In 1996, I was a freshly minted high-school history teacher offering a lesson about the presidential election. Ned, who sat in the back row, was doing what Ned always did: making his classmates laugh. He had a gift for the well-timed quip. His comebacks flew so quickly, it was as if he'd prepared them in advance. Generally, he seemed to invest more energy in entertaining the room than in whatever we were studying. A few years ago, Ned reached out to me on Facebook. He is now a high-school English teacher. In his message, he recalled in great detail the debates we'd had about the Civil War, the play our class had performed about Vietnam, the days I had assigned students to bring in a newspaper article and explain it to the class'which is when he had started reading the paper. And all this time, I'd assumed Ned hadn't been paying attention. Truth be told, in my 30 years in schools, I've met a lot of kids like Ned: the ones who won't stop with the commentary; the ones who raise a hand...
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