At 15, my world was upended. This was a lesson I’ll never forget
High school is a crazy thing. Teens (only boys at my school) privately learn about social order, sex, and acne remedies, while being publicly tested on Pi, Jane Austen, and the ever-present question: igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic? Every day is a whirlwind, tumbling clumsily and rudely through all the glittering elements of life in the hope that something will stick.
I remember the exact moment the glitter stuck.
I learned to read in English class, sitting among two dozen 15-year-old boys who had turned red from the beeper test an hour earlier in gym class. And the whole world opened up.
Of course, I already knew how to read. I was trying to find my way Harry Potter With the speed of a Seeker in a game of Quidditch. But at that moment, a huge adult-friendly door opened a crack and I walked in, eyes wide. There were two people who held this door open for me: the author Graham Greene and my 10th Grade English teacher.
was teaching us Quiet AmericanGreene’s 1955 examination of foreign intervention, democracy, and war in Vietnam is told through journalist Fowler’s wry, cynical eyes. Even after 20 years, this book still sits on my bookshelf, covered in faded highlighter and pencil markings. In reviewing this book with my teacher (which dazzlingly displays the quality most hateful to the young boy – passion), I learned that fiction is like a sedimentary rock: like the ancient city of Petra, it can be awe-inspiring at a glance, but becomes even more spectacular up close when its layers are examined in detail.
I learned three things about reading novels in that class: characters can say one thing and mean another; environment and context create meaning; and uncertainty is something to be valued, not feared.
As I look at this list in 2026 and after recently re-reading Greene’s book, I can’t help but think that these three things might be the most important lessons I’ve learned in my 13 years of education. The teacher gave a warning. He read Fowler’s statement aloud: “I never thought of myself as a reporter, just a reporter. I offer no perspective, I take no action, I don’t interfere. I just report what I see.” We are warned and challenged to be on the lookout for any time this statement may not be true.
This meant that I read with a purpose, like a detective collecting clues; I was excited when my highlighter found new evidence proving Fowler wrong. What a trick Greene was playing. He asks us to trust the narrator as he spreads banana peels all over Vietnam.
Without realizing it, I was thinking critically. If we can’t trust our hero, can we even trust the author? How can we trust someone? In a world filled with “fake news,” redactions, clickbait, podcast prophets, AI nonsense, and a cherry-picked White House press room, we are neck-deep in a media swamp like never before. Thanks to that English class, I get to travel the world prepared for Fowler-like hypocrisy, all thanks to that hot, plaid-clad teacher imploring a group of teenage boys to think.
The novel follows two characters who represent two possible futures for a country – neither of whom are actually from that place – and both of whom fight to gain power over someone who is actually there. Sound familiar? It should. As one of the passages I highlighted when I was 23 put it: “It is not the strongest rulers who have the happiest populations.”
As Greene writes in the book: “Pain does not increase in numbers. A single body can contain all the pain the world can feel.” Last Christmas, I was thinking about this book in connection with the countless images beamed back to us from Gaza, Sudan, even Bondi, thanks to that English class.
Work needs to be done to remain sensitive to this barrage of images. I believe that the English teacher is ready to help young people train their minds for this job. Empathy coach. My life experiences couldn’t be further from the characters in Greene’s book. I don’t share any particular situation with any of them. But an English teacher gave me permission to think: What if I did that?
What about our dying friend, uncertainty? The idea that two things can be true at the same time seems breathtaking. It’s constantly criticized for the weirdness of the Twitter verse, the Murdoch media’s insistence on pitting the two sides against each other, the stark hypocrisy of the MAGA mentality, and God forbid a politician change their mind about something. But English teachers value uncertainty; All good literature depends on this: to be or not to be? Did Offred remember? The Handmaid’s Tale wrong? Is Gatsby a dickhead? English teachers send young people to the tuckshop line, thinking in two pieces as they wait for their toast. Has this ever been more important in our lifetime?
While writing my first novel, Soft ServeI regularly saw the spine of Greene’s book staring at me from my bookshelf; This back was a back that told me to correct my posture when I was tired and lost. To keep writing in the hope that maybe I can create a work in which a reader trying to recover from a post-beep slump in a classroom, or looking back at their overstuffed lives filled with creative memories, might think of something taught to them by an English teacher who made them see it, as Greene wrote. Quiet American“Human nature is not black and white, it is black and grey.” So that they can find the sparkle in that grey.
Soft Serve Published by UQP on February 3.
