Vocations

     “Mr. K, does this sentence make sense to you?” asked one of the sixth-graders during literacy class.

     She had written “I had a rendezvous with one of my patients.”

     The speaker is a doctor?

     “Yes.”

     She was using “rendezvous” as a synonym for “appointment.”

     Are you going to be a doctor someday?

     “Either a doctor or a racecar driver—my dad likes racecars—or a veterinarian,” she said.

      I told her that she had the jump on her classmates in narrowing down her fields of study at such an early age.

     After retreating to her desk she made a quick U-turn.

     “I don’t have any idea what this word means,” she said.

     The word was “deprived.”

     The first thing that popped into my head was the line from “West Side Story” about the gang members being depraved because they are deprived. She was reading “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and the vocabulary exercise called for the students to pause over an unfamiliar word and first try to understand the meaning from context before consulting a dictionary and then writing an original sentence to demonstrate comprehension of the word.

     The passage in the book described the author’s parents, peremptorily seized by the Nazis, being permitted to carry away a rucksack and some money only to be “deprived” of those items shortly thereafter.

     Can you figure out the meaning from the context? I asked. Suppose, I told her, I were a mean substitute. (I immodestly used the subjunctive to denote a statement contrary to fact.) I would first deny you your books, laptop, calculator, and any instruments that might help you as a student, and then deprive you of even pencil and paper in class.

     “Oh, I get it,” she said. “Thank you.”

     But I was the one who was grateful.