Disclaimer: The below essay is partially fictional. Certain identifying details have been deliberately changed.
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In high school, I had a certain English teacher. We’ll call him Mr. N.
Before I begin, let’s point out the elephant in the room: American public education was and is not designed to foster a love of reading or writing.
Now, in fairness to the American public school system (would that I could tell my teenage self I would be writing those words one day), we should point out a couple more elephants as well.
There are many kids who do indeed unironically love reading, sometimes to the point of becoming psychotic fandom slash shippers. If you don’t know what the last three words in that sentence mean, you have led a charmed life and I envy your soul.
There also many more kids who would rather eat laundry detergent pods than read for pleasure. (Unfortunately, thanks to TikTok, we now know this statement is not complete exaggeration.)
While most adolescent palates admittedly lack the sophistication to appreciate the caustic terroir of Procter and Gamble’s finest stain-fighting vintages, let’s not forget that most teens in the U.S. public school system have access to social media, video games, and a lot of other things that make reading seem dumb and cringe. It brings me no pleasure to say this, but the days when we could motivate kids to put dead trees with ink in front of their faces for a Pizza Hut Book It! voucher are long gone. This was true even when I was a high school student eons ago, and technology and its ability to flood young brains with dopamine hasn’t exactly remained stagnant since I graduated.
Jon Haidt's call to ban smartphones in schools is an acknowledgment of this attention and tech arms race, but even so: A lot of potentially fun things necessarily become boring when you are either being forced to do them or there are better alternatives. Public school ticks both of those boxes, and while banning the phones is probably a good thing, it’s not like I would suddenly get the urge to binge-read Middlemarch just because my phone was out of pocket.
So yes, English teachers kind of have the deck stacked against them. I have never been a teacher, but I have worked with kids long enough to know that most English teachers (and teachers in general) are underpaid, overworked, and browbeaten by students, parents, administrators, and celestial tides alike. Many English teachers spend an inordinate amount of their time and mental bandwidth on things other than teaching English, and things did not improve after that tiny little pandemic in 2020. And oh yeah, they have to do all that with smiles and love while trying to edify a bunch of bored little shits. I do find the concept of “emotional labor” to often be overused and shoehorned into internet arguments just to score points or make one gender look worse than the other, but it is difficult to deny that teachers have a good case for unironically deploying it.
Personally, I went to a relatively good public school - none of the outlandish horror stories you hear about on r/teaching or on the New York Post. (That being said, just because I don’t have any DEFCON 1 horror stories doesn’t mean I have no school horror stories at all. But that may be a time for another post.) I do concede that it was unrealistic for all of my teachers to have maintained the level of compassion, patience, enthusiasm, and perseverance that we might have wanted, even if it came at the time in our lives when we needed it most.
All of this is to say: As a former teenager, I understood that there was a good structural chance that my public school teachers were not exactly going to be my BFFs. I understand (as much as I hate to admit it) that we are all human, even all the authority figures and scolds that we all used to hate. (As is often said, one of the nice things about becoming an adult is that you realize the adults were just making it up too.) And even back then, I understood that getting a room full of teens to give half a bowel movement about Shakespeare was an unenviable task. It’s not like I would have volunteered to switch places with any of my teachers in the classroom. I think they all did the best they could with what they had, and I can and should give them that much.
That being said, I am still going to write this essay, because Mr. N, in his own way, probably would have wanted me to.
I’ll let you all decide if he would have approved.
So Mr. N was my freshman English teacher (ninth grade for Americans, I suppose).
He was overweight, balding, and in his later years. Salt and pepper hair with more salt than pepper. He had a short mustache and shaved beard on his round, bespectacled face. His resting facial expression seemed jolly- I remember thinking he would have made an excellent Santa Claus impersonator- but when he opened his mouth and began to speak, I always remembered feeling disappointed that his actual voice never seemed as jolly as his face implied. To a visitor, he probably looked like a member of the school’s IT department more than someone who enjoyed the nuances of language and diction.
