I remember walking through Powell’s City of Books in Portland as a small child with my grandma. I remember being overwhelmed by the books around me, the way they smelled and felt, the way I got dizzy looking up at the tallest shelves.
I don’t know why I’ve always been fascinated by books, and not just the ideas they contained but the physical objects themselves. My first library card was a revelation to me. “I can take home any book I want?” I was an easily amazed child.
The feeling of pride I felt when I finished reading the first book I considered a ‘real’ book, meaning one with chapters that was over 100 pages, is something that is still with me. I wanted to tell everyone. It was Redwall, I think, and people must have been very irritated with the child who wouldn’t stop talking about mice who lived in castles.
For writers, it all starts with reading. The immense feeling of possibility I got when the nice old lady at the Washington County Library handed me my own library card is the same feeling I got the first time a teacher encouraged me to write about a topic of my own choosing. “I can write about whatever I want?”
What is your earliest memory of the written word? Do you and literature have a cute story about how you first met? Or did you grow up together and fall in love naturally, like Greg and Marsha Brady?
I bet you did a double take at that headline. It’s true though, Anne Frank had a vagina – as does every other female on planet earth. I know, shocking isn’t it? A young girl, who stays in hiding, and has no access to the outside world, has to make discoveries about herself, and one of them just happens to be that her major sexual organ is an odd one.
In the Definitive Version of Anne Frank’s diary, the publishing company actually decides to give us the entire diary, and not simply the excerpts we get to read in the heavily abridged version of the text. Unfortunately, a mother in Detroit has deemed this version a bit too “pornographic” for her daughter to read. Her daughter, a seventh grader in a suburban school district, had to read about such disgraceful, sickening, horrifying events like the Holocaust, you know, the murdering of countless people….. oh, and about a vagina. The mother felt as if it should have been her job to teach her daughter about such physical traits. She’s right. She should have taught her daughter about her body, and it probably should have been done before her daughter was hitting puberty. I guess she missed the boat on that one, and since she couldn’t do it, her daughter had to learn about it from one of the most important and most read pieces of literature in any country.
Here is the excerpt from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank:
“Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris… When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris….
There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”
During banned books week in September, my high school students were shocked at how many books have been “banned” over time, and the silly reasons over which the banning had taken place. Much like in the time of the great philosophers such as Plato, and Socrates, and Descartes, and Aristotle, people are shunned from asking questions, and wondering about society, and themselves.
So, yeah, Anne Frank had a vagina, and that’s obviously the most terrifying part of her diary.
(CAUTION: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS SOME SALTY LANGUAGE)
One summer, when I was ten or eleven, my stepbrother came into my room with a very serious question.
“Are you sick?”
He asked it with an expression not of concern, but of genuine confusion. You see, it was a beautiful afternoon, and I had repeatedly declined his suggestion that we go ride bikes in favor of sitting on my bed and reading a book.
For my part, I didn’t understand why my explanation of “I’m almost done with this book,” wasn’t enough to explain my reluctance to go do something else. In my head, that sentence should still be enough to get me out of anything, including jury duty.
Now, his confusion had more to do with my preference at that time for reading to going outside and causing minor property damage like a normal suburban boy. I think Bill Hicks is talking about something else here, an active anti-intellectualism in the form of a preference for passive entertainment to active.
Bill Hicks was one of the best comics of the 20th century and he responded perfectly.
“I’m not reading Hee Haw the book.”
(Hee Haw was a TV show. Google it.)
The experience is different, and the biggest difference between reading a book and watching TV is that the book won’t move on without you. It requires 100% of your attention 100% of the time you are engaged with it. You can leave a TV on and leave the room. Not so with a book. Unless you’re right in the middle of it it’ll just flip itself closed.
And look up more Bill Hicks. Because sometimes hilarious anger is the logical reaction to the things around you.
Before you start reading this, let’s get one thing perfectly straight, this post is not just about the students in your class, or the kids who say they don’t like reading; this post is very much for the teachers who stand in the front of the class, attempting to hide their sweat, and the fact that they are on the exact same page as their students – that they have never read the book that they are in the middle of teaching. It’s way more normal than people might think. Frankly, the first time teachers hand out an assignment, it’s not unusual for them to have never gone through that assignment, and be absolutely clueless as to how it’s supposed to go. Unless they were assigned certain texts in high school – and let’s face it, most teachers, myself included didn’t read everything they were assigned – they’ve never even considered opening the book that they’ve already placed on their classroom desks.
Last week, one of my students returned from a two weeks pre-arranged vacation. He was aware that we would be smack dab in the middle of reading Catcher in the Rye, and had been given all of the assignments ahead of time, as well as a reminder that the assignments, and the actual text of the book could be found on my classroom website. When he showed up in my classroom to ask what he had missed, it was more than obvious that he hadn’t followed through with any of the work we’d spoken about before his foray into the sun. We were just about to start chapter 20, and his response to me was, “Well, I read through the Sparks Notes last night, so I know everything that’s happened in the book.” Yikes. It took me a moment to figure out if he was serious. I mean, Sparks Notes were the hidden way to catch up when I was in high school, and not something that you openly bragged about having read. I told him that while I was glad he had a brief overview of the text, he had missed out on a book that might have taught him a little bit about his life. I mean, come on, even Holden Caulfield got A’s in English.
I did a lot of thinking about what my student had said, and it brought me back to my first couple years as a teacher, where, much like I mentioned earlier, I had not read all of the books that I was going to teach. I remember scrambling for “themes” and “meanings” and “symbols” and any possible “teachable moments” in the text just before the morning bell. That’s why, while I was not happy about what the student had done, I had to laugh it off. Frankly, the kids only mistake was telling me about his venture through the yellow and black.
There are some really good aspects to reading guides like Spark Notes, and sometimes it’s just the push we need to actually figure out what we are supposed to be gathering from certain texts.
For an example of what I’m talking about, RapGenius.com, has published a guide for The Great Gatsby. The movie is coming out this week, and a lot of American Literature classes are scrambling through it because teachers know that their students will soon be forking over their money to watch Leo DeCaprio portray the famed liar. It’s not the easiest book to understand, and it takes some time to truly grasp the depth of all the symbolism. This is a fantastic guide, and honestly, I’ll probably use a good deal of it when I teach this book next year. I’ve read Gatsby several times, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t use a refresher course.
Sometimes it’s not just the students who feel like the dumb ones in the class, and it’s okay to admit that, as a teacher, you don’t know everything.
I don’t remember ever having the choice, or thought process, that I would do anything other than go to college after high school. There were moments where I wondered about some other possibilities, but the reality was simple: I was going to college, and I was going to get a degree, and a job within that area of study. My mom was a teacher, and ever since I can remember I was helping with lesson plans, and with her classroom set up, and tutoring students, and working with her during summer school. I enjoyed teaching, and around the age of twelve, it became obvious to me that I was going to be a teacher. I think for a moment I thought about psychology, and for a longer moment about being a rock star, but teaching was in my blood, and I’m stubborn, so that was my final decision.
I hated high school. I did well enough to keep my parents off my back, and to allow my teachers to understand that I definitely didn’t lack intelligence, but not well enough to ever earn honor role, or ever pretend like I was going to be one of the super smart kids to head out to an ivy league wasteland of snobbery and excess. By my junior year, I had figured out how to work the system. I missed 87 days of school because I “had mono, and just never really recovered.” At least that’s what I told the attendance lady, and since I was her 1st period aide, I was able to avoid the parent phone calls, and snag a few pads of excuse slips in order to assure that I would never get caught. I was bright enough to call my teachers and ask for my homework so that I could keep my grades above sea level, and I made sure that I never missed more than two days in a row. It was important to at least attempt to keep up appearances. I was just bored in my classes. It wasn’t that I was skipping school to go do drugs, or drink, or party, or do anything stupid. In fact, I skipped school to hang out at Powell’s Books, or Django Records, or the library. Sometimes I would even let my boss know that I was skipping school, and work a few extra hours. I just didn’t see the point in wasting my time at school if I could do the homework, get decent grades, and still do the things I wanted. I got through junior year just fine, and had taken enough night school and summer school classes – all by choice – so that when it came to senior year, I only needed a few classes, so I was done with the school day by 10am, and ready to move on with life.
The rest of the story is pretty basic. I went to a Pacific University on the weight of my perfect ACT scores, and my college entrance essay. I enjoyed my college experience immensely with all the normal college kid things, graduated with honors, and immediately enrolled in Pacific’s MAT program so I could get my grad degree and start my life as a teacher. How drab.
Somehow, I now teach the youth of today, and most of those “yutes” (Come on! You’ve seen My Cousin Vinny!) don’t give a crap about college. In fact, most of them would turn out to be incredible industrial workers, or carpenters, or mechanics, or Boeing engineers, or any hands-on type of worker. Unfortunately, the school system doesn’t see it that way. Unfortunately, students are forced to sit through classes they don’t care about, don’t want to be in, and frankly, don’t need for their future. But with the current system, if they don’t pass their classes, they can’t get that piece of paper, and walk across the stage, and figure out which junior college to attend before using absolutely none of those skills to do the job that they want to do, and waste several years getting to the job that works for them – and some of them getting so lost along the way, that they never return to their original goal. It’s sad.
