I was at a reading sponsored by my MFA program.  Zadie Smith read from her unpublished novel, and it was gorgeous.  Colum McCann, one of my teachers, praised it afterward as one of the best readings he’d heard – “kind of like a prayer,” he said.  Afterward, Zadie hung out with us in an empty, carpeted room to chat and take questions over pizza and wine.  She was gracious and honest and smart.

One thing she mentioned was that her students – she teaches at NYU – tend to have avid but shallow reading habits.  “They’ve read every good American novel written since 1975,” she said.

(Some context: at the reading, someone asked, “Who are your influences?”, and she replied that the degree she completed – she read English at Cambridge – was on 400 years’ worth of English literature.  “So…those are my influences.”)

She was baffled that her students were trying to write fiction without a better grounding in the literature that came before.  They were reading David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides and Don DeLillo, apparently without noticing those writers’ debt to the last several centuries of Anglophone writing.  She was grave, in an English sort of way, about this state of affairs.  Her face, big-eyed, brows knitted down, seemed poised on the threshold of existential tears.

I had the sudden wish to press pause on my life, go to England for four years to study English at Oxbridge, come back, and press play again.  I thought: I am so, so dumb, sitting here with my plastic cup of wine and greasy pizza-hands.

“You should read the literature of your country,” she continued.  To Homer and Chaucer and Shakespeare, we American writers should add Whitman, Pound, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison.  Yes.  Yes.

I revisit this feeling sometimes:  I’ve read nothing.  I know nothing.

To be fair, I’m not alone: I had a so-so public education in a mid-sized American city.  Some classes were transcendent; most of them weren’t.  I went to a pretty good college, where I spent the majority of my time making tofu scrambles and hanging out in the kitchen of my campus apartment, procrastinating with friends.  I was neither a rigorous nor an especially lazy student.  I muddled through.

My college didn’t have course requirements – it was a great place for self-motivated people, which I wasn’t – and rather than progress through a sequence of courses in what would ultimately be an English degree, I took a class on 18^th century British female playwrights here, a class on representations of masculinity in 20^th century media there.  My college didn’t have majors, either, so it was more of an English/playwriting/social-studies/photography degree.  A tofu-scrambling degree.

In high school, I read some good books, from Shakespeare, Dickens, and Conrad to The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Grapes of Wrath.  But it was high school — do you remember the books you read in high school?  I don’t know, maybe you do.  I didn’t read the last chapters of The Grapes of Wrath or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because…well, because I was a jackass.

Since then, I’ve read some good American novels published after 1975.  Not all of them.  As I’m sure you’ve noticed, more and more get published every month.

Want to know what I did the next morning?  Speed-walking to the subway, I had a pants-on-fire urge to Google “literary canon” and “English literature 1500-1900” on my phone.  I was gonna get on this.  I was gonna read The Iliad on the way to work and The Canterbury Tales on the way back.  (Somewhere along the way, I was going to master Middle English.)

Burning with my mission that evening, I went to the King’s College page on the Cambridge web site.  There’s a link for “offer holders,” which is British for “accepted students,” where you can see summer reading lists for specific majors.  The English list includes Homer, Ovid, Virgil, the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Beckett (among others, plus criticism).  Which Shakespeare, you’re wondering?  “As many of [the plays] as possible,” and all of the sonnets.  I tried to imagine an American freshman reading this list as he contemplated his summer of waiting tables and getting laid, and I started laughing.

I went to the web site of St. Peter’s College at Oxford and had a look at their reading list.  It includes Old English texts, as well as resources for teaching oneself Old English.

“Don’t be put off: by the summer you will be reading these with ease and pleasure!  Now seek out a translation of these texts and READ BOTH THE SET TEXTS AND AS MANY OTHERS AS YOU CAN,” they implore warmly.

I sat at my laptop scratching my head.  Is it really just extremely smart, well-educated people who attend Cambridge and Oxford?  Do mortals even get in?

Last week, I was in my literature class, waiting for the professor, and I mentioned to two of my colleagues from the program that Zadie Smith blew my mind.  “I’m going to spend the next decade reading 400 years of English literature,” I announced.

