Today I’m taking a break from grading final exams to eat a little lunch and think a little thought. Exam week involves a classic Wandlessian paradox: I quite like grading them, as it turns out, since they usually give me a good glimpse of the sorts of learning that stick, but I also admittedly resent them a little bit, as the middle stretch of December is usually right around the time my mind starts fixating on other stuff.

What I think I like most about the style of exam I administer is the humane engagement it involves. I used to give finals that were a little mix-and-match at the level of objective knowledge and subjective questions, but all the adjustments we made in academics to maximize opportunity at the height of the COVID era have led to more venturesome essay-driven modes of response. I know some folks are terribly fretful about the prospect of LLM-generated responses, but to my thinking (and in my mode of evaluation) the risk seems smallish.

LLM stuff has no place at all in my creative life; I view it largely as a toy rather than anything verging on some simulation of genuine intelligence. I’ve used ChatGPT and a couple of image generators, all to results I more or less expected. The former offers useful pedagogical illustrations I can bring to my classes, and it helps to get a feel for the sort of prose it spits out. Were I a more adventurous professor I’d probably challenge one of my intro classes to a race, if only to see if an earnest essayist writing a first draft composes more quickly than an LLM user who has to revise the churned prose to make it sound almost human. My bet is that the original authorship goes much more quickly and smoothly, with far fewer vestiges of robotic lameness. I once asked the program to give me a jillion-dollar screenplay idea, and it gave me the plot of Needful Things, albeit with a 2500-word screed on ethics as a bonus. There’s a bit of tragicomedy to it all, but I’d like to think we’re beginning to figure out how little it’s actually good for. I have no doubt that there’s a certain kind of business mindset that imagines profits flying everywhere from all the time saved, but the fact that creative writers are in high demand to undo the silly things that LLM programs invariably do gives me some comfort regarding those bleak visions of the future.

The image generators make the prospects for LLM content even starker. I’ve not yet been brave enough to run a program live in a class, largely because my own experiments have been so wildly various (ask for a familiar figure in a party hat, for example, and the program might neglect to render any other clothing), but there are some vivid illustrations out there in the world already about what these models do, both by design and inadvertently. There’s some incidental racism and censorship cooked into most programs right out of the box, problems that can only be remedied by aggressively training a home model, never mind the creepy mutations and other errata. The images generated, at least for me, at best can inspire a bit of uncanny-valley fascination. There’s no art in them, no humanity–just strangeness.

At one level, I kindasorta get it. We value ease, or the appearance of ease, and the idea that a machine can produce images or writing at a high standard, allowing us to forgo decades of training and practice, is not without a certain kind of tantalizing interest. But I am, at bottom, an 18th-century scholar, and I’m often reminded of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” when he writes: ”True ease in writing comes from art, not chance/as those move easiest who have learned to dance.”

Someday I’ll write on the ethics of all the copyright violation that has made LLM vaguely possible, but today, for the sake of my own humanity, I’d better get back to grading.

I’m taking the lion’s share of this summery Sunday to work on formally articulating the rules of a game I’ve been developing over the past few months. The mechanics, as is the case with most games, are none too exotic, but I think the inner workings of any game communicate two critical things about its design. The first is the designer’s essential sense of possibility, the sorts of stories their game should be equipped to tell, and the second is the designer’s attitude toward newer gamers.

It’s the second point that’s topmost in my noggin right now, since my partner is relatively new to TTRPGs and doesn’t know the ins and outs of some mechanics that veteran players will instantly recognize. In many ways I’m simply trying to articulate mechanics in a way that will be accessible and engaging for players like her. She’s got plenty of gaming under her belt–we’ve played D&D 5E, Blades in the Dark, and several homebrew games with our circle of friends–but putting together the complete picture, anticipating many of the questions and eventualities that are likely to occur as play unfolds, involves a strange bit of perspective adoption.

