Middle School Reverie

By popular request, I am updating my blog. I didn't realize that I had let it languish for so long, but I make no apologies. I was buried under books. Before you get all jealous on me, please remember that these aren't snuggling books. They are very heavy and they have sharp angles. They are teaching books. Gah! Gag! Argh!

It's the end of the fourth week of class. I'm officially way behind, and officially slacking (c'mon, now, you knew I would). But I have to ensconce myself in a cubicle today and catch up, because I have seen what's ahead. The next few weeks are killer. How fun!

As I peruse the manuals on teaching, the guidebooks on philosphies and adolescent psychology and all that rot, I notice that something significant is missing. Where are the books on books? Are we supposed to know what 7th and 8th graders read? Yesterday one of my professors told us that we were the "experts" in our speciality area. This made me shudder -- expert? I'm an expert on all aspects of English now, am I? Has she not noticed that my grammar is rusty, and I frequently end my sentences a preposition with? I dangle modifiers by their thumbs, and I split infinitives (in two. With a cleaver). How do I qualify as an expert?

Well, I love to read. There's that. I've read a lot. So I can confidently walk into my 7th grade classroom and discuss Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, and (dammit) Faulkner. We can read poems by Hardy and Donne, and we can explore the sexual nuances in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Oh...wait. This is middle school. We're not allowed to talk about sexual nuances. So what the hell do they read in middle school?

This has not been covered in any of my coursework thus far. I can take an elective on Adolescent Lit, but not until next semester. I would really like to get a curriculum list or something, so I can see what I'll be using. Not because I'm interested in advance lesson-planning or anything like that. No, it's self-preservation. Because I strongly suspect that I haven't read any of the books I'll be required to teach.

Try to remember what you read in middle school. Difficult, eh? I tried, and it made my head hurt. I know I was in an Enriched English class (from which I was later ejected due to extreme lack of work) . I remember reading Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, The Bridge to Terebithia and Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember short stories: "The Most Dangerous Game" and "The Monkey's Paw" and "The Cask of Amontillado." I don't remember poetry. I don't remember drama.

I do remember loving what we did. The reading part, the discussing part, the analyzing part. The grammar part sucked. And that's my other fear: how am I going to teach something that causes me to cringe in terror?

I'll tell you what, though -- I refuse to fake it. I'm not going to be one of those teachers who smiles through her teeth and says she loooooves participles and adverbs, and parses verbs in her sleep. I'm not going to pretend that every word ever written and bound into a book is sacred. In college, I took an Intro to American Lit class with a bunch of fresh freshmen and an adjunct who dared to tell them that "great literature should make the top of your head explode, just like Emily Dickinson said."

And those fresh-dopes dutifully wrote that quote into their notebooks. I, the supreme super-biotch that I am, raised my hand. "So if Hawthorne doesn't do that for me -- if he doesn't make me explode -- then he's not a great writer?"

She looked at me in horror. "No, no. I don't want you to think that." The upshot was, she assigned us all an essay on "What Makes Great Literature Great" and everyone in the class despised me. I found this very amusing, because I actually love Old Nat. I just didn't want anyone to try to tell me that Great Literature excites some sort of physical combustion within the reader. Some of it we still have to trudge through (see, a preposition! See how bad I am!). Some of it is worth the journey. I hated Heart of Darkness -- hated reading it. Loved thinking about it -- and still do.

So I'm not going to tell a bunch of twelve-year-olds that they're dumb if they don't love My Brother Sam Is Dead or (worse) Johnny Tremain. I'm going to tell them, "Read it anyway, and let's find what's valuable within it." And I'm not going to pretend that grammar drills are fun. I'm going to say, "Do them anyway, and see if they improve your writing. If they don't, we'll find another way."

I'm never going to lie to them, unless it saves me from some sort of bodily harm. That's where I draw the line, folks. That's the river they can't cross.