When My Fifth Grade Teacher Read A Wrinkle in Time to Us After Recess
And how her favorite book taught us that we had courage of our own
Miss Duncan silently held up the paperback book she’d been reading to us since Monday, and we settled down at our desks. Outdoor recess, which had involved jumping rope and playing hopscotch in dirty, melting snow, had worn us out, but the sight of that book lifted us to attention.
My feet were soaking wet in my boots, but like my classmates, I hadn’t changed back into my dry shoes in my rush to hear the next chapter of A Wrinkle in Time.
The room was never more quiet than those twelve early afternoons of fifth grade, from the very beginning of Meg’s adventure when even the most unruly boys stared silently at our teacher. She tucked her large, round glasses tightly into her dark curly hair and held the small book close to her face, flipping it towards us before turning each page.
No illustrations prompted her, until that day. Two tiny drawings of an ant, a line, and two hands had us glancing at each other, some of us with raised eyebrows, others with frowns. A tesseract.
