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.
