs.
“We’re working on our Anne Frank diaries sir,” she said gently.
“What about before that.”
“Before that, let me see. We wrote about a hero. It was a portrait piece.”
“Right. As an introduction to the Anne Frank unit. Stefan, do you remember that?”
“Oh, yes sir! I wrote about Drazen Petrovic.”
“Who the heck is that?” Mateusz asked disparagingly.
Stefan turned to him with full force.
“Who was he? He was only the greatest basketball player in Croatian history,” he said indignantly.
Mateusz backed off.
“He’s a hero in my country. He was one of the first European players to play in the NBA and he could have been the greatest player period. Even greater than Michael Jordan.”
“He could have. So why wasn’t he?” Mateusz asked unaware.
“Because he died,” I said. “He was in a car accident.”
Stefan was getting emotional.
“Stefan, how often did you return to that paper? Was it like going to the playground and shooting jump-shots every day?”
“No sir,” he said more poignantly. “Like I told you, I shoot jump-shots to avoid writing.”
“Sir, I think we’ve heard enough about Stefan’s basketballs,” Artur B quipped.
The class ignited into a sudden boom of laughter. Even Stefan laughed along good naturedly. I just shook my head, making a mental note to remember the moment. I might want to write about it someday.
“We’ve got to get back to business,” I said after checking my phone for the time. “Marta, what do I write on your papers when they go on and on in a different direction than originally intended?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you know the answer.”
“I never look at your edits.”
“Oh that’s not true,” I said. “Out of everyone in the class, you’re the most eager to inspect my comments when I return papers.”
“That’s just to see what you misunderstood.”
“I see.”
“She’s impossible sir,” Artur B came to my defense. “No respect.”
“Does anyone know the edit?”
“For what?”
“When we’re off topic!”
Divya had her hand raised. I called on her.
“You would say off-topic sir.”
“Brilliant.”
“You see, it’s not so difficult,” I confirmed. “Marta, you’re the artist amongst us. Can you write the shorthand up here?”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes. It will help to get your blood moving. If you prefer to dance, I’ll allow it.”
She pushed herself off from port with a disgusted “ughh” and lethargically wrote OFF T on the board with a big circle around it. Then she pivoted and made for a quick return to her seat.
“Wait a minute. Just stay up here for the rest of the symbols.”
“Oh come on.”
“Look at the board Marta. Everyone else might as well be writing in Sumerian. How about when the writer is stuck on the surface of things and could use an anecdote to flesh things out.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he should pick a subject he actually likes,” she continued to punch.
“That’s the first rule. But we’re talking about revising. She’s stuck with the subject she’s got. Still, she mainly generalizes. Like, ‘English class was strange today’, instead of, ‘Mr. Krasner danced to the rhythm of a broken clock in order to demonstrate the tenets of good writing.’ Well?”
“Show don’t tell!” Artur B yelled. “More detail!”
“He’s right. Can you add both of them?”
She complied begrudgingly.
“What about when the writer is stuck on generic terms, like ‘Gosia wants to be a movie star’ instead of ‘Gosia wants to be Natalie Portman in Black Swan’.”
“Hey!”
“For the sake of argument..”
“This is intolerable,” Marta said.
“Then just name it Marta. Can you name it?”
She addressed my hint and wrote NAME on the board, adding her own flourish by signing the shorthand as her signature.
“Very good. I’ll remember to use that in the future. Okay, let’s keep going. What about when the writer skips through the most important part of the story. You know, writes the first few paragraphs with great concentration, then gets tired or bored and just runs right through the climax so as to get the story over with as soon as possible.”
“Slooooow down.”
That’s how she wrote it.
“Is this the fun part?” Ola asked again.
“How about when the writer said one line that could easily open up to five more, like a keyhole into a beautiful salon. There’s something very interesting in the salon but we can’t get in! The writer only leaves a glimpse.”
“Say MORE,” Mateusz yelled.
Marta painted MORE in broad marker strokes.
“Okay, I will. How about this beauty of a sentence: Like when you go on and on about a certain kind of thing, maybe even the writing process, but don’t really know how to say it in a few words, so you just keep rambling on with a lot of meaningless filler until you get tired and forget what you were talking about in the first place, so you drop in a period, but still haven’t said anything at all, really.”
Marta frowned.
“Well?”
“Wooooordy” she wrote on the board.
