Bodice-Rippers And Other Children's Books

Jejak PandaKembali Lagi Bertemu Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
situs bandar cemeWhen I was a boy, I lived with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather used to sit at his desk writing reports in the evenings before he went to work. The other police officers used to call him the Midnight Cowboy because he was from Texas and he liked to work the night shift. When I’d wake up in the mornings he’d be at the kitchen table with coffee and a cigar, reading The Journal-Courier. When my grandmother got home from Saint Raphael’s Hospital in the afternoon, she would sit at the kitchen table, drink coffee, and read The New Haven Register.

When my grandparents renovated their house, my grandmother insisted upon an office/living room with floor to ceiling bookshelves on either side of a fireplace. On the shelves nearest her reading chair, my grandmother kept all her mystery and detective fiction. On the top shelf were the books I’d later learn were called bodice-rippers—you know, the ones whose covers showed buxom women falling out of their blouses as they ran from a handsome man in a flowing white shirt. If the cover was really inappropriate, my grandmother covered it with aluminum foil. I used to have a hard time getting the foil back on the books and the books back on the top shelf.

In time, my grandmother cleared off the lower shelves for me and filled them with kids’ books. I also had my own books on that shelf, the ones I wrote and illustrated on blue-lined note cards. I’d construct them at my grandfather’s rolltop desk, which was along the back wall just beyond the far set of shelves. I distinctly remember one I wrote about a pet turtle that had died.

I began elementary school in 1974. Ridge Hill School was new and reflected the prevailing philosophies of the day, with open classrooms and mixed age groupings. Even in first grade we changed teachers for subjects. Mostly I was grouped with second and even third graders. So it was a surprise to my mother when we moved to the shoreline and I was placed in a remedial class. My mother was told that I had been placed there according to standardized test scores. Being a first grade teacher herself, my mother demanded to see the test results. As soon as the eksekutif pulled out the answer sheet, all the adults could see the problem. I had made geometric patterns on the bubble-in sheet. Apparently, the teachers had made me take the test with the older kids, and told me I could join the first graders at recess as soon as I had finished.

Once I was re-tested and re-tracked, I excelled in school, and I loved my teacher, Mr. Brucker. On Fridays, students took turns bringing a book from home to read to our classmates. At Christmas time, I brought in my copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just gotten as a gift and had read the weekend before. Mr. Brucker had to stop me before I got any further than the title, and told me privately that I could read it to him during sustained silent reading time.

The following year I had a teacher that I didn’t like. One time, Mrs. Morasky gave us an assignment to write a short story. I wrote one about a race car driver named Spider. I began the story in the past tense, and then at one point wrote about an actual race Spider had been in, and said, “And this is how it sounded on that day.” From there I proceeded to narrate my story in the present tense. When I got my illustrated story back, it was littered with red marks from Mrs. Morasky’s pen. She had changed all my present tense verbs to past tense verbs. I had to go to her desk and show her that she had missed the spot where I had used a flashback, which explained the shift in verb tense. Mrs. Morasky was neither impressed nor amused. Damn teacher’s kid!

By sixth grade I was riding a bus with high school students, and I would look to see what they were reading in their English classes. I had a really pretty neighbor named Jen. One day I saw she was carrying The Red Badge of Courage, so I went and found it in the school library and read it. Several weeks later she was carrying A Tale of Two Cities, so I got that next, and struggled to finish it. I was just as good in math as I was in English, but I found math boring, so I would carry a book or two with me at all times, and in pre-algebra class the following year I would sit in the back and surreptitiously read novels under my desk. Mrs. Dommers never stopped me because I did fine on my tests.

I always loved books, I guess because I was always surrounded by them and by adults who were reading them. I didn’t even have to be reading a book to derive pleasure. I used to get excited just being in a library or book store. I had an aunt in New York. She was a school librarian and the widow of a lawyer. My bedroom during the six summers I lived with her was across the hall from my deceased uncle’s library. Most of his books were too sophisticated for me, but I liked to sit in there on a couch along the back wall. I would get a feeling of nervous excitement just being among all those books.

