“Lexi, can I see you outside?” she asked.

            “Oh…um…yeah.”  I thought maybe she had found out about the fact that I laughed at her reading choice earlier that year.

            “Am I in trouble?” I asked, as soon as we were both in the hallway.

            “No, you’re not,” she said earnestly, “You could never be in trouble with me.”  This was when I realized that the big, loud Mrs. Blunt was literally only five feet tall.  I looked down at her while she kept talking.  “I just want a favor,” she said.

            “Oh, sure, like, extra credit?”

            “No, but if you want it, that’s fine too,” she replied, “I need some help myself-what do I do about this class?”

            “…Teach them?”

            “No, but how?”

            And there I was, at thirteen years old, with a woman three times my age begging me to tell her how to teach the class.  I felt really good about myself at this point, but still really awkward in the situation.  Plus, I didn’t know how to teach a class.  I didn’t even know how to write an essay at that point, because nobody had taught me.

            “I don’t really know how to teach an eighth-grade English class…” I started.

            “I’m not asking you to teach it,” she said, “I just need to know how to motivate these kids!  None of them want to write or learn!  I read your work, and then I read theirs’, and then I wonder, ‘Hey, nobody writes like Lexi!’ I mean, you’re amazing, and I know these other kids have the potential to be, but I don’t know how to get it through to them.  You must know.”  I wasn’t amazing.  I simply enjoyed writing and had nothing else to do but write, whereas the rest of the kids smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms and fried their bodies at tanning salons after school–the boys included.

            “To tell you the truth,” I said, “They’re just like that, and whether they have a lot of creativity or not, nothing you or I can do will ever change it.  Secondly, I write like this because I’ve never had a social life, and I have nothing else to do.”

            I was expecting her to throw in, “Aw, but that’s not true, you write like this because you’re talented!”

            But actually, she didn’t say that.  She looked at me with her pleading eyes and said, “Well, I can’t ask them to give up their social lives.”

    Feeling like complete shit for having a teacher admit to me that I had no social life, I looked around me with nothing to say.  ”Let’s just hope we score high the test this year,” I said.

Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr