Editor’s Note: The piece below was published in The Weekly’s 2018 “Joke Issue.” All content, quotations, and other editorializations are entirely fictitious. 

By the end of the first semester, Upper School English Teacher and freshman Grade Head Cory Zeller’s Literature and Censorship course took a different form. While the class continued to read banned and censored texts, Zeller began to interrupt students during their trains of thought in an attempt to make the classroom a safer, less toxic environment–frequently offering trigger warnings and leading the class discussion away from controversial topics.

Zeller’s first censorship of her students’ discourse occurred on a cold Tuesday morning in early January. Her Literature and Censorship students had read a dense 30 pages from Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” the night before and were eager to unpack the language around Proulx’s sexual imagery.

The reading featured a graphic homosexual sex scene in which Proulx notes that the two men had their “guns goin’ off” during intercourse. Most students were a bit surprised at the phrasing and wanted to share their thoughts. Most had questions about the guns themselves, and how the two men could engage in intercourse in a single person tent, on the top of a mountain, in frigid temperatures.

“What’s the symbolism associated with the guns?” senior Sojourner Hunt asked.

“Ms. Zeller, can you just talk more broadly about homosexual relationships in the world today?” senior Drew Munger asked.

“How does that kind of thing work?” senior Alex Chapman asked.

Zeller interrupted each of these and other questions which the same line.

“Those are questions we cannot answer here at Parker,” Zeller said. “The responses to those questions are too complicated, and we as a class don’t have the stamina for that.”

But what’s really changed about the classroom dynamic was the sudden absence of student talk about their weekend plans and social life. Suddenly, Zeller prohibited any student from speaking impulsively about personal topics unrelated to the book.

“Ms. Zeller, how’s your class of sophomores this year?” Chapman said. “Do you ever give me a name drop to the girls?”

Comments like Chapman’s were frequently met with a dirty look from Zeller among snickers from the other students.

“Alex, I don’t want any more talk like that,” Zeller said. “I have no interested in your personal life.”

Students across the grades were outraged at Zeller’s change in dynamic–and sudden lack of care for teenage gossip. Zeller used to talk at length about the social lives of her students and many of her students enjoyed how willing she was to do so.

“I hope she stops this act soon so that I can go back to gossiping in her class,” Hunt said. “I know she likes hearing about it, so I don’t get why she suddenly doesn’t want to hear it.”