The English 10 Honors discourse was heating up with the assigned reading and consequential discussion of the first few sections of Slaughterhouse-Five. Students in Mr. Brown’s English 10 Honors class all had differing opinions on what it means to be human and were determined to express their opinions in the most annoying way possible.

“I mean, most of them are on the right track,” Brown said about the attempts at capturing the book’s essence. “But there’s only so many times you can read the exact same theory explained in different ways before you start getting suspicious that they’re a hive mind.”

The students were enthusiastic in their quest to find out more about the book through the use of SparkNotes, but were dismayed when their $25 chromebooks were not allowed on the site.

“It’s literally bogus,” Cate Skine ‘21 said. “I’m trying my best here—these days I have so much other homework that it’s putting a lot of stress on me to finish math, science, and all of my many extracurriculars […] and after that trying to form original thoughts about morphine giraffe dreams — it’s just too much.”

But most students seem to have no problem connecting the anti-war sentiment in the text to their own lives in Iowa City. Sesquipedalian sophomores like Parker Floyd ‘21 contribute their own completely original ideas to the conversation, bringing up the walkouts and protests that only some of them participated in, but all of them observed.

“I mean, if you ponder it, it’s not dissimilar from our own lives,” Floyd said. “Let me elucidate my opinion: Slaughterhouse-Five is a quintessential part of our curriculum and it’s necessary for the labor that we do each day in class to connect to our lives extramural of class.” Floyd is one such student who does not participate in the walkouts because it could negatively affect his grade. “It’s still a robust idea, though. I might not participate, but it doesn’t mean I can’t reference or prognosticate the work my peers are exerting.”

Floyd then frantically continued work in his absolutely mangled lab book in the wake of reading chapter five. When asked about the state of the vocabulary lists in conversation, Mr. Brown shook his head.

“I feel like that they’re absorbing the content, but it’s in the wrong places—at this point it’s just painful,” said Brown. “I tell them to use the vocab, not abuse the vocab.”

The student teacher Ms. Jelli was increasingly disturbed with the conspiracies the class spawned as well as the errant vocabulary words.

“I was talking to Jeremy the other day and he used the word ‘puissance’ in a conversation about Slaughterhouse-Five,” Jelli said. “There’s also the ongoing issue of the students constantly connecting anything we read to North Korea. I don’t know how Mr. Brown does it.”

Brown affirmed that the students enjoyed making connections between literature and anything that may grab their attention in the moment, from fantasy football to Deep South politics. Brown was initially surprised at the depth and range of the discussions but quickly adapted to recognize the warning signs of a student about to perform his routine tendency to drive the entire conversation downhill.

“I would like to politely point out that you should be aware of any accidental monologuing you may be doing as a result of implicit bias favoring your race and/or gender,” Brown said during a small group discussion, to several indignant gasps.

“That’s kind of offensive,” Floyd, a white male, said. “I have just as much, if not more to say about this topic than any of my classmates!”

It’s easy to find many of the 10 Honors students desperately studying before their respective periods for the weekly check-in quizzes in an effort to bring up the class average.

“I don’t know why they try so hard, the quizzes don’t even go in the gradebook,” Brown said. “Sycophants, all of them.”

(See also: English 10 Honors Students Terrorize Local Theatre)