It’s fun now to watch my son and daughter develop a similar love of books and writing and stories. We have a library with floor to ceiling shelves, and kids’ books on all the low shelves. We created book nooks in corners of each kid’s room where they can sit and read quietly, and they do. Next year is first grade for Cormac, and I hope he gets a teacher he loves.

What Would Shakespeare Say?

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandar cemeI got in trouble with some parents one time for pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays were full of sex and violence. I said that I thought it was interesting that we make a big deal about all the sex and violence on TV while Shakespeare’s works are venerated as the highest literature. This ended up with a dad yelling at me, “Did you tell my daughter that Shakespeare’s plays were like reading porn?!” Clearly my words got a little exaggerated in transmission.

But think about the sexy lines in Romeo and Juliet or the comedies, the cross-dressing actors, the hyperbolic violence of the tragedies and histories, or the orange girls selling rum-soaked oranges to the groundlings. In fact, the Puritans shut down the Globe for licentiousness, and yet the plays that graced its stage are considered our highest literature.

I’ve had a few conversations lately that have made me think about the distinctions we make between fiction and literature, high and low art, or even among types of writing performed by teachers and students every day.

I’ve been interviewing candidates for the summer institute. One of the requirements for the institute is that the teachers compile a portfolio of original writing. So one of the questions I have asked is what kind of writing do the teachers think they will work on. This question always causes angst, and every year several teachers admit that they have a secret desire to write a novel. This year I got a couple of variations on this theme. One teacher admitted she desperately wanted to write chick lit and another that she wanted to write telenovela episodes. I think both women were waiting for me to frown discouragingly like some stereotypical movie professor, complete with tweed jacket and elbow patches.

Later I had a conversation with a student that was remarkably similar. She is writing her term paper on creative writing and the importance of its inclusion in English curricula. And like her soon-to-be colleagues, she was feeling guilt over the fact that she wanted to ask her students to write poetry. Considering Shakespeare’s sonnets, she asked if I thought it would be odd if, instead of asking her students to write an essay which analyzes Shakespeare’s relationship to his mysterious dark love, she were to ask her students to write a sonnet to someone they admired from afar. I told her I loved the idea. From a critical standpoint, what better way to learn the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet than to write one, and what better way to understand an apostrophe than to construct one? Critical skills aside, I said, the ability to write a good love poem is arguably a more useful life skill than the ability to analyze one.

But we never teach this way, do we?

English is always defended as a practical skill—everyone needs to be able to read and write, so get an English degree and then go to business school. The ability to write well will undoubtedly help you to make money! Or what gets emphasized are some of the most esoteric aspects of the field, like literary analysis. I write literary analysis, but since only 1% of the adult population of the US has a PhD, and only a fraction of that fraction are English PhDs, and even a smaller fraction of those are professors at research universities, that skill can’t get any more specialized.

Is that all English is, a nuts and bolts skill that will enhance more lucrative professions or a highly specialized skill used by only a fraction of a fraction of the population?

I was at an interdepartmental committee meeting with one of my colleagues from the English department, and we were asked questions about the practical uses of our fields outside of academia, and the other English professor got very exasperated and said, “None of this discussion is relevant to what I do! English is the largest discipline in the Humanities because it is the most important, and it is called the Humanities for a reason. I teach young men and women how to be human!” I wanted to applaud. I should have. Isn’t this what all narrative is, from oral stories like those codified in the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Gospels, Chaucer’s tales and Shakespeare’s plays, to stories and novels, movies, and TV shows? We listen to and tell stories to learn about the human experience and to thereby gain some insight into its mysteries. But try making that argument to the Board of Finance!

