If there’s a punctuation mark with which I most identify, it is the exclamation point, at least as far as my teaching practice goes.
Have I written about punctuation before? The structure imposed on language, I tell the kids, like sheet music, the design of a building. I subtract commas from a passage of The Catcher in the Rye. Now look at this mess, I say. I remove paragraphs from a Handmaid's Tale page. I cut every sentence in a paragraph of The Nickel Boys to four-word word bursts. The point is to have students see the screeds about punctuation as related to construction and art, essential agents in the delivery of a reading experience, not mere rules to get right or, more commonly, ignore and rush past or turn over to Grammarly.
That which seems obvious to the readers does not to the teen. Even when they, in the case of my seniors, are writing speeches and those just as much as any other kind of writing (ironically) beg for punctuation and line breaks to give a speaker a road map for artful pauses, emphasis, and the essential act of breathing (lest they wheeze out comma-hungry run-ons like uphill hikers). Hear the punctuation, I preach—control the flow.
Under no circumstances do I suggest that profligate use of the ! improves prose.
Maybe in dialogue, to show volume or intensity of speech—an occasional flourish, nothing like a requirement. I learned as a whelp that the ! is a childish crutch. Use it too often and it stops meaning anything. I don’t think that sentiment needs to be unlearned.
But I was just reading Alexis Madrigal’s new book The Pacific Circuit.
The man likes a slightly-more-than-occasional ! and I have to say it is one of the very finest nonfiction books I've recently read—and that goes for style as well as content. For example, here’s Madrigal in a sweet reverie about the Bay Area tech worker’s relationship to his environment:
The whole city ran on his money, readjusting itself to his needs like a flock of cybernetic starlings. What had been some inexplicable dollar store became a high-end Chinese place that would introduce him to baiju, which would serve him well on his next recruiting trip to Shanghai. What had been a white-tablecloth establishment that made him feel a vague sense of adulting unease would be remodeled into a rough-hewn Italian places that serves Roman food, where a bone would emerge from the kitchen, and he’d eat the marrow ostentatiously, licking his fingers as the biggest red wine from Italy lay streaks on his glass.
No ! in sight, just tasty prose and some devastating characterization. Those starlings! And lo, back on p. 27, one of the book’s first !, dropped into the river of language like the bass through the subwoofers at a warehouse rave:
But in parts of Oakland, the history embedded in the ground in the form of pollution can hurt you. The air gives your kids asthma. The water is not for swimming. But what beauty and possibility in the degraded landscape!
I feel like I'm shouting when I employ an exclamation point! Sort of like the lawyer with whom I worked from 2004-2006 who would write in all capital letters when she was pissed, which she always seemed to be. And she accompanied those all-caps broadsides with no shortage of exclamation points. Tori—sorry, it’s close to her real name but it’s been a long time, so sue me—liked to supplement the ! with a ?, and often doubled them up, a sort of echoing punctuation blitz assault. A killer move, to project both rage and incredulity. You could hear her cutting off heads, Game of Thrones-style, with each staccato line.
Scene: The Law Offices of REDACTED, San Francisco Financial District, 2004. Here, Tori, a young-ish partner with whom I have had guarded but largely smooth interactions, addresses John, a young-ish associate and my immediate supervisor on most cases. A 24-year-old paralegal prone to 1.5-hour basketball lunches and daydreams in a closet-sized office, I am cc’d of course, like the named partners lurking above Lori in the firm hierarchy, all of us silent observers to these tirades…
WHEN WAS THE BRIEF FILED, JOHN!?!?
ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU DID NOT FILE THE BRIEF!?!?
CAN YOU MEET ME IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM ON 30 IN 15 SECONDS TO DISCUSS THE BRIEF YOU DID NOT FILE!?!?
UNBELIEVABLE THAT YOU. DID. NOT. FILE. THE. BRIEF!!!!
“Tori can be…”
That’s John, later in the afternoon, tie askew, trying to explain as we sit in his slightly larger office, discussing how to resolve the issue of the unfiled brief.
I wait.
He tries again. “She’s a little bit…”
“I understand,” I say so he will stop.
