By Kelly Keene

“Today, we are going to talk about passive voice.” 

The class groaned. Riley didn’t even look up from their phone. Sebastian continued to doodle. 

“Passive. Voice. What does it really mean to give something a voice?” Ms. Dominguez said. “You have a voice. I do too.” 

Sam turned to his backpack to start looking for a pen, and Jasmin finally opened her notebook. “Some people, and things, don’t have a voice. They don’t have a say. Children under 18 can’t vote, for example. And animals don’t get to select an item to eat off of a menu. 

Yet despite these oversights, Passivity, of all things, has been given a voice- and the gatekeepers of grammar have a problem with that.”

Although the class had not been paying attention before, they were starting to perk up now. Ms. Dominguez had that effect on them. Try as they might to tune into their ear buds and tune out of her lectures, she always managed to say something curious. She was, afterall, not much like other adults they knew. 

When Ms. Dominguez looked around, and noticed she had captured their attention, she continued, “a lot of people see passive voice as an error. Something having to do with the past tense that makes their writing incorrect. On the surface, sure maybe that’s all it is. I’m sure if you ask the masterminds that invented the SAT, they’d maybe agree. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret…” She lowered her voice and leaned back against the front board. She held a dry erase marker in one hand that seemed to suggest she was about to write something important on the board. The students leaned in.  

“Passive voice is way more complicated than that.”

That’s all it took. She had them now. “So, if Passivity has a voice, that’s causing problems, the hard work we need to do today, is really pin down what it means to be passive.”

A moment passed.

“Let’s close our eyes,” she said. 75% of the class complied. The other 25% were still curious, but had been fooled by tricks like this before. “Come on everybody. I’ll close mine too.” A few more skeptics closed their eyes, until only Manny was left blinking up at Ms. Dominguez. 

“Ok, so I when I say the word ‘passive,’ I want you to picture a person-or an animal, being passive. What is that person, or animal, doing? How do they act? What does their body language look like?” She paused to give them enough time to fully visualize their scene. Some kids opened their eyes, then closed them again. Carine pressed her palms into her face. 

“Do you have your picture? Is it clear? Do you see it?” None of the kids spoke up. Some of them nodded, but Ms. Dominguez’s eyes were still closed. “Ok, now hold on to this mental image, but you can open your eyes now.” Sixty-four eyeballs shot open and bright. Ms. Dominguez walked to the center of the room, and all the eyes followed her. She pushed up her sleeves past each elbow and continued, “Now, when I count to three, I want you all to act out your version of ‘passive.’ Use your body language, not your words, to show me, and your classmates, what passive looks like.” 

Some kids, who had been doing their best to follow along, were now a bit confused. They looked at each other and shrugged. 

“You’re going to act out what ‘passive’ means to you,” Ms. Dominguiez repeated. “One… Two…” Luke’s face was resolute. He knew exactly what to do. Erik, on the other hand, grew flushed, and started to panic. “Three!”

Luke shot up from his desk, pushed his back against the wall and threw his arms up by his sides. His elbows were at perfect 90 degree angles, with his palms opened forward. He turned his face sideways, pressing his cheek into the poster behind him. His one visible eye looked up, and away. 

In the middle of the room, Alyssa took a different approach. She was on the ground, belly up, panting like a dog. Other students stayed seated, but put their hands up in a “don’t shoot” signal. And others leaned back and mimed swiping their phones absent-mindedly in one hand. These students were completely still except for the pulse of one thumb across an imaginary screen. 

Jessi had really embraced the exercise. They were on top of the table, lying face up, in a shavastana, sleep, or corpse-like pose. 

Now, at this point in her lesson, Ms. Dominguez couldn’t help but laugh. She caught sight of Carlos. He used his legs to propel himself, on his rolling chair, all around the room. He weaved in and out of other students looking this way and that. While they pretended to be asleep, he yelled, “Beep! Beep!” then glanced over his left shoulder. His hands were at ten and two, white knuckling an invisible steering wheel. 

“Okay, okay. Let’s return to our seats.” Ms. Dominguez held up her hand, signaling the class to refocus on her. Carlos kept driving around, taking the scenic route back to his desk. “Carlos, your interpretation struck me as a little different. Can you share what you were going for there?” 

Carlos knew she would ask. Ms. Dominguez always asked. “I was in the passing lane” he said. 

“Ahhh right. Thank you. Excellent work, everybody. 

