Mrs Baker's English Class


Mrs. Baker's tenth-grade English class was a legend at Ridley High School. It wasn't just that she wore mismatched socks every Tuesday or began every class by rewriting Shakespeare's sonnets as punk rock lyrics. It wasn't even her weekly "Literature Fights," where students debated whether The Great Gatsby was really just a fancy version of The Bachelor. It was her motto that everyone remembered:

"Become irreverent or become irrelevant. Yours to choose."

And every year, the incoming sophomores were a little afraid of what that might mean.

On the first day of school, Mrs. Baker walked in, surveyed the room of nervous teenagers, and launched into her opening lesson.

"Alright, who here loves rules?" she asked. A few students tentatively raised their hands.

"Good! Now, let's break some." She spun around, grabbed a copy of the syllabus from her desk, and dropped it into the recycling bin. "We won't need this. Here's my new syllabus: Question everything. Write with fire. Make me feel something. Got it?"

There was a collective silence. One student, Lisa, cautiously raised her hand. "But... what about grades?"

"Ah, grades," Mrs. Baker said, waving her hand dismissively. "If I've done my job, you'll be too busy creating something brilliant to care about grades."

The students exchanged wide-eyed glances. Was she serious? It turned out, she was.

The Experiment

A month later, the class was well into To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead of a traditional essay, Mrs. Baker had them write their own modern court cases — only this time, the jury was the class, and the cases were fictionalized retellings of their own school's scandals.

"I want you to find the truth in the ridiculous," she explained. "In the end, irreverence is about peeling back the absurd layers of this world to reveal what matters."

Josh, a quiet student who normally blended into the background, stood up for his turn. His case? "The Curious Case of the Missing Cafeteria Meatloaf." He spun a tale involving a student conspiracy, the janitor as a double agent, and Principal Saunders as the head of an underground meatloaf smuggling ring.

The class roared with laughter, and even Mrs. Baker wiped a tear from her eye. "Now that," she said, "is a masterpiece. It's ridiculous, but it's real because you let yourself see the absurdity in our everyday lives."

That was Mrs. Baker's superpower. By rejecting reverence for the expected, she taught her students to find meaning where others saw only rules and tradition.

The Faculty Meeting

Not everyone was a fan. At the monthly faculty meeting, Principal Saunders frowned as Mrs. Baker presented her latest idea: "The Irreverent Anthology," a collection of student work that included everything from satirical poems about cafeteria food to essays questioning the point of standardized tests.

"Mrs. Baker," the principal began, "while I appreciate your... enthusiasm, don't you think you're straying a bit far from the curriculum?"

"Far from the curriculum?" she asked, leaning back in her chair with a grin. "I'm taking them beyond it. I'm teaching them how to think. And if that's irreverent, then I'll gladly own it."

He sighed, clearly torn between disapproval and the undeniable results: students who used to hate English were now staying after school to argue over 1984 versus Brave New World.

He conceded with a smile. "You know, Mrs. Baker, there's something subversive about this."

"Exactly," she said, clapping him on the back. "Welcome to the club."

The Legacy

By the end of the year, Mrs. Baker's students were different. Lisa, who had started the year worrying about her GPA, was now leading protests against the outdated school dress code with a brilliantly written manifesto that quoted Lord of the Flies. Josh, who used to hate public speaking, had won a county-wide debate tournament with an argument about the importance of satire in political discourse.

At the final class, Mrs. Baker gathered her students one last time. "This is it," she said. "One last lesson. Irreverence isn't about disrespect. It's about challenging what doesn't make sense. It's about looking at a rule, a tradition, a piece of writing, and saying, 'But why?' It's about staying relevant by staying curious. So when you leave this classroom, take this with you: Become irreverent, or become irrelevant. Yours to choose."

And as they filed out, each student took with them not just the memory of Mrs. Baker's wild classes, but a spark of something new — the realization that irreverence was not just an attitude. It was a way of seeing the world, and a way of making sure they would never fade into the background.

Mrs. Baker smiled as she watched them go, knowing she'd given them the most important lesson of all.

The courage to choose.

(This story is donated to the public domain.)



--
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Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com

He/Him/His

"Wisdom begins with wonder." - Socrates
"Learning happens thru gentleness."
"We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from real options."  David Suzuki

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