Part essay, part poetry, part collage of student writing and personal reflections, this book uses metaphor to evoke the interactions and anguishes of a high school English teacher's day, a juggling act of efforts to help the demoralized and disruptive while still trying to make learning meaningful. In the book, the English teacher's students speak of school in their own metaphors. For the many who are "at risk," this means four-letter words which the teacher insists reformers of education must hear and understand. The book portrays such students as unable to make sense of a system of schooling preoccupied with maintaining surface order, one that talks of students' creative development but focuses on scores, measurable objectives, and moving students through the hoops toward graduation. The book ends with an extended metaphor--a parody of a standardized multiple-choice test, in which the choices evoke in "Catch-22" style students' reactions to the absurdity they perceive in their school experience. (RS)