Cheaters: a short story

I

It’s the end of class and Bruce Cramer wants to know why.

“I can talk to you about it after school,” you say, but Bruce doesn’t want to wait until after school. He wants to leave after school. He wants to talk about his paper now.

“It’s because you cheated,” you say, and at the word ‘cheated’ a few of his peers look over, which is why you didn’t want to talk about it now in the first place—you didn’t want him to suffer the embarrassment.

He puts on the look: eyebrows up, mouth round. As if you’ve struck him. He looks you right in the eye. “No I didn’t.”

“You did,” you say, and you reach out to take the paper from him. “Here,” you say, pointing to the second page, “And here,” on the third. “That’s all plagiarized.”

You hand the paper back.

“I wrote that,” he says. The rest of the class is quiet. You should have insisted he wait until after school. You understand that now.

“All of it?”

“All of it. I swear.”

“You didn’t get any of it from the internet? You didn’t copy and paste anything?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that.” Then, with some indignation: “I worked on it hard. I was up, like, all night.”

You hold out your hand. Bruce is bigger than you—much bigger—but when you waggle your fingers this time it feels more like they’re warming up to make a fist than motioning for him to hand you the paper.

After a moment’s hesitation, he hands it to you.

“The font changes,” you say, using your finger to stab first one page, then the next. “Here. And here.”

“What?”

He reaches forward to take his assignment back, but you hold onto it. He has to lean over your desk to look and see where your finger is pointing. “It turns blue. And it switches from Times New Roman. I don’t know what that font is, but it’s not Times New Roman.”

The color in his face makes like the font on his pages: it changes. From the healthy pink of youth to the ashen white of cheap copy paper.

“Maybe my computer—” he starts to suggest, but you cut him off by dropping the pages to your desk and holding up your hand. With the other, you open the bottom drawer of your desk. He cranes his neck to see what you’re reaching for.

“The original source had it in blue, too,” you say. Caught out, some of the color comes back into his complexion. He becomes petulant.

“So it was two paragraphs,” he says.

“Three,” you correct. “The second section was two paragraphs long.”

“And you’re going to fail me? For three paragraphs?”

“For cheating,” you say. “I’m going to fail you for cheating.”

“Ms. Gris!” he says. He’s looming over you, and there’s the threat of physical violence, but he’s sweating now, too, and looks nervous. His voice comes out both higher and softer when he opens his mouth to speak this time. “Come on Ms. Gris. You know I can do the work.”

“Actually, I don’t,” you say, and you stand. He’s still a full head taller than you, but he rocks back on his heels, ceding you the space. “If you could, why didn’t you?”

II

A quiz over the assigned reading: two chapters of The Great Gatsby. Ten questions, multiple choice, four minutes to finish. The quiz isn’t hard: if your students did the reading and paid attention—if they weren’t watching television or exchanging text messages—they should get at least seven or eight right, easy. Halfway through the allotted time you see Grant Crase, in the second to last row, lean over so that his torso comes parallel with his desk. His head rotates as if on a spit, turning just enough to see Kennedy Randall’s paper. The question isn’t so much whether or not Grant is cheating off his neighbor, but how you should address it. You could call him out in front of the class—in which case he’ll deny it, and you might get a call later from his father for accusing him unjustly—or you could hold him after and talk to him when all of his peers are gone—in which case some time will have passed and he’ll deny it. You can hold off longer yet, compare Grant’s paper to Kennedy’s while you’re grading, and when they match call them both in and find out if Kennedy was a knowing participant in the academic dishonesty. You could potentially give them both zeroes.

“Eyes on your own papers,” you say, addressing the class. You tell them there’s a minute left, and when that minute expires, you tell them to pass their answers to the front of the room.

1) Gatsby drove a(n)
A. Red hot air balloon.
B. Aquamarine submarine.
C. Orange propeller plane.
D. Yellow car. 

2) In the second chapter of the book,
A. Tom Buchanan kills Nick Carraway in th butler's closet, with the candlestick.
B. Jordan Baker meets with a German spy, on the hydroplane.
C. Daisy kisses Nick, in the pantry, while wearing a crimson ribbon in her hair.
D. Nick attends a private party with Tom in a seedy apartment in New York. 

