Janet finished and looked at me. “Needs some help on sentence length, but I think it communicates the idea. That one was by Hyacinth. Another former student of yours.”
She shuffled the papers and read another one. “This one is by Mason,” she said. “Fiction is a fun story that teaches a good lesson, like The Wizard of Auz. It teaches you to make friends and go on adventures but that there is no place like home. A lie is like a story, but it teaches a bad lesson and pretends to be real. Like when Jeremy Merriwhether wrote in an essay that Mr Gibson wore diapers. He was telling us about it on the playground yesterday. If people believe the lie, they’ll think Mr Gibson is just a baby. Jeremy will believe he can say anything he wants about people he doesn’t like and it doesn’t have to be true. Neither of those are good lessons.”
Janet riffled through a few more papers “And this one-”
“I think we get the point,” Mrs Brollish said. She adjusted her glasses and looked straight at me. “It was Mrs Grange-”
“It’s Ms. Grange, actually,” Janet interrupted.
Brollish looked even more annoyed. “It was Ms. Grange who brought the original essay to my attention first thing this morning.” I still don’t know how Brollish did it, but she emitted a silent growl; something I could sense instead of hear. I could almost see the little flaps on her neck vibrating. “It was also Ms. Grange that conveniently discovered this pattern among many of her students’ essays today.”
Janet jumped in. “Due to the serious nature of the allegations, Jeremy, Mrs Brollish, and I have been talking and we discovered a lot of inconsistencies with his story.” Jeremy sank a little lower in his chair. “A lot of things that just weren’t adding up. Like why neither he, nor his parents, nor any other student or their parents have ever reported such brazen babyish behavior from you and why he waited so long to tell anyone.”
Thank you! Thank you Janet! Someone was finally talking sense in this room! I wanted to hug her right then.