As the long summer days wind down and the beginning of the school year nears, little Billy Flaggins, age 6, was super excited for the first day of first grade: “I’m going to school! I’m six years old! I’m gonna be in Mrs. Handalf’s class! It’s like an adventure.”

Billy was initially homeschooled for kindergarten, so tomorrow would be his first day of public school at Mordor K-12. It was going to be a big change, but when his mom Galadriella got a job as a dental hygienist, she wasn’t able to teach him at home any longer. His father Ron Bean worked full-time as a captain of the fishing boat Gondor, so they decided to send him to Mordor. 

She said, “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. Grade school, I mean. He’s growing up so fast.”

Billy’s father Ron Bean added, “Middle-School stands on the brink. None can escape it. Each of us is bound to this fate—this one doom. Bring forth the three-ring binder Billy!”

Billy brought out a brightly colored binder that said Mrs. Handalf—First Grade on it. “I’m six years old! First I’ll do first grade and then second grade then third grade then a million grade then I’ll do high school!”

“One does not simply walk into high school, Billy. The very air you breathe is a poisonous Axe body spray. It is folly.” Mr. Bean said.

“It’ll be super easy and I’ll be friends with everyone,” said the child about to begin a long quest of disillusionment and misery. Billy didn’t know it yet but by third grade two of his friends would be carried off by orcs and a third would move to Seattle.

Mrs. Handalf, the longtime first-grade teacher at Mordor K-12, related how she began there.  “I started teaching in the year 3434 of the Second Age before the finding of Isildur’s Bane and the Doom of the Realms of Men. We only had chalkboards back then!” she laughed. “No smartphones, but every once in a while one of the kids would get a hold of a palantir and try to summon the Dark Lord. Oh, that fool of a Took!”

When asked how she helped generations of kids prepare for high school and college, she said she took the tough love approach. “I tell them ‘You shall not pass.’”