Cinemorphosis

Tag: education

  • The Business Model of Suffering and Abuse on Reality TV

    The Business Model of Suffering and Abuse on Reality TV

    We were discussing their current essay assignment: an excavation of cruelty masquerading as inspiration in the TV show The Biggest Loser. The facts alone read like satire written by a misanthrope: contestants more than 200 pounds overweight were pushed through eight-hour training days, incinerating close to 8,000 calories while being rationed roughly 800. Add caffeine pills, a chorus of screaming trainers, and the steady drip of public humiliation, and you have less a fitness program than a stress test for organ failure. That none of the contestants died feels less like good management and more like statistical luck. That millions watched—enthusiastically—says something unflattering about us.

    I show them Fit for Life documentary, which functions as a kind of aftermath report. Former contestants speak with the clarity that only distance provides. They describe trauma, yes, but also something more complicated: the show gave them structure, purpose, a narrative. It brutalized them and, perversely, steadied them. Most gained the weight back. Some now lean on GLP-1 drugs, their appetites chemically negotiated into submission. But all of them remember the same thing—the mercilessness was not incidental; it was the engine.

    I asked my students why I had assigned this essay. What, exactly, were they supposed to uncover?

    At the micro level, we peeled back the familiar myths. The cult of self-discipline—so comforting in its simplicity—lets us ignore biology, environment, and the sheer stubbornness of appetite. Bodies become symbols: power or failure, virtue or laziness, depending on who’s looking. We noted the obvious but rarely confronted statistic—most Americans are overweight—and the uncomfortable reality that GLP-1 drugs may be the only intervention that consistently works at scale.

    Then the room shifted. One student volunteered that she was on a GLP-1. The first weeks were a gauntlet of nausea and vomiting, but now the drug—Mounjaro—had quieted her hunger to a whisper. Thirty pounds gone in two months. Another student offered a counterpoint that landed harder: her father had been one of the exceptions. The drug didn’t help him lose weight. It helped him lose kidney function. As she spoke, she mentioned he was now on dialysis. The room absorbed that in silence. Miracle and risk, side by side, no clean narrative available.

    So we zoomed out.

    To design a show that courts physical danger and guarantees humiliation—for ratings, for merchandise, for the grotesque satisfaction of watching someone crack—is not an accident. It’s a business model. That’s the first kind of evil: deliberate, calculated, fully aware. Cynical evil. The producers know exactly what they’re doing. They understand the cruelty, and they monetize it.

    The second kind is quieter and more common. It belongs to the audience. Viewers sense the moral problem—on some level they know this is exploitation—but they file that knowledge away so it won’t interfere with their evening entertainment. They watch, they flinch, they keep watching. Call it willed ignorance. A cultivated habit of not asking questions that might ruin the pleasure.

    I told them, half-serious but not really joking, that if we were ranking things, cynical evil is a ten. Willed-ignorant evil sits comfortably at a seven—less flamboyant, more pervasive.

    Something clicked. The word evil—unfashionable, blunt, almost embarrassing in academic settings—cut through the fog. The discussion woke up. Students leaned in, argued, confessed discomfort, revised their positions in real time. The assignment stopped being an exercise and became a lens.

    That was the moment worth noticing. Sometimes you have to pull the camera back. Stop pretending the essay is about structure and sources and let students see the larger architecture: what the topic reveals about us, what it demands we confront, and why it matters that we do.

  • How It Feels to Grade 60 Original Essays Edited by AI

    How It Feels to Grade 60 Original Essays Edited by AI

    I assigned my students an essay that asked them to describe a place both ugly and formative—a crucible that hurt them and, in the same breath, made them. The submissions came back like a map of pressure points: a high school classroom that felt like a courtroom, a gym that smelled of rubber and dread, a mental health ward lit like an aquarium, a pre-op room where the clock ticked louder than courage, a soccer field that taught hierarchy and grace, a family home in El Salvador, a Korean farm where labor spoke in blisters. The content was theirs—specific, unborrowed, alive. But the sentences often arrived wearing a suspicious polish, the prose lacquered to a showroom shine. You could feel the editor in the room, invisible and tireless.