Each of the students has marked ‘B’ and ‘C’ on the first two questions, and the rest of their quizzes are, as you’d suspected, identical. They score two out of ten points, each. You ultimately decide not to say anything to either student—the twenty percent grades in the grade book when the class average was above eighty are surely punishment enough.

III

Three plagiarized papers in one stack.

The first one is easy to pick out. After two paragraphs of declarative sentences and unvaried punctuation, the third paragraph introduces commas, a semicolon, and the words “vestige” and “normalcy.” A quick internet search discovers the original source, and you print two copies of it, paperclipping one to the back of Heath Banda’s paper. You circle a zero beside his name on the first page.

The other two might have slipped by you but for the unexpected use of the word “whore.” From Emily Stafford’s paper’s second paragraph, and Naomi’s Ruiz’s third: “At the beginning of the play, Rosalind is the girl Romeo loves the most in the whore wide world.” You spend some time on the internet looking for an original source for these two as well, but don’t come up with anything. Emily and Naomi are refreshingly old-fashioned: they cheated off of one another.

IV

What is a kid saying when they cheat? In the parlance of the high school English class: What does it mean? Maybe she isn’t saying anything at all. Maybe she just isn’t very smart, or hasn’t paid close enough attention during class. It might be that he has been passed on too many times without learning the material in previous classes and is now too far behind to catch up. Or he isn’t capable of doing the work. The research tells you that the kid lacks time management skills, or access to resources. That the kid isn’t dishonest, but desperate.  

Maybe so, but it still feels like an affront. Did the student think that you wouldn’t know? That they are smart and you are dumb? Or is it something more personal and vindictive, an implicit critique of your assignment, which they didn’t feel like doing? A critique of you as a person they don’t respect? It could be—it’s possible—that the student loathes you. That he wants to repudiate everything you’ve tried to teach him, everything you stand for: that originality and integrity matter; that not only intelligence, but also hard work is necessary in this life; that if we learn anything through literature, it should be that our individual faults vibrate, reverberate, and compound in our communities—that when our societies fail it’s almost certainly because of our collective moral failings.

V

Your own moral failing is this: you cannot stop sleeping with Seth Weatherly, the school’s charismatic drama instructor. A fifth-year teacher in the building when you arrived for your first year, he was one of the few veteran teachers to come along to the new teacher dinner. You began seeing one another your second year, after he recruited you to help him interpret lines of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A series of assignations ensued behind the stage, in the makeup room, and, twice, in your classroom—on your desk!—that continued through the winter and spring, spanning the entire lead-up to his wedding—which you never thought would happen—and then, after a post-wedding’s summer hiatus (decidedly undreamy, this), picked back up again when he asked you to help with the next fall’s production of Guys and Dolls. Now, to escape from the performance’s opening weekend, you have driven halfway across the state to visit an old friend, Natalie.

“I’ve got one for you,” Natalie says, tapping on her nose charades-style with her pool cue. “This stay-at-home-mother. The worst kind of stay-at-home-and-check-her-kids’-grades-mother, she emails me because she doesn’t understand why her daughter has gotten a ‘B’ on this paper I assigned.” Natalie gives you a meaningful look, then leans over, lines up a shot, and sinks it. “I’ll be giving those papers back next class, I tell her, and there will be a rubric and feedback explaining my grading assessments. But this mom wants to know sooner. She wants to know if we can set up a meeting to talk about it tomorrow. With the principal. So I email back Sure, right? And I get out the paper to look it over—because she’s got me worried, like maybe I did something wrong—and I see that it meets the minimum length-requirement, but it’s got the typos and the mis-cited quotes and the superficial analysis, everything you’d expect of a ‘C’ paper. So I figure the ‘B’ is probably generous. I file it back away and she emails again to say we’ve got a meeting set up. With the principal.”

Natalie gives you her look again, then takes another shot, missing wide and bouncing the cue ball around the table. She steps back to give you your turn. “So I show up for this meeting, with my xeroxed copy of the paper, and Mr. Bramlage, our principal, says What seems to be the problem, and this woman just launches into me, about how I’m out to get her daughter, about how the kid can’t get a fair shake in my class, about how the other papers she’s written have all been C’s and why don’t I want her daughter to go to a good college, and if I do, then why can’t I teach her to live up to my impossible standards, and all of this, and Mr. Bramlage, God bless him, says Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s try to be more constructive. Can we talk about this particular assignment? And the woman, if she’s not three sheets to the wind, she’s two and a half, she says, Well I spent a lot of time—and then she just stops. Mr. Bramlage says, I’m sorry, you spent a lot of time? and she just sits there for a minute, mortified, to borrow Jane Austen’s word for it, and then she looks up and gives this little shrug. Mr. Bramlage, God love him, he doesn’t even go after her. All he says is, It seems to me like we’re done here, and we all stand up and he motions for her to go ahead and he and I follow her out of the room.”