Mr. N, for some reason, loved words. Perhaps that isn’t a sin in an age where some of us love sports and some of us love race cars and some of us love incredibly socially distasteful pics of lewd cartoon characters. And I guess there are worse things an English teacher could love than words. But Mr. N’s love affair with words went beyond simply having a word of the day on the corner of the chalkboard every morning. He often commented on the ways words rolled off the tongue, the way they felt against your mouth and palate when you spoke them into being. “Throat” was one of his personal favorites. He liked to say that “throat” was one of the few words in the English language that “spoke the way it sounded”. This made no sense to me at the time and sounded like the kind of deepity you might hear from Little Carmine from The Sopranos. (For people who have never seen The Sopranos, Little Carmine was not known for his acuity with the English language.)
That being said, as I get older, I am a bit ashamed to admit that I see his point. “Throat” does speak a bit like the way it sounds, especially when you compare it to something like “mattress” or “computer” or “potato”.
In fact, Mr. N had a soft spot for the “th” sound in general. Throw. Thwart. Thus. To him, it was a syllable that had “power”, whatever that meant. The way you had to close and purse your lips and tongue in unison to say it. It was a syllable you could “direct” and imbue with its own magic power, like a spell in D&D. Yet at the same time, it wasn’t percussive or concussive like “ck” in “back” or “ump” in “bump”. It was firm, but not hard. It was the duality of language at once.
You might wonder, perhaps, if Mr. N’s fascination with mouthfeels and lips and tongues took him from merely eccentric into creepy call-the-FBI territory. But to the best of my knowledge, Mr. N was not the kind of teacher that would deploy sophomoric humor to get freshmen’s attention, and his sensual fervor was restricted only to syllables and not to actual human beings.
Perhaps it might be different in a post #MeToo world, where more social attention and less charity is paid to the behavior of older boomer men than ever before (especially those working around young teenage girls). These days, I’m sure that in the tradition of Richelieu, one or two prudish souls could find Mr. N’s fascination with word-lip-sounds a fireable offense out of context. (That he looked like a stereotypical overweight balding dude with facial hair and glasses would probably not help matters.) That being said, everyone generally agreed that Mr. N was too weird to be actually creepy, and that his behavior was only worthy of mild mockery, not condemnation.
If anything, we students were more harassing of Mr. N than he of us. After a class involving one too many “th” monologues, when we were all filtering out into the hallway, I remember hearing someone come up with an extremely unprintable mock conversation, sotto voce, involving the word “throat” and Mr. and Mrs. N in the bedroom. Imagining the aging Mr. N expounding on the virtues of certain tongue sounds in flagrante derelicto was as hilarious as it was disturbing. Admittedly, if this were 2024, and if Mr. N had been a female teacher, heads would probably have rolled.
I am not going to claim that Mr. N’s tongue-word-texture soliloquies were exactly thrilling material for an audience of suburban fourteen-year-olds fresh off the cafeteria lunch stupor. (Someone at Sysco must have forgotten to take the tryptophan out of the chicken nuggets.) Normal adults- at least the ones we knew- did not deliver lectures about why “throat” and “thwart” were the best words in the English language and why they sounded good. For most of us, it sounded, well, kinda weird.
(If I wanted to be totally accurate to the language of the time, we would use the now politically incorrect phrase “weird and gay”.)
I will say this though: people generally paid slightly more attention to Mr. N than they might a regular teacher, because Mr. N’s love for words- as unrelatable as it was to our basketball and hormone-addled minds- was at least something novel. It was kinda cringe but at least it was more entertaining than him reading off a powerpoint about the Hero’s Journey archetypes in Homer’s Odyssey.
But now that I look back, I suspect that Mr. N’s love for words- while most likely intrinsic and genuine- was probably an offshoot of something else. Mr. N was an English teacher, but if anything, I find that the books he taught were mostly forgettable (even by the deadened standards of most English curricula).
What Mr. N prized above all else was communication. Whether verbal or written. He saw books- for better or worse- not as texts to be analyzed to death, not even as stories to be enjoyed, but as models for us to aspire to. Yes, we talked about archetypes and plots because of the state Board of Education requirements, but Mr. N always seemed to tie things back to the ways characters expressed themselves. Their choices of language, their mannerisms, their spoken (and unspoken) dialogue.
In retrospect, to Mr. N, all books- all stories- were at heart a message from one human being to another. They were a way for thoughts and ideas to be made tangible, and to Mr. N, most young people were hopelessly inept at making their thoughts and ideas tangible. Arranging thoughts. Communicating. To get better at it, you had to soak up some role models- any role models. Whether that was reading Mark Twain or Carson McCullers or anyone else on this planet. I suspect that as a ninth grade teacher- the first checkpoint after middle school graduation- Mr. N was less concerned with making sure we understood the specific social and racial dynamics of 19th century Mississippi than just getting us to pay attention to words in general. Words and sentences and having the confidence to use them instead of the stock teenage annoyed grunt (male) or huff (female).
Not that he ever went on a cliched “kids these days” rant in class or anything like that. He never delivered a boomer speech about how we were all letting our brains rot on TV and the internet and all that junk. But I mean, come on. Most teens do not inspire oratorical confidence when they speak or write. Their sentences are either like Hemingway but not in a good way, or like Faulkner but not in a good way.
If this sounds harsh, I say these things because I have been a teenager at one point. I know from whence I speak. Most of my classmates, to be blunt, were the same way. There were a couple of exceptions, but you didn’t exactly need to be a Toastmasters president to know that our class of bored teens and teenettes was not going to be winning any oratorical commendations any time soon. The way Mr. N’s brow subtly furrowed when we stumbled and um’med and like’d over our responses in class was proof enough of that.
In fact, looking back, I suspect that Mr. N may have been a member of Toastmasters at one point. It certainly explained the pencil assignment.
The pencil assignment went like this:
We were all lined up outside the door; uncharacteristically, Mr. N’s classroom was closed. We could see Mr. N shuffling around the room, putting something on each desk. Mr. N was not a particularly mobile individual, likely due to obesity and age; whenever he lectured, it was often while sitting in a chair at the front of the room. It took him a couple of minutes to make the rounds. When he opened the door and let us in, there was something resembling- if not excitement- then at least curiosity. Not because we expected Mr. N to suddenly bust out a George Strait solo or something, but again- when you’re in public school, a little novelty goes a long way.
Laid across the top of everyone’s desk, in that little groove that desks have for your stationery, was a brand new pencil. No, they were not color-coded or tied with a ribbon or anything like that. They were just ordinary Ticonderogas you could get at any supermarket or drugstore. Heck, we could buy them ourselves at the school store if we wanted (back when school stores were a thing.) Most of us reacted with bemusement- a few with suspicion- but no one was going to turn down free stuff.
Mr. N, seated as he was in his customary plastic chair at the head of the room, broke the silence with a short clap.
“Today, you each have a pencil in front of you,” Mr. N began, his voice resonant. None of us particularly thought much of Mr. N’s talent as a speaker. There were some teachers in the school, male and female, young and old alike, who could really give it to you with their voices. Vocal outbursts that could echo into adjoining classrooms, inspiring tittering whispers of “those guys are so screwed”. Mr. N was not one of them; age and an undisclosed respiratory ailment made it difficult for him to raise his voice. (Thankfully, we never gave him much reason to.)
However, it was clear that Mr. N was pulling out the stops for this one. A few people noticeably sat up.
Mr. N then went on to explain- I forget the exact phrasing- that writing as a skill was something we should all pay more attention to. He did not say this in an accusatory way; if anything, his tone was even more warm and encouraging than usual. Nevertheless, a couple of us looked sheepish. I may have been among them.
He went on to explain that writing would go on to pay dividends in our lives going forward. Not just to earn good grades or write college essays, but as a way to organize our thoughts. To express ourselves, and use our voices. Some of this was admittedly boilerplate, but we paid attention anyway- because we could sense Mr. N wasn’t giving this speech purely out of the goodness of his heart. We knew the other shoe was about to drop.
“Writing,” Mr. N said, voice gentle but firm, “is an incredibly important skill. Communicating is an incredibly important skill. And people shouldn’t have to become a big shot politician or a CEO to be able to express themselves.”
Easy for him to say.