“I went to Cambridge and got an English degree,” one of them said.  I stared at her, my mouth hanging open.  Here was an actual human person, someone I’d had beers with, who’d read all that Aelfric and Chaucer and Milton with her own eyes.  “I found it really suffocating,” she said.

Suffocating?  No!  Her education had been everything mine wasn’t.  In high school, she did the IB (international baccalaureate); she’d read English at Cambridge as an undergrad; she’d just completed her doctorate at Harvard in comparative literature.  I’ve built a significant chunk of my identity on feeling inferior to such people.  I got a degree in tofu scrambling!  What do you mean, suffocating?

“It was like – their attitude was that nothing else had ever been written.  I wanted to do my thesis on Ralph Ellison, and my advisor literally couldn’t find anyone who knew enough about him to supervise it.  And, you know, my major was post-colonial literature.”  It seems the emphasis was more on the colonial, less on the post-.

“At my college, all we read was post-colonial literature,” I joked.

Last night, I was reading an article on T.S. Eliot in The New Yorker.  I’ve never read T.S. Eliot, not even “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which I didn’t know was written by him until last night).  The writer of the article, Louis Menand, distills Eliot’s idea about what he called “the tradition,” i.e., the western canon:

[When I read a poem] I relate it to all the other poems I have read [and]…to all the poems that have ever been written.  Past poems condition my response to any new poem.  And the really new poem conditions my response to all the poems that preceded it.  After “Prufrock,” the Inferno is, ever so slightly, a different poem.  After I see a house by Marcel Breuer, my own house looks, ever so slightly, different.

 Eliot argued that, since this is the case whether a poet is conscious of the tradition or not, he or she might as well be conscious of it.  The more complete the poet’s saturation in the whole of literature, the more genuinely new that poet’s work is likely to be – that is, the more powerfully it is likely to affect the old.

Ah: here it is.  I think this is why Zadie’s message sunk in.  I always knew I wasn’t very well-read or well-educated, and I also knew there were plenty of people who knew less, had read less than I, and none of us was a worse person for it.  Reading Beowulf doesn’t make you a better person.  There are infinite things to be an expert on, and I’ll never be an expert on 99.9% of those things; neither will most people.  But I am a writer.  I’ve always been a writer, but it’s only recently, in the last few years, that I’ve committed myself to the task of fiction.  And I think T.S. Eliot and Zadie Smith have a point: the deeper a writer’s “saturation in the whole of literature,” or even in “the literature of your country,” or the literature your favorite writers call home – the better you know it, the more “genuinely new” your work can be.  It isn’t about the western canon, per se.  It’s about a canon –it’s about what came before you.  And it influences your writing whether you’re aware of it or not.

Tonight, in class, Colum asked one of my colleagues if he felt trapped by the canon.  “No,” he said, “I feel liberated by the canon.  Knowing it is the only way to be a writer of your time.”  There’s something knowingly provocative and absolute about this statement, but I agree.

Roots are good.  Acknowledging debt is good, and so is gratitude.  Honoring history is a way to avoid being history’s fool.

In this spirit, I’ve decided to spend my thirties (what’s left of them) on what I’m calling the Zadie Smith Reading Programme.  Obviously, I won’t stop reading when I’m 40, but deadlines have a way of lighting a fire at your heel.

I’m sending away for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Odyssey this week.  I don’t even have The Odyssey lying around, how embarrassing!  (I did read it in seventh grade, but that was almost 20 years ago.)  I’m also ordering  Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, per the suggestion of the lovely people of the English department at King’s College, Cambridge.  Knowing me – I’m kind of a dumb reader – I may have to borrow some DVDs from the library with those taped lectures from professors on the classics, especially when I get to Shakespeare and the Bible (gulp).

Look, I made a spreadsheet:

All my notes about which editions to read are from the Cambridge and Oxford web sites.  If you have suggestions about preferred editions, or titles to add, bring ‘em on in the comments!  And if you think this is all a lot of nonsense, feel free to weigh in, too.

Cheers.

