The Letter (Jackpot January #6)

I found a strange letter at work today. At first glance, it had the familiar air of a foreign-language writing assignment: a sparse, double-spaced page of writing peppered with green and red marks. Insistent, crushing corrections. The note’s content, however, is where it gets weird.

The writer addresses their teacher, expressing their need to end their course of study because they are too busy looking after their small child. They have no friends or family who can help them, so must drop out and wants to try again next year.

For context, I work at a college which teaches, among other subjects, ESOL: English as a Second Language. Much of the student population are recent immigrants who barely speak any English, and need these classes in order to further integrate into the UK. They are usually studying for the Life in the UK test at the same time. Most of them are also trying to get their drivers’ licence. They have uprooted their lives to be here, so they work hard day after day, crawl through red tape for years just to build a life in a hostile country.

When I read this ESOL student’s letter, I felt like I’d stumbled upon a mundane tragedy. Each week we have students who withdraw, many of them on the ESOL course, and too often it happen against their will. Their visas run out, their partners lose their jobs, they suffer a loss and have to move away. It’s so simple, so sad, and it happens every day. In my hands, I held a little testimony for the archive, one small record among thousands that the college file away and forget. But instead, this one had been marked.

I am obsessed with this letter. I can’t stop imagining the circumstances that led to its composition, because I cannot think of a single way of accounting for it that isn’t completely macabre. Either this was a real letter, which is bad, or an in-class exercise, which might be worse. Here are the scenarios I’ve imagined:

The letter is real, and the teacher corrected it. The student sits at their desk and, half-listening to their lesson on prepositions, etches out a note. They finish a little while before the end of class, and sit in agony, jogging their right leg, feeling every second pass. A strange guilt drips through them, as if the teacher knows they’re hiding something.

Just before the bell, their eyes lock and the student looks away. They walk away, feigning casualness, and the teacher sees something sketchy about them. She walks over to their desk and finds a note left there. It’s folded up, but by now the student has gone. Against her better judgement, she unfolds it, sees the double-spacing, and her teaching instincts activate. She gets to work, crossing out, annotating, underlining, until she’s satisfied. Then she clocks what she’s just read, what the student was trying to tell her, and she feels ashamed.

Or maybe, the student does go up to the teacher and tries to explain their situation. The teacher is sorry to hear that, and feels bad that they can’t keep working on their writing, that it may be another year before they see progress. Out of pity, she corrects the note. Maybe that way she has taught one last lesson, given one last piece of her time to help.

Or maybe, the teacher accepts the note in silence. The student drops it on the desk and walks out of the room. Unsure how to respond, she corrects the note, knowing her only chance to give it to them will be in their next lesson. She’s pressed for time, so she swoops by this student’s desk and drops the note. The student looks up, and they say nothing else to each other again.

The letter is fake, and was written for an assignment the teacher set. Another lesson to plan. The teacher sighs. Most of her students are adults, worrying about their job, money, kids, all the paperwork that comes with moving countries. She doubts they could care less about sentence structure.

She runs through a few ideas in her mind: conjugation drills, copying model answers, then she has it. If her students already have these concerns, why not get them to write about them? As dark and outlandish as it seems, why not engage them with a some writing practice for leaving the course itself?

The letter is fake, and the student chose this topic. “Write a short letter. You can write about anything,” says Teacher. And this student, they’re not going to spew out the same bland, sentimental crap as anyone else. If they’re going to speak, they’re going to speak the truth. Whatever they write, it has to be something that would happen to them, something they would actually say, otherwise why learn to talk at all?

Though perhaps their choice isn’t so conscious. Perhaps the student scans their mind for things to write about, and all they can come up with is kids, caring, juggling endless duties. The endless motions of life. If they need to practice writing, it’ll be easiest to just write about what’s right in front of them.

Either way, they hand in the letter like everyone else and then head out of class.

Hours later, the teacher is marking the classwork. Amid routine descriptions of people’s pets, their favourite foods, their local walking routes, she sees the student’s piece. She lifts her head, sits up a little in her chair. She furrows her brow, puts the page down on her lap, and stares at the opposite wall for a few moments. Then she picks the letter back up, pen at the ready, and descends.

******

I’m not sure which of these is the most likely. I do not prefer any of these explanations and I do not want to choose a favourite. Every option is ghoulish.