“And then if like that phrase, you know, ‘in a few words’, could easily be replaced with an actual word with an exact definition that suits the idea, like I don’t know, ‘succinctly’, what do we call that edit?”
“Huh?”
“Or boring. How many times do you guys use the word boring when instead you could say uninspiring or sleep inducing..”
“Or just plain dull,” Marta said.
“Dull, right. What is that?”
“It’s a word.…jeezus.”
“No, Jesus is a God. In the beginning was the word.”
She growled at me. I knew I was pushing her tolerance levels.
“Dull’s a better word than boring, for sure,” I softened. “What edit is that? When you replace a word with a better one?”
Silently she wrote W-CHOICE without adding much demonstration.
“Happy?” she added.
“You know Mr. Krasner,” Artur B interred, “this would have been a lot easier if you just gave us a worksheet. Then we wouldn’t have to watch Marta suffer all day. And we wouldn’t have to copy all this stuff down either. Don’t you think?”
“And if something is in the wrong place?” I redirected quickly to Marta. “Or someone,” I clarified. “And if that someone puts something in the end of the conversation that should be at the beginning, or at the middle that should be at the end, or at the end when maybe it shouldn’t be in there at all?”
Marta gave up.
“Out of order?” I filled in.
“Okay, great,” Artur B said with sarcasm intact. “Sorry for participating.”
I went to my desk to retrieve one of my piles.
“I do have the worksheet Artur, but I wanted us to produce the content first. That way, the worksheet is just a review for what you already put into your brain yourself. Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” he said. “But we could have saved a lot of time.”
“Yes, and by that statement you have just said something wise — where there is convenience, there is no work. Where there is no work, there is no result. There is nothing.”
“Do you want me to write that down?” Marta asked. “I like concepts.”
“You can sit down now Marta. Please, a hand everyone for our dispassionate artist.”
She sulked back to her seat, her dignity having taken a blow by participating in English class and partially enjoying herself. I began passing out the worksheets.
“Okay, you’ll notice all these symbols and a few more we missed on the editing worksheet. Run-ons, fragments, slow down, word choice, all of them we have just put on the board. But at the bottom, you will see that there is space for one more.”
“What’s that for?” Stefan asked.
“I want you to think of another editing symbol we’ve never discussed, for any type of error you wish. You can make one up.”
“Is this the fun part?” Ola asked.
“Yes Ola, finally this is the fun part!”
“I can’t believe I waited for this.”
“This doesn’t inspire you? You get to make up your very own grammatical mistake. You get to make the rules! For example, what if you think the writing is too good?”
“Huh?”
“Let’s say you’re the teacher and you find that the student’s writing is too fluent and polished. It makes you insecure. So you’d like the writer to insert a few mistakes. Dumb it down a bit. This should be second nature for Polish students.”
“Hey!” Gosia played at offence.
“I’m only referring to your disclosed stereotype. You remember the joke you told me about the Pole with two cows who has a neighbor with three cows? And how the Pole with two cows will not wish for a third cow like his neighbor, but rather that all his neighbor’s cows die?”
“You want us to come up with symbol for that?” Ola asked.
“Essentially.”
“How about a dead cow,” Marta offered.
I held out the marker for her. She sprang out of her chair.
At the board again, Marta drew a mottled and despairing cow who held his throat with his hooves and seemed to be choking from bad fumes.
“Um..that might be hard for me to reproduce. But it’s very impressive.”
“Can I stay up here?”
“Okay. What if the composition is too happy? It has a predictably happy ending, and you know, who likes happy endings? Maybe you could use a unsmiley face, with the notation — make more sad!”
“I could just draw a picture of my mom,” Ola said.
“Marta, can you draw a picture of Ola’s mom?”
She turned over an impish intent and drew a woman with flattened eyes and a stern index finger.
It occurred to me that the only way to seduce their cooperation was to weave in dead cows and domineering mothers. I made another mental note for my own pedagogy textbook.
“How about if it’s boring?” I asked. “Energy aborting. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I’m not drawing an abortion!”
“No, of course not. How about just zzzzzzz.”
“That’s boring.”
“What about a spiral for when the writer’s just going on and on and on and doesn’t know how to stop?” Mateusz jumped in.
Marta was busy drawing a picture of a student with her face flat down on her desk, apparently sleeping. Then Artur B exploded —
“How about an F-bomb?” he asked.
“What?!”
“You know, drop an F-bomb.”
He leapt suddenly out of his chair to draw the symbol himself. He had to wrestle the marker free from Marta, and once he did, he drew a small pipe bomb with twirling fuse.
