Gryphon By Charles Baxter

In the short story “Gryphon” by Charles Baxter, Tommy`s fourth grade teacher gets sick, so the next day when the students arrive to their classroom they have a substitute teacher. The substitute teacher Miss Ferenczi and the Mr. Hibler the real teacher have different ways of keeping the students engaging the students.

Mr. Hibler, teaches out of a book and when he is teaching English literature his students do not fully engaged in the material as he goes through it. From the students’ point of view, Mr. Hibler’s class is not that fun. Mr. Hibler has a time for everything such as English, math, and recess, but he only teaches the students what they need to know, and not any of the fun facts that surround the material that is currently being

This is both good and bad because she teaches from the book sometimes, just because she wants to follow the real teacher’s lesson plan, but she sees what he has planned for the students, so she makes minor adjustments with the things she is supposed to teach. “Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion (110).”Miss Ferenczi is a very caring teacher; for example, when she is doing a spelling test and one of the students can’t spell a word, she tells him, “If you don’t like a word, you don’t have to use it.”(107-108). She does the same thing when the students are doing arithmetic. She asks a student what was 6 times 11 and the student says 68, and she really knows it is 66, but she doesn`t want to embarrass the student in front of the whole class, so she does not correct him. The students really love her even though sometimes the things that she says don’t make any sense. “She lie…I didn’t believe that stuff about the bird…She didn’t know what she didn’t know what she was talking about.”(111).She keeps them engaged in the material by making up lies that cause them to think and ask questions. “You ever seen an animal that was half lion and half