The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. by Kate Messner

Author:Kate Messner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Please stand for the Pledge to the Flag.”

I stand, but I pull my backpack up onto my desk so I can look for my English papers while I’m pledging allegiance. I never got to do my homework last night because we got back so late and then dinner was late and then Ian tried starting the dishwasher with laundry soap inside and the kitchen got all wet and bubbly. After we cleaned it up, I had to go to bed.

I pull my crumpled poetry response sheet from my backpack. For some reason, it smells like applesauce. I reach in my bag for a pencil and feel something mushy. It’s the apple I brought for a snack after cross-country. Bruised, juicy, and mushy. I toss it into the garbage near my desk and read the journal question:

What might Robert Frost mean when he writes, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches”? Write your personal response in a paragraph.

This is the very worst kind of assignment. When teachers ask for a personal response, they never mean it. They want a school-acceptable personal response, which kids make up based on what we’re pretty sure they want us to think. It’s not what we really think, though. I toy with the idea of writing the real deal this time:

I think Robert Frost is saying that a little daydreaming and playing isn’t such a bad thing at all and that teachers ought to lay off when a kid gets caught looking out the window. We’re not plotting to make bombs or something; we’re just taking a little time out from a boring lecture to think about important stuff like the school dance or what’s for lunch. I really hope it’s pizza. Robert Frost probably would have failed English at this school because he’d be looking out the window instead of writing these responses all the time.

And if he had written the responses, he would have failed science, too, because he would have written poems about birches instead of collecting their stupid leaves and pasting them into an overpriced binder with index-card labels. And then someone like Bianca probably would have made fun of his poems when he was done.

I am done writing now and will be looking out the window for the remainder of the period.

What I really write is this:

I believe that Robert Frost writes, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” to show readers the value of imagination. I’m an artist, so I know that painting can take you away from earth a while, just like his trees took him into the clouds. But Frost also says in the poem that we need to come back to earth and get things done. He probably had to go milk cows or something, and we all have to pay attention and do our work.

Gianna Z.

When I turn in the response in English, I double-check to make sure it’s the second one—not the real deal—that I hand to Mrs. Clancy.

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