The Troubles of Mariel Clement: a short story

“She was picked up for a DUI last Tuesday night after your break started. She had a male student in the car with her.”

Apr 17, 2025

“So what can you tell me about this Clement person in your department?” my father wanted to know.

This was the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving Break. I had been out of town, at my grandmother’s in Kansas City, visiting my mother. There were steaming bowls of pho and plates of cracked rice, vegetables, and slender pork chops on the table between us; a communal plate of basil, bean sprouts, and wedges of lime to share. I had covered Mariel Clement fourth block class during the lunch shift earlier that day. It hadn’t gone very well.

“Not much,” I said, and I sipped a spoonful of still too-hot broth. “I haven’t really talked to her. They don’t let us experienced teachers speak to the new ones.” I cupped one hand around the other and squeezed one of the lime wedges into my bowl. When I looked back up, my father’s brow was furrowed.

“You’ve not spoken with her at all?”

I shrugged. “I’ve said ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Good Afternoon,’ maybe, but I doubt I’ve gotten a dozen words in return.”

“Does she have a mentor? Has anyone in your department spoken with her about lesson planning, classroom management, or anything like that?”

I thought about ladling another spoonful of broth; thought better of it. “We don’t do the mentor thing anymore. They cut them last fall.”

“But you discuss these things in your department meetings, don’t you? Things like proper relationships with students? Your department head brings up matters like this, I assume?”

“We cut our department heads when we cut our mentors. Didn’t you and I talk about that? They ‘dissolved the positions.’ When we have meetings the admins talk and we listen. It’s sit-and-get. So one of the principals might have talked to her—or maybe the Head of Literacy—but if she’s talked to any of the veteran teachers I’d be pretty surprised. Why do you ask?”

My father picked up his own spoon and dipped it into his still-steaming bowl. “She was picked up for a DUI last Tuesday night after your break started. She had a male student in the car with her.”

The scandal of the semester—because no one but the teachers in the English department thought the banning of our books was a scandal—involved Mariel Clement and her student Isaac Logan, a senior from her last-block class.

“A pot head and a motor head,” Valerie Stephens called him. Valerie’d had him the year before when he was a junior. He’d been new to the district then, transferred in from Minnesota somewhere—the Twin Cities or thereabouts. He wasn’t dumb, per Valerie, but he wasn’t very smart, either.

Hearing the words ‘pot head’ come out of Valerie Stephens’ mouth was interesting. I had never seen her smoke, smelled it on her, or seen any paraphernalia in her apartment when she and I had briefly seen one another two winters before, but rumors circulated through the student body every fall: papers she graded sometimes came back smelling like pot.

“She didn’t seem like the kind of woman to become romantic with a student,” Mrs. Dennison said.

We were in Mrs. Dennison’s room in the Auxiliary Vo-tech. While Mrs. Rosenbaum had been moved to her new room near the Main Office during the English Department’s classroom shuffle over the summer, and I had been moved upstairs to the Science Hall, Valerie and Mrs. Dennison had been moved out of the main building entirely and placed in AVT. Valerie had a relatively nice room next to the Family and Consumer Science classrooms, but Mrs. Dennison’s new place was in the shop wing. It had a polished cement floor and shared a makeshift partition wall of scrap metal, plywood, and old road signs with Mr. Reynold’s Automotive Tech classroom.

“How many of them ever do?” Mrs. Rosenbaum asked. Then, with some horror: “Do you think she really did?”

Of the teachers who were new in the building, Mariel Clement had seemed like the most competent to the veteran teachers from the word Go. While the other new teachers in our English department—we’d had five that year—had scrambled to get copies made before their first-hour classes and passed their plan periods huddled together, trying to make sense of this strange new place they’d found themselves in, Ms. Clement sat quietly in her classroom working her way through a stack of books she brought into the building in a Barnes & Noble tote bag: Wuthering Heights, Sense & Sensibility, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the like. While there was a general clamor to be heard from the other first-years’ rooms during instructional time, Ms. Clement’s classes had been relatively quiet, her students mostly on-task. The consensus opinion was that she was competent. Sometimes a first-year like her showed up and knew what they were doing, as if they’d already been teaching for three or four years. These good ones generally left for better jobs after a year or two. Before the scandal, this was the only concern anyone in our department had about Mariel Clement: that she was likely to leave us soon, requiring us to find yet another new teacher to educate—or at least occupy—our students.

That there had been difficulty came to light when the other first-year teachers began talking. And then there were accounts from the students.