“Insert F-bomb here.”
The class was roaring in approval. I had another moment for my book.
“That’s about the best editing symbol I’ve ever seen. And you’re right. Most writing could use a well placed F-bomb.”
I instructed both Artur B and Marta back to their seats. But in their awkward natures, they both spun inwards and smacked their foreheads against each other, as against a door. The classroom became a theatre with wild applause. Marta and Artur B stumbled backwards with stunned wincing expressions.
“You see how you two gravitate towards each other?” I said.
“It’s like they kissed sir.”
“If they were Eskimos.”
They absorbed the limelight for a moment, both suddenly vulnerable, their rehearsed veneers cracked.
“Really, if two people were ever right for each other..”
Artur B enjoyed the inference. Marta scowled from the back.
“It’s impossible Mr. Krasner,” he said after gaining back his composure. “She doesn’t like anyone.”
“What do you know?” she attacked.
“Well, you don’t. Name one person you like.”
“Charles Baudelaire.”
“Oh great. Anyone living perhaps?”
“No one living is worth being loved.”
“You see? She’s a freak. She probably spends her weekends at the cemetery.”
“Maybe I do. Maybe there’s better company to be found there.”
“Okay — “ I stepped in. “I think we’re all warmed up now, yes? Let’s see if we can apply those editing symbols!”
“Is this the fun part?” Ola topped off the melee. She had her chin placed atop joined fists and was pressing forward in her chair.
“Ola! Did you not hear Artur B interrupt an innocent writing lesson with an F-bomb? I cannot top an F-bomb.”
“Don’t bother Mr. Krasner,” Mateusz now entered the fray, “you could spin your own cotton candy for her and she’d still say she’s not having any fun.”
He was careful not to make eye contact with her. Ola mouthed a breath of indignation.
“Okay, unless you’d like me to shift into marriage counseling mode, I think we should continue with the lesson.”
I distributed the second worksheet. It was a copy of a handwritten sketch about the fires in Peloponnesus from one year ago. Maria, my current 9th grader, wrote it. It was a standard first draft, three paragraphs, and captured most of the facts of the natural disaster. Maria went on to complete a second draft and also a third: three pages of gripping narrative. The first draft lacked any hint of that eventuality. This is exactly what I wished to show the students. How most anything good, including writing, starts out as crap.
For lack of a better word.
“I want you to go through this piece of writing, written by someone your own age, and apply the editing symbols we have on the board. You have to use each symbol at least once. There is room for each one. That includes the content oriented ones, like “name” and “slow down”. You guys have to be the teachers now. Find the mistakes. Find the content areas. Give the student the right clues for an improved second draft.”
I observed that my class as a whole was sitting dutifully in their chairs. It took 40 minutes, but it happened.
“Mr. Krasner?” Artur B asked cooperatively. “Can we use all the edits on the board, including the F-bomb?”
“Yes Artur. If used intelligently, inflamed language can be very effective. And actually, I can think of a very good spot for an F-bomb in this passage. There was a fire.”
They drew closer to their worksheets and it was quiet.
“But you don’t want us to edit it?” Gosia asked. “Just insert the symbols?”
“That’s right. Be the teacher. Be critical. One step at a time.”
For the remainder of the class, I strolled through the rows of students and oversaw their lumpy concentrated forms. They sat in various shapes, some pretzel’d up and others with their slanted bodies held in place by the stationary arm. To my amusement, I saw a few dead cows and a sprinkling of F-bombs. The bell rang before we had an opportunity to share any of the variations.
“Okay class, you know what the homework is.”
“Let me guess — “ Artur B spoke for everyone, “we have to write the second draft.”
“You got it. According to your own edits. Make it better. Make it your own. And you’ll be graded as if it were your own. Sometimes it’s easier to write other people’s stories.”
“Mr. Krasner, whose story was this?” Stefan asked while the class rose rather quietly.
“I’m not telling. But I will share her second and third drafts with you next time. And we can compare. And trust me, hers dances. So don’t shoot too many basketballs when you could be doing this.”
Stefan shook his head and smiled the way a son might when he recognizes, against his will, some value in his father’s counsel.
Ola was repacking her bag.
“Hey Ola,” I said to her. “That was the fun part.”
“Yea, I know. You love giving us homework.”
Nurse Ratched, I thought.
For Last Period of A Teacher’s Tale, please see:
