THAT KID

On the first day of class a student challenged me. It was odd because students are usually subdued on the first day. They mainly sit quietly, mentally calculating how much effort the course will require, how much class they can safely miss and how easy a grader I'll be based on whatever hints of personality I manage to reveal during that first presentation. Pushover, hardass or something in between?

This semester the first presentation was a little spiel about agreement — an area of grammar that can confuse even the most conscientious. Is it "The group of plumbers are" or "The group of plumbers is"? Is it "The couple have" or "The couple has"?

I was talking about how when you have a "neither/nor" construction the verb must agree with the noun closest to it. So, for example, it's "Neither the actors nor the director likes the theater." It sounds kind of wrong, but it's right.

A woman in the dead middle of the room barked, "That's stupid."

All 60 heads turned toward her, then toward me. Apparently I was supposed to passionately take up the "It's not stupid" side of the argument. I am familiar with the collective, expectant look in these situations. Usually it arises when someone throws down the heretofore unquestioned wisdom of his high school English teacher like a gauntlet. "I was always told never to split infinitives," he'll declare. Or "never to use contractions." Or "never to end a sentence with a preposition." Or "never to start a sentence with a conjunction."

The students don't usually tell me that what I'm saying is stupid per se, just that it's profoundly unorthodox and clashes violently with everything they've ever been told. I like how these challenges generally come in the passive voice. I was told. It makes it easier to pick up the gauntlet. Well, now you're being told something else. If "being told" is all the authority you require to cling to a belief, then "being untold" has a certain persuasiveness, too, provided the person doing the untelling has a mental stature in the ballpark of the original teller.

The "That's stupid" challenge is harder to answer, because in many cases I agree with the assessment. Part of me wanted to tell the woman, "You're right. That is stupid. Let's do it your way. Take home the grammar book and highlight everything that you believe to be stupid. Pencil in how you would handle the situation instead, and we'll adopt that as our text. OK?"

Instead, I said something to her along the lines of, "Well, it sounds stupid to our ears because we're so used to hearing it said incorrectly that when we hear it said correctly it just seems wrong and nonsensical. If you find it terribly grating, you can just switch the order and say "Neither the director nor the actors like the theater."

This seemed to mollify her — until I said the next "stupid" thing.

In class after class, she'd belt out her opinion, never bothering to raise her hand. "That's stupid." "That's lame." "Oh, that makes sense," meaning, of course, that it makes zero sense.

I honestly feared she would become a problem, a distraction, even as I started to become privately fond of her sauciness. On quizzes she would write things like "My girl Sebs! Woo-hoo!" (referring to Gov. Sebelius) or "The Hill!" (referring, affectionately, to Hillary Clinton). I have a big soft spot for a certain kind of zany, even if ill-informed, pertness, maybe because it's a quality I lack — or, if not lack exactly, then am unable to show. When the students had to write a haiku for a silly headline exercise, hers was about Ernest Hemingway's cats in Key West. And I knew she knew about them not from reading about Hemingway, but from partying in Florida. And that somehow made the poem even more endearing — to know that it came from life, not books.

Today in lab she started peppering me with challenging questions about the exercise. I was keeping pace with her demands, but my face, on the fourth or fifth question, must have betrayed the tiniest feeling of weariness, because all of a sudden, while I was in mid-answer, she relented. She just stopped. And she said, "I'm sorry. I'm being that kid." I said, "That's OK, what I was ..." And she interrupted me, a weird blankness on her face. "Nevermind. I don't want to be that kid."

So I didn't answer. I just sat there feeling kind of blue while they finished their exercises. Why didn't she want to be that kid anymore? I was getting so used to that kid. It made sense for her to be that kid.

I felt seriously down. Then as she was leaving class she turned in her exercise and asked me, "Are you going somewhere fabulous for spring break?"

"No," I said, sadly picturing myself in swimwear and hoping she and her classmates weren't doing the same. "I have to ..." but before I could get out the word "work," she barked, "You're not?! That's stupid!"