A 21-Year-Old English Nerd Learns to Read

So, this past semester I took a class called "Expository Writing II" in which we were allowed to write whatever we wanted, as long as it was, "nonfiction prose." So I wrote blog posts. But none of them actually made it onto my blog, because I was busy tearing them apart and nitpicking and trying to make my professor's suggestions sound the way I wanted them to sound. So honestly, I edited most of them to death and don't really feel like posting them any more.

But I'd like to publish a few survivors over the coming weeks, followed probably and hopefully by some thoughts on my recent trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and also on some books I've been reading. Because it's summer! And that means time to write things that aren't for school! Even though these technically were for school... but you get the point...

I am future English teacher. Fear me.

If when speaking to you I wrinkle my forehead and look up and to the right, I am silently correcting your grammar. My free reading list a) exists, and b) last year included Austen, Atwood, Fitzgerald and Vonnegut. I didn't choose the literary life. It spotted me in second grade reading group getting pumped about the social commentary of Andrew Clements' Frindle and declared me an indisputable nerd. 

Second grade Frindle fans become English teachers’ pets in high school, and then they go to college and study English Ed to one day make their own pets of likeminded students and torture the rest with social commentary and grammar correction. It's the circle of literary life. 

When I'm sitting around on summer vacation reading Fitzgerald, I'm usually analyzing and dreaming of classroom discussions. I am an analyzing addict. But I've recently discovered a phenomenon that challenges the foundations of my nerdy perspective and I think, maybe, will make me a better English teacher.

This year in my string of literature courses, I found myself in "Children’s and Adolescent Literature." This will be great, I thought. I'll read teen fiction and think of new ways to torture teenagers. But I was surprised to find that, since this was a literature and not an education course, the professor expected me to read for myself. That meant, she challenged, not analyzing but just feeling and identifying and reading. 

It seemed an unfair request. And then. We read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. 

No, this was not my first time reading Harry Potter. I was a proper child of the phenomenon. But this time I read it with the lens of my course's foundational question: What makes good children's literature? 

And I was stymied. Traveling through the familiar corridors of spells and moving portraits, I kept my eyes open for symbols, characterization, themes, and the undeniable spark of greatness. Harry Potter is incontestably a great work of our time. But I could not for the life of me figure out why. What made this book so different? I came up with only one explanation: it was magic. 

So I started thinking about other literary wizards, and that led to John Green, an author I consider the most realistic and impactful voice in current young adult fiction. And I imagined approaching any one of his novels (several of which are taught in high school classrooms) with an analytical eye. 

The young adults John has created (yes, we're on a first name basis) stared out from the pages at me with the same defiance as Harry. There was little for me to divine from the text, and this time I identified two reasons. A) The books did not lack symbolism. But the symbols did not need explanation. Right there on the page, they made clear sense and served their purpose. B) They were written in a way that openly invited the reader to make of it what you will. They contained within their numbered pages an infinite space: room for the perspectives and understandings of a wide array of readers.

I am newly awed by these remarkable works of fiction that defy even my propensity toward analysis. They are good stories, well told. They stand alone. 

I am reminded of Mark Twain's note that opens The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." 

I never understood that. I think I know now what Twain was trying to say. I'm not willing to relinquish all my English class analysis in the face of Huck Finn. But I am willing to treat those English class things as tools to refine my students' and my understanding of the great, not as building blocks to create it. Greatness is just story. 

John Green, too, sees fit to preface his The Fault in Our Stars with a plea to his readers. He writes, "This book is a work of fiction. I made it up. Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide in a story. Such efforts attack the very fact that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species." 

This nerd turned English teacher will always like symbolism. I will always like anything that helps me understand and appreciate literature’s delectability. But the ability to analyze symbols is not the most important thing I will give my students. That gift will be made-up stories that matter. 

Nykerk Hall of Music

Music expresses that which cannot be said, and upon which it is impossible to keep silent. - Victor Hugo

"How was Chile?" (Variations include How was Argentina, Spain, South America and wherever you were)
"It was great. It's good to be back though."

This conversation, inevitably, is the current framework to my life. I'll admit to being a little tired of it, but all things considered, I don't mind too much. Mostly because both of those assertions are fundamentally true.

My trip was great. It was a whole host of other adjectives as well, but great is an adequate descriptor. And it is, refreshing, energizing, comforting, strange and wonderful to be back at Hope.

Hope College is, I think, a much more complex place than its tulip-toting image. And there are aspects, especially in regards to the unstated expectations this environment puts on us in social and spiritual arenas, that I was more than ready to leave behind last fall. And to those who are experiencing similar frustrations, my advice is just that: leave.

