Elementary [n.h. au]

five | should auld acquaintance be forgot

Aside from the obvious reasons, Rolly Marshall firmly believed that grading assignments was the worst of her responsibilities as an educator.

It wasn't just the fact that sitting down for hours on end rifling through stacks and stacks of paper-clipped assignments was tedious and exhausting. Rolly could do tedious and exhausting—she did it every day, in her classroom, when she was in the thick of implementing her lessons. The art of teaching was in and of itself a tiresome high-wire act.

The problem was that sitting down to grade was tedious and exhausting and when she pulled out her colorful gel pens and put in the effort to score assignments, the grades earned by her students were sometimes so dismal it made her wonder if she'd even taught the material at all that week.

Saturday morning—her first day of freedom for the holidays—Rolly was sitting on the floor of her living room, spread eagle, looking at stacks of assignments with great disdain. She'd tried to be proactive over the past few weeks, paper-clipping assignments together and slapping sticky notes with the subject and week number on top, but even with these attempts at keeping herself organized, Rolly still failed to get her grading done some weekends.

As she worked her way through a stack of math papers, Rolly cringed as she compared the answer key in her teacher edition to the actual work her students had put on the paper. She recalled how many of her students had struggled with the assignment, but much of that stemmed from the fact that they couldn't follow directions to save their little lives. Rolly gave them orally and more often than not, the directions were right there on the paper as well, but her seven-and-eight-year-olds seemed incapable of following directions of either kind—written or spoken.

Instead, they wailed their cry of defeat—Miss Marshall! Miss Marshall! I don't get it!—and Rolly had to grit her teeth and explain for the millionth time that if you were looking for a total, you would need to add to solve that particular word problem. And then the next cry of her name would pierce the air and she would wince upon hearing it, like it physically pained her to have it hurled at her repeatedly.

Most days, she heard "Miss Marshall!" so much, she'd seriously contemplated changing her last name.

Just as she was considering extending her holiday break from two weeks until forever, her phone began ringing from across the room. Rolly groaned and did an awkward roll to get on her knees and crawled to her phone, her mood immediately changing the moment she saw who was calling.

Hastily, she answered the call before her voicemail kicked in. "Okay. Second career options. Go."

There was a deep laugh that carried through the line, one that made all the tension in Rolly's muscles dissipate instantly.

"What subject are you grading?" Darren asked.

Darren Marshall, Rolly's younger brother by about a year, was the family wunderkind, but Rolly never really resented him for it. Jealous at points, sure, because things came easier to him than they did for her, but Darren had been her best friend since they were young. There was no bigger fan of anything she did than him. He often saw all of the things in Rolly that she couldn't see in herself, and he was her link to sanity most days. Even with the distance between them, Darren always had Rolly's back, and she had his, and that was the way it had always been.

"Math," Rolly answered, heaving a sigh as she crawled back to the mountain of assignments in the middle of her living room floor. "I'm starting to think that every time I teach, I turn into one of the teachers from Peanuts."

Darren laughed again, which made a grin stretch across Rolly's face. He told her once that she could've had her own stand-up show if she'd tried, and every once in a while she dreamt of how different her life would be if she had listened.