“Writing is an indispensable part of communication,” Mr. N went on. “How many times have you had a thought in your brain, a really good argument, and then when you tried to say something your tongue gets tied and the words come out all wrong? It’s not necessarily because you’re stupid. It’s because writing is a way of putting thoughts in order. When you write something, it forces you to put your thoughts out there. It’s easy to think. It’s a lot harder to say. And it’s a lot harder to do.”
At this, I cringed with self-awareness. As a teenager, I was prone to the belief that I had the world all figured out and that I was definitely more intelligent than the people around me. (I am told this is not uncommon among teens. Or non-teens.) Yet the feeling of thinking I had good thoughts and then realizing those thoughts were actually kind of half-baked was too relatable- and too frequent- to be dismissed with teenage snark. Mr. N had scored a critical hit and I did not appreciate it.
(Years later, I would read Paul Graham’s 2022 essay on putting ideas into words, and remembered being incensed that Paul had easily articulated the phenomenon of having good ideas, trying to write them, and then realizing that your ideas are less good than you thought. I also remembered that Paul’s essay felt familiar to me somehow, even though I could not for the life of me remember where I’d heard the concept. It’s only now as I write this that I realize where the genesis came from. Sorry, Paul; Mr. N beat you by a little bit.)
“You shouldn’t be scared of writing,” Mr. N said, suddenly, though not unkindly. “Everyone should be able to write about anything. And everyone can write about anything. You might think you don’t have anything to offer the world or that you’re too young or that people won’t understand. But you all know how to write. Most of you just don’t know it yet.”
We all stared at this. For all of his lectures on the “th” sound, Mr. N had never been the, shall we say, inspirational type before. A nice guy? Yeah. A little weird and eccentric? Perhaps. But this “you can do it” Dead Poets Society phase of Mr. N was something new entirely. It was not anything any one of us had expected from this aging, balding old man who sucked on the word “thwart” like raspberry lozenges.
“Anyone,” Mr. N went on, in the same supportive but firm tone, “should be able to write f-” He paused for a half-moment. "a couple hundred words on anything.”
To this day, I’m not sure whether to feel appreciative or insulted that he’d clearly intended to say five hundred and then dialed the number down.
A couple of us had begun to give the mock eye-rolls of terror, but there were also a couple of us that did look genuinely worried. We knew this was not going to be another lecture on thwarting throats. The pencils in front of us suddenly seemed like poisoned treats.
“What I want you to do today,” Mr. N said, dropping the hammer, “is to write an essay about that pencil. You have the rest of the period.” He looked at his watch for dramatic effect. “Go.”
No one started writing. A couple of confused, tentative, almost indignant hands went up.
“Yes?” Mr. N nodded to a girl in the front row.
“You want us to write an essay about, like…a pencil?” This particular girl was one I’d known for having an acerbic tone, usually in the service of dismissing boys she disliked. But here, her voice just seemed genuinely confused.
“Yes,” Mr. N nodded. “Just the pencil.”
“Like, what are we supposed to write about a pencil?” the girl said, as if Mr. N had asked us to solve the Riemann hypothesis in the next 38 minutes.
“Anything you want,” Mr N said, his face the picture of calm and equanimity. “What it means to you, what it makes you think of, what you could do with it…Go wild.”
The girl’s skeptical expression did not fade. Her confusion was slowly being replaced by annoyance. “It’s a pencil.”
“Yes,” Mr. N agreed, clearly unmoved by our increasing frustration. “It’s a pencil. But pencils can have stories too. It’s your job to pull a story out of that pencil.”
The girl looked as if she was about to say something else, or take the pencil and shiv Mr. N with it, but settled for a glower at her desk.
Another voice from a boy. I realized belatedly that he’d been keeping his hand aloft the whole time. “Uhh…how long does this have to be?”
“As long as you can make it,” Mr. N replied with zen-like detachment. “Size isn’t everything.”
(Had we not been terrified by the imminent prospect of extemporaneous pencil-prosing, I’m sure some of us would have chuckled.)
Another hand from another girl. “Can you write about, I guess, the history of pencils or something like that?” She was clearly grasping for straws.
Mr. N gave a shrug that was both reassuring and unmoved. “If that’s what you want.”
