SO, FINE. NEX Level hated her. (Did he?) Or he was avoiding her. (Was he?) Or maybe she’d just hurt his pride. She still cringed when she thought of her comment about opening a line of credit. In any case, it was over—Nex hadn’t been in touch since their argument, and she refused to contact him, though there still were times she couldn’t help hoping, when she pulled out her phone between classes, that she might find he’d sent her a message. He probably wasn’t going to, though. Which was fine.
What she really missed was poetry. Since their first date, she had not gone to a single poetry venue on her own. She hadn’t even written anything new. It was as if poetry itself was Nex Level’s domain, and she dared not enter unless he held open the door. This was the part of the situation that seemed most unfair. (Wasn’t it?)
The slowness of after-school tutorials invited such mental digressions.
In front of her, in a circle of desks, sat five low-level readers in various states of disrepair. Other teachers talked about how rewarding it was to work with students individually, but Lena preferred even her rowdiest class to this slow hour at the end of the day, trying to extract the author’s purpose from a passage about Helen Keller. As the group stammered through the story, the effort not to feel depressed exhausted her.
Two paragraphs into the story, after every student had pronounced the word vaguely wrong, after Lena had explained what to and fro meant, clarified that a honeysuckle was a type of flower, and decided to completely ignore the word languor, she paused to ask a simple recall question. No one could answer it.
She tried again. “Okay: How did Anne Sullivan teach Helen Keller what a doll was?” There was a forced excitement in her voice that she hated but was powerless to stop.
“She gave her the doll and traced the letters onto her hand.” Chantel, a massive girl with patches of dry, itchy-looking skin on her hands and wrists, was always the one who provided the merciful answer in the end. She was eager to please and had a sense of focus in spite of her low reading level. In a world that was even half fair, Chantel would have been the type of gifted teenager able to lose herself in books, a late bloomer whose future shined in from beyond the rusty gates of high school and who understood that any book could be a self-help book if you read it right. Instead, here she was, stumbling syllable by syllable along with the others.
“Very good! So how do you think she showed Helen what a cup was?”
“A picture?” ventured a girl named Amarylis who was almost definitely pregnant.
“Remember,” said Lena, “she’s blind.”
“Oh.”
“Okay! Let’s start reading again!” Where was this cheerful voice coming from?
The group mumbled through another paragraph, incomprehensible, uncomprehending. Lena marveled at Anne Sullivan’s patience. How many times must she have traced those letters on Helen Keller’s hand before the meaning sank in? Nothing brought Lena into more direct contact with her own disillusionment than tutoring low-level readers. She had entered teaching expecting students who, with the right question or book recommendation, would demonstrate some untapped well of deep, original thinking. Instead, she’d found that teenagers who had never read a full book were unlikely to share original thoughts. They were much more likely to parrot clichés from social-media celebrities or believe made-up news, or say things like It doesn’t really matter whether you vote—or require bribes to come to tutoring sessions, where they stuttered through passages about Helen Keller.
Lena cheerfully summarized the paragraph they had just finished. Then she asked the students to close their eyes and trace the word doll into their own hands. “If you were Helen Keller, would you feel happy at learning a new word?”
“Yes,” said Chantel.
“If I was blind and deaf, I’d just kill myself,” said Rico.
Rico’s attendance was even more sporadic in tutorials than it was in class, yet when he showed up, Lena found his presence refreshing. His neck tattoo, which was supposed to make him look tough, contrasted with his Kermit the Frog–like build. He also bit his nails even shorter than Lena bit her own. But it was his sarcasm that made Lena suspect he felt the same way she did, sitting in this circle, reading these passages full of subliminal positive messages. Must every story be a life-affirming testament to the strength of the human spirit? Was it even responsible to insist that every ugly duckling would become a swan, that every little engine could make it over the hill, that all the puzzle pieces needed for a happy ending were already in the box and one only needed the grit to fit them together?
Lena summoned her theatrical skills to keep the excitement in her eyes. “Have any of you ever learned something that makes everything start to fit together, like a puzzle, and it makes you want to say, aha?”
More silence. Amarylis tapped her foot, thumping her knee anxiously against the leg of the desk until she caught Lena looking at her.