Note: This post has been edited slightly from its original version.  (01/15/12)

The first day William showed up to my class, he took a seat near the window and slouched down in his seat.  From here, he could see the Brevoort Houses, where he lived.  He had covered the front of his notebook with the word Brevoort and the name of a well-known crime syndicate associated with it.  His feline face was stony.  In crossing the street to come to school, it seemed he’d entered enemy territory.

We soon learned that William was merry and affable, that when he trusted you, he loved you.  We learned, too, that he used his friendliness as a cover for considerable academic deficits.  On his way into the classroom, he’d light his face up like a game show host and thrust his arm into the air to high-five the teacher, shake her hand, and give her a hug as he shouted her name.  It was a performance: it delayed the moment when he’d have to sit down and be a student.

The last time he took my class, he failed it.  By the end of the semester, after a long series of interventions and a signed contract, he couldn’t pay attention for 10 minutes without devolving into The William Show.  He seemed to need my personal, undivided attention every single second; unfortunately, there were 25 other kids in the room.  I rarely send students to the office, but I threw William out at least once a week in May and June that year.

William’s highs are high, and his lows are low.  When he’s angry, he seems taken over by an alien spirit.  Don’t fuckin’ touch me! he’ll scream at the teacher trying to help, his arms flailing, even if it’s someone he loves.  When he’s in a rage, his face gives it away: he looks like someone whose best friend has punched him in the gut.  It isn’t malice that drives his anger, it’s betrayal: I trusted you, and look what you did to me.  He’s an aggrieved kid.

He isn’t really a kid anymore; he’ll be 18 in the spring.  I haven’t looked at his transcript yet, but I’m pretty sure he’s only earned a few credits in the years he’s been at our school.

He strolled into my class on  the first day saying, Claire! like an old friend.  I couldn’t receive his warmth without thinking of its flipside, his pattern of evasion, then fighting, then giving up.

But he was holding it together.  He moved to the front so he could see the notes on the board.  He completed the assignment carefully, in his exacting handwriting, using complete sentences.  He looked up at me.

You gonna help me this year, Claire?

Of course.  But I’m not going to drag you over the finish line myself.

You gonna meet me halfway?  You gotta meet me halfway, Claire.

I’ll meet you halfway.

I clap his shoulder.

I’m glad you’re here.

After class, I pull him aside.

You were great today.  You were on the ball.  Keep it up.

He nods, beaming.

Claire, you think people change?

I do.

History tells me this will be our high point.  I hope I’m wrong.

Then we started talking about sexual harassment.  This, it seemed, wasn’t something she would be able to avoid, like getting falling-down drunk and waking up under a coffee table.  It’s already happened; it’s been happening for years.  And not just the garden-variety street harassment anyone with two X-chromosomes walking down Fulton Street is familiar with; we’re talking sexual harassment at her job.  Not only from her co-workers, but from her boss.  Ugh.

And I had been so full of advice up to that point, sharing every granule of wisdom I could dig up about college and adulthood, talking a mile minute, but when she told me what her boss had said to her, I was just like, Damn.  Thinking to myself: I know exactly what you mean.  I have experienced that so many times.  I’ve even gotten it from colleagues at school, people she knows.

Suddenly I didn’t feel so wise.

I mean, what did I do about it when I got harassed at work?  Let’s see: at the Post Office, it was easy, I told my supervisor, and the offending weirdo stopped wandering into my work station.  But at a fine-dining restaurant where I waited tables in Philly, the kitchen was always abuzz with hostile, disgusting commentary about women and sex, and I did nothing.  What could I do?  They were cooks; that’s what they did.  (Or this was my impression, based on the culture of the restaurant: the kitchen had the power.)  And at the old east-midtown steakhouse where I worked before I started teaching, forget it.  Like Olivia, I got gross, intimidating comments from my manager.  Which meant that when I received unwanted attention from customers—bankers, mostly, puffing their chests and drinking themselves stupid as they gnawed on steak—I ignored it.  And the guy at our school who told me, with a leer in his voice, how good I looked every time I wore a particular dress—well, he happens to be one of my favorite colleagues.  This seemed to be how he talked sometimes; he wasn’t trying to be an asshole.