Sometimes we, and even the authors we love, are our own worst enemies in making such an argument. Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously railed against the “mob of scribbling women” that were producing popular fiction. William Faulkner was once told that his novels were too difficult for the average reader, and that many undergraduates would complain that they did not understand his prose even after three readings. Asked for a comment, Faulkner replied, “Try four.” But for every author who defends so-called high art, there are those like Norman Mailer who once defended TV sitcoms as just a modern form of story telling, and the only thing he protested were commercial interruptions because they break the narrative line. Faulkner himself wrote more than fifty movie screenplays, including those for To Have and To Have Not and The Long Hot Summer, which were the first films to bring together Bogart and Bacall and Newman and Woodward, respectively. Former UConn English Professor Scott Bradfield once offered a graduate seminar titled “Lit and Shit: What We Read and What We’re Supposed to Read.” And of course there’s Mark Twain’s observation that “a classic is a book that everyone praises and no one reads.”

So absolve yourself of guilt this weekend when you watch reruns of Law and Order or rent a romantic comedy, and don’t feel like you have to shut your door and draw the shades when you ask your students to write that love poem.

The Old Dance

Jejak PandaHai.. Bertemu Lagi Di Website Kesayangan Anda
situs bandarqI had a funny phone call the other day. I had to call the Teachers Retirement Board, and I ended up playing phone tag with this guy for several days till I finally reached him Thursday afternoon. I was wondering why this guy was returning my calls. My experience with most bureaucracies is that I might get one courtesy return call if I’m lucky. Turns out this guy was so good about returning my calls because he wanted to ask me which of the six Courtmanche brothers was my father. (My father is Gary, brother #5). The guy from TRB had graduated from Hillhouse High School in New Haven with my uncle Gordy (brother #2) in 1958. We had a nice conversation about New Haven and my uncles.

I hung up feeling like I’ve had this conversation before. For one thing, my family is huge. My father is one of ten siblings. I’m one of twenty-five first cousins on my father’s side. Many of us went into teaching: my father, my uncles Red, John, and Joe, my aunt Betse, and my cousins Brian, Jackie, Jennifer, Nikki, and Stephanie, while cousins Alicia and Michelle are finishing college and planning on going into teaching. Several cousins are still too young for college, including Joseph, who is in middle school. And if I want to get really crazy, I can throw in my mother, my step-father, an aunt on my mother’s side, and god-knows how many second cousins. I lost track.

Another fairly significant bunch went into law enforcement. One standing joke in the family is that you can’t spit in New Haven without hitting a Courtmanche. The other one is that everyone in New Haven knows at least one Courtmanche relative. Half the city has been taught by one of us and the other half has been arrested by one of us. Sometimes both. In truth, my uncle Wayne is a corrections officer in Cheshire, where there’s a prison for juvenile offenders. When he first began working there over twenty years ago, he was escorting a kid to his cell, and seeing the name on my uncle’s badge, the kid said, “Hey, you related to Mr. Courtmanche, the principal at Cross?” Wayne said, “Yeah, he’s my brother.” The kid said, “Hey, tell him hi. He’s a cool dude.” Like me, that was not the last time Wayne had that conversation.

Growing up in New Haven, I found it a blessing and a curse to have so many teachers and cops in my family. It was cool when a party got busted and some cop who knew me let me and my friends go without arresting us, but the thrill of such an opportunity was fleeting because I knew that cop would be calling my grandfather (a retired former chief of police) the next day, and I would catch hell on Sunday when I went to my grandparents’ for dinner. I also found that I made it through high school with virtually no traffic tickets, despite being a typically reckless male teen driver. Of course every Sunday my grandfather would take me aside in the driveway, pull out one of his ubiquitous notebooks, and tick off a laundry list of violations he had gotten calls about. He had even gone so far as to give me one of his old license plates for my car so that it was easy for his old friends on the force to keep track of me.

The experience of having lots of teachers in the family was less punitive—though it certainly could have been. I went to a Catholic high school, and we had two sister schools. One was the now-closed Saint Mary’s in New Haven. One day when we boys got out early on a nice spring day (OK, maybe we cut our afternoon classes) a bunch of us peeled off our jackets and ties and drove downtown to St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s had the unfair reputation of having lower academic standards than our other sister school, and so in our adolescent minds we correlated this with elevated levels of promiscuity among the girls. Thus the inspiration for our sojourn that spring afternoon. We snuck into the school and got caught by a bunch of the nuns, who dragged us into the head nun’s office. She was like the principal and mother superior rolled into one. I was placed in a line before her desk with five of my friends (some got away). We felt like we were on trial. Then, after several minutes of awkward silence in that very warm office, the head nun shouted, “John, I’m deeply disappointed to find you involved in these shenanigans!” We all looked over at our friend John, whose head was hung especially low. Then John replied, “I’m sorry Aunt Joan. Please don’t tell Mom!” And at that moment I thought, my god I know that feeling! I should point out that John is now a cop in New Haven. Funny how these things come around.