We were all collectively realizing that any future questions were probably futile.
Slowly, with the zombified resignation of the inevitable, we began to pull out binders and hunch over our desks. And I looked down at the blank sheet of looseleaf I’d gotten from my binder.
Writing a couple hundred words about a pencil…are you kidding me.
My first instinct was to start with a line about where Mr. N could shove that pencil. I almost wrote it down. But a small part of me was still aware that I might have to hand this in at the end of the period and that going that route was unlikely to help my college prospects.
There are so many things I would rather write about than a pencil.
I had never really seriously written anything before, but in a strange way, the resentment made me feel like I could write about anything- except the pencil.
I would rather write about that time I went on a vacation that I hated or the video game I wasted a couple hours of my life on or a review of the cafeteria’s godawful food or…
I took the pencil in my grip, rolled it around in my palm.
You little bastard thought you were gonna be used to write the Great American Novel, didja? No, you’re just a piece of wood ran through and spitroasted with a thick graphite alloy rod and I’m going to use you to rub out a stupid, embarrassing essay that I have no intention of ever looking at ever again.
Then the pencil talked back to me.
I don’t mean this literally, of course. Whatever my other teenage idiosyncracies, schizophrenia was not among them.
But as I let my bitter, sarcastic thoughts marinate inside my head, my brain, unbidden, conjured up a stream of consciousness for the inanimate object I was holding:
You think this is a picnic for me, you little shit? Yeah, I had high hopes. My mom was a fir tree in Albany and my dad was on the varsity graphite team in Binghamton. They all told me I needed to make something of myself. They wanted me to become a pencil in a multimillion dollar law firm or scribble footnotes on corporate acquisition contracts. But fuck me sideways, I wanted to help other people. I wanted to help kids like you. So I decided to become a school pencil. You know how hard that was? Everyone telling me that I was wasting my potential. That I was never going to pay off my pencil student loans. That I should go into the pre-med program for Pencils Who Want To Be Used To Write Important Prescription Medications For Over The Hill Celebrities. But I thought, those kids need me! Who else is gonna be there for them when they want to draw S’s or tiny penises on the margins of their notebook? Who else can be there when they need to twirl something in their fingers to try to look cool even though they actually look like loser nerds? That’s me. That’s who’s there for you.
And the kids like you? They need some emotional support in their day. They need someone who can be on their side when all their teachers and parents hate them and they get rejected for the prom and they think biology and social studies are BORING AF. Yeah, I know. You can just go home and play your video computer games or whatever. Hell, I know you all play tetris on your graphing calculators when you think your math teachers don’t notice. They do, they just aren’t paid enough to care as long as you pass your tests. But don’t lie. For these state-mandated eight hours a day every time you’re in class bored out of your mind, I’m your best damn friend in the world. So shut the fuck up and give me some of the respect I deserve. Because I’m what’s keeping you from dousing the place in gasoline and bringing a match.
And I looked down at the pencil in my hand.
I took a deep breath and wrote down everything it had told me onto my paper. I left out some stuff, like the profanity and the part about the tiny penises. I did not know if fir trees actually grew in Albany, but I was not in a position to fact check. I wrote and wrote and sneaked a glance at the clock and realized I was running short on space and time so I capped off the conclusion a little earlier than I would have liked. Also, I noticed my hand was hurting.
But other than that, I found out that writing a couple hundred words about a pencil was not as bad as I’d thought.
And then I realized something:
I can’t hand this shit in. This isn’t an essay on the ATP process or the mitochondria of the cell. This is unlike anything I’ve ever written for school. It’s way too edgy and embarrassing and it shits on the public school system more than I feel comfortable attaching my name to in print.
But I had this realization a few minutes before the end of period and I also realized that not handing anything else in was also not an option.
When Mr. N told us that time was up and to hand everything in, we shuffled up towards his desk. None of us had a particularly joyful expression. A couple of papers noticeably had only a couple of paragraphs of text. There was some exasperated tittering as we got up, a couple of whispers of “Man, I couldn’t think of anything” sprinkled among the teenage footsteps. There may also have been some profanity, although given Mr. N was still sitting at the front of the classroom, it was muted. We saved our choicer words for when we were back in the hallway.
