Even in January, the classroom was crowded, clamorous, and hot. Sunlight pulsed through tall arched windows at the back, intensifying the stew of smells—pencil shavings, whiteboard marker, old food and young bodies. Teenagers filled five rows of five desks each. The first row was populated, unsurprisingly, by girls. To Molly Nicoll, they betrayed no hints of the awkward vulnerability, the blushing, blemished, essential discomfort with self, that had plagued her own teenage years: rather, they slouched in their seats, dangled legs over chair-arms like gymnasts, and typed into their phones with agile, furious thumbs. They wore tasteful makeup, and blouses with skinny jeans, or logoed fleece jackets and yoga pants. Their eyes flashed up at Molly, questioning whether she had anything remotely interesting to offer—and judging, presumably, that she did not, they returned to their small screens. Behind these girls was the co-ed hubbub of the middle rows, and in the back were boys—with sideswept hair and polo shirts and boat shoes, or buzz cuts and hoodies and giant, gaudy sneakers—who talked or yelled or threw small objects back and forth or stared out the windows or slept. They were juniors, six or seven years younger than Molly herself—a gulf of time and experience that seemed suddenly impassable.
Nevertheless, from the front of her new classroom she addressed them, waving her arm in the manner of a desperate hitchhiker:
“Hi, everyone! Hello? Can we quiet down, please?”
The students hushed and looked her way, and she felt a swell of tenderness toward them—They listened! They liked her! And yet she was unnerved. Her own teachers had given her theory and pedagogy, heuristics and state standards. They had not told her how to stand before these privileged, unfamiliar faces, feeling in her tight blazer and wool trousers as foreign and enormous as she had when she was a teenager herself.
She was twenty-three years old, recently graduated and newly credentialed, and until a week ago had never lived anywhere but her father’s cramped, two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of Fresno, in the nowhere place between beige strip mall and brown farmland.
“My name is Miss Nicoll,” she began, glad that she’d rehearsed. “I’m really excited to meet you. I understand your teacher had to leave kind of suddenly. That must have been hard for you guys.” The students did not blink. She pressed on. “We’ll pick up where Ms. Frank left off. We’re going to look at great works of American literature, and discuss some social and historical themes that these works explore. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas in class and reading the essays you’ll write at home. And if you ever have any questions or concerns, I hope you’ll talk to me. My classroom door is always open.” As if to prove this openness, Molly beamed a smile around the room.
It was impossible to tell how much of her message, if any, was reaching the students. But they seemed, if not inspired, willing to go where she would take them, and for that she was grateful. She ran through the roll quickly, remembering what names she could, then uncapped a pen and wrote in large, looping letters across the whiteboard: The American Dream.
“What is the American Dream?” she asked them. “What do American authors have to say about it? And what does it mean to us today? These are the questions we’re going to explore.”
The front row nodded; the others stared. Several girls took out sheets of lined paper and wrote The American Dream across the top, then looked up at her for more. Finally a hand crept up in the front row. Its owner, Amelia, had rapidly blinking eyes and a frown of bangs over her forehead.
“Yes?” Molly asked hopefully.
Amelia looked at her phone and recited, “The American Dream refers to the equal opportunity for every American to achieve success through ingenuity and hard work.”
Molly had been warned about this: apparently the modern teenager preferred to live outside of knowledge, or to skim along its edges by way of Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and the basic Google search. She nodded. “Okay, yes. Thanks. Can we put the phones away for a minute? What I want to know is, what does it mean to you?” Again they said nothing, merely shifted in their seats. “What are some things that one would aspire to achieve or attain?”
“Good grades?” guessed a girl in the front.
“A Lambo?” asked a boy in the second row.
“Maybe a personal assistant?” another girl offered. “Who follows you around all the time and, like, does stuff for you?”
“A private jet!” called a back-row boy, and another sang out:
“Fly like a G6!”
The class laughed, the room relaxed. Molly said, “So we’re thinking of lots of material things. That’s interesting. How about a safe home? A rewarding career?”
“Obviously,” said Amelia.
“Now, do you think every American has the opportunity to have these things?”