I’ve never been a “college-or-else” teacher. I don’t think it’s necessary. I wish students were allowed to leave high school their sophomore years and begin apprenticeships in things they actually care about. Those who want to stay in school and work toward a degree in arts and letters would stay in high school, and venture to college, but beyond that, what’s the point? We’re wasting our most valuable resource – teenagers.
I know this website deals with mostly language, so I’ll end by bringing it back to that. Today, a student of mine named Andrew, brought this beautiful poem to my attention. It’s by a slam poet named Suli Breaks. It was just one more reminder that my students – even those who aren’t paying a ton of attention to the normal educational system – are truly paying attention to the education that they want to have. The school system is broken, and as a teacher, I feel that it is my job to fix it from the inside out.
Here is the poem, by Suli Breaks, called “Why I Hate School, But Love Education.”
I do not believe in history. There, I said it. It never happened. Not in a “the holocaust isn’t real” diluted way, but rather in the “every textbook got it wrong” way. I remember in middle school I was really interested in what had happened throughout the timeline of America. I always wanted to know who did what, and how we settled where, and why we live the lives that we live today. And then I discovered fiction. I discovered the books, or poems that were written in those time periods, and I started seeing a bit more of an honest approach to the literary history of the time, that I did not see in the text books.
It wasn’t until mid-way through high school, where I truly started to question the books that we were reading. It wasn’t that the teachers were attempting to indoctrinate us into some type of cult-ish, we-are-who-the-book-says-we-are type of thinking, but rather, people had been paid to tell a certain story, and while the accuracy of the story was defined by years of research, I felt that if they weren’t there to see it take place, they couldn’t possibly understand the accurate version of the story. Research can only get a person so far.
It was around this time that I also discovered the works of Dickens, and Blake, and Donne, and George Elliot, and the Bronte sisters. Their words all felt so brutally honest, that I began to feel as though, while three of the four (if you lump the Bronte sisters together) were writing fictional tales, they weren’t afraid to show the true darkness of those time periods. William Blake, as a fairly unknown poet of his time, was not afraid to talk about London as he saw it. He was not worried about any backlash from the church as he told tales of children as chimney sweeps who, when stuck inside the piping, would simply be burned until their bodies disintegrated, and un-clogged the chimney system. Donne, a former man of God, was not afraid to talk about the struggles he had in the church, and how he had lost his faith over too many questions. Bronte and Dickens were not afraid to talk about a world where people were not all happy, and where the realities in Jane Eyre, and A Tale of Two Cities felt so much more matter-of-fact than any textbook description of England during those times.
I’ve had countless debates with history teachers over the years. They have been trained to believe the research. I have been brought up to find honesty in the fiction of the period. It’s a battle that has gone on since the earliest novels were written. So, who is right?
That leads me to today’s Question of the Day: Do you believe in History, or History via Literature? Explain.
“All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.” —Bret Easton Ellis tpr.ly/Shy4C0
— The Paris Review (@parisreview) April 30, 2013
Before I started teaching, I was a voracious reader. I would devour any book I could find, typically reading it cover to cover in a couple of sittings, and then either writing a review or paper or some type of notes on what I had read, and how I felt about the book. When I started teaching, this all seemed to change. I was so focused on building proper curriculum, and keeping a step ahead of my students, that – with the exception of the novels I was teaching – books fell by the wayside. During the summer I’m able to finish a few books, but I’ve never gone back to the type of reader that I was during my formative years.
One of the last books I read prior to teaching was Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. I’d seen the movie, and I felt that it was missing too much. Characters seemed to trail off, and I wasn’t convinced that Patrick Bateman was just simply evil for the sake of being evil. I knew there had to be more. I purchased a copy of the book, and sat down for one of the greatest roller coaster rides I’ve ever been on.
I read that book cover to cover, only putting it down when I felt so ill from the descriptions that I thought I was going to lose my lunch. There has never been a book that has felt so visceral, and so beautiful at the same time. Through all the evil, and all the abuse, and all the destruction of person and persona, I felt that it was such an honest look at the darker side of the human psyche.
To me, Elis had written an updated version of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” or “Porphyria’s Lover.” A stunning look at how the mind might work if every dark thought were to take precedence over anything good. Patrick Bateman was an honest character, who just decided that he wanted to take control over every situation – even if taking control meant that he had to manipulate and murder everyone he cared about, much like the lover in Browning’s poem.
Elis’ quote, found above and in the Paris Review interview, speaks perfectly to how someone should write. A writer writes what they want, and not what they feel they should. If one is honest with himself in the writing process, then he is more apt to write the piece that best represents who they are, and how they are. Everything else is meaningless. Never forget to just write.
