What a load of bantha dung! Leia Origami interrupts. Selling your soul to the Edu-Fun Empire has blinded you, old woman. Do you even know what education is any more? Do you remember your George Dubya poster?

Ah, yes. In the early years of this century, I used to have a satirical poster compiling some of the dumbest ever George W. Bush quotes (of which there were plenty to choose from, of course). But one that I thought most people missed the point of was 'You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.' It's easy to laugh at the irony of Bush's poor grammar when he was promoting education, but that wasn't the real problem with him. The problem was that, along with many apparently literate politicians and even teachers, he apparently thought that the purpose of education was to pass tests.

I always knew it wasn't. Tests are an attempt to measure education, and no more than that. But on the other hand, they are a convenient excuse when the real reasons for something take too long to explain. When students don't understand why they need to do homework themselves, instead of downloading the essay from the internet or posting their math problems on social media, explaining, 'Because if you don't learn how to work out the answer for yourself, you won't know how to do it when you take your test, and you could be kept down a year,' is easier to explain than, 'Because if you don't learn how to think for yourself, you won't learn how to grow up.'

When parents complain about the content of a course, they might not listen to explanations like, 'No, Mark Twain was writing an anti-racist message, but Huck Finn as narrator uses racist language because that is how a boy with Huck's background would talk,' or, 'Sorry, Mrs Coley, I don't care whether the official teaching of your church is that the universe is only six thousand years old; Michael is in school to learn to understand scientific evidence, so no, I'm not going to ask my teachers to teach "Creation science" alongside actual science.' But if I say, 'If they don't study the material, they can't pass the test,' then no-one can argue with that.

I had to learn to pick my battles. I cried the night after I signed the order banning the table-top role-playing games club, back at the beginning of last year. I remembered how much I had loved playing a half-elf paladin when I was in middle school. But Mrs Coley was already apprehensive enough about sending her son to a public school, and if I couldn't agree to teaching Creationism in science classes or having prayers in Assembly, at least I could show her that I wasn't entirely an agent of Satan by banning Dungeons & Dragons. (At that time, the petition she organised with her friends from church didn't complain about video games, because in her childhood computer games were Tetris and Pong. She didn't start worrying about computerised role-playing games until the beginning of this year, and frankly, Lori Calhoun the librarian and I were quite happy to ban them from the school library.) But she remembered not being allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons as a child, therefore Michael wasn't allowed to either. So it was a choice of compromising, or letting her withdraw Michael and send him to a church school where he would grow up not having any friends who weren't Christians, and not knowing anything outside the dogma of his church.

Last year wasn't a good year, in many ways. We had our worst ever test results, and were threatened with funding cuts if we couldn't improve by this year. We were nearly banned from the Natural History Museum in Washington D.C., after a student broke that priceless fossilised dire wolf skull. (Probably we should have organised an Assembly on how not to break things before letting any of our students go on any field trip. It was bad enough when Jerry Snider came into the teachers' lounge practically in tears after someone had 'stolen' his beloved Shakespeare bust – though he was actually in a better mood by the next day, when the student in question confessed to having accidentally broken it, and brought in a home-made Play-Doh model as an apology.)

And when it comes to careless students who break things, that was the year in which we acquired Dwight Tharp. I seemed to have to write a note to Dwight's mother every second day after someone – usually Gorman – had sent him to In-School Suspension. Even when I wasn't personally involved in disciplining him, every day some member of staff had a new story to tell about his bizarre behaviour, like Susie Toner's story about the day he disappeared from a PE lesson and hid in a locker.

I've tried talking to him, many times, about why wearing a cape to school and telling people to call him 'Captain Dwight' is inappropriate, and so is playing with a finger puppet during the Pledge of Allegiance, or eating chalk, or, or… it's hopeless. He just stares into space, or says something unrelated, like, 'Purple,' or, 'Tycho Brahe had a wax nose.'

The infuriating thing is that he's actually intelligent. After all, how many twelve-year-olds have even heard of Tycho Brahe? (Though he's wrong about the nose. I was so intrigued that I looked it up, and Brahe's nose was originally believed to have been made of an alloy of gold and silver, but a recent analysis of his skeleton suggests that it was a brass made of copper and zinc.) He consistently gets at least A and frequently A+ in math, and he can be excellent at other subjects when he can be bothered to do any work. Last semester, Mary Porterfield was full of smiles over how enthusiastic he had been on a biology project and how well he had done, even if his social skills in teamwork needed a little more effort. This semester, Deborah Bolton, who has him for English this year, didn't actually show me his book report, but I overheard her conversations with the rest of the staff about it, discussing whether it could be plagiarised and generally agreeing that, while the quality is worthy of a post-grad student rather than a seventh-grader, the content is so individual that it clearly is the work of an eccentric twelve-year-old who isn't ashamed of liking stories about talking mice, and that, while it was usually Deborah's policy to disallow book reports on graphic novels, she had to make an exception for this one, as only one of the texts discussed was a graphic novel.

Once, they'd have called me over to take a look. Once, I wouldn't have needed to pretend to listen to my personal stereo in order to eavesdrop. And once, I would have been Dwight's teacher instead of the principal of the school he attends, and I would probably have liked him and wanted to encourage him to channel his intelligent, creative, highly unusual mind into schoolwork more often rather than into turning a lipsalve tube into a projectile weapon. Once, instead of considering expelling him and referring him to a reform school, I would have been passionate about encouraging and helping him, the way I was about helping Adam.

The stories about him haven't been all negative, by any means, or at least not this year. For example, Jim Tolen, Dwight's PE teacher this year: 'You'll never guess what Dwight Tharp did in my class today!'

Susie: 'Ran away and hid in a locker again?'

Jim: 'No, actually he was a great help to me. Harvey Cunningham was bitching about having to do warm-up exercises, as usual,' [I hear nearly as many staff conversations complaining about Harvey as about Dwight – though there's a lot of overlap, since the two boys are in the same class and a lot of the conversations are about friction between them] 'and waving his Darth Vader puppet about, shouting and trying to organise a mutiny – I was on the point of sending him to the Empress over there,' [nobody overtly looked in my direction, but there were a lot of stifled snickers] 'and then Dwight got out his own puppet and talked to him with that, in that really awful Yoda impression he does,' [though in fairnesss, a teacher doing an impression of a student doing a bad Yoda impression is even more embarrassing] '"Discipline is what Tolen teaches us. Obedience you must learn, Padawan." And it worked! Harvey did the sit-ups, no argument, and he was good as gold for the rest of the lesson. He's making a real effort now. You know how sometimes kids think the world is divided into geeks and jocks, and that if they're smart then it's beneath their dignity to do PE. Well, I guess sometimes it takes a weird kid to get through to another weird kid.'

Susie: 'Wow, does this mean Dwight has become a fan of working hard at PE?'

Jim [laughs]: 'Lord, no, Dwight just goofs around and pays no attention to anything I say. Lives in a world of his own, that kid.'

I wondered how long it would last. But Jim and Susie both kept on coming in exclaiming over how Harvey and plenty of other seventh-graders who aren't particularly sporty are putting much more effort into PE (except Dwight), and then, when Susie came back after being off sick one day, Jim was excitedly telling her about how he had got her class and his together on the day she'd missed, and organised a crab soccer game between them, and how Harvey and his friends had obviously been practising playing as a team, and Harvey had scored the winning goal…

I think the words 'Harvey' combined with 'friends', let alone 'playing as a team' startled everyone far more than the winning goal. The one thing we all know is that, while Harvey is an intelligent and (unlike Dwight) consistently hard-working student, his social skills are nearly as poor as Dwight's, and that he struggles with any project which requires teamwork. That was why there had been so much trouble when Dwight and Harvey were paired for a biology project, back in the fall.

I suppose if you look at it that way, the school system fails students like Harvey as badly as it does ones like Dwight. It's just less obvious. As long as Harvey consistently gets A grades and is socially just about high-functioning to pass for normal, it's easy to assume that he doesn't have problems. If his social and emotional maturity don't keep up with his academic skills, and he becomes lonelier and more isolated through high school and college – well, from the point of view of a teacher or parent, that can look like a good thing, at least as long as he picks courses that don't have a group project component. No social life means no distractions from studying, no peer pressure to drink or use drugs, and no risk of getting a girlfriend pregnant. Perhaps he'll even convince himself that he's doing fine – right up until the point where he has to apply for a job, convince an interviewer to like him enough to hire him, and then work well with his colleagues.

(Or perhaps he'll give up hope before that. Harvey may still be getting well above-average marks, but they are falling slightly. Apparently he has been telling all his teachers that he is suffering from 'Funtime-induced brain damage' caused by the mind-numbing tedium of watching videos explaining how to do things he had already learnt years ago. It may have started off as a joke and a way of rebelling, but if this goes on, what if he ends up convincing himself that it's true, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? It won't stop him getting decent enough grades, graduating from high school, and getting into a good college. But it might stop him from having the confidence to be all that he could be.)

I suppose, to a student with no social skills, group work can look like a pointless chore, a hoop that the teacher arbitrarily expects them to jump through. When it came to the bug collecting project, we could have bought twice as many butterfly nets and had Mary hand out one to each student, instead of requiring pairs of students to share one between them. What they need is activities where they can see an actual reason for working in a group, like team sports, or orchestra, or choir, or theatre.

In other words, students need precisely the sort of activities that I cut to make room for the Funtime test-prep sessions (and because, with the money I'd paid for the videos, I couldn't afford to employ teachers for any non-core subjects).

I have screwed up big-time.

And yet – maybe there is hope. The folder of papers that Leia Origami came with, a collection of writing by many different students with different personalities and interests, proves it. McQuarrie students are learning to unite and work together.

It's just that what they are working together in is rebelling against me.

Well, no. They're rebelling against the Funtime videos that I imposed on the school. It's not personal. Or at least, it isn't personal as far as 'Princess Labelmaker' is concerned. I look back at the lines of white-on-black on the front page: 'I AM SHOWING YOU THE FILE BECAUSE I THINK IT WILL MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND US BETTER. PLEASE READ THIS CASE FILE. AND THEN I TRUST YOU WILL JOIN US, NOT FIGHT US. HELP US, PRINCIPAL RABBSKI . . . YOU ARE OUR ONLY HOPE.'

I look again at the little paper figure in front of me. I didn't write this script, she snaps. Just because some idealistic kid thinks there's still good in you doesn't mean I have to agree.

'Oh, yeah?' I fire back. 'You think you're not still an idealistic kid? Wait until you're my age and trying to juggle being a senator, a Jedi and a mom, and your kids hate you if you don't turn up to watch their every lightsaber tournament because there's a galaxy-threatening crisis that you have to sort out, and you never know whether getting it wrong might be enough to drive them to turn to the Dark Side…'

Someone knocks on my office door. 'Lougene? Are you all right?'

I'd forgotten not to talk out loud. Oh, kriff.

Author's note: Most of the teachers in the Origami Yoda universe apart from Ms Rabbski and Mr Howell don't seem to have canonical first names as far as I can recall (and Mr Good Clean Fun eventually has a canonical first name but not a canonical surname), so I randomly made names up for them. I did the same later on for Tommy's brother, whom Tommy and seemingly even his parents (as reported by Tommy) never refer to by name.