When I was grading, I often thought of the “Lowered Expectations” theme song from MADtv’s video dating parody.

47. Killing Mr. Griffin – Lois Duncan

Kidnapping your teacher is such a classic high school move…Not. Dude. Seriously? Psychopath Mark really knows how to manipulate people. And burn things down. And torture cats. And make girls like him. He even gets the senior class president involved and poor junior Susan, who just wants to be elsewhere and also has a crush on the senior class president, which is exactly how they get her. The basketball star and the cheerleader not applying themselves in English class is stereotypical, but also, they do have activities. Activities do sometimes get in the way of homework. Shit happens. Teams win tournaments and go to state and all that stuff that teams do. What’s great about this story is that all the types being used to create this motley crew of murderers are very different. They aren’t easy to mistake for each other and that’s the mastery of Lois Duncan’s teen novels, she’s got all the voices down.

I will say that Mr. Griffin seems harsh in expecting high school students to understand the concept of pushing themselves to do their best work. I don’t think he deserved to be accidental-murdered over it, but, still, he’s clearly not seeing what’s there in his class even in the before-smartphones and AI time. I do agree, based on my time grading college papers, that a lot of students don’t seem like they’re applying themselves and get really angry when you point that out and I was only pointing out that they had a rubric they could have thought about applying themselves to instead of just going on and on about Tom Cruise in The Firm or using the dictionary as a source that counted towards the minimum requirements for a research paper and not going over the requirements…sigh…so I understand where he’s coming from, but I also understand that’s not reality for lots of students for a variety of reasons. I would have loved it if even the worst writers in the bunch just tried to fit the requirements of the assignment. That’s all they needed to do. I wasn’t grading for style, I couldn’t because there were so few writers with it in the courses I graded. That’s okay. That’s real. Mr. Griffin doesn’t see that. He’s a perfectionist. And that’s essentially how he gets killed. Having high expectations and angina at the same time. And those meddling kids.

 

Merricat always put her best foot forward in class, in the window sill, when meddling, and when ordering deaths or produce. Always.

 

Merricat knows how easily something simple can go awry. She thought she just had a babysitting job on the night of the eclipse.
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