The Back Row Is Listening
Essays from a Chicago high-school English classroom, about the students who seem not to care and turn out to hear everything.
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Everett Lane has taught English in the same Chicago classroom for sixteen years. These essays are about what he learned there: the kid in the back row who never raised his hand and quoted Baldwin at graduation, the radiator that decided when class was over, the paperback library he built from yard sales, and the small daily choices that make a room a place where teenagers read. Funny, honest and practical, for teachers, parents and anyone who remembers a teacher who saw them.
Room 214 has thirty-two desks, one teacher’s desk with a drawer that sticks, and a radiator under the window that knocks three times every forty minutes like somebody wants to come in. My first year, I thought it was a student playing a joke. By the second year, I used it as a bell. The room faces east, so in the morning the sun comes straight in over the parking lot and lands on the back row. The kids who sit there squint through first period and put their hoods up, and for most of my first yea
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Everett Lane
I have taught sophomore and senior English at the same Chicago public high school for sixteen years, in the same classroom with the same radiator that knocks like somebody wants to come in. I started writing these essays on the Red Line, on my phone, because the stories from school were piling up faster than I could tell them at dinner. I believe every teenager is a reader who has not met the right book yet, and I have a shelf of beat-up paperbacks in Room 214 to prove it. I live in Hyde Park with my wife, our two kids and a stack of ungraded essays that never gets shorter.
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