    I keep returning to a metaphor I can’t shake: AI is like a bodybuilder taking steroids for writing. Go in “natty,” and you present a muscular physique that is honest–well defined, maybe even impressive. Add the chemical assist and you step onstage thirty percent larger, veins penciled in, every line exaggerated into spectacle. 

    After sixty of these eye-popping essays, I felt the same deadening I get at a bodybuilding show. At first you admire the craft; then the sameness creeps in. The poses change; the effect doesn’t. Everything looks like everything else.

    This is my ambivalence, and it refuses to resolve. On one hand, AI hands students a language upgrade that would make a New York editor nod—clarity, rhythm, a vocabulary that lands. It’s as if they’ve been fast-tracked to a professional register. On the other hand, that very upgrade dilutes the experience. When strong language grows out of a human mind, it carries the friction of effort—the faint grit that makes it feel earned, inhabited. When it arrives laundered through a machine—the “stochastic parrot” Emily M. Bender warned us about—it can be dazzling and hollow at once, a chandelier with no wiring. The sentences glitter; the room stays dark.

    I’ve graded hundreds of essays for years and thought I knew the terrain—the tells of struggle, the leap from draft to draft, the moment a voice becomes unmistakably its own. Now I’m reading in a new jurisdiction with no settled law. I’m less a judge than a border agent, inspecting passports that all look freshly printed. Welcome to the literary Wild West: the gold is real, the essays are suspect, and every nugget asks the same question—where did you get this?

  • The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    In her Atlantic essay “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?”, Lila Shroff describes a classroom that has quietly slipped its friction. Students entering high school around 2024 have discovered that schoolwork—once a slog of half-formed ideas, crossed-out sentences, and mild despair—can now be outsourced with the elegance of a corporate merger. With tools like Claude Code, they recline while a digital understudy attends class on their behalf, taking quizzes, drafting lab reports, and assembling PowerPoints with the glossy finish of a mid-level consultant angling for a promotion.

    Teachers respond with variety, as if novelty could outpace automation. More assignments, different formats, new prompts. It doesn’t matter. The students simply retrain their AI to shapeshift into whatever species of learner is required: the earnest analyst, the reflective humanist, the data-savvy pragmatist. The submissions arrive immaculate—coherent, polished, and suspiciously free of the small humiliations that once marked actual thinking.

    The problem is not that the work gets done. It’s that no one is being worked on. The transformation has shifted from mind to method. Students aren’t learning the material; they’re learning how to manage a machine that can impersonate someone who did.

    If that weren’t enough, the next escalation has arrived with a name designed to soothe your nerves: Einstein. This AI agent claims it can log into platforms like Canvas and complete an entire semester’s workload in a single day. It doesn’t just skim the surface. It watches lectures, digests readings, writes essays, posts discussion comments, submits assignments, and takes exams—leaving behind a digital paper trail so competent it borders on smug.

    Shroff decided to test the promise. She enrolled in an online statistics course and turned Einstein loose. Within an hour, it had completed the entire semester of work: eight modules and seven quizzes. She earned a perfect score. She also learned, by her own account, almost nothing. The grade was real. The education was imaginary.

    Einstein’s creator, Advait Paliwal, is a 22-year-old who speaks with the calm inevitability of someone announcing the weather. His argument is simple: this is a warning. Adapt or become decorative. Educators have responded with lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters, which he treats as polite acknowledgments that the problem is larger than any one person. If he hadn’t built it, someone else would have. And if you find Einstein alarming, he assures us, you should pace yourself—this is the beta version of the apocalypse. “There’s more to come.”

    Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is not retreating. It is accelerating, pouring resources into embedding AI deeper into the educational bloodstream. The irony is almost too clean: educators are losing control not only because the technology can’t be contained, but because they use it themselves. AI grades papers, drafts materials, streamlines feedback. It makes the job more efficient. It also quietly rewrites what the job is.