Chief among Ms. Clement’s troubles was the fact she had isolated herself. Hailing from a suburb outside St. Louis, she had come upon our school district at a teacher career fair and been drawn by the opportunities Christine Parro, our assistant head of HR, had offered her to Help kids who really needed to be helped and to Work on her Spanish—a language she had minored in during college. She had come to Plains City with an open mind—had come in the spirit of adventure—and been disappointed by our outpost on the High Plains almost immediately. She hadn’t liked the wind, the paucity of trees, the relative dearth of big-city amenities, the dust and intermittent whiffs of feedlot odor. Even before the administration warned Mariel and the other new teachers to stay away from the veteran staff, Ms. Clement was turning down lunch, dinner, and Friday night get-together invitations other teachers offered. She skipped both the district-sponsored Welcome Picnic at the zoo and the back-to-school bowling night at Prairie Thunder Lanes. Instead of socializing with other staff members, she had been seen at the new Target on the north end of town on more than one Friday night, a Venti-sized cup from the in-house Starbucks kiosk in her hand. She would walk around for hours, seldom buying anything.

Then, too, contrary to outward appearances, things hadn’t really gone quite so well for Ms. Clement in her classroom. She had had trouble recognizing what her students didn’t understand, and she had struggled to connect with her students’ understandings of the world and explain things. As all of us had, she had come to the school with expectations of what juniors and seniors in high school ought to be able to do, then stumbled in moderating those expectations when she found herself facing students who failed to understand her instructions and acted out in their frustration. The janitors cleaning out her desk and closets found stacks of ungraded student assignments. In several of the paperclipped sheaves it was clear that she had begun to do the grading, then given up. “Who hasn’t been there?” Valerie Stephens asked. It was heartbreaking, all of us knew, when you thought you had taught the material well and every paper you looked at told you the students hadn’t learned. More heartbreaking still when you were a first-year and had thought teaching would be easy.

“If she’d just talked to any of us,” Mrs. Rosenbaum said. The rest of her thought went unspoken.

Ms. Clement used words like apropos, superfluous, redundant, anemic, and superficial in her discussions about writing with her junior and senior students, not realizing until October that none of her students knew what any of these words meant. Later that month she overheard one of her junior girls tell another she thought she “would make a good hair stylist,” and reprimanded the first. What Ms. Clement had interpreted as an insult to the latter girl’s intelligence had been intended as a compliment, though—the second girl had told the first that she was thinking of going into cosmetology after high school.

And Ms. Clement lost her temper and berated a class that wasn’t paying close enough attention as she reviewed the correct answers to an exam her students had performed poorly on. She exploded at her students as her own eleventh grade instructor, Mr. Fitzpatrick, had exploded on the class she had been a member of at the private high school she had attended. “Do you want to have secretaries, or do you want to be secretaries,” she asked. “Do you want to have someone to clean your house, or do you want to clean other people’s houses? Don’t you want to go to college? Or do you want to be a bunch of garbage men and truck drivers?”

And of course two of her students’ mothers were secretaries, and two of the students’ fathers did work for the city’s sanitation department. Another’s uncle drove a semi across the country, and there wasn’t a Hispanic student in the room who didn’t have a mother, grandmother, aunt, or older sister who’d earned money cleaning someone else’s house. When these facts came to light (a junior named Harmony Vincent spoke up to rebuke her), Ms. Clement laid down her exam’s key and told her students to work on their own for the rest of the hour. She passed the time until the bell sitting behind her desk staring at the wall beyond her computer’s monitor.

Mariel Clement’s trouble dealing with Isaac Logan began early, at the beginning of the school year. She had responded to his crass comments with gentle attempts at repartee, at first, hoping goodwill on her part would lead to good behavior on his. (Valerie Stephens, in contrast, had shut him down early, definitively, and without apology.) When these attempts at bridge building hadn’t worked, she had threatened to send him to the office. But she had never followed through with any of these threats. In early November things had escalated. Logan swiped markers, stole the plants she brought to the room, and vandalized desktops. Relatively innocuous verbal interruptions to her lessons like “Can we work outside today?” became more pointed disruptions such as “Would you know if I came to this class stoned?” The afternoon before the two were arrested, Logan had reportedly asked what time he and his friend Nick Pitts should pick her up to go out that evening. None of the students who were interviewed said they thought the question was serious. They just thought he was trying to get a rise out of her.

People have often asked me about Mariel Clement since, and I always say the same thing I told my father: that though she and I worked in the same department—though we taught almost identical course loads—I never had a real conversation with her. At the first department meeting of the school year neither of us was invited to stand and introduce ourselves; at subsequent meetings we were prevented by our administrators from speaking. The most involved exchange I ever had with her took place in the faculty workroom one morning when I walked in to find her making copies of Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron.”

“Is everything going alright for you with those juniors?” I asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she replied.

