Introduction
I looked up when I heard my classroom door and saw it crack open. Sierra poked her head in. “Can I sit with you? I have bagels and cream cheese.” She thrust her arm through the narrow opening and waived a bag of bagels.
I looked at the stack of essays and journals in front of me that still needed grading, then hefted them onto another desk. “Of course,” I replied with a smile.
She opened the door wider and bounced in, the bagels in one hand and a tub of cream cheese in the other. I pulled out the toaster and the small bag of plastic knives I kept in a cabinet, and set them on the desk between us. We were silent as we opened the bag, cut our bagels in half, and inserted them into the toaster.
“So, are you ready to graduate?” I asked as we waited.
“Oh my god, you don’t even know how ready,” she laughed. “I was able to make up that D you gave me—”
“The ‘D’ you earned,” I interrupted.
“The ‘D’ I earned,” she corrected and nodded sheepishly. “I took an English course at Evergreen (one of our local community colleges) on film studies. That was really cool. But I had to do a research paper. That was not fun.”
“I love research!” I exclaimed as the bagels popped up, browned and steaming. We gingerly placed them on the paper towels from a roll on my desk.
Sierra carefully spread cream cheese on her bagel. “That’s because you know how. I was lost when my teacher said to write a research paper. I was like, ‘What? How do I do that?’” She gave me the side-eye. “I had to teach myself.”
I chewed quietly for a few seconds. “Do you wish we had taught you to do research?”
“Yeah, I guess. It didn’t have to be you, but it should have been someone. And real research, not that stuff we did in… oh, I can’t even remember what class. But we just looked stuff up and cut and pasted it into our essay. We’re good at that.” She sighed. “But the real stuff? Nope.” She look up again. “I mean, we’re going to have to do that in college, right?”
It was my turn to nod sheepishly.
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