So what I noticed was that most of you became very still, almost in complete stasis. There was very little movement, or motion at all. Those of you who did move, seemed to orient your movement in response to something else. Carlos could only pass if there were other cars on the road. Sam moved his thumb, but only as a means of navigating through content on a screen. Do you see what I’m getting at?” Some students nodded, but none of them understood. Not yet. 

“To be passive, we have to surrender to another force.”

Alyssa said, “what?”

Ms. Dominguez pressed on. “Luke, why don’t you explain what you acted out?”

“Oh, I pretended like I was at the movies, and someone in the seat next to me had to go to the bathroom. I got out of the way as much as I could so they could pass by.”

“EXACTLY!” shouted Ms. Dominguez. “Liz, what about you?”

“I dunno, I just sat down.”

“Right! We are better able to act when we are on our feet. If we sit down, that is a less active, and more passive position. Passive is the absence of action. It’s a response to someone or something else. It’s relational. It’s relative.” 

Alyssa spoke up again, “I don’t get it.” 

Ms. Dominguez now turned directly to her, “Have you ever wanted to act, or have you ever wanted to do something, but were forced to sit down, or stand by, and do nothing instead?”

Alyssa thought, and the rest of the class did too. She thought about the time her older brother had come home late at night. He was drunk, and started yelling at her mom. Alyssa had wanted to hit him, but she just sat in her room with her ear against the crack in the door, and waited for him to stop. 

Her classmates thought of the time they had to wait to go to the bathroom. Maybe someone else had taken the pass, when they also wanted to use it. Or they thought of the time their coach called a play, and they were left on the sidelines. Some of them were getting their driver’s licenses soon, and thought of the agony of waiting to make a left hand turn. 

“Being passive kind of sucks,” said Sebastian. 

“Yeah, it does,” said Ms. Dominguez. 

The class sat together for a moment, considering the weight of Sebastian’s words. Ms. Dominguez walked back to the board and uncapped her marker. She wrote: The milk was spilt on the counter. 

“This is passive voice. Not as big of a deal as doing nothing when your friend might need your help, but this is what it looks like in our writing.” She wrote another sentence below the first: Juliet had died in the crypt. Then another: Gatsby was deceived. 

“Just because we want to correct sentences like these, doesn’t mean passive voice isn’t still used in the world around us. Listen to the difference: The beaker was filled with 4.5 fluid ounces of liquid nitrogen. Lab reports use it all the time. They want the reader to focus on the experiment. They want to show what the chemicals did, not the chemist.

Reporters also use it all the time. The stock market has dropped by 8 points today. Or the fire was extinguished after forty-five minutes. The otter was released back into the wild-”

Riley interrupted, “Or like when the police say, ‘A black man was shot.’” 

The class fell silent. 

“Yes,” said Ms. Dominguez. She wasn’t smiling anymore. 

She turned back to the board and wrote: The woman was raped.

It was early Spring, and Sebastian, Riley, Carlos and Alyssa had been in this class since August. The students trusted Ms. Dominguez, and despite the occasional tardy, or paper wadd  thrown across the room, she trusted them too. This time next year, they’d be getting ready for prom, and other senior activities. They’d be looking forward to graduation, and college, and the rest of their lives. It was important, Ms. Dominguez thought, that they understood this lesson now, before it was too late. 

“When we use passive voice, we lose accountability for the action in the sentence. Someone spilt the milk. Juliet killed herself, and Gatsby, with all his wealth and power, had agency too. So did Daisy, and so did George Wilson.

The news will report that, ‘a black man was shot.’ But someone pulled the trigger. I want us, in this class, to remember that. Push past passive voice. Find the agency, and hold people accountable. Hold yourselves accountable. Hold the people with the power to choose what they do accountable when you write.” There were no more phones out now, but there were some pens tapping anxiously against desks. The students were ready to start writing.

“English teachers make a fuss about passive voice because we want you to see your writing as action. We want you to choose and move in this world and take responsibility for the choices you make.”

After that, the students wrote. Some rewrote the news. Others unpacked traumatic experiences. They did not use passive voice. Sebastian did not take out his phone for the remainder of class. Carlos dreamed about borrowing his dad’s truck, and driving to the beach the day after he turned 16. Liz stayed after school to finish her homework in the library, and Alyssa helped her mom cook dinner when she got home. Riley became a journalist. Jasmin started her own business. And Luke sat in the aisle seat the next time he went to the movies.