You laugh at the way she’s bugged out her eyes, and then you shoot at a ball that doesn’t go in. Then Natalie does that Natalie thing she can do so well—meet the eyes of a handsome stranger across the bar and hold his gaze while she says something else of entirely no consequence to you, and the night swims along.

VI

In the version of things that makes sense to you, what happened was this: a bunch of men (you should say people, you know, but feel fairly confident they were mostly men) had jobs filing paperwork, and when they filed the paperwork, they made money. They couldn’t just file the paperwork, though; they had to file it with people who came to see them. There were some requirements and stipulations. The paperwork was related to the loaning of money, and the ability to file a piece of paperwork was supposed to be contingent on whether or not the person who applied for the paperwork would be capable of paying back the money loaned to them. But then the requirements and stipulations were loosened—or were allowed to be interpreted more loosely—and the men who filed the paperwork suddenly found themselves able to file more paperwork, much of it for applicants who probably wouldn’t be able to pay back the money.

The applicants’ abilities to pay back the money weren’t the paperwork-filing men’s problems, though. Only the applicants’ abilities to qualify for the paperwork to be filed.

On the first day of class on your first year of teaching you asked your first class of students if they would rather have a challenging class that was interesting, or an easy class that was dull, and then you smiled, as if you were all in on the same joke. Overwhelmingly, your students responded in favor of the easier class that was dull, and the joke, it turned out, was on you. There’s an analogy, here, you think—perhaps not a very good one, since you can’t quite line it up—and you think that people lack not only character but something else, something you aren’t sure you can name, but you think “authentic ambition” might be close. The fact you can’t quite articulate it any better than this frustrates you. As an English teacher, you ought to be more precise with your words.

You think about this in your classroom while your students work on a “find the supporting evidence” assignment, wondering which of them will grow up to be the men who file the paperwork and make the money that will cause the economy of your country to first bubble, then collapse. There was some talk when you were in college—not a lot, maybe only a week’s worth—about the “Hidden Curriculum”: the lessons the students learn in school beyond those their teachers are actually trying to teach them. A student who struggles mightily to earn a ‘B’ in a reading-intensive history class might learn time management and organizational skills. The value of hard work. A girl in a class where the teacher only calls on boys might learn that her opinions don’t matter—that she is a second-class citizen. Insohowfar is yours a class where kids learn to care inordinately about their grades? Insohowfar is yours a class where you teach students that their recorded outcome—their grade—will be more important than the material they have read or the skills you’ve tried to teach them, or the society they belong to or the people they are?

For you the recession will mean a pay freeze. New teachers will be fired and new hires paused. You will have to do more work and ultimately be paid less for it. Older teachers at better, more attractive schools around the state will hold onto their jobs longer. Teachers like you who covet their positions in affluent, easy-to-teach-in districts will have to wait a few more years before you can replace them.

Perhaps teaching your students the material in your curriculum should be your secondary goal, you think as you drive away from the school’s double-doored entrance behind the theater one night a few weeks after your weekend out with Natalie. Perhaps first you should be teaching them to be good.

VII

Despite the recession and the rumors of teachers having trouble finding jobs, you land one, with the help of your friend Natalie, across the state, at the private school where Natalie works. The first time a student swears at another in the back of your class—not just in friendly conversation, as kids sometimes do, but viciously, derogatorily, in a way that makes even you, on the other side of the classroom, feel withered and diminished—you’re shocked to find that the online grade book’s discipline section is entirely devoid of student discipline write-ups.

“It’s because so many of the elite colleges ask for copies of them now, as part of the application process,” Natalie tells you when you ask her. “If we write a kid up, we could hurt their chances of getting into a good school. And helping kids get into good school is one of the things that makes us look like a good school.”

“So we can’t write discipline referrals?” you ask.

“We don’t write discipline referrals,” she clarifies. “It’s preferred that we just talk to them.”