    The endgame is already visible. It has a name that sounds like a software feature but reads like a verdict: the Fully Automated Loop. AI generates the assignments. AI completes them. AI grades them. The student, once the point of the enterprise, becomes a spectator to a closed circuit of competence.

    We used to worry about students not doing the work. Now the work does itself.

    And when that loop closes, education doesn’t collapse in a dramatic heap. It hums. It functions. It produces results.

    It just stops producing people.

  • Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    In “Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange Right Now,” Frank Bruni captures a tension that defines the modern classroom: how do you offer students hope without lying to them? His students at Duke University are coming of age in a moment that feels less like a transition and more like a rupture—truth is contested, institutions feel unstable, artificial intelligence is reshaping entire professions, and the political climate leans toward confusion and consolidation of power. Add to that a job market where careers in public policy, government, and nonprofits are shrinking, and the traditional pathways begin to look like dead ends.

    Bruni’s difficulty is not just emotional; it’s epistemological. The ground keeps shifting. The job market no longer behaves like a map you can study and memorize. It behaves like weather—volatile, unpredictable, and indifferent to your plans. Bruni and his colleagues find themselves in an unfamiliar position: experts who no longer trust their own expertise. When the mentors are unsure of the terrain, the act of mentoring starts to feel like guesswork dressed up as guidance.

    And yet, retreating into cynicism would be a dereliction of duty. Bruni insists on offering hope, but not the anesthetized version that avoids discomfort. His version of hope is anchored in reality. He tells his students that survival in this environment will not belong to the most credentialed or the most specialized, but to the most adaptable. The winners will be those who can pivot quickly, read patterns early, and anticipate what’s coming before it arrives. In other words, they must think several moves ahead while the board itself is being rearranged.

    This requires a shift in how students approach their education. The old model—bury yourself in your major, master the material, trust that the system will reward you—was always a partial truth. Now it’s a liability. Depth without awareness is no longer enough. Students need a wide-angle lens, an ongoing scan of the broader landscape: economic shifts, technological disruptions, political currents. The classroom can no longer be a refuge from the world; it has to be a vantage point from which to read it.

    Bruni’s message is unsettling, but it has the virtue of being honest. Hope, in this context, is not the promise that things will work out as planned. It’s the conviction that those who stay alert, flexible, and strategically aware can still find a way forward—even when the path refuses to stay still.

  • The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    In her Atlantic essay “What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens,” the author examines a belief so widely accepted it rarely gets questioned: that more technology automatically improves learning. Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher, bought into that belief for over a decade. His students worked on Chromebooks, navigating a custom-built math site while monitoring software kept them from drifting into games or distractions. It was a tightly managed digital ecosystem—efficient on paper, persuasive in theory.

    Then Kane pulled the plug.

    This wasn’t a minor adjustment; it was a small act of rebellion. Nearly ninety percent of school districts now issue laptops or tablets, sold on the promise of “personalization”—the idea that technology can tailor instruction to each student’s needs, close learning gaps, and adapt to different cognitive styles. It’s an elegant theory, especially attractive to those whose reputations and revenue depend on merging education with technology.

    But in Kane’s classroom, the theory collapsed under the weight of actual human behavior. Screens didn’t personalize learning; they colonized attention. Students stared at them the way gamblers stare at slot machines—fixed, hypnotized, and detached from the room. Class discussion withered. The teacher’s voice, once the organizing force of the classroom, lost every round to the glowing rectangle. When attention becomes a zero-sum game, the screen doesn’t negotiate. It wins.

    Kane’s frustration deepened when he read Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, which argues that increased technology use correlates with declining student performance. So Kane ran an experiment: he removed the Chromebooks for a month. What he discovered was not subtle. Students began paying attention again. Participation returned. Assignment completion jumped from 45 to 62 percent. Writing equations by hand—slow, deliberate, mildly inconvenient—forced students to see their own thinking unfold. The inconvenience turned out to be the point. Learning, it seems, benefits from friction.

