Global war depleted the pool of young teachers at the school, which instead turned to elderly residents of the village who had, in youth, distinguished themselves in one profession or another. The administrators, familiar with my eminence as a litigator, asked me to serve as an English teacher. I was thrilled. Nothing pleased me more than the prospect of teaching my favorite poems and novels. Still, I affected skepticism, as befit an accomplished legal thinker. I came around to the idea, of course. What else would I have done, sat around my house talking to my two dogs, Lily and Rosemary, while I mourned my wife (three years buried) and lamented the absence of my children (my son flying bombing raids over Hamhung, my daughter married to a rich man in Portland and irreversibly estranged)? Still, I arrived that first morning to Hartfield High School disconsolate over my lack of confidence, which was a direct result of my lack of preparation. Butterflies had kept me from thinking about what to do other than to dwell on those butterflies, and the pep talk Lily had given me, in the form of leaping up on my lap as I unworried myself with whiskey, hadn’t taken. I was ill at ease and frightened. Would the children laugh at me, call me names? I was a tall man still, with cubic features that lent themselves to “Frankenstein.” Then I had an inspiration: a trial. Children loved drama, the more so when it appeared to have an underlying moral foundation, and the works I intended to assign could easily be reframed as trials. I selected one of my favorite novels and got to work extracting from it questions of misdeeds and redress, perspective and evidence, individual freedom and the social contract. The first day, I stood before the class and announced the name of the accused, the nature of the crime, what was known and not. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said. The children hung on the edges of their seats.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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