Lena tried to keep her own foot from tapping. “Can you imagine the way Helen Keller felt when she finally understood what water was?!”
“Yes,” said Chantel.
They finished the passage, moving on to the first question in the author’s-purpose practice packet. What is the most likely reason the author wrote this passage? To persuade? To entertain? To inform? Amarylis was wiggling her foot again, pulling at a string on the threadbare knee of her jeans.
Lena suppressed a sigh. Even if the students in front of her did pass the TCUP, by some Anne Sullivan–caliber miracle, they would never be the type of readers who thumbed through a newspaper or perused the racks of a bookstore or stayed up all night to finish a novel. Watching one of her favorite activities become an instrument of torture made Lena’s soul feel… threadbare.
Lately, she’d found herself wishing the whole scene were simply someone else’s problem. She imagined being far away, becoming a person who nodded sympathetically to complaints that somebody should do something to fix this whole education thing—the way people did with prostate cancer, or genocide in South Sudan.
Finally, the tutoring session ended.
“Great job today, everyone!” Lena lied.
Threadbare soul. The phrase popped into Lena’s head again—more insistent this time. She jotted it on a corner of the practice packet with its pages of relentless questions about the author’s purpose.
The truth was, she wasn’t even sure there was such a thing as an “author’s purpose.” There was more than one reason for writing anything, and some of the best authors never revealed their purpose at all. But she would never have tried to explain this. Not with level 1 readers. Not during crunch time.
When she got home, she took the marked-up packet from her bag and stared at it. Threadbare soul. She imagined Rico biting at his tiny slivers of fingernails, Amarylis tapping her foot, picking at that hole in her jeans.
Pulling at the strings of my threadbare soul. She turned on some background music and sank into a chair, pen in hand. What rhymed with soul? Trying to meet this artificial goal? Taking its toll? No. These sounded forced. Forget about rhyming, thought Lena. What was this concept she was trying to capture? She bit her thumbnail, a habit that was especially pronounced in times of worry or heartache, but also when ideas were coming to her.
A lyric from one of the hip-hop chart-toppers she’d suffered through during long-ago parties floated into her head: I got ninety-nine problems, but a bitch ain’t one. Her students had so many problems. Ninety-nine problems, ninety-nine problems… The line kept repeating itself to her like an itch asking to be scratched—like the uneven edge of a fingernail, begging to be bitten into a straight line.
Students with ninety-nine problems apiece. Yes, that worked. Now, what rhymed with apiece? Harassed by police? No, that topic really was Nex Level’s territory. Truth be told, her personal experience being harassed by police was limited.
Ninety-nine problems apiece.
Problems like what? It occurred to her that she didn’t know that much about her students’ problems outside of school. Was she supposed to? Teachers in movies knew everything about their students, and that mystery-history-teacher blogging lady seemed like she did, but Lena didn’t know how any teacher could handle it—the problems of adults combined with the reading skills of children, multiplied by so many students. She thought of Chantel shifting uncomfortably in her chair, Rico checking his watch then looking at the clock as if asking for a second opinion, as if the tutoring session would never… cease? Problems that never cease? No. That felt thesaurusy, and, anyway, it wasn’t quite the point. So what was the point? What was this message she was trying to dredge from the dark sea of her subconscious, tugging it up word by word? At least. Increase. Decrease. None of these words had a grip on the core of the thing. It was about the way the air tightened around her in the room, the way she felt trapped, like an insect in amber, as she listened to sixteen-year-olds stumble over syllables and pronounce letters that were supposed to stay silent, the sounds of frustrated teenagers tapping pens and tapping their feet, shifting and creaking the seats, struggling students with ninety-nine problems apiece…
And there it was: the right line, the right rhythm, the blast of concentrated truth that artists chased with each brushstroke and singers searched for in the notes of a song. This was the writing experience Lena had always wanted to share with her students. Could she? In that moment, it didn’t matter. A portal had opened, and everything Lena knew about teaching, everything she knew about life, was hers to pin down perfectly on the page, never to be forgotten, never to escape, never to step casually out of her door into the morning sun. If there was another purpose to being an author, Lena certainly couldn’t think of it right now. The sounds of the poem rose up around her. They drowned out the melody of the music, a plane in the sky, the whole tangled concept of author’s purpose, the unringing phone at her side.