I read from the barely legible handwriting in front of me:

“I like to eat chicken and ham chicken and ham is good to eat I like to eat chicken and ham and ham and chicken and chicken and chicken and ham I like to eat chicken and ham….”

I looked up from the paper. “And it just goes on and on. Janet,” I said, “is there an Eldritch code in this somewhere or did this child get kicked in the head before writing?” Tracy and Beouf cackled in their chairs. “Do these children not know what a period is?” More laughter.

Janet reached across the cluster of desks. “Let me see.” She squinted at the paper, analyzing the handwriting. “This is Ethan.” She said. “Yeeeah, Ethan has a learning disability. Great at talking, bad at getting his words on paper. He just starts to go on a loop and can’t stop. This is still a big improvement from the beginning of the year.”

Tracy, Beouf, and I stopped giggling. Great. Now I felt guilty. “Unfortunately he gets no credit for this,” Janet sighed and made a ‘0’ with her big red pen. “Didn’t even write to the prompt.”

“What was the prompt, again?” Tracy asked.

“They were supposed to write about who their role models were,” Beouf said.

Silence.

“Chicken and ham.” A whisper by me.

“Ham and chicken.” A little louder from Tracy.

“Chicken and ham and ham and chicken.” Beouf. Even louder.

“Ham and chicken and chicken and ham!” Janet shouting!

We all burst out laughing. All of us. Even Janet. Sometimes you just had to laugh at this stuff. It was better than crying, anyhow. Janet flopped her head down on the desk. “Kill me. Just kill me. Dead please. Thank you.” More laughter.

We were all gathered in Janet’s room. A few days ago, her students had had to participate in a school wide writing exercise in which every third through fifth grader had to write to a prompt for close to an hour straight.

Sit still. No talking. Eyes on paper. Just write. Not what you want to write. Write about the most generic thing possible: Shit like ‘Favorite season’, or ‘Favorite food’ or ‘Role models’.

It was bad for the kids and worse for the adults who had to enforce it. Keep an atmospher of perfect quiet and focus with a bunch of eight and nine year olds? Might as well have asked them to find the Lost City of Ohiyo while they were at it.

Also, it goes without saying, but written essays had to be graded eventually. That’s where we came in. Janet had asked Beouf and I to help her grade the work, and naturally (having nothing better to do) we obliged. Tracy was technically off the clock, but elected to stick around and help. We pushed some student desks together, (I was left to supervise of course) divied up the stack, broke out some pens, and indulged in the ages old habit- that tradition passed down from teacher generation to teacher generation: Grading papers, talking trash, making jokes, and quietly worrying about how good we really were at our jobs.

“At least his spelling was fine,” Beouf said, “Do you want us to count spelling?”

Not breaking her gaze from her own pile, Janet tapped a printout she’d placed in the middle of the cluster. “It’s on a rubric. If the spelling doesn’t really stop you from understanding what they’re trying to say, let it pass once or twice. But if it’s starting to interfere with comprehension or happening a lot, start marking off for it.”

“Got it.” A quick glance let me see red ink go flying across Beouf’s selected page. “Geesh, my babies can spell better than this.“ No joke…

I swallowed my pride and kept marking at my papers. To prevent bias, all student names were covered up with tape, but I was secretly hoping that the ones who were doing particularly well were some of my former students.