Part 46: Mr. Brown / Victoria

Isaac Brown had become an English teacher because he liked books. Not passionately, not perversely, but slightly more than he liked most other things that made up life. He was, by nature, indifferent to most things, content with wherever he was: unimaginative, unambitious. But at one point in his life, when he had found himself on track to being enrolled in college, when people stopped asking him where he would go to college and started asking him what he would study, he said English and it stuck.

There is a theory out there that everyone’s life is determined by a set of three words. For some, those three words are “I love you” or “Viva la revolution” or “God is great.” For Isaac Brown, the three words were a bit more prosaic. At one particular moment when he was in high school (it happened to have been at 3:12 PM on a Wednesday in November, as he was walking home from school, his junior year, but he, being a sane person, did not remember that) he had the thought, “I like books,” and those three words had, more or less, determined the course of his life. They had faded into the background of his mind, become a part of his identity, one that he drew upon when it was time to choose a major.

As for becoming an English teacher, that was the inevitable result of being an English major and not having any desire to go to grad school or write for a living or struggle in any way, shape, or form.

But there were some things that no one had told Isaac about being an English teacher which he was now learning through experience: first, that talking about the same book all day every day, year after year, would make you hate that book, the same way setting your favorite song as your alarm is the fastest way to making it no longer your favorite song; second, that being an English teacher means a lot less reading books and a lot more reading insipid essays about books by people who probably didn’t even read them. Which was kind of remarkable in its own way, how much you could gather about a book just through osmosis and word of mouth. Or the way some of them could, at least.

But take this essay, written by an eighth grader, one of a set of three or four who he always mixed up unless they were in front of him:

How does Harper Lee use symbols in To Kill A Mockingbird?

Harper Lee uses symbols very well in To Kill A Mockingbird. They are one of the most important parts of the book. Symbols are things used to represent things other than themselves. One of the symbols that Harper Lee uses in To Kill a Mockingbird is the mockingbird. Another one is the dog that Atitcus shoots up. These things are symbols because they represent something other than themselves. Also, they are both animals. In conclusion, Harper Lee uses many symbols in To Kill A Mockingbird to represent things other than themselves. Sometimes they are animals. And she is very good at using them.

Technically speaking, this did answer the question, which was the most annoying thing about it. And the grammar, spelling, and sentence structure were fine.

Not even knowing why he was doing it, Isaac Brown circled the “And” in the last sentence.

Then he circled “shoots up” and wrote “awk” above it, which the student would not look at or understand. He (or she, possibly) would just see that there were marks on the paper. The more marks he put, the less likely the student would challenge a low score. This one got a 2.

The next in the pile was from Victoria Brixton:

Compare and contrast To Kill A Mockingbird with another work of literature. This could be a novel, poem, or short story. (Remember: compare means to say what is similar and contrast means to say what is different.)

To Kill a Mockingbird and The Letter are both similar and different. They are similar because they are both written about different places. TKAM is written about the south during Slavery times, and The Letter is written about Russia when they had concentration camps. But they are different because they are about totally different things. TKAM is about a kid named Scout and the ghost in his neighborhood and racism and stuff. The Letter is about a man who finds a letter on the ground. Also there are no ghosts in The Letter. And there is only one character in The Letter. TKAM has so many different characters that its confusing. So in conclusion, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Letter have some similarities but they also have differences.

Was it his questions?

No, no, you couldn’t blame the questions when clearly most of them hadn’t even read the book. They’d had plenty of time to read it - most of Friday’s class, in fact, which had been a gift to them (not to himself, as one of his colleagues had suggested, good-naturedly, in the teachers’ lounge) - but they just hadn’t.

Besides, even if they were bad questions, how to tell? How to write better ones? These ones did all the things he had been taught a good question should do - they required critical thinking and application and making connections; they were more than just rote recall, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank bullshit, which would have been so much easier to grade, which were what most of his colleagues still used. So relatively speaking, he was still beating them. If there was a sudden cut to the English department, he wouldn’t be the first to go, which was all he really cared about.

The only real reason to come up with more interesting questions was in the hope of getting more interesting answers to read on a Monday evening. But there was no elixir against them not reading the damn book.

Mr. Brown - he was Mr. Brown when he was doing anything school-related - realized he hadn’t graded Hannah Pratt’s test yet. How could you help but think of Hannah right after Victoria? They were inseparable, as he knew from experience: he’d separated them (physically) in class once, but that just made Hannah talk louder, ostensibly so Victoria could hear her but really just so he would know he hadn’t beaten her. 

But as obnoxious as she was, she was smart, and may have even read the book, or somehow gleaned enough about it to allow him to pretend she had. So grading her test might encourage him. Give him the strength to get through the rest of the stack before his nightly beer, some mindless TV, and bed.

He flipped through his pile of papers, scanning for her name, but didn’t find it. Right, she had been absent that day, and he had mentally compared Victoria to a lost puppy, and there had been an email of some sort about why she was absent that he had meant to read. He made a diagonal mark next to her name in his gradebook, gave Victoria a generous 2+ out of 4, and flipped to the next test.

*

On Tuesday, between Math and Social Studies, Victoria made brief eye contact with James. He looked almost like he wanted to talk to her, or do the head-nod thing guys did, which they had never done before but once you started doing you couldn’t stop, and so, startled, she bolted.