Schooled in Murder Read Online Free PDF

important because it gives them something to do and makes them feel like they’re protecting kids. They can shuffle paper instead of actually talking to teenagers. The stark reality is that insane things do happen, and sometimes they can’t be prevented. And that’s sad, but you cannot live your life because you fear the sky is falling.
    I come down on the side of taking all necessary precautions, but madness and useless panic resulting in nonsensical paperwork and pointless rules are not my style.
    The referred-to social workers at Grover Cleveland High School were a stunning collection of younger men and women who desperately wanted to be in private practice. I don’t remember one child in whose life they actually made a difference. Of course, they didn’t have to report to me, but teachers usually hear.
    Jourdan said, “And the kids will be weeping. They loved Gracie Eberson. She never gave homework. Never.”
    Some of the young teachers believed in the philosophy that kids won’t do homework so why bother to assign it? I thought anyone who held that philosophy was a lazy-ass fool who didn’t belong in the classroom. Yeah, it’s a battle to get them to do homework. What did these young teachers think they were going to do when they got in the classroom? And those silly studies claiming homework is harmful? Yeah, it’s too burdensome for some parents to say things like, “Do your homework” to a teenager. That might require enforcing a rule, turning off a television, hanging up a phone, not texting a friend, postponing an Internet chat. Those parents want to be their kid’s friend, and they don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want to be the one to say no. Letting teenagers run the asylum was not an option, at least not yet, not in my classroom.
    Luci said, “She was the most popular English teacher among the kids. She and her ilk cultivated them as friends.”
    Morgan said, “The ones I can’t stand will be the students who didn’t know her and who are weeping. Trust me, there will be tons of those. Remember when that junior died in a drunk-driving accident? His teachers barely knew him, and before the accident he didn’t have friends. No one sat with him in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but the weeping went on for weeks. It was sad that the kid was dead and that he’d been lonely, but they were taking advantage.”
    Brook shuddered. “Teenagers clustered together in the halls and washrooms feeding on each others’ melodramatic nonsense.”
    “Did Gracie have kids of her own?” I asked. “A husband?”
    Luci said, “She married her childhood sweetheart right out of high school. They’ve got four boys, six, four, two, and the one she had in August. I’ve seen pictures. Cute kids.”
    “It’s going to be awful for them,” I said.
    Luci said, “I met the husband once. He seemed nice enough. An electrical engineer who couldn’t get a job out of college. He opened a coffeehouse. How does a family recover from this?”
    Time and pain, I thought. What else was there when faced with a relatively young person’s unexpected death? As the Deborah Kerr character says in the movie of Tennessee Williams’s play
Night of the Iguana,
sometimes you just have to endure.
    Jourdan said, “I hope Mabel did it. Even if she didn’t, she’s been arrested, and she’ll be humiliated. That’s what I want. To see her humiliated. She is an asshole and a moron and evil incarnate and a Nazi.”
    “We’ll get you a thesaurus in a minute,” Morgan said.
    The door to the faculty room crashed open.

5
     
    Ludwig Schaven rumbled in huffing and puffing. He was three hundred pounds at least, by far the most heavyset man in the department. His jet-black hair was slicked back from his forehead. He’d played tackle on his high school football team. After his third concussion, the doctor told him to stop playing before he did permanent brain damage. There were those of us who thought the damage had already been