“Perhaps Sedgewick Bell’s life would have turned out more nobly if I had understood his motivations right away and treated him differently at the start. But such are the pointless speculations of a teacher.”

— Mr. Hundert in Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”

After struggling with students’ behavior in my middle school classroom last year, I feared an uprising of students critical of my failings as a teacher. I imagined students collectively shouting “I hate you!” and questioning my judgment. So I was at first hesitant to expose my students to Ethan Canin’s story “The Palace Thief,” which is about a teacher who failed to help his student become a better person. Would this story bring on the criticism I feared?

To my surprise, when I did teach it, the students cared less about the teacher’s development and were drawn instead to the antagonist Sedgewick Bell, a troublemaker who cheats his way to success.

One student’s reaction to Sedgewick really stuck with me. While the majority of the class deemed Sedgewick a bad character, this student continually stood up for him.

“He was cheating to make his father proud, right?” the student said to me one day after class. “Wouldn’t his dad be mad if he didn’t succeed? So I think it was the right thing for him to do.”

Interestingly enough, this student had a very strict father and a problem with rampant cheating.

Last year, I felt like I couldn’t reach my students on a moral level at all. Our middle school was struggling with funding and needed to score well on the state standardized tests. Instead of teaching literature like I wanted to, I taught excerpts from CodeX textbooks. Instead of writing my own curriculum and letting my students’ needs inform the lessons I chose to teach, there was a schoolwide mandate for teachers to teach the same standard every day. I didn’t have time to answer any of my students’ moral or behavioral questions; I had to lay down rules and stick to them relentlessly just to get through the prescribed materials.

By March, we had been doing just test prep for two straight months, and my students’ frustrations boiled over into disgust — toward English as a subject, me, all their teachers and the school itself. Even my students who were voracious readers at home were resistant to the curriculum, refusing to engage and tossing verbal hate bombs. I started thinking about changing my career.

This year, my faith in English as an avenue for emotional maturity has been renewed thanks to a new principal who believes in the value of literature and the absence of high-stakes testing for 10th-graders. Instead of enforcing behavioral rules so I can teach skills for a test, I’m teaching critical, moral thinking through the lens of literature.

The student who fought so passionately for Sedgewick’s moral uprightness despite his cheating later confided in me, “I’d like a teacher like Sedgewick’s teacher who keeps pushing me to succeed, no matter what I do. That might actually make me do my work.”

Through critical character study and then applying the knowledge gained to his own character, this student was able to identify and articulate what he needs to become a better student.

If teaching “The Palace Thief” has taught me anything, it is that my past failures do not need to define my future. I may not have reached every student, but I have reached at least one. And that’s a good start.