“And the office?”

“Oh, you can send them. They usually leave it off the books. But mostly you should try not to send them. It’s kind of frowned upon.”

Perhaps, you think, this is enlightened teaching. A primary difference between your old, troubled school and this new one whose name is illuminated by brightly shining floodlights at night. You shouldn’t have written up student misbehaviors in your old building or sent children to the office at all. You had helped to create a culture of criminalization there; instead you should have spared the rod and helped the children.

You find your first plagiarized paper a few weeks later, and when you offer to give the student half-credit on a rewrite, she politely informs you that you cannot. “You have to give me a chance for a full-credit rewrite,” she says. She smiles an I-understand-you’re-new-here smile and reaches into her leather book bag. “It’s in the student handbook.” The handbook seems to fall open to exactly the right page when she pushes it forward.

“Of course,” you say. If it’s school policy there’s not much you can do about it. “Of course,” you repeat.

VIII

It’s true that the parents email and call you more often, and that some of the students seem needier, showing up to ask you questions more often before and after school, but it’s nice that they care, at least. Shouldn’t they want to end the quarter with a 93% and not a 91%? Isn’t it nice that, though it’s unweighted, they want the ‘A’ on their transcripts instead of the ‘A-’? Your classes are smaller, but the school’s attendance rates are higher, so in a class of twenty-four students you have twenty-four students in their seats almost every day, whereas at your old school a class of twenty-nine frequently only had nineteen or twenty students present. You don’t have to talk to as many students about makeup work after they’ve missed class, but more students come in to warn you they will be gone in advance. Majorca, they tell you, and Saint Lucia. “I don’t really want to go,” a girl tells you. “It’s a family thing.” They are never late for class, and they always have their supplies with them. Saying get your pencils and paper out, please at your old school turned your classroom into an open-market for borrowing and bartering. Here everyone has everything they need. Transitions between activities are smooth and fast. At your old school you worried about students having reliable access to computers, printers, and the internet. Here such luxuries are ubiquitous.

Still: in the middle of the morning one day Samantha Aldrich comes in to talk to you. “I was just wondering if we could talk about which questions I missed? On the test?”

It’s your second block plan period and you just put the grades in five minutes ago. She’s here, now—Samantha—because her phone buzzes every time a teacher updates the electronic gradebook. She was finished with her work in Mrs. Lasky’s Pre-Calculus class, and had asked if you were on plan or not before requesting a pass.

“I’ll go over all of the correct answers with you and your peers next period,” you tell her.

“It’s just—I studied really hard,” Samantha says. “It’s going to drive me crazy.” And because she seems earnest—a quiet, hard-working kind of student, one of the ones who smiles back at you when you greet them at the door—and because one of the administration’s chief goals for the year, trumpeted at every after-school meeting, is “relationship building,” you open the lower right drawer of your desk to retrieve her marked-up exam, a 59 circled in red beside her name at its top.

“Did everyone do as bad as me?” she asks, and you apologize, telling her no. The class average was—you turn to check your computer screen—a seventy-six.

Two other classes take the same test the next day, and no one scores as poorly as Samantha did. In fact, even among students who traditionally do poorly, fewer students score poorly at all. The averages for these new classes are eighty-seven and ninety-one.

You can’t pin it on her—maybe someone else surreptitiously took pictures of the test, or smuggled a copy out of your room—but she’s at your door at the end of your plan period again, two weeks later, after a quiz she’s earned a ‘C’ on. “I was wondering if we could go over the questions I missed?” she asks, and you shake your head, say no. You’re afraid she’ll have to wait until the next period like everyone else this time, and you sign the pass she’s brought with her and send her back to Mrs. Lasky’s Pre-Calculus class.

IX

It’s not just cell phones and peer-to-peer messaging; it’s group chats, crowd sourcing, and wiki-pages. Sometimes every student in a section is enrolled in the same password-protected forum sharing questions, answers, and pictures of material. “Don’t look at your neighbor’s paper,” you say at the beginning of an exam. “Your integrity is more important than your grade,” and a few—not just one or two, but four or five—actually look up to roll their eyes.

Daniel Brossard’s mother comes in for the spring parent/teacher conference, an unusual thing since Daniel is a senior. With only two and a half months left, how much could it matter? Daniel is a good student taking AP Calculus and Physics, though, and the good students’ parents tend to make a point of coming in no matter what.

