Sarah Bynum: Ms. Hempel Chronicles

“If I started my anecdotals this afternoon, I would have to write only one and a half a day. That sounds manageable.”

“Recycle,” Mr. Polidori said from the depths of his cubicle.

“I do recycle,” Ms. Hempel said. “I make my kids recycle, too.”

Mr. Polidori’s face appeared above her. “Use your anecdotals from last year. Just insert new names — if you go under Edit, then slide your arrow down to Replace, it’s quite straightforward.”

“Oh,” she said. “I can’t do it. Because the material is all new this year. They’re not reading The Light in the Forest anymore. Or April Morning. But it’s a wonderful idea.” This possibility had never occurred to her.

FOR THE NEW SEVENTH-GRADE curriculum, Ms. Hempel picked a book that had many swear words in it. She felt an attraction to swear words, just as she did to cable television, for both had been forbidden in her youth. Her father had considered swear words objectionable on the grounds of their very ordinariness. “Everyone uses the same old expletives over and over again,” he said. “And you are not everyone.” He grasped her cranium gently in one hand and squeezed, as if testing a cantaloupe at the farmers market. “Utterly unordinary,” he declared.

But to Ms. Hempel, swear words were beautiful precisely because they were ordinary, just as gum snapping and hair flipping were beautiful. She once longed to become a gum-snapping, foulmouthed person, a person who could describe every single thing as fucking and not even realize she was doing it.

In this, she never succeeded. When she read This Boy’s Life, when she saw shit and even fuck on the page, she quietly thrilled. Then she ordered copies for the seventh grade.

“First impressions?” she asked, perched atop her desk, her legs swinging. “What do you think?”

The seventh graders looked at each other uneasily. They had read the opening chapter for homework. A few stroked the book’s cover, of which they had already declared their approval; it was sleek and muted. Grown-up. A cover that promised they were venturing into new territory: no more shiny titles, endorsements from the American Library Association, oil paintings of teenagers squinting uncertainly into the distance.

“Do you like it?” Ms. Hempel tried again. She smiled entreatingly; her shoes banged against her desk. Teaching, she now understood, was a form of extortion; you were forever trying to extract from your students something they didn’t want to part with: their attention, their labor, their trust.

David D’Sousa, ladies’ man, came to her assistance. Even though he was a little chubby and overcurious about sex, he was a very popular boy in the seventh grade. He had gone out with a lot of girls. He walked down the hallways with the rolling, lopsided gait of the rappers he so fervently admired. In the classroom his poise deserted him; he sputtered a lot, rarely delivering coherent sentences. He batted away his ideas just as they were escaping from his mouth.

But David was a gentleman, and ready to sacrifice his own dignity in order to rescue Ms. Hempel’s. Cooperative and responsive, she thought. Willing to take risks.

“It’s like…,” he began, and stopped. Ms. Hempel smiled at him, nodding furiously, as if pumping the gas pedal on a car that wouldn’t start. “It’s…” He grabbed his upper lip with his bottom teeth. He ground his palm into the desk. The other kids delicately averted their eyes; they concentrated on caressing the covers of their books. “It’s… different from the other stuff I’ve read in school.”

The class exhaled: yes, it was different. They spoke about it as if they didn’t quite trust it, particularly the boys, as if there was something inherently suspicious about a book whose characters seemed real. Toby, for example — the narrator. He wanted to be a good kid, but couldn’t stop getting into trouble; he loved his mother a lot, but wasn’t above manipulating her into buying things that he wanted — it was all uncannily familiar. They were also puzzled by the everyday nature of his struggles: there was no sign that soon Toby would be surviving on his own in the wilderness, or traveling into the future to save the planet from nuclear disaster.

“It doesn’t really sound like a book,” said Emily Radinsky, capricious child, aspiring trapeze artist, lover of Marc Chagall. Ms. Hempel would write, Gifted.

“I normally don’t like books,” said Henry Woo, sad sack, hanger-on, misplacer of entire backpacks. Ms. Hempel would write, Has difficulty concentrating.

“It’s okay for us to be reading this?” said Simon Grosse, who needed to ask permission for everything. Ms. Hempel would write, Conscientious.

ON PARENTS’ NIGHT, MS. HEMPEL felt fluttery and damp. She knew from past experience that she would make a burlesque of herself, that her every sentence would end with an exclamation point, and her hands would fly about wildly and despairingly, like two bats trapped inside a bedroom. The previous year, a boy named Zachary Bouchet had reported, “My mother says that you smile too much.”

In the faculty room, Mr. Polidori threw an arm around her and whispered, “Just pretend they’re naked.”

That was the last thing Ms. Hempel wanted to imagine.

Instead, she decided to picture her own parents sitting in front of her. She pictured her mother, who would make them late because she had misplaced the car keys; and her father, who would station himself in the front row and ask embarrassing questions. Embarrassing not in their nature, but embarrassing simply because he had asked them. Her father liked to attract attention. “Ni hao ma! ” he would greet the waiters at the Chinese restaurant. “Yee-haw!” he would whoop at the fourth-grade square dance recital. “Where’s the defense?” he would wail from the sidelines of soccer games. “Brava! Brava!” he would sing out, the first to rise to his feet. Ms. Hempel, as a child, had received several standing ovations, all induced by her beaming, cheering, inexorable father.

Each of these parents, Ms. Hempel told herself, is as mortifying as mine were.

A mother began: “This book they’re reading — I was just wondering if anyone else was troubled by the language.”

Ms. Hempel smiled bravely at the instigator. “I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, and reminded herself: This woman can never find her car keys. This woman is always running late.

A classroom of parents, squeezed into the same chairs that their children occupied during the day, looked at Ms. Hempel.

She couldn’t say, Your kids are okay with me. I promise.

Instead, she said, “When I chose this book, I was thinking of The Catcher in the Rye. Because every time I teach Catcher to the eighth grade, I feel like I’m witnessing the most astonishing thing. It’s like they’ve stuck their finger in a socket and all their hair is standing on end. They’re completely electrified. What they’re responding to, I think, is the immediacy and authenticity of the narrator’s voice. And part of what makes Holden sound authentic to them is the language he uses. This book’s impact on them is just— immeasurable. Even the ones who don’t like to read, who don’t like English. It suddenly opens up to them all of literature’s possibilities. Its power to speak to their experiences.”

Ms. Hempel paused, surprised. She had recovered.

“I thought to myself, Shouldn’t the seventh grade get the chance to feel that? That shock of recognition?”

And she meant it, in a way, now that she had to say it.

What happened then? Ms. Hempel doubted it had anything to do with her speech. Perhaps an insurgency had been building quietly against the concerned mother, who probably hijacked Parent Association meetings, or else was always suggesting another bake sale. Maybe they heard in her complaint an echo of their own parents, or they believed on principle that words could never be dirty. Maybe sitting in the plastic desk-chairs reminded them of what school felt like.