“My boss is a good guy,” Olivia insisted.  “It was really nice of him to give me the job.  And he goes to church every Sunday.  And he’s strict about how we conduct ourselves, he doesn’t let us come in with short shorts or sagging pants.”  (She works at a daycare staffed mainly by teenagers.)  “And he has two teenage daughters,” she added.  This is a man with values, she seemed to be saying.  How could he make her so uncomfortable?  She was having a hard time reconciling it.  She seemed ashamed.

“Honey, just because the man goes to church doesn’t mean he’s incapable of making an inappropriate comment to his female employee.  He probably has no idea he did anything wrong.  What he said is in step with the culture we live in,” I told her.  “It doesn’t mean it’s not sexual harassment.  It doesn’t mean it’s okay.”  Doesn’t mean it won’t happen again, and again, and again, I thought.

Feminism may have come a long way since office games of Scuttle, but I challenge you, female readers, to think hard for a minute.  How are your daily interactions colored by a little bit (or a lot) of sexism?  At work, on the street, in the subway, across the counter at the cash register, in line at the DMV, staring at a billboard…?  Did you feel like there was anything you could do about it?  If so, did you do it?

If you’re asking me, no, I didn’t, not every time.  I told Olivia about the time—a month or two ago—when I stepped off the C train at Utica because the conductor announced it was going express.  Sharing what I thought was a moment of collective humanity with a few exasperated passengers, I announced, “I’m gonna walk.”  One of them, a man in his forties, said, “I’ll walk with you,” and fell into step beside me.  Did I want his company?  No.  Did I think there was anything I could so or say to stop him?  No.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  Why was I so terrified?  Terrified of what? Confrontation?  Why did I say nothing, gritting my teeth, walking with him the entire way to school?  He yammered on about himself and flirted shamelessly with me, asked for my number, didn’t care that I was married (“Naw, we can just be friends”), and told me to look him up on MySpace.  (MySpace?)  Not once did I find the guts to leave his company or be anything less than polite.  I didn’t give him my number, or look him up on MySpace.  (MySpace?)  But I did, by virtue of not asserting myself, allow this complete stranger to see where I worked, and to monopolize 15 minutes of my time.

Ugh.

Olivia, I still think you should write your boss a letter after your last day and tell him he made you uncomfortable.  I still think his reaction, ultimately, is unlikely to be of much consequence to you, and you might open his eyes a little.  He’s in the business of teaching and stewarding young people, both the children in his care and the teenagers in his employ.  He should know how he made you feel.

Also, it’s illegal.  Civil rights activists fought long and hard to make sexual harassment in the workplace against the law—let’s honor the legacy.  Let’s do better.

And I’ve been busy.

You might already know this—I got married.  (!)  If you are my friend on Facebook, there is one picture from the wedding, and I promise more soon(ish).

I also applied to a bunch of MFA programs in fiction, and I’m headed to Hunter in the fall, about which I am extremely excited.  (!)

I’ll be teaching part-time and going to class in the evenings, a combination that may prove to drive me bonkers.  Or—who knows?—maybe I’ll finally learn to draw a better boundary around teaching, rather than pouring every ounce of my sweat and soul into the job, spending a half-hour per draft, per kid (multiply 30 minutes and the total number of papers, and you get what my weekends can look like), answering late-night texts from advisees fighting with their mothers.  But basically, for six years, I buried myself in it from September to June, hunkered down like a soldier in a trench.  There must be a better way.

(Obviously.)

So what did you read this summer?  I’m about to read Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter for class, and I was thrilled to learn we’re reading Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women too, which I read last fall and recommended to everyone I knew.  (And Marlon James is coming to Hunter!)  (!)  I just finished Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, which I couldn’t put down.  Before that, I was on an Ann Patchett kick, with Bel Canto and Run.  Earlier in the summer, I devoured Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.  I read it on a friend’s recommendation (thanks, Ben!) and was fairly flattened by Hollinghurst’s attention to the infinite, minute calculations and measurements between people of different classes, races, sexual orientations, tribes.  A delicious, heartbreaking book.

What’s for fall reading?

I never thought I’d be listening to Karen Finley talk about her “twat” in the context of a museum field trip, with 14-year-olds.

In the “Looking at Music 3.0” exhibit at MoMA this afternoon, Corey says, all jumpy, “Claire!  You gotta come listen to something!”

