Tag Archives: teaching

Of Teachers and Books and the Choices We Make

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One of the many things I love about being an English teacher is the way we sit down as colleagues, typically late Spring, to discuss the books we’ll teach in the coming year. It’s fascinating to track both the national mainstays (The Crucible, Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter) and those that are more regionally specific.

I’m happily in Cape Cod, so a salty nautical theme runs fast and furious. We have The Old Man and the Sea, so accessible and haunting, The Odyssey (duh) as well as new advocacy this year for Moby Dick (regionally relevant? Absolutely! Narratively? Challenging! Student engaging? We will see!)

I laughed with another English teacher this afternoon about the rightful endurance of Melville’s text, one everyone loves to say they have read, but no one ever seems to currently be reading.

More broadly, I am stunned by the publishing world, its enormous challenge, its infinitesimal chance. Just to publish anything with one of the major houses is an absolutely herculean achievement, worthy of taking lots of time off by the sea with all the lobster rolls and plenty of ice cream from Four Seas just to celebrate the jolly feat of having slipped through the barricades, making it to print. So few ever do!

Then there is the yet more infinitesimally slim, still greater herculean achievement of making it from the American bookshelf into the American classroom. Your work is being taught. Imagine. It is not lost on me that most of our texts were drafted by the long deceased, but of course we teach living writers all the time. One colleague is introducing Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart next year. A few years ago I brought Kevin Powers’ war novel The Yellow Birds into the New York public school system. These are all wins.

For as hard as it is to get published AND catch the attention of the teaching world—for your book to take flight in the classroom canon—I’m struck by the fickle hand of chance that is at play in all of this. As in, you’re just sitting in a meeting, the question gets asked generally (“Anyone want to introduce a new text next year?”), you briefly make your case, and boom! It’s in. Teachers rarely feel powerful, exactly, and this is indeed a moment to savor. Next thing you know, the list gets finalized, the order goes out, and you have cemented a new text into the order of business for the coming year. The whole thing goes down in less than ten minutes!

Yes, yes, we are ever mindful of how and why we make these bids. The book must be appropriate, in every sense of the word. It must be teachable. That is to say—given to assignments. To probing. To in-class examination and engaging classroom discussion. This is, of course, the work of the teacher, but some texts are undeniably better suited to being taught than, well, others. I’d love to teach Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland with all its melancholy evocation of a post-9/11 New York, but there’s just no way. The Great Gatsby (on which O’Neill has said he loosely based Netherland) remains a standard bearer in the American classroom to a large extent because 1) it is a very good length, 2) the characters are clearly sketched out and positioned well against each other, and 3) the themes are both relatable and aspirational. Lol, the green light and all that.

One text I advocated for this year, but sadly not for my own classes (might try to sneak it into my Grade 12 world lit course?) is Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. The first four volumes of this work are now out in English translation, and I’m dying to read the fifth. Translators of the world, stand up!

A graphic novel of a childhood in Libya and Syria, The Arab of the Future is full of the salt-sweat of elders, the curious textures of new meals, the frenzy of local educational practices in these two Middle Eastern countries.

Sattouf (in gamine profile here in the New Yorker and TAOTF reviewed here by the NYR) is half-French, and periodically returned to see his mother’s family in Lyon. So he maintains a one-foot-in, one-foot-out perspective on his Syrian father’s proclamation that he is, in fact, the Arab of the future. What he is, most immediately, is the observant child in between. His takes are by turns detailed, hilarious, macabre, frank, guarded, silly, serious and endlessly fresh.

I love every panel of The Arab of the Future and can’t wait to bring it to my sea-side students next year! Onward!  

Love. Love Is All You Need.

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heartWhat is it about the oblique kindness of strangers in a city that is otherwise so straightforward, so full-on committed, to its aggressions?

Tonight I went to a massive grocery store. I was shopping for the week ahead. I’m on a tight budget, so I skip half the things I love and would live by if I could (a comely Prince de Claverolle cheese, august offerings of organic apples in the ruddy pride of their prime) and steer toward the off-color and slightly beaten versions of things that I like and can live with (currents in bulk, a rendering of cous cous that was ever so slightly more course than its neighbor on the dispensary wall, same price).

The aisles were impossible with carts and shuffling, all parkas and mufflers and gruff-stuff attitude even as New York remains entrenched in this warm pocket of unusual fall weather. People are dressed, already, for the worst and it takes up space, you see.

Jostling and cavorting past this family, around that stern-faced woman inexplicably in spats, now past a man who was brazenly, so brazenly, eating from the dried nuts bin from which the customer is meant just to take in spade his desired amount, secure said amount in one of the millions of waiting plastic bags, weigh it, affix the price sticker, and move along. At no point or jaundiced juncture hangs a sign that reads, “Oh come all ye faithful, stick ye grubby-ass nasty-hands into our many fine bins and feed freely from the largess of our trust.”

No.

So I just about earned a PhD tonight in the wiles and ways of that price sticker-pumping machine because, admittedly, I felt a sudden and yet not un-foreign impulse to police the free-loaders even as everyone swore it was all either beneath or beyond them to work the damn machine and thus I, too, was reminded of that one and true core fact, a fact my good Aunt Ann has been repeating through her many glorious decades at the helm and in the realm of her independent bookstore: The customer cannot be trusted.

Well. Anyway. Then I got to the baked goods section.

Me: “Hello, may I please have a baguette from here, the lower shelf. How much is this one?”

Staff member: “Those loaves are all one forty-five each, love.”

I have long adored the lovely work of inventing and depositing sweet nicknames on the heads and ears of all who cross my path. I don’t often hear it back, least of all initiated. Who cares? My students are all, to me, “my dear,” “sweet one” “buttercup” “dream boat” “ladybug” “lady doodle” or “doodlebugs” in the event of a mixed-gender situation. It’s more fun that way.

But I am rare to roll out “love”, and rarer still to hear it. Yet this fine baker, in all the pressed glory of her early evening whites and professionalism, did just that. It was, to my mind, like the sudden engagement of an affectionate arms race. I could not and would not let this gracious stand-off go without notice and so I fired back with good aim and only the slightest reduction in the stakes:

Me (startled): “Oh. Well, thank you. Yes, I’ll take one.” Pause. “Doll.”

It’s my go-to. “Doll”. So lovely and steeped, as it is, in a vintage air of the 1920s. I am not in the habit of calling a baker “doll” yet nor, critically, am I now, nor have I ever been, against it. Being addressed, from the jump, as “love” just levels all possible assumptions and puts me on a war footing of trust and affection.

The woman could have then slavered and spit all over my loaf, adored it with all her funk and bad intentions, and I likely would have regarded both it and her the same—lovely. Thank you. How disarming the simple act of choosing to speak kindly, to use words of connection and affection in, arguably, our least likely of places: just here, the baker’s counter.

Take the good with the bad, for I then felt somewhat ready to propose to the MTA conductor who cast a kindly glance on my subway ride home. And, truth be told, arguments could be made and tongues wagged both high and loud against the seeming abuse of our language, the displacement of context that otherwise robs our strongest words of their greatest meaning. Please. Put your ballyhoo away. Our time together—all of us—is entirely too limited. Do you realize it is already Thursday? That it’s nearly March? That it’s going to be 2020 in, roughly, 5 minutes? And that we all, in so many ways, live almost entirely in the past? Each of us, in his or her own past.

Stop it. Love is the alarm clock. Let’s use it and speak it and profess adoration to the baker and dear reverence to our trusted MTA conductor who transports us, all of us, to the last, safely home again. How total the effect of this one word, and how great its value in the pondering, for she is powerful, the most powerful in all the English language:

“Love.”