It was the week before Halloween, and too many teachers were out sick.

By that point in the fall, our academic leaders had been juggling absences for days, trying to assemble coverage that would not exhaust the faculty who remained. Schedules were revised, prep periods absorbed, favors called in. Each solution created another problem somewhere else. 

I looked at my own calendar and, perhaps foolishly, offered to take some of the classes myself.

I expected the offer to be politely declined. Instead, it was accepted with visible relief. Within a day, eighth-grade English blocks appeared on my schedule. Real classes. Real students. Real time. 

Into the Classroom

It was late October. The season felt like an invitation. If you want to read something spooky with middle schoolers, it’s an eye of the needle to thread. It must be unsettling without being gratuitous. So, I went back far enough in literary history that we’d probably be safe.

Edgar Allan Poe.

We began with The Tell-Tale Heart. I assumed we’d talk plot. They moved straight to voice. The narrator insists he’s sane the way someone insists they’re calm, and the class could hear the strain beneath it.

When we reached the confession, I asked how the story ends.

“He snitched on himself,” one student said.

I picked up the marker and wrote the sentence on the board exactly as they’d said it.

Then I told them, “Just discuss it like you would if you were talking about it with your friends after school.” The room loosened. I’d opened the gates, and now I was standing there with my book, trying to look competent while eighth-graders tossed terms across the room with increasing ease.

We reached one of Poe’s lines that is so tightly wound you can feel it clicking into place. A student read it aloud with a little extra emphasis, the way middle schoolers do when they can tell something is good. A student nodded toward the page. “Okay, Poe cooked right there.”

The room chuckled again, this time with the satisfaction of agreement.

I hesitated for a second, because in my generation cooked is what you say when someone is done for. “No,” another student said, “Like he nailed it. That line is crazy good.”

So cooked meant the opposite of ruined. It meant excellent. I nodded as if I had known that all along.

The bell rang. Papers slid into backpacks. Chairs scraped. I stayed behind for a moment, looking at the board. He snitched on himself sat there in the middle of the room, unpolished and exact. Indeed, he did. 

Out in the hallway, I checked my phone. Emails waited. A facilities question. A calendar issue. A staffing concern. Important things. In one room, we’d been talking about guilt and confession. In the next, everything needed a quick answer.

The next day, we read The Raven aloud. I expected some restlessness. Instead, the repetition held them. They could feel how nevermore changes as it repeats, turning from strange to final. A student said the narrator keeps asking questions he already knows the answer to.

“It’s like he wants it to be sad,” another said.

The room went still for a moment. A pencil stopped rolling. Somewhere in the back, a hoodie zipper stopped halfway. Then someone near the window nodded once. “Clock it.”

I asked what that meant.

“It’s when someone says something and it lands,” they said. “Like, everybody notes that.”

By the third day, they wanted something scarier, so we ended with The Masque of the Red Death.

They noticed the walls first. The sealed abbey and locked gates. The belief that danger can be kept out with enough resources. Then someone said, “Prince Prospero. That name is doing a lot.”

There was that familiar, low sound of agreement. Prosperity. Insulation. A man who throws a party like money can bargain with reality. As we talked about him, one student laughed. “He’s being so chalant.”

Another student translated it for the room before I could even ask. Chalant is the opposite of nonchalant. It means trying too hard. Being extra.

“Like he’s doing the most,” someone added.

“He’s proving he’s fine,” another said. “Like the party is proof that everything is OK.”

Then they found the clock. The way the music stops. The way the room freezes. The way time refuses to be ignored. One student said the clock is reminding them. Another said every chime is interrupting their fantasy.

Someone said it again, quieter this time. “Clock it.”

And without much prompting, the conversation turned toward the pandemic. Our pandemic. Adults insisting things were under control. How differently families lived through the same period of time. They found meaning in names, objects, metaphors; not as decorations, but as containers sturdy enough to hold what was hard to say directly. Each time, the work was not simply defining the word. It was discovering what kind of insight that word made possible.

Go and Listen

As a Head of School, much of my work happens at a remove. Budgets. Policies. Staffing. Long-term planning. Meaningful work, no doubt, but abstract. Standing in front of those eighth-graders, listening to how they made meaning and watching them teach me their own idioms of truth, was quietly rejuvenating. It reminded me what all the invisible work is meant to serve.

On my way back to my office one afternoon, the bell rang down the hall. Barely noticed most days. That week it sounded different. Not unlike the ominous chime in Prospero’s abbey. Not a threat exactly, but a reminder that time is real, and that what matters most was happening elsewhere, beyond my office walls.

Every so often, we school leaders should go back into the room and listen, good and long. And when we hear the truth, offered by young mouths in a new tongue…clock it.