The exhibit, which claims to explore “the influence of music on contemporary art practices, focusing on New York in the 1980s and 1990s,” has listening stations around a small room, and you can don giant pairs of headphones and hear music, some of it accompanied by music videos.  A giant screen plays a loop of old music videos, including songs by A Tribe Called Quest and Grace Jones.  (!)

In other words, cool and interesting to me and my fellow-teacher Jon-Michael, but largely bizarre to our students.  We had a small, good-tempered group who approached the stations with a mix of caution and curiosity.

I follow Corey and another student, Tina, to a station where Karen Finely’s song “Tales of Taboo” is playing.  Oh, boy.

“I saw her once, about 10 years ago,” I tell them.  “She was, uh, well – she was naked and poured honey all over herself.”

Corey nods vigorously and instructs me to put the headphones on.  I can hear Finley, in her nasal, over-enunciated voice, shouting, “You don’t own me, bastard!  You fuckin’, asshole!  You wanna suck my, pussy, well let me suck your dick!”

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular contribution to the American musical tapestry, Finley goes on to angrily describe things like sticking Belgian waffles up her grandmother’s ass and how she wants her “a dwarf,” closing with instructions to “suck me off.”  “Take that clit,” she says, “put it on your face, bastard, put it on your mind.”

Corey and Tina stare at me, eyes wide.  Finally, I remove my headphones.

“What do you guys think?”

“Um,” Tina begins, straining to sound respectful, “She’s weird?  She’s, like, outspoken?”

“She’s crazy,” Corey interrupts.

“She…expresses her feelings, kind of, sort of…”

“Through sex.”

“And music,” Tina clarifies.

“She probably a nudist,” Corey says.  “I’m just sayin’…I really think she’s a nudist.  ‘Cause the whole song is about sex, and how she gonna do the do, and, uh…”  He devolves here into a gutteral implication of what it means to “do the do.”

“So…you didn’t like the song?” I ask.

“It was uncomfortable,” says Tina.  “It’s not something I would listen to and buy at a store.”

“If kids hear that, like on the radio…then they gonna feel some type a way,” adds Corey.  “She’s crazy.  She’s retarded.  I’mma be straight up: she’s just ed.”

[Translation: special ed.]

“Why do you think she made that song?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Corey says.  “To express her feelings.  Express like a…different side.”

“Do you wish she hadn’t made it?” I ask.

“I wish I hadn’t listened to it!” Tina laughs.

“If my mom heard that,” Corey says, shaking his head, “if I ever played that on my computer, she gonna break it, instant, she just gonna throw a pot, and bam!  But some people…”  Corey looks philosophical.  “If you’re a nudist, you probably like it.”

My short story “You Fox” was short-listed as a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project fiction contest last month, judged by Robert Olen Butler.  (I’ve entered that story into Narrative Magazine’s “30 Below” contest, too, so cross your fingers!)

This morning, I’m surveying a room of 26 teenagers in the half-light, bent over their paperbacks, sustaining their silent reading.  Some of them have chosen well – a juicy YA romance here, Twilight there – and a few struggle nobly, having erred and plucked the random Kafka or Camus from the pile.  No one talks, no one sleeps.  This is what it’s like the first day: no fast moves.

And Kellye Washington walks in.  Kellye Washington!  The most defiant, flinty student I have ever taught! (See previous entry.)  My blood turns to ice.  I play it cool.

“Do you have a book to read?” I ask gently.  She turns to me with her big eyes.

“Um, no, not right now, but I have something at home I can bring,” she stammers.  Kellye Washington!  Stammering!

“Come on, lemme show you what I brought in from the library,” I say, gesturing for her to follow.  She looks them over and selects a good Sharon Draper, Copper Sun, on my recommendation.

Reader, she was a model student the rest of the goddamned day.  And she was in my class straight through to dismissal.  (We start the year with a seven-day intensive at our school, pairing up with another teacher and teaching the same kids most of the day.)