“How’s our Dan doing?” Mrs. Brossard asks, dry, cracked lips framing her teeth.

“Fine, fine,” you say, scrolling on your computer to find Daniel’s class, Daniel’s name.

“He got a ‘B’ last semester,” his mother says. “And he’s lined up for an engineering scholarship because of some of his test scores. Forty thousand dollars.” She trots out her smile, again. “He has to get an ‘A’ in your class this semester so his GPA is eligible. He needs an overall three-eight.”

“For the year?”

“For all of high school. He’s really on the bubble.”

Daniel’s profile finishes loading on your screen. “He has a ninety percent,” you tell her. “So his fate’s in his hands. Two papers, two tests, and some easy daily points and he’s out of here.” You push a button to look at his overall GPA—a 3.72—then go back to your gradebook to review the list of his scores for the year. Daniel hasn’t managed an ‘A’ on a paper or test since the first and easiest exam of the year back in September. It’s the freebie ‘daily points’ and small assignments that have floated him from a grade that might be a ‘B-’ or a ‘C+’ to his current, low ‘A.’

“Have you graded his most recent paper?” Mrs. Brossard asks.

“I haven’t gotten to those yet.” You tell her you’re planning to grade them over weekend, and you offer to work with Daniel if he’s willing bring his last papers in early—not a day or two before they’re due, but a full week—so that you can proofread them and give him feedback.

You retrieve your stack of ungraded papers after she leaves and find Daniel’s. As one paragraph moves into the second, the second into the third, you recognize that it’s good, much better than his previous work. He’s worked with a sense of urgency—he must have put in some time. But your pleasure sours before the second page ends. The paper is too good. You come across the words “surrogate,” “ephemeral,” “tantamount,” and “scintilla,” words you haven’t taught your students; words that aren’t consistent with Daniel’s written vernacular as you have experienced it. And the paper has drawn out subtleties of the work it analyzes—“Paul’s Case,” by Willa Cather—that you haven’t talked about in class. Subtleties that you’ve never considered in more than a dozen readings of the story yourself. It is, to be frank about it, the best high school paper you’ve ever read. The kind of paper a graduate student would write.

You run internet searches on a few of the paper’s key claims and a few of the more adroit turns of phrase, then start running each paragraph’s first sentence and every unique-sounding phrase you come across. It’s not anywhere. None of it results in a matching search hit. Getting out the manila folder containing the instructions for the school’s plagiarism-sniffing software, you scan the paper, convert it from a PDF to a Word document, and run it. Nothing.

He’s commissioned it, you realize. Contracted some grad student at some university somewhere and passed him or her the assignment. Paid a few hundred dollars for a unique paper. There are teachers who would confront a student without evidence, who would say This isn’t your paper, but this isn’t something you’ve ever done. To say “I know you and everything you’re capable of” and call someone a cheater goes against something in your ethical framework. You write ‘100’ at the top of it—you write ‘100’ on a paper at most, two or three times a year, and some years not at all—and move it to the bottom of the stack. You put the stack away.

X

You’ve quizzed your first block on an assigned reading, and then, because a clear understanding of the text is an essential foundation to build a class discussion, and because you need to have a good class discussion today, you’ve gone over the answers with your students. Then you swap the answers around during your second block plan period. Number 1 is no longer ‘A’ but ‘C’; number 2 is no longer ‘C’ but ‘B.’ When your third block comes in, you give them the updated quiz, going over the answers before the class discussion again, as you did with your first block. After school David Markham, a good-looking kid with a cleft chin and a European haircut—one of the captains of the school’s soccer team—comes in and asks if he can make up the points from the day’s quiz.

“You missed every question,” you tell him. “Did you do the reading?”

“I did,” he says. “I must’ve just blanked out or something.”

“I’m not sure it would be fair for me to quiz you again,” you say. “We went over the answers as a class and then we talked about the chapters in discussion. There’s no longer an objective way for me to check and see if you did the work you were supposed to do.”

He nods at this, seems to think. “What if we double my next quiz score to make up for it?” he says. “Sometimes teachers do that.”

This request is so bold that you have to stop and look at him for a moment. David wasn’t the only student in the third-block class to get a zero. There were eight others with matching sets of wrong answers.

