Satan, Frankenstein and the Thinker · Wed Apr 5, 22:12 by Eleri Straker
I first met Patience when she was eleven. She was small and pretty with long brown hair. What struck me about her in the first lesson I had with her, was her ability to think. Surprisingly enough, this is quite unusual in an eleven year old. Most year seven children are busy trying to make new friends, trying to seem grown up or cool, or just trying to annoy the teacher with their post-primary school lavatory jokes. Patience was different. Cool and composed, she stood out from the crowd in her stubborn refusal to conform to eleven year old norms.
Patience knew all the answers to my carefully aimed questions and if, as very occasionally happened, her knowledge let her down, she would consider me coolly as I attempted explanations, nod wisely, then carry on writing whatever it was she was working on, clearly dismissing me as a slightly annoying, if occasionally necessary inconvenience.
Not that she was arrogant, in fact, quite the opposite. I liked her cool demeanour and her clever mind and over the next three years, we got to know each other well and to understand how each other’s mind worked.
Patience reappeared in my classes in the sixth form. Sitting at the back of the class with her long brown hair, black nails and heavy metal T-shirt, Patience had reinvented herself into a sullen, introspective Goth. My heart, initially lifted by the presence of one I knew of old as a Thinker, sank like a stone as the Goth in my class surveyed me silently through the fringe of dark hair, occasionally grunting in reply to questions directed at her.
For a whole year I watched with growing despair, as the Thinker of old seemed to forget how to think. Then something happened. I have no real idea what it was (though I have my suspicions that it involved a member of the opposite sex!) but suddenly there was a new voice in the lessons. Someone who argued with me. Not the petulant argument of a stroppy teenager, but the reasoned, cool argument of the Thinker. She was back.
For weeks I feared that this return of the student that I knew of old was something temporary, that some day soon I would walk into my Othello class and the surly Goth would be there again. But it didn’t happen. But it did seem that the brain-dead grunting of the past had robbed my Thinker of her ability to produce the A- grade standard that I knew she was capable of.
Then Satan and Frankenstein appeared. Not some nicknamed students or pet dogs. The real ones. At least as real as they appear in the books. “Frankenstein” and “Paradise Lost.”
The time to produce A level coursework had arrived and the Thinker had chosen to compare Shelley’s creature with Milton’s fallen angel. Initially intrigued, and not a little concerned at the magnitude of the task – after all, analysing Mary Shelley and John Milton is not the easiest of projects, I approached her essay with not a little trepidation.
It was a revelation. There was not a trace of the surly, taciturn Goth. This was pure Thinker. Reasoned, cool, thoughtful and utterly brilliant. By the time I finished reading the two and a half thousand word exploration, I was grinning from ear to ear. I have never, in my years of teaching English read anything so innovative or thoroughly enjoyable. It reflected a mind full of clarity and joy and, thank God, a complete refusal to conform.
In a few short months, my Thinker will begin a new life at University where, hopefully, she will find kindred spirits to share her clarity and joy in literature.
She will love it. But here, at the back of my Othello classes there will be a Thinker-shaped hole.
She will be missed.