The game I’m working on in some ways goes against the grain of the TTRPGs I generally play, in that it involves working out narrative possibilities in a more or less functional polity. Trying to design a well-run kingdom or nation is a distinctive sort of challenge, as quite a lot of modern fare is dystopian and/or grimdark. Some of the more common motivational tropes of gaming–monstrosity, villainy, crime, and corruption–feel considerably different if they are exceptions rather than the rule. Conflict and complexity take on different shapes when wickedness isn’t centralized or explicitly authorized by those in power.

The other risk in this kind of navigation is the presentation of governmental and cultural structures that players will find facile. As a population role-playing gamers are notoriously unpredictable, which is, I think, the point. Games allow us to test out agency, so of course some stretching of essential premises is sure to happen. Some folks will defy an existing civic order simply because it’s not the one they would have chosen for themselves, or because it’s lacking in some way the designer overlooked, and some will try to take advantage of institutions that can be profitably bent in their favor.

I think newer and experienced players alike engage with a game more interesting ways when the terms and conditions are flexible, when they leave everyone with sufficient room to move, to flesh out their vision of their character persona. I’m trying very hard for that reason to avoid devising mechanics that yield a meta, an established set of systemic exploits and advantages that everyone knows to capitalize on. A meta makes it possible, even likely, for players to feel they are playing wrongly or badly, letting down their fellows at the table.

A good/bad example of the kind of tricksy game I have in mind is Destiny 2. At one level it’s a beautiful play environment, a space opera that installs the player as the main character in a galactic drama. I took a break from the game for almost a year, and getting back into the swing of things this summer has been pretty seamless. I also remembered, however, why I stopped playing in the first place. For all its many virtues, Destiny 2 depends on meta-gaming to a dispiriting degree. Beyond the basic rules of player engagement there is a metric ton of optimization information. Playing solo offers a limited array of satisfactions, but if one wants to play as part of a trio or team of six the tacit expectation is that all participants will know what to do and be fully optimized for the doing.

When our gaming group is in the throes of game testing, the designers usually take for granted that they’ve missed something essential in the design, that players will identify oversights that functionally “break the game.” I think I’m more comfortable with that possibility than with mechanics that are infinitely fiddly, that stand in the way of player self-expression, or that stand in the way of climbing aboard.

In some ways I suspect my writerly sensibilities are at odds with my design tendencies. In a good story, I find that there’s generally plenty of guidance but a little room left over for the play of the imagination. In my first drafts I almost always overwrite, trying to make sure I’ve offered all the plot bread crumbs I can think of, and in revisions I do my best to trust in readers a little more completely. As a designer I take for granted that players will do just what they like within the framework of a game, but I need to define in pretty granular terms how those possibilities ought to unfold at the mechanical level. When I write for games I generally write quite a lot and find I need to add more and more. When I write stories I move in the opposite direction, editing for clarity first and then cutting away hundreds or thousands of words.

Lately my partner and I have been watching Columbo reruns. From a narrative standpoint, especially in terms of a viewing culture that’s familiar with procedural drama, it’s fascinating.

Most of the fare we see these days involves intricate plotting that the agents of law and order have to unravel, expose, and then prosecute over the course of an episode, so the order of operations is well and truly established. In Columbo, the model is upended: the viewer gets to see the whole of the crime (give or take some concessions to 1970’s morality), gets to see the measures the culprit takes to cover their tracks, and then gets to see Peter Falk, who plays Detective Columbo, get at the truth through dogged persistence and strategic efforts to get the antagonist(s) to underestimate him until it’s too late.

All told, most episodes deliver a kind of olde-skool satisfaction. Columbo is decent, generally likable, and he embodies a mode of detection that anyone might rise to. His effectiveness stems from his humanity, his astute observation, and his experience. There are seldom forensic fireworks at play–just basic assumptions about how people act and a readiness to tease out the threads of discrepancy.