    I’ve been teaching college writing for over thirty-five years, and I’ve seen my own version of this “kryptonite effect.” Smartphones siphon attention. Laptops become portals to games, sports, and anything but the task at hand. I’ve watched students drift out of the room without leaving their seats. The screen doesn’t just distract; it competes, and it usually wins.

    And yet, my experience isn’t a simple indictment of technology. Between 2018 and 2019, I ran a structure that worked. We met twice a week: one day for lecture and discussion, the other as a writing lab. During lab sessions, students wrote on desktops or their own laptops, working through scaffolded assignments. I read their drafts in real time, helping them revise thesis statements and sharpen arguments. The dynamic shifted. I wasn’t a distant lecturer; I was a coach moving from desk to desk. Students completed work on campus instead of procrastinating at home. Completion rates improved, not because of the machines themselves, but because of how they were used.

    The pandemic ended that model. My courses shifted to a hybrid format—one meeting a week—and the lab disappeared. I’ve been reluctant to surrender precious face-to-face time to silent writing sessions. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been too cautious. If Kane is right about the power of attention, perhaps the most effective use of class time is not more talking, but more doing.

    What Kane’s experiment ultimately reveals is not that technology is useless, but that it is context-dependent. A math classroom, built on sequential problem-solving, may suffer when screens fracture attention. A writing classroom, structured around drafting and revision, may benefit from them under the right conditions. The mistake is not using technology. The mistake is treating it as a universal solution.

    If I were back to teaching two days a week, I wouldn’t hesitate. One day for discussion. One day for writing in a lab. Not because technology is inherently good, but because, in that setting, it serves the work instead of sabotaging it.

  • Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    My students have been reporting a peculiar academic phenomenon: the two-hour class that contains no discernible lesson. In its place stands a performer—a professor intoxicated by the belief that a self-indulgent monologue is effective teaching. Convinced they possess the sacred “gift of gab,” they proceed to use it like a leaf blower in a library.

    And gab they do.

    They narrate their dreams with the seriousness of a Jungian symposium, decoding every symbol as if the subconscious were filing quarterly reports. They recount contractor disputes with the dramatic tension of courtroom testimony. They offer serialized updates on family feuds, restaurant conquests, tropical vacations, and medical procedures so vivid they border on malpractice to describe. They even resurrect their collegiate glory days, in which they allegedly outwitted professors and classmates alike—a mythos delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been fact-checked.

    Meanwhile, the classroom undergoes a quiet evacuation.

    Not physically—students remain seated, dutiful, nodding at appropriate intervals—but cognitively, the room is abandoned. One student is deep into a novel. Another is solving calculus proofs. Several are toggling between sports highlights and sports betting apps, hedging their attention the way day traders hedge risk. Text messages fly. Homework from other classes gets completed. What was scheduled as instruction has been repurposed into a supervised study hall with a live podcast no one asked to attend.

    The professor, of course, notices none of this.

    This is the defining pathology: two monumental blind spots. First, the inability to recognize that the monologue is not merely irrelevant but actively draining—an intellectual sedative administered over two uninterrupted hours. Second, the delusion that presence equals engagement, that a room full of bodies must also be a room full of minds.

    It is neither.

    What we are witnessing is an academic epidemic: Lecture Drift Syndrome. A condition in which a class session slowly detaches from its stated purpose and floats into the open sea of anecdote, confession, and self-display. The syllabus becomes a relic. Time warps—two hours pass, yet nothing has been learned. Themes dissolve. Structure collapses. The lecture doesn’t end so much as it dissipates.

    In the end, the classroom is no longer a site of instruction.

    It is a stage occupied by one man talking—and thirty students elsewhere.

