Dyslexia
The reason that Parker Elias is considered unteachable is because he suffers from dyslexia. Rather than merely describing what this condition is and how it affects learning, Parker’s first-person narration sections forthrightly illustrate what it is like to deal with dyslexia through the imagery of how words are spelled through his eyes:
“NEEGIN RATTS/POTS. That’s what I saw the first time, anyway. Now I know that it really says:
ENGINE START/STOP”
“At first, it looks sort of like ALIEN ROT ANT GRID, but that can’t be right. Then I recognize the logo from the internet. It’s Oriental Trading.”
Mr. Kermit
Unusual for the author, the real focus of the story—not just its protagonist, but the character around which everything revolves—is an adult. It is no secret that Mr. Kermit has been spiraling downward ever since being caught up in a cheating scandal he actually had no involvement in. Others speak of him in a way that fills in the details, but the imagery that creates the thick outline comes straight from his own narrative chapter:
“When breakfast is mustard on toast, that’s a sure sign that it’s time to go back to the grocery store. It means I’ve run out of butter and cream cheese and jam, and I’m digging into the condiment packs left over from my last McDonald’s run…The apartment is a dump—clean enough, but definitely from a bygone era. I can afford much better, but I’m too disinterested to redecorate and too lazy to move. It’s the perfect place for a meal of mustard on toast—the breakfast of the disinterested and lazy.”
Allusion as Imagery
Mr. Kermit is a character not entirely unlike Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Admittedly, he is not much like Rick, but he is definitely not unlike him as well. Both men, in their different sort of way, have been transformed from ambitious idealists into cynical isolationists due, at least in part, to being abandoned by the woman they loved. It therefore makes perfect symmetry for Mr. Kermit to allude to one of the most famous movie quotes of all time when the daughter of the woman who betrayed him suddenly shows up in his school:
“Emma Fountain! I can scarcely believe it. Of all the classrooms in all the schools, she has to walk into mine!”
Vuvuzelas
A funny word that merely describes a party noisemaker. The origin of the trumpet-shaped plastic horn traces back to Africa, but the connection is tenuous at best. Narratively, they represent the one thing that is still capable of drawing Mr. Kermit out of his carefully constructed apathy toward almost everything. Mateo compares him to the Grinch on the subject and it is apropos: picture how much the Grinch hates it when the Whos blow their Who-Hoobers and beat their Blum-Blookers and that gives you an idea how much Kermit hates Spirit Week when students blow their vuvuzelas (not a made-up word, by the way.) Imagery is used throughout the narrative to illustrate the effect of this party noisemaker on Kermit and then brilliantly reused to portray how much the unteachables love him.