At one point, she offered to help me prepare folders for the class.  The rest of the time, she was actively engaged with the material.  Oh, and get this: I saw her phone in her hand as she came in from lunch, and I asked her to put it away, and she put it away. She didn’t roll her eyes, suck her teeth, ignore me, curse me out, or try any of her ninja-mind-tricks to flummox me.  And at the end of class, I asked her to put up her chair, and she PUT UP HER FUCKING CHAIR.

She brought a tenderness, a delicacy, to everything she did.  Like she was looking after a baby.  There was something heartbreaking about it, and it gave me weird heart palpitations all day.  I was sure I was seeing an apparition.  There was a deliberateness, a hyperfocus, that reminded me of seeing friends on their way to manic episodes.

I hope that’s not what’s in store for her.  I shouldn’t even be talking about it – I don’t want to jinx it.

In my five years of teaching, this has always been true.  Even the scariest, nuttiest, hardest cases – I could always see the bunny rabbit inside, looking for love.  It was just a matter of finding a way in – I was sure everyone could be whispered to.  I was sure everyone had a rabbit inside that responded to ordinary love and safety.

That is, until today.

Kellye Washington is a sullen freshman.  Kellye Washington is the most mystifying student I have ever encountered, more even than Donnell Spence, who was mean as a snake, more even than that stoned, sexist genius Ashante, whose grandma finally put him on a bus back to Virginia when she’d had enough.  The very hardest students I’ve had were boys.  All the craziest girls seemed knowable, even when they were difficult.

Kellye haunts into a room like she’s about to be ambushed, shoulders hunched, big eyes searching the corners.  She’s tall, but she never stands up straight.  Her default mode is hostile distrust, and she’s usually scowling or expressionless.  The other day, she wore a bright yellow t-shirt to school, and it looked great on her, and I complimented her in the hallway as I strode past: “That’s such a good color on you!”  She looked at me as though I’d demanded money from her in Urdu.  Her power lies in stony refusal.

She joined my poetry class today.  I gave her the work we’d been doing so she could catch up, and explained what to do.

“Why?” she asked coldly.

“What do you mean?” I replied, a pool of calm.

“Why are we doing this?”

I launched into a speech about being prepared for college, where they were going to write literary essays, and our graduation requirements, blah, blah, blah.  She interrupted me.

“We not writin’ our own poetry in this class?”

“No.  We’re analyzing poetry.”  It’s direct preparation for our graduation exam in English: a comparative literary essay that would pass muster in a freshman English course in college.  I am literally teaching to the standards.  Most of my students, unfortunately, have never encountered literary analysis beyond “book reports.”

“I’m changin’ out a this class,” she announced, leaning back in her chair as though the room had suddenly become unbreathable.

“What class did you have before you switched into this one?”

“I don’t know.  Some class.”  All this was delivered in a monotone as she kept her eyes trained to the sides of her face.  When she talks to teachers, there’s no invitation, no hint whatsoever of her actual feelings about a thing beyond a flinty inconvenience.

“So…” I said, sensing an opportunity.  “Do you want to go to the principal to talk to him about switching back to that class?”

“No,” she said, pulling out her knitting.

Whatever, I thought, go ahead and knit.  I got 18 other kids in this room clamoring for my attention.

Later, she waves her hand.

“Can I go to the office?

“Why do you need to go to the office?”

“I don’t need to go, I want to go.”

“Okay…why?”

“Because.”  Oh, Lord, here we go again.

“But…20 minutes ago I offered you the opportunity to go to the office.  I’m just…confused.  Why do you want to go now?”  Her answer made no sense.  I don’t even remember what it was.  “Here’s a pass,” I said, giving up the fight.  “Go ahead.”

What was her deal?  She didn’t seem crafty, like Maria, who acts like she’s got ants in her pants and begs to go to the office, the bathroom, anywhere, just so she can roam the halls and stir up gossip.  Kellye didn’t give me some elaborate excuse.  There was no deference to my power as the teacher; she wasn’t even trying to subvert it.  It was like she already had, and she was just letting me know.  She was going to do what she wanted, in her own time.

Twenty minutes later, she was still sitting there.  Now she was drawing her name in big block letters on a sheet of loose leaf.

“Uh…I thought you were going to the office?” I asked.

“I am going,” she said, not looking up, not hurrying her steady hand.  I was momentarily stumped.