I do use ! in emails. Maybe they’re inappropriate, but I always think of a cheery ! at the end of an interview or pitch request (“Thanks for your time!”) or casual invitation (“Let us know if you can attend!”) as a release valve for potential tension, a reminder that I, the messenger, am light in spirit with regards to whatever I am requesting, that there is minimal pressure, or that the absolutely simmering pressure is tempered with understanding, enthusiasm, and kindness. When judiciously levied in such a context, the ! signals, for me at least, a gentle jolt of positivity and sincerity. Of course, a writer might guess that’s what I’m going for and infer the opposite. You can’t win ‘em all!
While exclamation points are a rare entry into my sporadic journalistic practice, I use the ! all the time with students—when I compose my weekly agendas (posted each Sunday on Canvas!) or tap out comments on student writing. I hear my voice through the comments, sometimes without the normal attention to punctuation and capitalization.
Hey let’s get some paragraphs here! i’m losing track of your ideas!
Let’s add another example from the research to support this claim!
Wow, I love this line!
I have also noted that I sometimes slip into that potentially patronizing first-person plural, entirely unintentionally, of course—probably an effort to make the student feel like I am there with them as they charge into the fray. The ! announces that these feelings perhaps demand some corresponding urgency. The ! is not angry though—unless it is repeated or preceded by an all-caps rant à la manière de Tori. It is heightened, for sure, but sunny—a little cushioning for that sharp edge that may or may not accompany nearly any request or suggestion.
I think I lean on the ! in part because, with all the comments I write (and on rough drafts far more than final versions), I don't have time to meticulously craft every statement, to make sure I’m finding the most diplomatic language for every point I need to make. I tailor my approach to individual students—some like humor, others don’t; some will worry if advice isn’t tempered by effusive praise; others don’t care—but sincerity and enthusiasm are universally appreciated, I find. That is where the ! does heavy lifting for comments that could otherwise come across as curt. The ! is a quick way to signal: you’re working on growth and I am here for it, as the cheugs say. I’ve even been known to toss in an “lol” or a specs-wearing, buck-toothed “nerd” emoji to celebrate some incisive analysis.
Embarrassed! 🫢 But so long as “live, laugh, love” posters aren’t plastering the classroom walls, maybe a little so-called cheug doesn't hurt.
A friend of mine has done some high-level marketing work for companies you may know if you have certain lifestyle proclivities, and when I posted (as I rarely do) on social media many months ago about the chummy breathlessly under-30 tone suddenly common to political campaign contribution requests, she educated me. Simmons, she explained, this is called “cheugy,” and, in her opinion, it works (just not on her, because, as she also explained, she’s not a cheug—it can be a noun as well as an adjective):
I’m aware that I’m not breaking any news. I genuinely didn’t before know that cheugitude includes language use as well as fashion aesthetics. This article in The Cut from 2021 explains:
While basic implies being simple or less than, cheugy feels softer and more self-deprecating (in part because the word is nonsensical). There’s also something freeing in proclaiming oneself a cheug. And boys can be cheugy too! According to the Times, Barstool Sports, “Saturdays are for the boys,” and long board shorts: cheug, cheug, and even more cheug. Rich people can also be cheugy. Gucci belts with the big “GG”? Cheugy. Tory Burch sandals? A cheug’s shoe of choice. Tiffany & Co. bracelets? Cheug city. Even words and phrases can be cheugy: I did a thing, adulting, all the feels, doggo.
This relates unsurprisingly (since I'm giving it real estate in this newsletter somewhat intentionally ill-optimized for readership growth in the present era) to a tenet I have about teaching.
The teacher persona is not divorced from one’s private persona. It is a somewhat amplified and often (unfortunately) barely controllable version of the authentic self, a sort of autofictive construction, the product of extra oxygen squeezed into a shard of that self, one that would be too exhausting to maintain for more than a few hours a day. Like you’ve peeled off a strip of skin and grown an alt-you in a petri dish, raising it up from grub to full-grown teach. At school, I am more aggressive, louder, more caffeinated—generally way more ! than the guy who reads at the pub, prefers making Thanksgiving sides over the main dish, and enjoys playing “off the ball” in basketball. I don’t like to shrink rooms but at school I shout greetings to kids as they slump towards me. I fingerpick bad solos on my half-size classical guitar to greet them. I play Bill Evans and do air-piano routines while going through the roll. I act out the social media posts of characters from books we’re reading. “What's good, brother!?” I shout like Hulk Hogan to a former student—a phrase I would not utter in any other context.
This is not at all classic cheug but the ! (and its attendant behaviors) might be mine.