Most cases involve premeditation by some clever, privileged criminal, one who has a solid understanding of how the machinery of law and order works and the sorts of conclusions it usually produces. Quite a few of the culprits assume they can pin their crime on a less privileged suspect, ruses Columbo invariably sees through. The criminal’s plans usually begin to unravel when they either a) do something too clever by half to cover up what they’ve done (wiping away the fingerprints from a doorknob, for example, that should be covered with the victim’s), or b) when they volunteer explanations for some oddity that Columbo has observed that makes alternative solutions seem (at least to Columbo) even more unlikely. Most episodes are especially satisfying at that level. We get to see criminal masterminds with all sorts of advantages at their disposal brought low simply because they couldn’t shake free from the detective’s tenacity.

The magic of Columbo has aged strangely, in part because it’s vision of the world is somewhat romantic, at times even idealistic. More modern procedural shows tend to be predicated on the assumption that everyone has secrets to keep and will lie incessantly to keep them. The workman with the shaky alibi is often having an affair, for instance, a complication that will often find our detectives, however able, chasing down the wrong scent for 30-45 minutes. Columbo’s antagonists are always clever (and successful because they are so clever) and quick on their feet; the working class folks in their orbit are almost always decent, salt-of-the-earth folks. The culprits are always lying at the fundamental level of their commission of the crime, but they otherwise deal in plausible possibilities and half-truths. The episodes usually end when Columbo exposes one key element of their pattern of misdirection and the house of cards collapses so dramatically that the criminal has no choice but to concede that Columbo got them.

It’s a lovely, reassuring structure, especially since Columbo always arrives at the conclusions for the right reasons, unraveling every thread, reconstructing precisely the crime we’ve already witnessed, and laying it all out plainly. It’s a far cry from the fog of lies and denials we normally see, lies extended and compounded, amplified and echoing, judged and justified. And that’s just in our plotted fictions. Public discourse seems to me even wilder more often than not, the fog of fictions considerably thicker, with folks known for their integrity wittingly and unwittingly thickening the mist through various acts of critical self-promotion. Columbo, even with all the vicious premeditation, feels like a kind of cognitive comfort food, even with a modern acknowledgement that much of what he does would constitute harassment by modern standards. At times the overall design of the show feels contrived, which I think can be appropriate for the genre. Getting to the satisfactions of actual justice involves a kind of relentless engineering we don’t often see, given our own less clever but more brazen doers of wrong.

I have several bloggish/website items on my Big Summer Checklist, so I reckon I should knock off one of them. The past several weeks have been a great stretch for creative fermentation inside my melon, which means my partner has had to put up with me staring at the ceiling and the walls while characters and plot elements take shape. I’ve probably overshot the mark a little bit, since right now much of the mental heavy lifting involves sorting and sifting, trying to decide which imaginative critters belong to which project, but I’m pleased to report that I’m more than ready to tuck in to the vry srs bsns of turning premises into pixels.

I’m feeling especially good feels today because last night the 2022 Stoker Awards were handed out, which means that my media feeds are filled with more love and kindness than I typically come across. I still think of myself as a gawker at the candy-shop window when it comes to the Horror/Dark Fiction community, but on days like these one is bombarded with reminders that Horror Folk are, by and large, among the most sweet-natured and humane creatures one is apt to stumble across. Last night we were all celebrating one another and the year’s achievements, both locally (in Pittsburgh) and virtually, and it’s a real delight, especially as an academic, to see so much affection and admiration in circulation.

My partner and her friends went to the spa as a group yesterday, so there were plenty of good feels and chill vibes to be had at the Abbey. And, perhaps as a result of those ambient vibefeels, I started thinking about how much dark speculative fiction arises from visions of affections misdirected and love gone wrong. The story I’m currently working out involves a bit of small-town logic, in part because smaller towns often serve as fine hothouses for fraught relationships, dark secrets, and longstanding tensions and resentments. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the kids like to say, and there’s often a generational quality to those old grievances and grudges. Stephen King nails that feeling in quite a lot of his fiction, and I tend to look for that microcosmic malaise in lots of movies and stories. The Black Phone, one of last night’s award winners, really makes hay with those dynamics, as we get a little world that feels enclosed and pressurized, ready to boil over even before The Grabber starts plucking kids from the street. Abuse and toxicity are woven into the fabric of the little community the screenwriters depict, an effect that reminds me of Derry in It. To face The Grabber, the protagonist needs to take in–and believe in–a different kind of communal possibility. It’s an especially beautiful movie in that regard, as the ending hints at not just a limited resolution but the potential for something more restorative, more redemptive. It’s powerful coming-of-age stuff, a trajectory that horror handles better than almost any other genre.

