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She wasn’t too impressed with my pages full of letters and crayon drawings. “When are you gonna start reading books?” she wanted to know. “Soon,” I kept saying.
    I could never tell her that the letters just didn’t make sense, that all the blackboard exercises made me feel itchy and restless, like my whole body was covered in poison ivy blisters.
    Poke must have been feeling the same way. During penmanship, he stared out the window, jiggling his legs like always. I sneaked a look over at his paper. He had copied only one row of letters from the blackboard so far, and his writing looked even worse than mine, all running downhill and smeared with pencil lead.
    Miss Vest was watching Poke, too.
    â€œPoke, are you having trouble with this assignment?” she asked.
    â€œNo,” he muttered, hunching over his paper.
    Miss Vest started to walk toward us. Poke wouldn’t look up at her. Instead, he kept filling in a big
O
on his paper, making the circle black and angry looking, until all of a sudden, his pencil point snapped.
    â€œCan I help?” Miss Vest asked quietly.
    â€œI
said
no,” Poke hissed, keeping his teeth clenched. Then he flung his pencil down and slouched back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
    Miss Vest tried not to flinch. She stood over him for a minute, staring down at the top of his head without saying a word. When he still wouldn’t look up at her, she started back to her desk. I heard her sigh as she walked away. The truth was, nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the assignment. Luella had borrowed Ida’s compact to paint two red spots of rouge on her cheeks, and up front some little kids were whispering and poking each other in the ribs.
    Then Dewey spoke up. “Most of us are done, Miss Vest. Recess ain’t for another ten minutes. Don’t we have time for some of those newspaper stories now?”
    At first I thought Miss Vest was getting ready to lose her temper. She swiped a mussed piece of hair behind her ear and stared at Dewey hard, but then she said, “As a matter of fact, I think we
do
have some time.” Everybody looked up from what they were doing. Her voice sounded funny, too high and too cheerful.
    â€œMaybe hearing what those reporters have to say about us is just what we need right now.” She grabbed up the stack of clippings and started shuffling through them. “Let’s see. . . . Here’s one called ‘Clans of Hillbilly Folk Welcome Book Learning in Hoover’s Dark Hollow.’ Or what about ‘Wild Young Mountaineers Swarm to Hoover School’?”
    She glanced up at us. Her face was flushed and her dark eyes glittered. “Not that one?” she asked, pretending to be surprised. “Well, how about this one from the
Washington Herald
?”
    She cleared her throat and began to read: “Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where snow now sifts through the wild oak branches, President Hoover’s trim little school for mountain children opened its doors to more than twenty education-starved people last Monday. The First Lady will find ample outlet for her well-known humanitarian sympathies in the ragged little mountain children who have trooped from their mud-chinked log cabins scattered through the wooded depressions of the hills. Some of these sad little wraiths are as shy as wild rabbits. They have never ridden on trains. Some have never even seen one. The biggest excitement in their lives has been ‘hog-killin’ time’ at their mountain homes—”
    â€œHog-killing time?” Ida cried. “They think I like
hog killing
?”
    But Miss Vest barely took a breath. She flipped through the stack and found another article to read, and then another. Why wouldn’t she stop? The newspapers were all the same. All of them made us sound ignorant in one way or another, more like dumb farm animals than just regular folks without