Make it happen. I know there is scheduling and finances and countless other excuses, but I firmly believe you have control over your priorities and if travel is something you truly desire there is always a way. Take a May Term, go on an immersion trip, spend a semester, a summer, a week outside the bubble. Yes I said it. I acknowledge the existence of the bubble. I spend a lot of time arguing against that concept, because I believe that your "bubble" is your personal experience and bemoaning being trapped in it is useless, because there will be one wherever you go. I had a bubble in Chile. But it was a different bubble. And that can make all the difference.

I'm going to get off my Study Abroad soap box now because what I really want to talk about is how grateful I am now to be here at Hope. In these first days of the semester, which I think hold more novelty and promise for me than they did even Freshman year, I am blessed by the expected and the unexpected.

I relish returning to the most infinitesimal of routines.

In Dimnent Chapel, the preacher says, "This is the word of the LORD," and I join the murmur - "Thanks be to God."

In my cantankerous old car, I turn familiar corners without thinking.  

In the smooth-cornered classrooms, I finger the pages of syllabi, read over education department policies (In English! I still marvel). I breathe in the smell of school.

The ice crystals that formed on the inside glass of our front door

But then - surprise! The snow pours down and they give us real live actual snow days, for crying out loud. The unexpected extended vacation is delectable, my new roommate and I hole up in our lovely house and watch old episodes of "Downton Abbey."

At the evening worship service, Sara, a senior from Honduras, is invited to read the communion rites in Spanish. My ears perk up and I drink in the silky sounds like Chilean wine.

What I am trying to say is that I am delighted to live for a short time in this strange series of moments where the most familiar things seem new.

Here's just one more:

I swing open the door to Nykerk, pick up a thick black folder and perch on the edge of a red backed auditorium seat. The Second Altos, few and proud, are glad to see I have returned. The director goes to the piano, plays a series of notes. It's just a warm-up, one I've sung a thousand times.

But this time, when I open my mouth, I am spellbound. The sound swells around me, imperfect, we have just begun to breathe. But that point of beauty, one harmony of many voices - I'll never be able to put it into to words.

Thus ends the first semester I'd gone without singing in a choir since the third grade. I have returned to the music - and the textbooks, and the snow.

Thanks be to God.

After it warmed up, I went for a Sunday evening walk. Sunset over frozen Lake Macatawa

Poem #4

I actually wrote this poem a year ago, but its one of my favorites and I thought I would post it to celebrate my return to the land of windmills and snow. And maybe motivate me to blog again. It's good to be home.

Holland, MI

I live here.

City of south mitten territory.

And I am always writing of islands,

full of temples and wet tropical heat.

Here we boast impervious to any weather,

when it is 50 degrees in February and snows in April.

Start downtown – where the coffee shops two blocks apart

with letters for names spar lazily for customers.

The streets lined with trees planted by my great-great-grandfather.

Last spring when the tulips bloomed early so only stems were left

by the time the festival brought elephant ears

and wooden-shoed dancers to the streets.

Summer on its heels and the street performers on Thursday nights:

Justin’s card tricks draw a crowd

of round-faced children and their incredulous grown-ups.

There is a belly dancer and a human statue,

and seafoam toffee sweet and spongy from the Peanut Store on the way down 8^th Street.

On the other side of the school, cut across the tracks

to the donut shop on the corner by the train station.

The Amtrak whistles by going south to Chicago,

while students slump together in booths at 2AM when everyone knows

the donuts are hot and fresh and if you ask the man behind the counter

in boxers and an apron he will tell you

about the refugee camps on the way from China.

The neighborhoods thick with 1^st and 3^rd and 4^th Reformed Churches.

You run out of corners at Lake Macatawa 

with the piers full of boats and Kollen Park.

On 17^th Street with Mi Favorita Grocery where you can buy paletas,

and bicycles the local hoodlums strip for parts sit like skeletons in side yards.

Spanish spills from front porches,

families lucky not to live in the migrant camps

who will still leave for Texas in winter.

Temple Tattoos which caters to the impulsive decisions of college students

and high schoolers smelling of pot –

follow them to Smallenburg Park next to the rescue mission,

where the skate park is not quite as good as the one they tore down

so the college could erect a new music building.

Take River Avenue to the north side of town,

past all the buildings plastered with Dutch names:

Dykstra, Dewitt, Van Raalte, VanAndel, VanAnything.

When the houses emerge on the other side they are big and brick-solid.

These are lake folk,

sending their children to schools with Spanish emersion programs,

and toting their little blonde heads to the beach

where the dunes rise and the water is cold and unsalted.

In the winter when the lighthouse ices over

and the waves freeze strange and artic.  

Over the rise the DeVos mansion sprawls like something medieval.

Here we speak of bubbles, which must have shimmering walls.

We point to home on our hands and

put on firm Midwestern pride like winter jackets.

In the morning the lake effect pours relentless from the skies,

blanketing the numbered streets from 1^st to 152^nd.

The train tracks, the forgotten bicycles and the trees downtown. 

All of Holland, covered in snow.