  • 4 Writing Prompts That Address Sports Betting

    4 Writing Prompts That Address Sports Betting

    Next semester I’ll be teaching a class of student-athletes. Based on the epidemic of sports gambling, I am certain many of them are sports gamblers, or at least know people who are in the throes of this addiction. I think it would be appropriate to offer a unit in which they can write a research paper on this topic. Here are four argumentative topics:

    1. The Normalization of Gambling in Sports Culture

    Professional sports leagues once treated gambling as a threat to the integrity of competition. Today those same leagues partner with sportsbooks, run betting segments during broadcasts, and place odds directly on screen. Write an argumentative essay that answers this question: Does the normalization of sports betting strengthen fan engagement or does it corrupt the spirit of sports by transforming competition into a financial spectacle? Use examples from professional sports broadcasts, advertising, and campus culture to support your position. Address the counterargument that betting simply adds entertainment value for fans.

    1. The Ethics of Sports Betting Among Student-Athletes

    Many college athletes gamble on sports despite NCAA rules prohibiting it. Some argue these rules are outdated and unrealistic in an era when gambling apps are ubiquitous and heavily advertised. Others argue that athletes betting on sports—even unrelated games—undermines the integrity of college athletics and creates conflicts of interest. Write an argumentative essay evaluating whether the NCAA’s restrictions on sports betting for student-athletes are justified. Consider issues of integrity, fairness, financial pressure, and personal freedom. Include a counterargument that challenges your position.

    1. Are Sportsbooks Designing Gambling Addiction?

    Modern betting apps use features such as push notifications, instant deposits, “risk-free bets,” and live betting during games. Critics argue these features are designed to keep users betting continuously and blur the line between entertainment and addiction. Supporters argue that gambling is simply a voluntary activity and individuals must take responsibility for their choices. Write an argumentative essay evaluating the claim that the sports betting industry intentionally engineers addictive behavior. Use evidence from journalism, psychology, or personal observation. Address the counterargument that adults should be free to gamble without government or institutional interference.

    1. The Illusion of Skill in Sports Betting

    Many bettors believe they can “beat the system” through research, statistics, and insider knowledge of teams. However, studies show that the vast majority of bettors lose money over time. Write an argumentative essay addressing the claim that sports betting is largely an illusion of skill rather than a true test of knowledge or strategy. Is sports betting closer to investing, where expertise matters, or to casino gambling, where the house always wins? Use evidence from reporting on the sports betting industry and address the counterargument that disciplined bettors can consistently profit.

  • The Semester When Students Got Tired of AI Slop

    The Semester When Students Got Tired of AI Slop

    My critical thinking class this spring has produced something I have not seen in several years: essays that sound like they were written by human beings.

    The first two mini-essays show almost no signs of AI cheating. Students wrote about the theme of “optimization without integration” in the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” and about toxic positivity and infantilization in “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.” These are not easy concepts. Yet the writing has been thoughtful, uneven in places, occasionally clumsy—in other words, unmistakably human.

    Part of the explanation lies in the design of the assignments. I structured them as hybrids. Students begin with a single analytical paragraph about the episode itself. Then they pivot and connect the theme to their own lives. The second step is the key. AI can summarize television episodes all day long, but it has a harder time fabricating the peculiar messiness of someone’s actual life.

    But the assignments alone do not explain the shift.

    Conversations with students suggest something more interesting is happening: they are tired of AI. Not ethically troubled, not philosophically conflicted—simply exhausted. They complain about what they call AI slop: bloated paragraphs that say everything and mean nothing, prose that sounds like a motivational speaker trapped inside a thesaurus.

    They are burned out on the smooth, inflated voice of the machine.

    What they seem to want instead is something refreshingly primitive—authentic expression. The Black Mirror episodes help. The themes are sharp, strange, and slightly disturbing, which gives students something real to react to. They also appreciate that the assignments are short—well under 1,000 words. These essays function as warm-ups before the larger research papers later in the semester.

    The result, at least so far, is encouraging.

    After four years of watching AI creep into every corner of student writing, I may be seeing the beginning of a recalibration. Students appear to be treating AI less like a magic genie that produces instant essays and more like what it actually works best as: a tool for editing and cleanup.