The teacher persona that has evolved over the year hopefully registers as intense—because students deserve intensity. I also hope it comes off as caring—because, while I might be wrong, care animates me. It’s why I’m doing this instead of something else. I may be more ! in the classroom setting but I’m also certainly more diplomatic and patient and intuitive than in my life outside of school. Yet I don’t want to be the “warm demander” I was told I should become in more than a few professional development meetings over the years.
“Oh, you have Simmons for Lit 12? He’s the kindly cajoler.”
“No, that’s not quite right—I’d call him the friendly facilitator.”
“Really?”
“Maybe the chaotic coach?”
All of those sound better to me, although maybe I’m overthinking it. Demanding emphasizes the worker-supervisor relationship too much for my taste—although I could be biased because a former woefully under-qualified charter school administrator once peddled the Henry Higgins model for three hours on a blistering August afternoon. This strikes me as the exact opposite, tone-wise, of what high school students need: condescending, haughty, the insistent message that the “wrong” must be squished out of inherently lacking learners to make way for the “good.” Not exactly Paulo Freire, brother!
I am reminded of the late Pulitzer-winning food writer Jonathan Gold, whom I interviewed for The Believer. He and I were talking about restaurant service and we were, I recall, lamenting the stuffiness of fine-ish dining service but more so the expectation of subservience in a server, the customer being the not-always-warm issuer of demands and the server being the one who endeavors, against great odds, to meet them.
Anyway, Gold articulated (I can't remember if this made it into the final transcript) a stance I gravitate towards as a server of sorts—a dispenser of learning experience, a conjurer of strong vibes! The server is not a servant despite the customer service setting. The server is attuned to timing, needs, and comfort, a representative of the establishment and yet also their own person, who, ideally, has pride in the work and the authority and fortitude to reject the serfdom model—the notion that, if you are eating the $15 fries, the person who brings them is your peasant for 30 minutes.
“My attitude [as a server] is basically this: ‘I'm here to help you have a bitchin’ time’,” Gold told me at that interview, impersonating the loose, savvy, and refined server of his imagination as he leaned across the table.
Over at the high school, I’m not reeling off the specials or soothing anyone whose rack of lamb was supposedly undercooked, but, the different “business” notwithstanding, Gold gets at kind of what I want: for class to be cozy yet rigorous, reasonably informal but also serious, and thus for me to come across as serious but nonetheless entertaining, for me to not so much demand work output as help students be their best selves, for them to feel that they matter, that the work will benefit them.
Let’s have a bitchin’ time. And if a little Simmons-style cheug gets us there, then why not let it rip?
Funny thing is, I might be wrong.
Not about the mission, just me.
And not about embodying a certain ! of spirit either, but about the precise nature of its expression and the effect it may have!
Scene: My Classroom, last week, tutorial period. Barbara, a student I really like, tells me (in front of a handful of other students) that, before taking my class, she heard horror stories.
Record scratch. Coffee cup drop. Head swivel. Room silent.
What!!??
Horror stories? About me? The kindly cajoler? The friendly facilitator, the—no! How!!??
She explains: Simmons is supposedly smart but scary and sometimes mean, he raises his voice, he runs around the room, he suffers no fools, he keeps people on edge, he makes things awkward when something isn’t going well, and—
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I say.
“No, I really like this class, those people were mostly wrong, I mean, sort of,” she assures me. “But, I’m just saying, that’s what I heard and…”
“You heard?”
“Well, there was also the thing with Matt…”
“Matt?”
Truth is, while I am a reasonably popular teacher (there have been actual polls, I’ll let you know), I wasn't unaware I have the potential to polarize. A former administrator once told me that irony is dangerous in the classroom because kids couldn’t get it. I thought he was selling kids short—because they are immersed in simplistic, reductive, unsubtle gestures of irony for much of their media diet. He issued an email rebuke to avoid sarcasm—a characterization of my teaching I rejected even as I defended its occasional and appropriate use.
But I suppose I saw his point. When a kid falls asleep in class and I casually suggest carrying a cattle prod to self-impose alertness, might that be a bridge too far? I always figured making something potentially confrontational into a moment of levity was a good idea. The next time the kid passes out during a discussion, I can be stern. And understanding if the exhaustion is the product of a disrupted home life or a medical issue. But at that point, once the pattern really emerges, I’m not saying anything in public because, should the issue run deep, any amount of drama playing out before the class will do harm, not good.
