Multiple-choice reading

Jonah had not wanted to enter the competition. It was his English teacher, Mrs Okafor, who had put his name down, and when he complained, she had simply said, “You argue with me in every single lesson, Jonah. You may as well get marks for it.”

So here he was, on a Saturday morning, sitting in the third row of a school hall that smelled of floor polish, waiting for his name to be called. On the stage, a girl in a dark blue blazer was speaking about climate change. She did not look at her notes once. Her voice rose and fell exactly where it should, and when she paused, the whole hall seemed to wait with her. Jonah looked down at his own cards, covered in crossings-out, and felt his stomach turn over.

His topic was “Should homework be abolished?” He had chosen it because it seemed easy. Now, listening to the girl, it seemed embarrassingly small.

“You’re next after this one,” whispered Mrs Okafor, leaning across from the seat beside him. “Remember what we practised. Slow down. Breathe.”

“What if I forget everything?”

“Then you’ll have to say what you actually think,” she said. “Which might not be a disaster.”

When his name was called, he walked to the stage too quickly and nearly tripped on the top step. Somebody laughed, not unkindly. He put his cards on the stand, looked up, and saw two hundred faces looking back at him. For a terrible moment, the first line of his speech simply disappeared.

He looked down at the cards. The words were there, but his own handwriting suddenly seemed to belong to someone else. Instead of reading, he heard himself say, “I was going to tell you that homework should be abolished. I’ve got some quite good statistics. But actually, I’ve just realised I don’t completely believe it.”

There was a small, surprised silence. In the front row, one of the judges stopped writing.

Jonah kept going. He talked about his little sister, who cried over her maths every Tuesday, and about his friend Sam, who had no desk at home and did his homework on the bus. Then he talked about the history project he had done the year before, the only piece of homework he had ever enjoyed, because he had been allowed to choose the subject himself. The problem, he said, was not homework itself, but homework that nobody had really thought about. By the end he had used none of his statistics and only one of his cards, and he had gone two minutes over the time limit.

He did not win. The girl in the blue blazer won, which seemed completely fair to him. But as people were leaving, one of the judges, a tall man with grey hair, stopped him by the door.

“You broke most of the rules,” the man said. “You went over time, and you changed your argument halfway through.” He paused. “It was also the only speech this morning where I felt someone was actually thinking.”

On the bus home, Mrs Okafor said nothing about the result. She simply asked, “Same time next year?”

Jonah looked out of the window. “Maybe,” he said. “If I can choose the topic.”