    I could be misreading the moment. Trends in education are famous for evaporating the second you start feeling optimistic.

    But for now, the classroom sounds different.

    The paragraphs have fingerprints on them again.

  • The Sweet Tooth Age: How We Traded Depth for Dopamine

    The Sweet Tooth Age: How We Traded Depth for Dopamine

    In “The Orality Theory of Everything,” Derek Thompson makes a striking observation about human progress. One of civilization’s great turning points was the shift from orality to literacy. In oral cultures, knowledge traveled through speech, storytelling, and shared memory. Communication was social, flexible, and immediate. Literacy changed everything. Once ideas could be recorded, people could think alone, think slowly, and think deeply. Writing made possible the abstract systems—calculus, physics, modern biology, quantum mechanics—that underpin the technological world. The move from orality to literacy didn’t just change communication. It changed the human mind.

    Now the concern is that we may be drifting in the opposite direction.

    As social media expands, sustained reading declines. Attention fragments. Communication becomes faster, louder, and more performative. Thompson explored this shift in a conversation with Joe Weisenthal of the Odd Lots podcast, who draws heavily on the work of Walter Ong, the Jesuit scholar who wrote Orality and Literacy. Ong’s insight was simple but profound: when ideas are not recorded and preserved, people think differently. They rely on improvisation, memory shortcuts, and conversational instinct. But when ideas live in texts—books, essays, archives—people develop interiority: the capacity for reflection, precision, and layered analysis.

    It would be too simple to say we now live in a post-literate society. We still read. We still write. But the cognitive environment has changed. Our brains increasingly gravitate toward information that is fast, simplified, and emotionally stimulating. The habits required for what Cal Newport calls “deep work” now feel unnatural, even burdensome.

    A useful analogy is food. Literacy is like preparing a slow, nutritious meal. It requires time, effort, and attention, but the nourishment is real and lasting. The current media environment offers something else entirely: intellectual candy. Quick hits. Bright packaging. Strong flavor. Minimal substance. We have entered what might be called the Sweet Tooth Age—a culture that prefers pre-digested, entertaining fragments of ideas over sustained, solitary engagement. The concepts may sound serious, but they arrive in baby-food form: softened, sweetened, and stripped of complexity.

    After forty years of teaching college writing, I’ve watched this shift unfold in real time. In the past six years especially, many instructors have adjusted their expectations. Reading loads have shrunk. Full books are assigned less often. In an effort to get authentic, non-AI responses, more teachers rely on in-class writing. Some have abandoned homework entirely and grade only what students produce under supervision.

    This strategy has practical advantages. It guarantees original work. It keeps students accountable. But it also reflects a quiet surrender to the Sweet Tooth Age. The modern workplace—the environment our students are entering—runs on the same quick-cycle attention economy. Their exposure to slow thinking may be brief and largely confined to the classroom. When they transition to their careers, they may find that on-demand writing is no longer required or relevant. 

    Not just education but politics and culture are being swept by this new age of dopamine cravings. The Sweet Tooth Age carries a cost, and the bill will come due.

    The content that wins in the attention economy is not the most accurate or thoughtful. It is the most stimulating. It is colorful, simplified, emotionally charged, and designed to produce a quick surge of interest—what the brain experiences as a dopamine reward. But reacting to stimulation is not the same as thinking. Performance is not analysis.

    Performance, in fact, is the preferred tool of the demagogue.

    When audiences lose the habit of slow reading and critical evaluation, they become vulnerable to what might be called Kayfabe personalities—figures who are larger than life, theatrical, and emotionally compelling, but who operate more like entertainers than honest brokers. The message matters less than the performance. Complexity disappears. Nuance becomes weakness. Certainty, outrage, and spectacle take center stage.

    In such an environment, critical thinking doesn’t merely decline. It becomes a competitive disadvantage.