It makes me think of the Physician’s Tale from Chaucer, in which the physician tells of a knight who is looking to hire a governess for his beautiful daughter, who has just turned twelve and is at risk of becoming “too soon ripe and bold.” And the physician says that he has advice for governesses: “And you mistresses in your old life/that lord’s daughters have in governance,/never take of my words no displeasure:/think that you be set in governings/of lords’ daughters only for two things:/Either for you have kept your honesty,/or else for you have fallen in frailty,/and know well enough the old dance,/and have forsaken fully such mischance for evermore.” He then tells us that the best governess is like a poacher who becomes a game keeper, and sure enough it is the formerly wanton woman that the knight hires to be governess to his daughter. She is best prepared to recognize the perils to which the young girl might fall.

Brooding Male Protagonists And Summer Vacation

Jejak PandaSelamat Membaca Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
judi bandarq onlineI’ve been so swamped this week with simpulan exams, planning for the Connecticut Student Writers Recognition Night, the Summer Institute (the Orientation Day is next Saturday), and the Student and Teacher Writing Conference that I feel like haven’t had a minute to even think about subjects to write about this week. And today is so beautiful that I am immensely distracted by the sunlight falling upon the Japanese Maple outside my window and the cool breeze gliding in.

I stayed at work till almost midnight last night reading my students’ simpulan projects. The students in Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers work in groups to write a curriculum for a course of their own design that implements their ideas for teaching, especially teaching writing. Curricula is truly a new genre for these students. They’ve never read one before, little yet tried to write one, and they get very frustrated with themselves when it doesn’t come as easily as they expect writing to come to them.

Nonetheless, they always do a decent job, and occasionally produce something really awesome. I still remember one curriculum from five years ago called Exploring the American Immigrant Experience Through Literature that was just terrific. The former head of the social studies department at my old high school used it as an exemplar for her teachers. This year I read some good projects on the American Dream, Social and Political Change, Representations of Power, and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British and American Women Writers. The students who designed the Social and Political Change curriculum conceived of the ambitious goal of studying the evolution of media alongside developments in society, politics, and literature. So for the Puritan period they have the students studying sermons, and during the Revolutionary period studying broadsides, right up to blogging and social networking during the contemporary era, which they brought right up to the election of President Obama. The students took on a little more than they had the time to bring to fruition, but I really love the concept. One of their central ideas was to have the students learning about these genres by writing them. Imagine, in the first quarter students would be writing and delivering sermons, and by the fourth quarter they’re creating facebook pages with live-streaming blogs embedded within. Pretty cool idea if you ask me.

The young women who wrote the British and American Women Authors curriculum realized they had some serious knowledge gaps in their chronologies, but now they’ve made reading lists for themselves for the summer. My favorite email from them was the one in which they asked if I thought Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein had enough in common to be grouped together for the 1800-1850 British unit. I wrote back “Bertha, Heathcliff, and the Monster! What a terrific trio of characters!” In each case there’s an idealized Romantic character who is transformed into a tragic and vengeful killer (or would-be killer) by the rejection and mistreatment of his or her suitor. I was telling one of my friends about this proposed unit, and she wondered aloud why emotionally maimed men like Rochester and Heathcliff are so attractive to women, not just the Jane Eyres and Catherine Earnshaws of the world, but to real, living, historical women, too. In a recent article, Gina Barreca asked similar questions about the attractiveness of a character like Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. I guess it’s no more consternating than why men fall in love with the Hester Prynnes of literature and life, or with someone like my all-time favorite fictional character, Remedios Buendia from One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of whose suitors falls to his death just trying to get a glimpse of her showering. I guess those are questions to address in the curriculum.