Having that thought in my noggin has been a great help in terms of fleshing out characterization. No matter how odd or even pathological the cast of oddballs might be, most readers and viewers are going to go in to the fiction with the belief that people are the way they are for reasons. That’s a hand that writers sometimes overplay (I’m thinking particularly of the recent versions of Halloween right now, in which Michael Myers is thoroughly psychologized, as the viewer bears witness to scads of formative moments that make him something far more understandable–a troubled adult rather than a Big Box of Inexplicable Evil), and it takes plenty of practice to offer the sort of hints and intimations that deepen and complicate the reader’s sympathies without robbing the wickedness that follows, however eerie or gory, of its appalling force.

Every now and again I will dive into a story with only a few bits and pieces of a character in mind, but the story I’m about to embark on has quite a few moving parts meshing together at the level of character from the jump. I won’t commit many background details to the page, but I know these people reasonably well–where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and where they imagine they are going before things get grisly. When I’ve got that much material mapped out, I tend to write far more quickly and far less self-consciously.

Speaking of which, there’s a new bit o’ fiction of mine you can read over at Tales from the Moonlit Path. Hop on hither and see what befalls Janie when a stranger calls.

Photo by 2y.kang on Unsplash

What follows is a story I drafted in early 2022, in the thick of the Teacher Shortage (by which I mean the predictable consequence of decades of disparaging and belittling an entire profession, which reached unprecedented heights during the pandemic). I still quite like the story, but I suspect the context–legislation that allowed a host of classroom-adjacent staff, like office professionals, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers, to substitute teach in my home state–has been largely lost. I think there’s something to be said about what comes of viewing K-12 teachers, some of the loveliest, most dedicated, most generous critters on the planet, as functions rather than people, and this is my way of saying it. So here we go.

At some point after the morning bell, in the middle of her third ice-breaker of the week, Sonya looked out over the rows of masked, bright-eyed faces with names she would never remember and realized she couldn’t take it anymore.

When the last student in the last row had offered a fun fact about himself, all those faces turned to her expectantly.  By then Sonya was looking past them, staring at a faraway point somewhere beyond the coat closet, the broken clock, the bone-white cinderblock wall. 

“Are you feeling okay, Ms. Bottoms?” a red-haired girl in the front row asked, her hand tentatively raised.

She blinked, turned to the girl, and smiled.  “I’m doing just fine—better than ever, really!  Thank you for asking.”  Sonya chewed her lip and scanned the room, sizing up those thirty waiting faces.  “Today feels like a very special day,” she finally said.  “How would you like to spend it?  Talk it through and let me know.”

The class was stunned, but only for a moment.  When they understood that she was serious, a lively debate erupted among them.  Sonya excused herself and slipped into the hall to see if she could get away with what she had in mind.

As soon as she closed the door behind her a strange silence settled in.  The whole upstairs wing was essentially empty, with the students from all four of Wheaton Elementary’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes consolidated into her home room for a run through the daily rotation. 

Wheaton served both Folsom Falls and a ring of rural areas, so the shift to online classes had involved a series of staggering steps, setbacks, and on-the-fly adjustments.  The Folsom Falls students with good internet connections were at home, taking classes from the teachers at Plainview Elementary.  The rest of the older students were here with her, collected in the January dark and brought in to face whatever skeleton crew Wheaton could scrape together for the day.