Overall, we as a class thought the pencil assignment had been cute for about five seconds but really it was just weird and dumb like everything else about Mr. N, and after making a couple of jokes about what Mr. N could do with that pencil, we all lurched like a collective wave through the hallways to our next class.
The next day in class, Mr. N began the session by shuffling around at his glacial pace and handing us back what we’d written. Most students took the papers without expression and crammed them out of sight into their binders or into their backpacks after glancing at them for only maybe half a second.
When Mr. N got to my seat, I was not particularly enthusiastic to hear what he’d thought of my imaginary pencil’s little guerilla rant against the American public school system. I was fully prepared to shove the paper into my backpack out of sight like everyone else.
My paper was marked with red ink. This was absolutely not good.
There were four words at the top of the paper, in two pairs. From a glance, I saw that the first started with S and the third started with an A, making it look like:
S___ ___—
A___ _____!
Oh god, it says See Me After Class. With an exclamation point!
I wasn’t a bad kid, for chrissakes! I was a nerd. Nerds got good grades and stayed out of trouble. But what I was holding looked like the exact opposite of staying out of trouble. Have you ever experienced tachycardia? At that moment, I did. I don’t recommend it.
I grabbed the paper to shove it into the bowels of my backpack and hope Mr. N forgot about seeing me at the end of the day, which caused me to accidentally glimpse the four words at the top of the paper more closely.
And I realized they said:
Super cool-
And funny!
Have you ever experienced bradycardia? Well, from a medical perspective, it’s not good either. But when you experience it right after having your heart beat like 300 times per minute, it sure is relaxing.
Mr. N sat at his perch at the front of the room and greeted us with a smile.
“You all did really well on the pencil assignment,” he said, causing a mild ripple of surprise to spread throughout the classroom. I thought again of the multiple papers that seemed to have only a couple of short paragraphs at most on them. “See? Anyone can write about anything. All you need is a little push. And it becomes a part of you.”
For a moment, his gaze lingered on me. And I tried as hard as I could to look away while not looking away too flagrantly.
Then Mr. N clapped his hands.
“Okay. So, today, we’ll be starting with a new reading. Everyone, take out your copies of World Literature and turn to page 315. We’re going to be reading The Portable Phonograph by Walter Van Tilburg Clark…”
This shocked me for a moment. I thought for sure Mr. N would have asked someone to share their essay. But maybe that would have been a bridge too far. Or maybe he was lying when he’d said we’d all did really well on the pencil assignment and he wanted to spare us the embarrassment of a public reading. Or maybe he thought that us being teenagers, we would find any one of these pencil essays cringe no matter how good it objectively might have been.
Whatever it was, I’ll never know. Because for the rest of the year, while Mr. N would continue to expound on the virtues of the th and the ch and the ck words, and while we would have other writing assignments, we were never given anything on the level of the pencil assignment again.
Would I say that Mr. N caused me, years later, to try to attempt to write for a mass audience on the internet in the midst of my depression? No. There are other stories behind that, other tales involving youthful curiosity and poor decisions and discovering internet fanfiction and all that other stuff.
But I suppose I would be lying if I said that Mr. N hadn’t planted the beginnings of a seed, a seed that would get me to see the art of arranging words and describing things and communicating ideas as something a little bit more than what we had to do just for class assignments.
As for the actual text of what I wrote for the pencil essay, I wish I could tell you that I had that essay framed when I got home and I’ve been saving it ever since.
Unfortunately, that day we had chili dogs for lunch and there was a new MMORPG all the nerds were playing that I really wanted to get into and so I just kinda dumped the essay into my backpack and forgot about it and I guess I must have thrown it out unceremoniously a few weeks later when I was doing a general bag cleaning because I had an incredibly bad habit of finding binders and organization too cumbersome (something that would come to haunt me in future years). It’s one of the few things I regret not saving from my teenage years.
But at the end of the day, I’m not too broken up about it.
I know that if I had to, I could write another couple hundred words about a pencil if I wanted.
Maybe even five hundred this time, Mr. N.
Really good story!! I see why you created a substack