I grew up in a tiny town called Venango, Nebraska, a rural farming village of 242 people. A lot of my formative memories took hold there, even though we only lived there for my middle-school years.

I went to school in this building right here, Venango Elementary, which housed the entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade population of Venango.

One of my teachers, a guy named Mr. Shepherd (I don’t think I ever knew his first name—in fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to me he had a first name) had a reputation in my class for assigning “punishment writing” to any kid who acted out in class, by which I mean committed some transgression like speaking out of turn. He’d demand that the offender would write the same sentence 250 times or 500 times or whatever, as befitted the severity of the transgression, then took malicious glee in throwing the pages away right in front of the student who’d transgressed.

Because there’s nothing like making young children associate learning with mind-crushing tedium and then watching their work destroyed in front of them to instill a deep, lifelong passion for learning and a keen intellectual curiosity, amirite?

One day, a day I still remember quite clearly, Mr. Shepherd accused me of talking in class. The actual transgressor was the kid behind me, a kid named Mike, the school bully who loved seeing other people get in trouble.

I have never, ever liked being accused of something I didn’t do. I did something wrong? Cool, man, lemme know and I’ll cop to it. Accuse me of something I didn’t do? Fuck you, I’ll burn my own life down before I take responsibility that isn’t mine to take.

So it was that Mr. Shepherd, with the absolute conviction available only to autocrats, abusers, and teachers of middle school, decided I was the one responsible for the voices he heard, and demanded that I write “I will never talk in class” 250 times that night, to be handed in the next day.

I was livid when I got home. The wrath in Heaven at the rebellion of the angels was but a candle beside my incandescent rage at the injustice of a teacher believing I’d done something I hadn’t done.

Enter my mom, who taught me a valuable lesson.

My mom in 2016, wearing the same expression she did on that day in 1980.

We didn’t have that lovely, evocative expression “malicious compliance” back then, but that’s exactly what my mom suggested I do.

She explained that yes, teachers could be wrong and no, not all injustices could be rectified, but as long as I was going to be writing something 250 times, why not use it as a covert opportunity to express how I felt?

So I sat down and started writing.

I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will always talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will celery stalk in class.
I will beaver balk in class.

She encouraged me to adjust my letter and word spacing so that, on casual glance, the lines of text would all look about the same.

The next day, when Mr. Shepherd took my neat stack of handwritten papers and dropped it in the trash in front of me, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d stuck my thumb in his eye, my small act of defiance against injustice, and he never even knew.

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My mom died in December 2023. I still haven’t adjusted to the reality of living in a world where she no longer exists.

There has never been a moment in my life I did not have the absolute, rock-solid certainty that she would always, always be there for me. My mom always had my back. She taught me, not just facts and skills and things about the world, but how to think. She encouraged the boundless, limitless curiosity I still have today.

She taught me how to think. How to ask questions and find answers. How to see the world, not as I want it to be, but as it is.

I still keep in my phone a list of the things she would say, the things I heard again and again growing up, that I continued to hear even as an adult:

• Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.
• Information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
• The curse of being middle class is you can afford anything you want but not everything you want.
• People vote their identity and their feelings, not their interests.
• People in groups will agree to something that each one individually knows is stupid.
• We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true. Understanding what is true is hard work.
• You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
• Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.

I still miss her, every single day.