In the Social Studies classroom across the hall she found Dante Winn, a lanky, well-dressed Black man who was thumbing through a book and fleshing out a lesson plan, waiting for his turn with the kids at the 9:20 bell.  He greeted her from his desk but held up a warning hand, the lenses of his glasses clouding as his breath escaped his mask.  “Chances are good that I’ve caught it; made the mistake of going to a funeral last Friday,” he said with a sigh.  “No symptoms so far, but we’re a half-dozen teachers down.  I had to come in.”

Sonya nodded and smiled sympathetically.  “I was at Oak Grove on Monday, over with the first- and second-graders here on Tuesday.  It’s the same thing everywhere.  The cupboard of available subs is running pretty low.”  She took a step backward and looked down the hall.  “Speaking of which, I’ve got an idea for the day,” she added, “but I need to see who else is holding down the fort.  I’ll be right back.”

Sonya walked down the hall and waved her arm back and forth inside the Arts and Music classroom, turning on the motion-sensor lights.  The room was empty, save for the mess left from the day before.  Markers, colored pencils, and construction paper were scattered all over the widely-spaced tables.  It looked like the kids had started making paper lanterns, but the work had been abandoned halfway through.

The lights were already on in the last classroom in the wing, the all-purpose Math and Science lab.  Sonya peered around the corner, started, and grinned at a familiar face.  “Hey, Jerry!” she said with a wave.

The occupant of the lab, sorting a tall stack of worksheets into shorter piles, tugged at his collar and sat up straight behind his desk.  “That’s Mr. Rawlings to you, young lady,” he said with a wink.  “At least for today.”

Sonya laughed and curtsied.  “I’m ever so sorry!”  She stepped inside the classroom and stood at the corner of the chalkboard, a healthy ten paces away.  “They roped you in for a tour of duty?”  

Jerry nodded, slipping off his reading glasses and untangling the arms from the elastic straps of his mask.  “It was either me or Judy from the cafeteria,” he replied, “and I’m not just going to stand by and see these kids cheated out of their pizza.”

Sonya walked to the window and saw Jerry’s bus dominating the far side of the faculty parking lot.  There were about a dozen cars in the lot, all told.  “They had Naomi from the principal’s office with me over in east wing on Tuesday, picking up a third-grade class, but today she’s got to field yesterday’s backlog of calls from parents.”

Jerry shook his head.  “I knew they ‘d written up that bill that’d let any warm body stand in as a sub, but I never thought the schools would actually use it.”  He slumped in his chair, looking incredibly tired.  “It’s a damned shame we can’t do right by these kids.” 

“I’ve got a little notion about that, if you’re willing to hear it,” Sonya said.

She led Jerry over to the Social Studies room and introduced him to Dante.  It took all of three minutes to convince them to hand the kids over to her for the day—a farewell gift for her last day of substitute teaching.

Jerry nodded his assent.  “If any of the kids want to rattle the test tubes they can come on over to the lab,” Jerry said, “but if we manage to send them home healthy and a little less feral, I’ll be a happy camper.”

“I could use the extra planning time,” Dante admitted from the far side of his desk, smiling and stretching.  “And I seriously doubt anyone in the front office will have a chance to make the rounds today.”

Sonya grinned.  “If they do, and if anyone complains, just send them to me.”

Sonya slipped back into her classroom, and her return went largely unnoticed.  The debate about how to spend the day was apparently still raging, and the students in the frontmost rows had pivoted in their seats to challenge a cluster of kids in the back corner.

“And what have we decided?” Sonya asked cheerily.

The kids looked at one another, and at last a tallish boy in the center of the classroom piped up.  “Most of us want a free reading period—just reading, no pop quizzes or comprehension tests or anything like that,” he said.  He twisted to the right and pointed a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the corner-dwellers.  “But they don’t want to read today.”

A brunette in the very corner of the room, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face half-covered by a homemade gingham mask, glared at the back of the boy’s head and then looked to Sonya.  “You did say it was a very special day,” she said, catching Sonya’s tone exactly.  “So we were wondering if we could work together and write a story of our own.”  The kids just around her all nodded in unison.

