Priya Nair had been teaching English at Westfield High School since she was twenty-six years old. She’d started the job thinking she’d stay two or three years and then figure out something else.
That had been fourteen years ago. She stayed because the work was real. Teenagers that age were still forming — still deciding what they were going to value and how they were going to treat people — and she believed the classroom had some role in that, even when it was hard to see.
Her reputation among students was mixed. The ones who worked said she was fair. The ones who didn’t said she was hard. She had a rule she never wrote on the syllabus but always kept: she would not assume a student understood something until she had proof. She had thirty-one students this year in her ninth-grade English class. Thirty of them, she could work with. The thirty-first was Brennan Holloway.