“Well, then go back there, get comfortable, and join the conversation.”
And to my surprise, she nodded in agreement and headed straight back to the couch. I caught a couple of the boys following her every step with their eyes. There was really no telling what part of her they were focusing on, but I couldn’t blame them for looking. She obviously turned heads wherever she went. Landry’s eyes lingered the longest, and I wanted to throw something at his head.
“So, the quote up for discussion today is: ‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.’ What does this mean to you? How do you see this play out in your lives, in the world around you? No answers are wrong, except for the really bad ones.”
The class laughed and hands began to shoot up around the room.
Boring answer was first, followed by short answer, followed by scatterbrained answer, followed by an answer that seemed to have nothing to do with the question, followed by a request to go to the bathroom, which I denied.
“Come on, guys, I think this is such an important quote. Emily,” I said, gesturing to a particularly demure girl in the back who was in her first year at Lakefront, “what do you think the quote means?”
She clearly was not expecting to be called and immediately clutched the paper in front of her. Her eyes darted around the room, and she was blushing. But I knew she was intelligent and very perceptive. So I told her that.
“I read your papers every week, Emily. You always give some of the most insightful answers. Surely, you have an opinion that would be valuable for us to hear.”
Emily sat up straight when I said the part about how her answers were insightful, as if being injected with a shot of pride. She suddenly looked confident.
From the back of the room, I could see April smiling.
“Well,” Emily started, looking up at me as she spoke, “I think it is pretty simple what the quote means, what Atticus was trying to say. If you feel like something is the right thing to do or say or whatever, it doesn’t matter what other people think, even if it’s a large group of people. I mean, in the South, the majority of the people believed in slavery for the longest time, or that Blacks weren’t equal to Whites, and they were treated horribly. But, I am sure there were plenty of people who didn’t agree with the majority opinion. Their conscience told them that everyone else’s attitude was wrong.”
I noticed a couple students shaking their heads as Emily spoke, as if they were in disagreement with her. I made a mental note to grade their quizzes more harshly.
“You are absolutely correct, Emily,” I said. “Just because a large group of people do something or agree to some ideal, doesn’t mean that you have to, especially if deep down, you know what they are saying or doing is wrong.”
I turned toward the beauty on the couch. I had a fleeting dirty thought about her before I spoke.
“Mrs. Batista, what do you think about all this?”
She started to talk, and then I immediately cut her off. Like a jerk.
“Oh, by the way, everyone, this is Mrs. Batista. Mrs. Geary is out sick this week, so Mrs. Batista is substituting for her.”
Everyone nodded and a few girls smiled. The boys used this opportunity to turn around completely in their desks as they had seemingly been given permission to ogle.
“Landry!” I said. His head jerked away from April to my face. “Your shoelace is untied.” He bent down to take care of it, and I shook my head. Little pervert.
“Okay, sorry, Mrs. Batista, go ahead.”
“Well, I agree with everything Emily said. I think this can apply to important things and also inconsequential things. Emily brought up the great example of slavery and racism. Surely there were lots of people around at the time who knew internally that what was happening was wrong. And yet they let fear of the majority shut them up and keep them from taking a stand. And sometimes those who did were harmed for standing up for what they believed in.”
The girls nodded and the boys just stared.
“Absolutely,” I said, nodding. “What do you guys think are some of the inconsequential things this can apply to, like Mrs. Batista said?”
Anthony Elba started speaking without being called on. This was normal for him. If he wasn’t such a nice kid, I might have been tempted to throw a large book at him on a daily basis.
“Probably, it could apply to like the stuff we eat, you know?” He was looking around at the class, waving his hands like a politician trying to rally support.
“In what way, Tony?”
“Like, everyone knows it’s stupid to eat fast food. Like a really dumb idea. It clogs your arteries and stuff. But people still go to McDonalds. It don’t stop ‘em. They even made that one movie about how gross it is for you, but they still sell like a billion hamburgers a day. That’s ‘cause people are seeing what everyone else is doin’, and even though they know it’s a dumb idea and they’ll probably have a heart attack, they go buy that crap anyway. You know?”