Sonya stepped around her desk and sat on the edge, smoothing her skirt to her knees.  “A little disagreement is healthy, so long as we’re civil when we settle our differences,” she said.  “Today, however, I think we can agree to disagree.  And I think we can get away with doing both.”

The eyes of both the readers and the writers widened, and they whispered excitedly to their neighbors.  “And,” Sonya continued, holding up a finger before the readers all bolted for the bookcase, “you’ll have all day to work on whichever project you prefer.  We’re not doing a rotation today.”

“No Common Core stuff today?” the tallish boy asked, incredulous.  “None at all?”

“Nope—no quizzes, no discussion, no Common Core bubble sheets.  Just free reading and writing.  Is that okay with everyone?”  Sonya spread her hands, and thirty fifth- and sixth-graders nodded in unison.

Sonya rounded back behind her desk.  “Writers,” she said, addressing the back corner, “why don’t you step down the hall to the Arts and Music room—no, we’d better make it the Math and Science lab.  That way you can talk while you work on your story.  Let Mr. Rawlings know that I sent you, and let him know what you’re up to, okay?  If you have any questions as you go, just come back to me if he can’t field them.”

The writers looked at one another, then gathered up their things and filed out the door.  A boy with curly blond hair from the front row joined them.  

Sonya let the readers make their selections from the bookcase, sending them over to the side of the room in pairs, starting from the back of the alphabet.  When everyone was more or less settled in, she powered on the computer, pulled the keyboard out from its sliding drawer, and started typing.

In twenty minutes Sonya had drafted a letter to the email list most of the substitutes for the district used, and she took another ten minutes to revise it, making her points brief and compelling.  She nodded to herself.   When she was finished the letter set precisely the tone she wanted:  it came up short of calling for a sick-out, a walkout, or something like a strike, but those possibilities were heavily implied as unavoidable steps if the district kept stretching its supply of teachers and subs so thin.

The boy with curly blond hair slipped into the classroom and sidled up to her desk just as she clicked Send.   “Ms. Bottoms?” he said shyly, resting his hand on the side of her desk and looking at his fingers.  “What’s the difference between no one and nobody?  We don’t know which one to use.”

Sonya smiled.  “Have you tried them both out in a sentence?  Which one sounds better?”

The boy’s brow furrowed, and he pushed the stapler so it was parallel to the edge of the desk.  “I can’t really tell the difference.  ‘No one can hear you holler’ doesn’t sound much different than ‘Nobody can hear you holler’.  Not to me, anyway.”

Sonya nodded and touched his hand reassuringly.  “I think that’s exactly right—as far as I know there’s no real difference between them.  No one is a little more formal, but nobody sounds just fine to me, especially with a verb like holler.”

The boy’s face brightened.  “Thank you!” he chirped, and he hastened from the room.  As soon as he was gone she squirted a glob of sanitizer into her palm and massaged it into her fingers.

Sonya looked out at the readers and sighed.  They were all utterly engrossed, lost in Oz or Narnia, caught up the adventures of Pippi Longstocking or Klaus and Violet Beauregard.  They were all eager to learn, hungry for words and the world, but on any other day, with any other sub, they would be taking practice tests to prepare for the real tests that would decide how much funding Wheaton would ultimately get from the state.  It was a stupid, pernicious system.

It took Sonya half an hour just to address her next letter.  She intended to mail it directly to the school district’s superintendent, but she wanted to copy in everyone she thought might weigh in on the side of the teachers and substitutes:  sympathetic principals, the presidents of the school boards for Folsom Falls and Oak Grove, and even the leaders of a few parents’ groups.  When she was satisfied with the list she spotted another student just outside the classroom door, a bespectacled Black boy in a blue cardigan.

Sonya waved him inside, and he began without preamble.  “Ms. Bottoms, is it duct tape or duck tape?” he asked in a whisper.  “And is scissors supposed to be a singular word?”

