Critique

When my fellow teachers and I correct the Spanish regents essays we keep the doors closed. This is because we like to ridicule them, loudly and frequently.

There is a customary way to do it. Protocol dictates that the offending student’s teacher takes a hit at the same time as the teacher. The exchange thus goes as follows:

“¡Gonzalez!”

“¿Sí?”

“¿Jane Kelly?”

“Oh yeah, she’s bad.”

Then the teacher correcting the student’s essay reads the badly written or just ridiculously stupid line aloud, provoking a cringe from the teacher and laughter from all others present.

No students are present in the room. If one does happen to enter we keep our mouths shut and mark away silently. As soon as the youngster departs the door gets shut and the fun begins all over again.

In contrast to work, where we rip apart the students’ work when the students are not present, in my weekly writer’s workshop we rip apart the work in front of the writer. However, a cardinal rule of the workshop is that the author whose work is “up” cannot say a word in its defense.

That is until last night.

The discussion was about the work of a young man in my workshop. I had previously suspected him to be a bit loony but mainly based on instinct and not hard evidence. The critique was not favorable. His piece was a mess.

We were not hostile, though. Rather we were having a general discourse on areas in which he could improve. Nonetheless he interrupted us and went off on a very, very long tangent about the things he has been going through in the past year. He was beginning to talk about the medication he is on when the workshop organizer shut him up.

It was an eyebrow-raiser, but given that we were all sitting within five feet of each other, eyebrows – and jaws, for that matter- remained still. He concluded his speech by presenting everyone in the workshop with a thank you note for reading his piece written on the back of a four-page, single-spaced email he had recently written to the president of his former university.

“On a scale of 1-10,” a friend asked afterwards, “How uncomfortable did that make you?”

I in fact had enjoyed the whole display. It was tantamount to someone starting to curse loudly in the middle of a meditation seminar. My friend was freaked out, though.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “We won’t be getting a repeat performance of that anytime soon.”

And yet we might. And somehow I think there is in the actions of this unbalanced young man a touch of poetic justice. He is an avenging angel of sorts. He speaks, unknowingly, for kids even younger than he who take standardized tests, write essays and never, ever know what goes on behind closed doors.