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it’s pitiful. A grown man devoting his whole life to trying to get teenagers to care about literature.
    It’s hard to watch sometimes, how bad Mr. Hammond wants everybody to love this stuff, this English stuff. Sometimes I think how happy he’d be if he could have a bunch of students like Grace in here, who’d appreciate all his hard work.
    Because to a guy like me “The Chimney Sweeper” is some piece of shit. It doesn’t make a bit of sense. Of course, it would to those High Academic Program types. They’d take one look at it and see the secret meaning that Mr. Hammond has to explain to the rest of us, that it’s about boys who clean chimneys for a living.
    He says how the boys are like lambs. As in baby sheep. That’s right…baby sheep. It doesn’t say that, of course; you’re just supposed to know .
    â€œWhat are some words in the poem that could be associated with lambs?” Hammond is asking.
    â€œHis hair curls like a lamb’s back,” some girl says.
    â€œYes!” Mr. Hammond’s fist pounds the desk. He’s like one of those motivational speakers. “Any others?”
    He looks around the room. Everybody else is like me; nobody raises a hand, nobody makes a sound.
    Still, Hammond waits, like if he gives us a little thinking time, we’ll all suddenly turn into geniuses.
    â€œLook at the verbs,” he hints after a moment.
    Still nothing. It’s so quiet, I can actually hear a cricket chirping outside.
    â€œIf you saw a group of lambs out in a field, what kinds of things would they be doing?”
    The girl next to me yawns so wide, her jaw creaks.
    Hammond’s in a tailspin, poor guy. I feel sorry for him—I’m having a bad day too; I know how it feels.
    So now I take a look for some lamb words in case it might cheer him up to see me looking. And God, can you imagine if I was actually the one who found a lamb word? He’d retire on the spot. He’d have reached the peak of teacherhood.
    I’m looking for something like “Baaa,” I guess, but there’s nothing there. Just regular words.
    â€œWhat about ‘down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run’?” Mr. Hammond presses. “‘And wash in a river, and shine in the sun’—they used to wash sheep bytaking them to the river. Once the sheep were clean, they’d take them in for shearing. Look at the fifth stanza; ‘Then naked and white—’”
    I perk up a little at the word naked , and find it on the page.
    â€œâ€˜â€”all their bags left behind, / They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.’ How do you think a sheep would feel, to be rid of all that heavy fleece? What do you think it would do, once the shearers released it?”
    Silence in the classroom. It’s like the man is speaking a different language. Nobody has any idea what he just said.
    â€œTo ‘sport’—what does that mean?” Hammond asks, but this time he gives up and answers himself. “To frolic, or play. Can’t you see the lambs frolicking, playing once they’re relieved of their burdens? ‘Sport in the wind’?”
    He quits with the questions and starts talking again. About child labor laws or something. I like him okay, but I hate this class. English has always been a nightmare to me. It’s a battle for me to stay in regular and not get stuck in remedial. I’ve always kept ahead of the game, but I still hate English, I hate books, I hate school in general. Always have. Any minute somebody could be expecting you to read out loud, or to explain something.
    â€œMr. Trammel,” Mr. Hammond says. “How do you think you’d feel, spending all your days inside dark,cramped chimneys, breathing soot and coal dust?”
    â€œLike Santa Claus.”
    A couple of giggles behind me. Mr. Hammond just looks at me and waits. Unlike all the other English teachers I’ve