“If you ever have any questions, or need help, you can always holler,” I said, and I told her what my room number was and when my plan periods were.

She thanked me again. For the rest of our time in the room there was only the whir, rattle, and chunk of the copier spitting out her story packets until the stack was finally finished.

What happened in the course of that Tuesday night became, in the months that followed, the subject of much rumor and speculation. Mariel Clement may or may not have bought Logan alcohol—I don’t think she did—and she may or may not have asked him to take her somewhere to buy drugs. I don’t think she had done that, either. The two might have passed part of the evening together at her place, as one story goes, and been on their way to one of the taco trucks on the edge of town for a late meal, but to me this has always seemed unlikely. She might have been driving to drop him off at one of his friends’ places since he was drunk and couldn’t drive. I had it from my father, who was legal counsel for the district, that Mariel wasn’t staggering, fall-down drunk, as many claimed, and that she was, in fact, only a few hundredths of a percentage point over the legal limit. I’ve always been inclined to believe her story—that she was alone drinking a bottle of wine while she watched a movie in her apartment, that Isaac showed up at her door drunk and that she had refused to let him in. That her subsequent refusal to let him drive away was the right thing to do. Her assessment that Logan would have gotten behind the wheel and done something stupid if she had called or threatened to call the police was probably correct. It seems unlikely—I and most of the other teachers thought—that the two of them slept together, as has been suggested, or that any kind of romantic or physical relationship took place at all.

In the aftermath of the thing, as the rumors and speculations spread, I wondered if I and the rest of my department might hold some share of the blame. Might the situation have been better handled—might her difficulty in handling Isaac at the outset of the year have been better resolved—if the administration hadn’t prevented the existing English department members from collaborating with our younger peers? Shouldn’t we have defied the administration and reached out more forcefully to offer our assistance? In that particular cultural moment, when the shared balance of educational responsibility—the teacher’s to teach, the student’s to learn—had been tilted so far toward the teacher, when the failures of students were seen as their instructors’ failures—when failure, conceivably the best teaching tool available, was no longer an option (“No Child Left Behind” should have been analogous to “Banks are too big to fail,” but the banks were fed a surfeit of money while the education initiative was unfunded and the children saw their teachers fired and schools closed), wouldn’t she, she who must succeed, and who must do it alone—a first-year teacher who needed a job in the face of the recession, who had been taught in college that the best teachers didn’t write referrals, but took care of discipline problems on their own in the classroom—wouldn’t she have refrained from reaching out for help? Might she, uprooted from her St. Louis suburb, alone in Western Kansas, cut off from her colleagues, faced with eleventh and twelfth grade students who read at fifth- and sixth-grade levels, tasked with the overwhelming responsibilities of both catching these students up and moving them forward—expected to do so without the use of the standard tools of the profession—books—if she took her job, her obligation to teach, seriously, which everyone agrees she did—might not she have been bewildered—desperate—probably depressed? The whole situation was reduced to a few lines in the Post-Dispatch’s police blotter: “Mariel Clement, 114 Meadow Court #3: DUI, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Isaac’s story changed over time as he first tried to save himself (“No, I’ve never seen that before. It must’ve already been under the seat”), then copped to ownership of the pipe to try to clear her name, giving the whole thing that terrible suggestion of romance.

Mariel was suspended immediately and indefinitely. The administration put a middle school “literacy coach” in front of her classes for two days, then realized that the coach wasn’t properly licensed to teach high school classes (K-8 Only, her license read), and then there was the filling of time and space with a string of substitute teachers as the Central Office searched for a suitable long-term replacement—anyone credentialed at all would do—and the principals in the building dealt with the heavier-than-usual stream of end-of-semester discipline referrals. Charged and found guilty, she would never be able to teach a classroom of students again.

I subbed in her classroom several times after first hearing about her arrest during that dinner with my father. I tried to discern whether her classes were harder than average, normal, or easier—but of course it’s hard to tell when you’re an established teacher in the building—a known quantity to the students—and know how to get students under control and on task. I walked around the room while they worked—looking at her bookshelves with her pedagogy books, her desk with its small, flowering cactus and philodendron, the sagging Barnes & Noble tote and the three books she had left beside her computer’s keyboard: Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Do you think she did it?” My father and so many other people asked. “Did she seem like the type?”

What I can’t stop thinking about is the whir and chunk of the copy machine as her copies of Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story came out; the almost fearful way she’d regarded me when I spoke to her—didn’t she know we weren’t supposed to talk; that she could get in trouble—; the careful underlines and fine, blue-inked annotations she had left in the margins of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that I picked up from her desk and leafed through. She could have been—should have been—a good teacher. The proper question—the one everyone should have been asking—was what we could have done differently to help her.

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