You think that you shouldn’t tell him, but then decide to tell him. “Do you want to know something interesting about your quiz today?”

He shrugs, looks down at his watch. “Sure.”

You turn his quiz around on your desk so he can see it, then get out the answer keys, both of them, setting one on either side of his page. “When you took the quiz at 12:30 you missed every question. But if you’d taken it three hours before, when first block took theirs, you would have gotten every question right. Is there anything you want to say about that?”

He leans forward, looks from one key to the other. “Huh,” he says.

“Anything else?”

“I mean, that’s weird,” he says. “It must be some kind of coincidence.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to say anything else?”

He shakes his head no, says “No.”

“How about I give you the rest of the day to think about it?” you suggest. “Come talk to me after school.”

XI

Instead of admitting to it—and haven’t you given him a perfectly good opportunity to do the right thing and admit it?—David doubles down. “I’m an honest person,” he says. “I take pride in my honesty. I don’t cheat.” He goes on to tell you that the fact you have insinuated he has cheated is offensive to him.

So astonishing is this claim—so galling and unexpected—that at first you don’t know how to respond. Instead you find yourself examining his face—his eyebrows neatly manicured (even the boys pluck and shape them now), his morning’s shave still fresh, without even a suggestion of afternoon growth.

“So can I have a chance to make up the points?” he asks.

“Ten questions,” you say. “A zero. And you’re telling me that you did the reading, and the fact that your answers line up perfectly with the answers I gave the other class is a coincidence?”

He spreads his hands. “It’s weird, I know, but—”

“You can go,” you say. “I’m not going to give you a chance to make up the points. I’m writing you a referral. For academic dishonesty.”

You find that the look of surprise on his face—his eyes widening as he looks down on you from across your desk—is satisfying to see. He looks back over his shoulder for a moment as he opens the door, and in the flash of hallway you see before the door swings back shut you recognize one of his friends—another soccer player, one of the other cheaters—and it comes to you that you’ll have to write all eight of them up now. So you do.

###

You write up the soccer player and his friend, two girls on the dance team, a cross country runner, a varsity debater, a co-captain of the robotics team, and one of the band’s drum majors for cheating on your quiz. Mostly nothing happens. Mostly the parents are good. Two of them email to apologize on behalf of their children, one to ask if the points can be made up in any way. When you write to say no, she doesn’t respond. Four of the parents don’t seem to do anything at all. If they’ve complained to the principals or the private school’s board, it hasn’t gotten back to you. David’s father wants to set up a meeting with you and the principal, though. When the meeting starts, at four o’clock on a Thursday, Mr. Markham doesn’t make any pretense of having gloves on to take off.

“You’re calling my son a liar,” he says. “You’re questioning his integrity—his integrity—and you don’t have a breath of proof in the world.”

“The quiz—” you say, sliding the soccer team co-captain’s quiz forward. You push the two answer keys to either side of it.

“Oh, I heard about your trick-answer quiz,” he says. “Aren’t we in America here? Isn’t there such a thing as a presumption of innocence? That—” his gesture toward your paperwork is entirely filled with disgust—“is entirely circumstantial.”

“Mr. Markham,” Mr. Bramlage says. He has said Mr. Markham’s name several times during this tirade. Softly at first, then more loudly. After Mr. Markham has finally stopped talking, Mr. Bramlage holds the other man’s gaze for a moment. “Mr. Markham, you will not raise your voice at my teachers.” Mr. Bramlage nods to you, says your name, and asks you to speak.

You explain the circumstances of the quiz—when the reading was assigned, how much reading there was, how many questions were asked—and share the class averages. You relate the known circumstance of Mr. Markham’s son’s quiz matching the answers from the previous class’s answers, tell Mr. Markham and Principal Bramlage that David Markham told you he’d done the reading, and point out that several of the answers David selected are absurd—that anyone who had read Macbeth would know it didn’t take place in Berlin; that there were no characters named Romeo, Puck, Lennie, or Willy Loman.

“Whether my son got the questions right or wrong on your trick-answer test isn’t what’s at stake here,” Mr. Markham says. “I’m here because you’re calling my son a liar—because you have the audacity up there on your high horse to look down on an honest kid and tell him he’s not one. What do you think that does to a kid?”

