“What does ANY of this have to do with my life?!?!” he spews. Usually, freshmen like it when I dress up silly in a glittery gold cape. They like discussing superheroes and Greek mythology; it’s the most popular unit of the year. But Day 1 had already unearthed a vicious critic who couldn’t handle the lack of direct practicality. Try explaining to a fourteen-year-old boy that studying Greek mythology will improve his vocabulary, expand his critical thinking skills, acquaint him with the universal legends that he will hear referenced for the rest of his life, or develop the still, deep waters of his moral compass and his everlasting soul. This child has been raised on a steady diet of materialism, fact regurgitation, and concrete data. He doesn’t believe that he has a soul—or if he does, it’s probably cursed.

I give my best explanation for today’s lesson, as I don’t have a problem with students wanting to know the why behind any what. But it doesn’t suffice. He’d rather not learn the background for The Odyssey before reading it, he tells me. “Let’s just learn it as we read it and get this story over with.” The worst part about his negativity is that it’s so loud, leeching into the rest of the room like cancerous ash. Here I’d been having a relatively okay day, a little morning chaos aside, and now here he is to dangle a little teacher insecurity in my face and smudge dirt and waste all over my classroom. He pulls out his phone and blatantly starts scrolling. “Blake, please put your phone away,” I say in my gentlest voice.

“Why?? We’re not even learning anything!!” He has reached the point of insolence, and it stings. I inch my voice up to a level just firm enough that he knows it’s a rule without smashing him down in anger. “I know that you don’t like today’s lesson, but you are in school, and you have to put your phone away.”

He rolls his eyes dramatically and points to the clock. “What, for like, two minutes?!”

“Yes. For two minutes.” I watch him slam the phone on the desk, and I finish the lesson. In the evening, I watch an inspirational video of a famous teacher lead his disadvantaged students in hands-on, interactive lessons that mingle song and play and advanced critical thinking into some kind of neon artistic game. They’re geniuses; they’re all smiling wide. They love school. They stomp and sing in rhythm, hold their heads up high, answer questions with words like caliber. Everyone oohs and ahs over his unconventional teacher persona and willingness to involve theatrics and play in his classroom.

Me? I wear a gold cape to set a tone on hero day, and Blake raises an eyebrow and asks me, “Can we do something actually at our age level?” For four years I have worn that cape on superhero day, and for four years ninth graders have absolutely loved it. The age level isn’t the problem here. It’s the cynicism, the complete refusal to care or relax or just have a little fun with something. It’s the despair that convinces kids like Blake that life is meaningless and all outcomes are negative, so he might as well check out now and spread a little poison while he’s at it.

The video skips to a bright little ending, and I click back to my tab of crippled, shriveled and sick short stories to grade, their grammar tied up in frightful knots, their sentences lucky if they so much as end with a period. I wonder, again, if I’m effectively teaching my own batch of minions anything or not. All I’ve got to hold onto tonight is the first thing Blake said today, before the temper tantrum and the Great Phone Debate: “We should call you Ms. Smiley, because you never stop smiling. You smile constantly, and I don’t know why. There’s no reason to smile in school, ever.”

I can’t even say that he meant it as a compliment; I think he was simply observing something so foreign that he had no category for it other than unnatural. And that holds my anger against Blake in check for another day. His attitude was scathing, his open contempt for my lesson a slap in the face—but then, what am I to expect from a student who cannot even comprehend a smile? What kind of mud is this boy crawling out of that he cannot recognize sunlight? And we have most of a school year left to continue this uncomfortable, exhausting conversation; where might it lead? I won’t plan to smile the whole time; I’m sure that will come on its own. He will fail to understand me, and I him. But I will do my best to model life to him this year, and hope and healing, and he will make of it what he will, and at the very least he will not be able to deny it.

What does that have to do with his life? It is life that calls to him from death—so I will let the darkness curse it as it comes. I will not flinch back. I will keep marching on.