And yes, if I am offended on behalf of a positive classroom culture, I confess that I do interrupt. I don’t have such tact. I can get angry (which I have documented). My old boss, an old-timer Bay Area class action attorney, used to say he would only strategically blow up in one or two depositions a year, when he could see that a targeted burst of rage might be an effective tool. (I wish Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors were similarly self-possessed!)
Similarly, I can only do that once or perhaps twice a year in any particular class. Otherwise, like prose excessively larded with the !, it holds no weight and becomes a sign of weakness. So I try to use irony without targeting individuals, addressing issues as hypotheticals when the individuals who are perennially tardy or transparently far more concerned with grades than learning know exactly who they are. If I’m ticked, I usually take a deep breath and blandly recite my concerns, not to show a lack of care but to communicate that I am not personally distressed—by, for instance, a dearth of class participation. I like to pick moments to get real—and that doesn’t mean I flip my hat around, shut the classroom door, and leap onto a desk. I just try to explain why something matters. Over and over again. I’m just trying to help them and I want them to try to help themselves. If they never learn to use their voice, they may be ignored and overlooked. That would be unfair, and they deserve better. Invoke justice, not norms—that’s when they’re far more likely to listen.
But I also pretended to take a nap in class last week because so few kids were willing to talk about an article we’d read in 2nd period—a profile of a go-getter businessman who parlayed a very rough childhood into, first, a lucrative rap career, and then entertainment industry mogul status: Jay-Z. The American Dream, baby! Imagine if he had no voice! I scooted three desks together and fake-snored for two minutes and “woke up” to a few hands. A stunt, cheap and attention-seeking, but it worked.
Scary? Mean? I don’t know. I’ve always thought I was a nice guy. But I try to find the balance between heat and honey. I don’t always get it right. I’m sure another teacher could read this and consider this all unprofessional or misguided or stupid. Start your own underperforming Substack.
Then, an hour after the conversation with Barbara ended, I remembered: Matt, the example she’d offered.
“What did you just say to me?”
That was what I snarled in class—three or four weeks ago. I hadn't forgotten, just decided not to view the interaction as consequential. I also can’t remember the exact words Matt used to incur my first (or second?) outburst of the year in 4th period, but it was clearly a momentary lapse, like I was his mom talking to him, and he was reacting with the same scoffing tone he’d reserve for the announcement of a new curfew. I’d asked him to close his laptop. He, bound for a highly selective California university, was insolent, saying something to the effect of whyyyyyy, adding a few exclamation points, following the question with a muttered dismissal.
“Seriously? What’s the point?! I want to do my work!”
He wanted me to leave him alone—as if he’d benefit from whatever lukewarm discussion was going to usurp his precious time.
And I challenged him because of what that sentiment communicated to the rest of class, about class as a place and idea, about them and what they might offer. Getting publicly mad about that made more sense than getting publicly mad at a kid for, oh, taking an overly long bathroom break or being late yet again.
I mean, it’s not like serving a rack of lamb. The work is too different. I am the chef too, sourcing from texts but pulling it all together under the umbrellas of units and learning experiences. And the teacher persona can sell or detract from the value of those things. Great servers and bartenders can disappear into a role, revealing little of themselves. They can be inscrutable, bemused when a pretentious diner swirls the wine too vigorously. A too-familiar server grates more than a distant one.
But a teacher requires a relationship across 180 days, not the 30-90 minutes demanded by a meal, and when literature is on the menu, and student voices are welcomed, they too are the chefs, sprinkling themselves into the mix, and so I’d rather be highly scrutable and authentic than a calculating and detached taskmaster. I’ll take a few too many ! over the lifeless alternative.
A quick note! I wrote an Edutopia article about how teachers are approaching their units on that well-scuffed notion: the American Dream, long and perhaps still the domain of Gatsby, that shape-shifting, yearning empty husk of a creature. I interviewed dozens of teachers around the country—far too many to pack into the 1200 words I was allowed—and had some rich conversations. Read it if you’re curious.
I'm a serial over-user of the ! in emails.
My teacher persona is extremely hammy. Also, I've been using the occasional exclamation point in my novel-in-progress and it's so satisfying. It's at once sincere and ironic, a huge tonal flex, in my opinion.