“Um.  No you’re not, you’re, uh…drawing.  Right now you’re drawing, you’re not in the office.”

“I am going,” she repeated, her tone and volume unchanged, as though she were my great-uncle, in the garage working on a model airplane, and I was wondering when we were going to play catch.

She’s not switching out.  I talked to the principal.

It’s gonna be a long semester.

Final speeches were due on the last day.  Some students were still revising final drafts while other kids spoke.  Some threatened not to go at all, still terrified, even though their speeches were in their hands, and this one counted double all the other assignments.

Nasir went.  He spoke about believing in judging a person for their character and not relying on stereotypes.

Jangly-nerved Melvin went, delivering his speech in a rush.  It was well-written, surprising: he’d changed topics three or four times and finally settled on this: “I believe in not reacting,” in turning the other cheek, in walking away from a fight, in acting like a man, not a little kid.  I was overjoyed.  He seemed to have learned something after all.  He seemed, in my hopeful eyes, seared by Minnie’s teary exit a few days earlier, despite his feigned nonchalance.

Tiny Mistique gave her speech in a whispered monotone, holding her hand next to her mouth.  She’d had a rough semester, and I was surprised (and proud) that she’d gotten up at all.  She spoke about the power of emotions.

Leela, always polished, delivered the speech she’d spent weeks revising.  It was about believing in knowing when to abandon a relationship, in this case, the one she had with her father.

Rudy gave a speech about believing that comedy could be a legitimate career.  We applauded.

And then it was Minnie’s turn.  She was the one scribbling all over her draft while Rudy spoke.

“I used to believe I am not beautiful,” she read defiantly.  “I used to believe that my sisters looked like goddesses, while I looked more like their servant.”

Apparently, she was not going to speak about “anti-war.”

She wrapped up her short speech, which had virtually the same material, but with key verbs changed and a few things added, with, “Now I know that my family has a problem, not me.  I believe I am unique.  I believe I am me.”

Something broke open in the room, and we all breathed new air.  I wiped tears from my eyes and tried not to show it.

There was no “moment,” no fanfare, no meaningful glance.  Minnie ended as she usually did, raising her eyebrows and looking down, muttering, “Yeah, so…”

But she’d claimed something, briefly held it aloft for all of us to see, and you could tell she was proud.

Sirens wailed in the distance, and the crowd fell away.  I still couldn’t see out the window.  Students were streaming back upstairs, one of them bleeding from her arm.  They had stony, intent faces and stormed past me; our school social worker helped the girl with the bleeding arm.  I always feel so useless in these situations: my skill set doesn’t translate to the street.

I saw Melvin return.  We were both subdued now; the drama in my class seemed like it had been hours ago.  It was so small next to what had just happened.

“Melvin.  Let’s talk,” I said.  He followed me to a stairwell.  We settled against opposite walls and looked gravely at one another.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” I said.

He nodded.  We talked; he owned up to the fact that he had laughed after Minnie’s speech.  I asked him why.

“Because I play too much,” he said, defeated, and I could hear his mother in his voice.

By the next day, word got around that a boy from across the street had been slashed, and he was pressing charges.  Three of our students, including R.D., sought immediate safety transfers to different schools.  The subtler mechanics of the conflict remained foggy to me, except the basic us vs. them of it.

What about Minnie?  I found out from another teacher that she had fled to another class, a math tutorial, and sought comfort there after leaving my room.  She seemed to have avoided the street fight completely.

I pulled her out of a class and spoke with her that morning.  I understood if she didn’t want to do the speech, or even return to class, after what had happened; I was prepared to arrange some independent work for her to do in the office.  But she was surprisingly upbeat.  She seemed, as she often does, like she was about 25 years old.  It seemed clear to her that what had happened in the class was the result of childish immaturity.

“I’m gonna write a different speech,” she told me.

“Oh,” I said, taken aback.  “Okay.  What are you going to write about?”

“Anti-war.”

“Um, you mean, like…peace?”

“No.  Anti-war.”

“Uh, okay, great.  See you in class, then.”  And I wondered if that was that.  Of course, I was wrong.  Minnie was going to surprise me, again.