“Mr. Markham,” Mr. Bramlage says, raising his own voice. Mr. Markham, halfway out of his seat, sits back down. “I’ve been in education for thirty-two years, and I taught math for the first eighteen of them. What you’re talking about here? The coincidence? This doesn’t happen. Statistically, it doesn’t happen. Not at all.” Mr. Bramlage tells Mr. Markham that you, the teacher, have the right of it, and he outlines a course of action to put the incident behind David Markham and everyone in the room. David and all of the students who cheated (“tried to take the easy way out,” Mr. Bramlage says) will be given second chances to make up the points. Since David and the others are all first-time offenders, the school will adhere to its policy of leaving the incident off of discipline records. Anything that happens in the future will be dealt with more severely.  

XII

It hasn’t yet snowed during your second year in the new building when you decide to stop being a teacher. The kids are still looking forward to Thanksgiving and their Christmas vacations. You’ll take a job at a library or bookstore, you think, or do something secretarial, or work in medical records, transcribing dictations. These kids clearly don’t need you like your old students did. Another teacher just as good as you or better will come along to fill your spot. And besides—these kids have money. Their lives are on rails. So long as they don’t lean too far this way or that, they won’t fall off, and nothing truly bad will ever happen to them. In the meantime, your contract has a premature exit clause. If you quit before the end of the school year you have to pay the school a sum of money you don’t have.

Which isn’t a problem, you decide. You’ll make like your back row students, showing up with your body and not your mind, collecting a paycheck every month while deciding what you ought to do. (Paralegal sounds good. What kind of training does a paralegal need?) Teaching can be autopilot-easy when you’ve been doing it for several years and already have binders full of lesson plans to fall back on. You’ll halve the number of graded assignments you give and award more participation points. To avoid the ugliness of student dishonesty, you’ll threaten quizzes but never give them. There will be no more outside-of-the-classroom paper writing, with computers connected to the treacherous internet, that black market of facile ideas and ready-made arguments. Instead you’ll assign in-class essays, shorter and handwritten.

“Do we not have a quiz today?” your students ask after reading four chapters of Frankenstein, and you tell them no, today is a discussion day, instead. “No quiz today?” they ask after an assignment of Whitman and Dickinson, and you tell them no, they’ll be writing their own poetry, instead. “And your poems have to be good, because we’re reading them out loud at the end of class.”

The in-class essays have fewer sentence fragment and run-on errors than the typewritten ones did, and you hypothesize that your students were distracted while writing at home—that they were “multitasking,” or stepping away to the refrigerator mid-sentence and coming back without properly reviewing where they’d left off. When someone writes a page that is too sloppy for you to read, you call them in and make them type it out after school. The administration never calls you in to take you to task for the relative paucity of meaningful grades in your online gradebook, and no one says anything about the obvious grade inflation that has taken place. At the end of the first semester, no one has failed your class, or even earned a ‘D.’ And the class discussions are… good. You still have the sense that a number of the students are looking up online synopses (the internet’s equivalent of the little yellow books people used to use when you were in school), but it seems that more of your students are doing the readings now than ever before. “Will there be a quiz?” your students ask in February, after you’ve assigned a pair of stories by Eudora Welty and Kate Chopin. “Every time I don’t quiz you makes it more likely you’ll have a quiz the next class,” you say, but there isn’t a quiz the next class, or the class after that. Only more class discussions.

You circle your room’s desks permanently to facilitate the talks your students are having, and then—because you’re no longer creating or grading quizzes or working through long, stapled-together pieces done in double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman—you start writing poetry on your classroom’s marker boards. Frost and Bishop, Tennyson and Hughes, Walcott, Brooks, Rich, Oliver, Piercy, and more. You start to write your own poems, too, but never sign them. “Anonymous,” you say when your students ask.

In April an email arrives in your inbox from Seth Weatherly, at your old school, who tells you he and his wife are getting divorced. Though you’re not, you write “I’m seeing someone,” and hit Send. When the end of the school year comes, no one from administration has chastised you for how easy your class has become, and students from your American Literature class come into your classroom to thank you. They tell you they’ve never read so much. One of them tells you she never even liked reading. When the next year’s contract shows up in your school mailbox, you sign it.

When they make it so easy, it seems you would be cheating yourself not to.

Peter Shull is a novelist living in the Midwest. His debut novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on this platform and will be published in physical and electronic editions in Spring 2025. Subscribe for occasional updates, thoughts on writing, and short fiction.