Yours, etc.
- Mar 31
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 8
By Kasumi Parker
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a high school English teacher possessed of moderate intelligence must ache for the opportunity to teach Pride & Prejudice.
However little known the feelings or views of such a teacher may be on her first step toward tenure, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of her colleagues with doctorates, that they assume she has read it, heightening her inferiority complex and her desire to locate her Cliff’s Notes from high school.
“My dear friend,” colleague Caitlin said cheerfully, “It’s actually not that bad!”
I made no answer.
I went to my department chair for advice. She gave a knowing smile to the Jane Austen puppet on her bookshelf and handed me two overburdened manila folders. Like her folders, she was bursting with decades of ideas. Act out this scene! Compare film versions! I didn’t have ideas, so I used hers, even when the words didn’t make sense coming out of my mouth.
In the classroom, I dimmed the lights for an untold number of film clips. Colin Firth paced under natural lighting. Time melted away.
Partway through the unit, something strange happened. I began to enjoy myself. It must have been the letters that characters wrote to each other. Letter-writing, I knew about. Crafting a message to a crush to exude effortless intrigue? Expert. Devising an email to my child’s teacher to mask my anger and compel their generosity? Not so different from Elizabeth Bennet. I find it easier to hide feelings in writing than to talk about them. Jane Austen’s concerns weren’t so different. My ninth graders, however, favored talking. If talking were akin to writing a rough draft in pen, they had no trouble using Sharpies.
One Friday afternoon, I flipped through some Regency period love letters while waiting for my students to arrive from 8th-period Chorus. Their hallway acapella rendition of Toto’s “Africa” filtered into the room before they did. The transition from singing to no-longer-singing would be a struggle. I dismissed an impulse to create a new activity on the spot to match their Serengeti energy. I would stick to the plan: They would write love letters to each other, but in Jane Austen’s style.
The students came in the room, belting without the self-consciousness that some people experience upon entering a classroom. I smiled big, my internal pep talk going strong. Watching teenagers create period-piece crush drama and then read it aloud: That could be fun. “You can pass notes! For a grade!” I projected over their rain blessing. They looked at me. I held the handouts in a fan formation for mystery. Explaining the assignment, I said writing in someone else’s style was like a puzzle. I reminded them that they loved puzzles. They even had the option of expressing real feelings and then using the class assignment aspect to deny everything. One student told me, while taking out some knitting, that their generation didn’t pass physical notes. I told myself to stay strong.
After I distributed the sample love letters, the class read them to each other and began writing. I walked around the horseshoe of desks, pretending to examine their work, despite being unable to read it upside-down. The students’ end-of-week energy and base-level anxiety (or mine?) produced a thrumming on the edges of their desks, electric shocks from the dark puke carpeting. They were still loud, but they weren’t talking or singing. They were giggling. And writing. It was time for the read-aloud.
In the way that a single student can make a whole class miserable, a student doing something surprising at the end of 9th period on a Friday is a gift to the class, moreso to a teacher who gets self-conscious when students don’t pay attention and also when they do. That student walked across the classroom and got down on one knee in front of a classmate: “My dearest,” they proclaimed. “I can hold back no longer.” The classmate returned the favor for about a sentence before knocking over her desk and falling to the carpet in paroxysms of laughter. On the first day of the Pride & Prejudice unit, I had given a lesson on irony. Had I just witnessed it? I wasn’t sure. Another student faced a classmate seated next to him and, without raising his hand, went for it. “My dearest third cousin: My reasons for sitting next to you are, first, that I should think it a fine example to the other students whom you have rejected; secondly, that it will add greatly to my happiness and your awkwardness; and thirdly, that it is the advice and recommendation of my noble school counselor. Yours, etcetera etcetera.” The class erupted in laughter and recognition. Creepy is timeless, universal.
There was nothing left for me to do but laugh, too. Their letters may have been fake, but their joy was real. Had I been sincere – or joyous – at fourteen? When I was in ninth grade, I was in love with a friend who was in love with another friend. For weeks, I listened to the friend talk about his crush, giving him no indication that I was ready and willing. Then the other friend rejected him, giving me a window. I ripped out a page of loose-leaf from my English notebook, wrote him a letter, and folded it into a tiny triangle, tucking in the last part to seal it. Opening it would take effort, create anticipation. My five-word pronoun-filled version of Mr. Darcy’s missive: “Me, me, or maybe me?”
Kasumi Parker is a writer and high school English teacher. Her prose has been published Black Warrior Review, PRISM International, Lumina, and others. She received an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Kasumi lives in New York City with her family.