Sonya smiled.  “The answer to your first question is actually a fun little story.  The tape we all use was originally called duck tape because it was originally made from a material called duck cloth, but not many people knew that, so the spelling changed.  You can use either one really, or you can use gaffer tape, too.  Readers will know what you’re talking about.”

“Could you spell that for me?” he asked, and Sonya did.

“And to answer your second question, scissors is one of those weird nouns that only comes in a plural form, like glasses—and I mean like reading glasses, not drinking glasses—or pants.  So if you’re wondering about verb agreement, it would be ‘the scissors are’.  Does that cover it?”

The boy nodded, smiled, and darted for the door.  “Thank you!” he cried over his shoulder, and the readers looked up from their books and glared at him. 

The bell rang a short while later, and Sonya glanced at the classroom clock automatically before remembering it was broken.  It was 10:15, and she was stuck. 

The overture to the letter had been easy.  It involved a bit of inflated praise, characterizing her readers as well-meaning people who had been dealt an incredibly bad hand, even though she felt most of them were bean-counters and penny-pinchers who viewed the kids as little more than costs in a column on a spreadsheet.  Deciding how she could really reach them, however—how she could make the plight of demoralized teachers and their overworked stand-ins vivid—eluded her. 

A petite girl with a patterned mask and matching hairband materialized beside her desk.  She was a little flushed and fidgety, shifting from foot to foot as she waited for Sonya to acknowledge her.

“And what can I do for you?” Sonya asked, turning from the monitor.

The girl started, stopped, and began again, struggling to phrase her question.  “Is it cut or cutted?  If it happened in the past, I mean.  And would you say a number of cuts or an amount of cuts?  I think we should just go ahead and change the verb, but Laurie says that only cut will really do.”

“It sounds like it should be cutted, doesn’t it?” Sonya began, and the girl nodded.  “Cut is one of our irregular verbs in English, though.  We have cut, cuts, and cutting, but no cutted.”

“I still think we should use snip,” the girl said.  “I just like the way it sounds.”

“Me too!” Sonya said, smiling through her mask.  “And when I need to decide if I should use number or amount, I try to think in terms of how many or how much.  If I think “how many cuts,” then I use number, if it’s “how much cuts,” then I use amount.  Which one sounds better to you?”

The girl nodded again.  “‘How many cuts’, definitely.”

“Then number it is,” Sonya said.

“Thank you, Ms. Bottoms!” the girl said, and she turned on her heel and bounced out the door.

Sonya watched her go, looked out over the readers, and returned to the screen.  She pursed her lips and started typing. 

She would pull no punches.  She would tell the people who had been entrusted with ministering to the needs of these kids that they were failing, that they had failed.  Kids need guidance, supervision, commitment, and consistency, and what passed for education in the district was erratic, haphazard, and contingent.  If they expected the schools to serve their purpose—to turn out young adults who were ready for the world—they would need to invest in something better than the patchwork, piecemeal scheme they had settled on.

When she was done Sonya nodded.  It wasn’t a perfect letter, but she couldn’t think of any way to make the plight of students, teachers, and substitutes more vivid.

“Ms. Bottoms?” a girl’s voice called, and the brunette with the ponytail and the gingham mask curled around the corner of the door, holding onto the jamb.

Sonya turned to the girl.  She saw an irregular diagonal slash of dark red that crossed the gingham, descending from the brim of the girl’s mask to her chin.  When she slid her hand down the jamb the girl left a red smear, redder than fruit punch, redder than fingerpaint.  Sonya’s mouth went dry.

“If you have a name that ends in an S, do you make the possessive with an apostrophe S or just an apostrophe?” the girl asked.  “Like, would it be ‘Mr. Rawlings’ head’, ending with the apostrophe, or ‘Mr. Rawlings’s head’ with a second S at the end?” 

The girl tilted her own head and waited for an answer. 

Sonya swallowed hard and clicked Send.