Accomplice by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

This story definitely had me looking up a few words that I didn't know existed:
acuity = keenness of sight, hearing or intellect
perspicacious = perceptive
iconoclastic = someone who challenges beliefs, customs, or traditions
beatific = expressing great happiness
lumpen proletariat = with a life regarded as intellectually empty and socially inferior who is part of the working class
cataleptic = the state resembling a trance
zazen = a form of meditation in Zen
futzed = to spend time frivolously, lazily, or aimlessly
cicatrix = medicine or a scar left on a stem where a leaf used to be attached

As you can see I learned a few new words in this story. The title is not really telling what the story is about in the sense of what one thinks of when it comes to an accomplice. This story is about student progress reports and how they are merely anecdotes for teachers to write year after year which could almost be written on form letters. However, this teacher wanted to try an experiment. Students were to write their parents an identity of themselves. One girl writes her story only to have the teacher (obviously) pick it apart and mark it up thoroughly with at red pen. The girl's father simply writes counter arguments against what her teacher had written on her essay. In a sense it the father in the story as well as the teacher act as accomplices to the students in writing raving reviews of them so that they can move on to the next grade. This is a very well written story.