across the page. My body surged with caffeine and adrenaline. An absurd confidence settled over me. I picked up my pencil and began.
Some of the questions made me flinch: I felt the sting of Gottschalk’s pointer as it struck various points of my body. Other questions seemed totally foreign and yet I found the answers spilling from the graphite in quick, neat letters. The giddiness that overtook me was so unanticipated I didn’t know if I was about to laugh or vomit.
Fifty questions, fifty minutes. Gottschalk clapped and there followed the cracking of a dozen pencils hitting desks. Not mine, though—I was done, and had been for a long time.
We passed our tests up the rows. Gottschalk took them, pounded them into order, and took his seat as the bell rang. Cheers erupted; the real party could now begin. As the class left, whooping, I thought I saw the raven hair of a beautiful girl. No matter; I turned my gaze to Gottschalk. He had on his glasses and was already scratching away with a red pen. He glanced up. Our gazes met.
Very slowly I approached. As I passed each desk, my heart leapt at the prospect of never again entering this room. I arrived at Gottschalk’s desk and stood silently as he ran a finger across handwriting I recognized as my own. I glimpsed red ink on the previous page, but not much. His pen stood poised to mark, swaying like a rattlesnake.
Page two: no red marks. Page three: his fingers regripped the pen, but nothing. Page four: a red circle and -2; a crossed-out sentence and -4. Page five, the final page: his plump finger smudged lead as it tracked each line. Finally he flipped through the pages in reverse order, adding up the tally, and marked the final count upon the front page: -8.
By his rubric, it was an A. I was too stunned to react.
Gottschalk set down his red pen and removed his glasses.
“I appreciate, Mr. Crouch, your powers of memorization. It’s possible you possess a savantlike ability in this regard. It’s also possible, I suppose, that you actually gave time and effort to the task. There are certainly many correct answers in these pages. Yet I find myself curiously unmoved. Allow me to explain. On Friday I was asked to lead this school, and over the weekend I spent a great deal of time pondering that responsibility. Those now under my purview are teachers. Teachers, in theory, teach. As acting principal, I am charged with ensuring that, at the end of the day, lessons have been learned. I cannot cut my own teaching any slack in this regard; to the contrary, I must hold myself to the highest standards. At the beginning of the semester you walked into this room unwilling to learn. I was adamant in involving you. Countless times I have pulled you to the head of the class to immerse you in the lessons to the best of my ability. The results have been discouraging. Oh, you’ve managed to regurgitate well enough. It’s a trick you have learned. But I do not condone trickery; I demand engagement. And this is where my meditation over the past weekend has brought me. Teaching is not about facts, it is about the building of character, and facts are merely the tools, as a dumbbell is a tool for building muscle. You have been the teacher today and I the student. You have taught me that an A on this test is not what you need. What you need is the maturity that will come only from engaging with that which you have so flippantly tossed aside. This, what you have handed me, was intended as a slap in the face, and I take it as such. I’m afraid I cannot turn the other cheek, Mr. Crouch. The previous principal, perhaps, but I am of different quality.”
With that he raised the salvation of my grade point average, my mother’s pride, the sole hope of my future, and tore it in half. He put the two pieces together and tore again. Again. Again. Ragged rectangles fluttered to the desk. I thought of scooping them up in my hands and rushing to the principal’s office to reassemble and prove my score, but behind that door, too, was Gottschalk.
“You will repeat the class,” he said, gathering the scraps in a tidy pile and lifting a trash bin. With a flick of his wrist the remnants of my exam disappeared.