Vocabulary and Hot Water

Lunchtime. With the quarter recently ended, I am relishing the quiet of these thirty minutes; for weeks, I have spent most of my lunch fishing photocopies of assignments that were due in the middle of September, so that students can scribble answers and receive half credit for their late work. Their learning hovered next to nothing, and my searching for assignments added up to a stressful non-break in the middle of the day, after which I slumped down into a pile, with a cup of tea and a terrible attitude, when fifth period began. The whole process was rather disillusioning, for their efforts and mine seemed like a mere sham by that point.

Now lunches are back to normal, a grey and cool half-hour filled with reading that I don't get to do during the regular day. A half-hour of quiet and rest and solitude. Well, almost solitude, and almost quiet. It was truly this way for about two weeks at the beginning of the school year, and lunches were calm and soothing. That was until the Guests arrived.

To understand the Guests, it is important to know that my class load this year consists of five sections of ninth grade English. At my school, roughly three out of every five members of the class of 2011 are boys. The honors classes, of which I teach none, consist mostly of demure, clever girls. This leaves me with zillions of boys, so that every day I wade deeper into a bizarre and surreal world run by fourteen-year-old boys. They are a funny bunch, but they think they are even funnier. The Guests are two such boys.

They arrived months ago, two students from different classes, who just wanted a place to sit down. And no wonder, I thought. The halls were tornadoes of giggling girls and boys hurtling wildly toward the exits, and only the boldest freshmen had ventured into the dangerous neighborhoods. I glanced up from Three Cups of Tea at them, giving but a very cursory notice to their presence. They sat across the classroom from where I holed up behind my gigantic desk, and spoke in hushed tones. Perhaps the classroom intimidated them, but at the time I just thought they were quiet. They munched on sandwiches and whispered and eventually one of them put in earphones and played with a new iPod, while the other one stared out of the window. I read my book, unconcerned. As they left, the one without earphones looked up and said, "Hey... Could we eat in here, like, every day?"

"Sure," I shrugged, and looked back down at the book.

I don't know what I expected, but what I did not expect was to really see them every day. But I did. Every day, they wandered in and sat down across the room, murmuring and fiddling with handheld video games, always preserving the quiet in a way that I liked. The lights never came on. I was never bothered much, actually. It might have stayed that way, a silent symbiosis with the Guests and I, had it not been for the hot water pot.

A useful tool I was given before going off to college, the hot water pot has taken up residence on a rickety green desk this year. I had taken to making tea for myself during lunch, and one day one of the Guests noticed the steaming water.

"Hey. Wow, does that make the water hot?"

I nodded. "Yes." I am not terribly talkative during lunch.

They came closer, crossing the room cautiously, like deer in a meadow, coming to observe the novelty of the water pot. Right up to the desk the Guests came, until they stared down into the steaming spout of the pot.

"Wow," said one. "That's neat. You just plug it in."

I nodded again, sitting down in a student desk and sipping green tea from a flowered Starbucks mug.

"Wait," remarked the other Guest, holding his hand up in the midst of an epiphany. "Could we bring Cup-O-Noodles in? And, like, get hot water from the pot?"

"Sure," I answered. "That would be fine. Bring them tomorrow."

And they did. From that day on, the Guests have brought noodles every day. As often as I can, I fill the pot ten minutes before lunch and plug it in, making sure to heat the full 1.5 liters so that all three of us have enough water for two noodle meals and one cup of tea. Sometimes I forget the water, and they go fill it during lunch, and all of it has become an unspoken ritual, a focal point like a wood stove in a chilly house. And now they are sitting on my side of the room, talking to me as I eat a salami sandwich and set down the book I had been reading halfheartedly. At a pause in the conversation, I turn away from them to check my email.

"What are you doing?" one of the Guests' friends asks me.

"I'm going to play a game," I answer without thinking, and open a window with a vocabulary game that donates rice to third world countries. An English teacher's dream.

At the word "game," their ninth grade boy ears perk up, and before I know it they have surrounded my chair, peering over my shoulder at the simple multiple choice quiz on my screen.

I correctly identify a few words, filling the little virtual rice bowl to my students' delight. Then, remembering I am teacher, I start making them answer. I start asking questions.

"Well, what do you think 'festoon' means?" Mumblings behind me, and I turn around. "Come on, now, what do you think?"

I glance at the answer, "decorate with flowers," and think it improbable for ninth grade boys to identify. But they do, and almost immediately.

"How did you know that?" I ask, amazed.

"Cause it sounds like, you know, 'festive' or 'festival,'" reasons one of the original Guests.

We do this for a while, me referring the questions to them, until they realize that I know the real answers and are letting them choose the wrong ones.

"This is serious, Ms. D," they scold. "There's rice for hungry people involved. Look, we've only donated 110 grains. You need to guess, too!"

We play for another ten or fifteen minutes, five boys standing behind me and shouting out words like bulwark, predestinate, and somnambular, often with correct meanings arrived at through circuitous but sound routes. I realize how much alike are our approaches to language. Not one of us has a dictionary to look up these words; we simply rummage through the files and bins of our experience, our reading, our sound associations, until we have a good enough guess. We accumulate several hundred grains of rice and spend most of our lunch in this way.

I realize, as I close the game and they make their noodles and chatter along, now in the desks on my side of the big classroom, that I have lost my quiet lunch. That I have just spent most of it playing a computer game with the ninth grade boys, a word game that is the very opposite of quiet. I realize that I may never go back to the lunchtime solitude, just me and a book and a cup of tea. But here, with the Guests and their friends, the game and the hot water pot, I have begun to discover the meaning of hospitality. And that even a hospitality as passive as a shrug and a few cups of hot water can take me by surprise, seeping across the cold meadow of my empty classroom and creating a space of warmth, grace, and even peace for a little while.