    This is why the Sweet Tooth Age is more than an educational concern. It is a political and cultural risk. A public trained to consume stimulation rather than evaluate evidence becomes easy to mobilize and difficult to inform. Emotion outruns judgment. Identity replaces analysis. The center—built on patience, evidence, and compromise—struggles to hold.

    When literacy weakens, the consequences do not remain confined to the classroom.

    They spread outward—into public discourse, institutional trust, and civic stability. The shift back toward orality is not simply a change in media habits. It is a shift toward immediacy over reflection, reaction over reasoning, spectacle over substance.

    And when a culture begins to prefer performance to thought, chaos is not an accident.

    It is the logical outcome.

  • The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading questions early and found myself with a full hour to kill. So I did what any quietly restless child with access to art paper would do: I drew a gigantic submarine.

    It was glorious. The hull bristled with portal windows, and inside each window lived a tiny, talkative world. Every occupant had something urgent to say. One man was making pancakes and inviting others over. A woman, her hair set in curlers, announced she was in no condition to be seen. Another guy sulked over a bowl of cereal because the box promised a free toy and delivered nothing. Someone tried to nap in a hammock but complained about the noise. A girl had a strip of apple skin lodged between her teeth and was losing her mind over it. There were at least a dozen such figures—boasting, whining, confessing, performing.

    It was a floating anthology of minor human grievances.

    I was proud of it. I felt like I was getting valuable training for my future career writing for Mad Magazine. I was quiet. I was finished with my work. I was bothering no one.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart appeared.

    She moved down the aisle between desks, paused, and studied my drawing. I waited for praise—some acknowledgment of creativity, wit, talent. Instead, I got disdain. Her red hair was stacked into a bouffant, her eyebrows arched in judgment.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “But I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was working quietly.”

    She ignored that and began reading my dialogue bubbles aloud, dripping sarcasm into every line. The class erupted in laughter—not the good kind, the kind that comes from watching someone get filleted by authority.

    Then she delivered the verdict.

    “Your parents should know how you’re spending your time in my classroom.”

    She flipped the page over and wrote a note explaining my offense. I was to take it home, secure parental signatures, and return it like evidence.

    That evening, after dinner, I showed my father the drawing.

    He was livid.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why,” I said. “I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “I don’t get it.”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you implied her work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “But I didn’t say anything. I just drew.”

    “It doesn’t matter if you’re right,” he said. “What matters is you made her angry. In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought those were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Go to your room. Write her an apology.”

    I wrote the apology. But even then, I knew—deep down—I had done nothing wrong. In fact, to this day, that submarine remains the best use of time I ever managed in her class.

    The truth was simple: Mrs. Eckhart didn’t like me. I was brooding, inward, melancholic. She sensed something in me she found intolerable. Once, after she criticized a homework assignment, I tried to explain myself.

    “You have an excuse for everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

    If all my teachers had felt that way, I might accept the diagnosis. But they didn’t. Every other teacher thought I was polite, attentive, fine. There was something specific between us that never resolved.

    Sometimes hostility is not psychological; it’s biblical. It has no cause, no logic, no cure.

    I think of the excellent movie The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Padraic. No grievance. No inciting incident. “I just don’t like you anymore.” That’s it. Padraic hasn’t changed. Colm simply finds him unbearable.

    After nearly forty years of teaching, I know this pattern well. I’ve been popular, well-liked, even beloved by students—but that hasn’t spared me the occasional student who radiated pure contempt. Once, friendly students asked if I noticed a guy in the back who glowered at me all semester. I told them yes. Every so often, someone decides you are intolerable. There is no appeal process.

    In those cases, effort only makes things worse. Trying to win favor intensifies the repulsion. The Chinese phrase captures it perfectly: mei ban fa—nothing can be done.

    Do I resent Mrs. Eckhart? A little. She was an authority figure with a visceral dislike for a ten-year-old boy. But what endures most isn’t bitterness. It’s joy.

    That submarine was alive. It was funny. It was mine. No note home, no scolding, no pinch-faced teacher can take that away.