At this point, while most of my colleagues here at UConn are finishing up the semester and getting ready for summer, I am entering what is our busiest time of year at the CWP, but I am looking forward to working with a stellar bunch of teachers at this year’s Summer Institute, and doing an independent study with one of my talented undergraduates. But since the semester is over here and the demands of the Summer Institute will be so great, I plan to write this column less frequently for a little while. I will resume weekly columns again in the fall.

My thanks to everyone who has been reading all year. I know there are more readers than is indicated by the postings because so many of you email me or mention to me in person that you enjoyed this or that column. I hope to see some of you at Recognition Night May 12, from 4-7 PM in Jorgensen Auditorium, or at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference on May 20. If I don’t, endure and enjoy the end of the year, have a great summer, and I will be back regularly in September.

Walkers

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Di Blog Kesayangan Anda Dan Selamat Membaca
bandarq terbaikI was going to start this first post of the year by complaining about this or that educational proposal. And there certainly are plenty of goings-on to critique, but then I thought that, rather than set a negative tone by beginning the year tilting at educational windmills, I would try to begin on a positive note. So here goes.

I was saying to my wife the other day that I really don’t like summer, and I don’t know why I ever pretended I did. It is too hot and too humid. I burn in the sun in a matter of minutes. There’s too little structure for me. I like fall, and I’ve always liked fall. I like the sunny days without humidity and excessive heat. I like the cool nights with a window open and the air conditioner off. I love to jog down the street and watch the sunlight fall through the golden leaves of a slowly turning maple tree. I love to feel a slight chill in the air and to need a sweater. I love the smell of wood smoke. And I love school. I always loved school.

I have wonderful memories from kindergarten and first grade when I walked to school with a pack of neighborhood kids that slowly increased in size the further along we marched and the closer we got to school grounds. My neighbors Gary and Walter and I would start out together. Walter was Gary’s older brother, and he received fifty cents a week from my grandmother for walking with me to and from school each day. I would walk six houses to Gary and Walter’s and then we would proceed up Fenway Drive, picking up Walter’s best friend Michael, who would run across the street to meet us, then David on the corner at the top of the hill, and finally Reggie and Joyce at the intersection. Joyce was our only female walker. From there we would cut through a neighbor’s yard, running alongside his garage, and we’d pop out in his side yard where he had an apple tree we sometimes stole apples from. Most of our neighborhood was post-WW II construction, and the area had been covered in orchards before the war. Many of us had fruit-bearing trees in our yards, mostly apple, but I had a pear tree and two plum trees in my yard, and my grandmother and aunt spent the fall baking apple pies and pear torts. We always cut through that one neighbor’s yard because his house fronted a T-intersection, and we would walk along the intersecting street to where it met School Street. From there we turned right and marched onto the grounds of Ridge Hill School, which had been built in 1969, the year I was born.

I know my memories are idyllic, and I know that my experience with this walking pack of boys wasn’t always so bucolic and idealized. We argued and fought. I hated Walter’s friend Michael, and resented that Walter, who was usually good to Gary and me, could degenerate into a bully around Michael. And we were yelled at and chased on more than one occasion by the neighbor whose yard we cut through, but mostly I have good memories of the time, and wish I had been able to continue to walk to school after we moved out of the New Haven area when I was seven.

This fall my daughter has begun preschool and my son has begun first grade. We live two houses down from his school and have a crushed stone sidewalk in front of our house. He’s a walker like I was, though he doesn’t have a pack of neighborhood kids to join. Most of our neighbors are older, grandparents now, and the few little kids who live in the area take the bus or are dropped off by car by parents who can’t or won’t enjoy the walk I cherish. School doesn’t begin for my son till nine, and he wakes up around 6:30, so while the weather remains warm and pleasant we are spending our mornings exploring the neighborhood.

My son turned six earlier in the week, and he received several new books on dinosaurs, fossils, and wildlife. He usually tells people he wants to be a scientist, an archaeologist, or a paleontologist. He was reading one of his new books this morning and asked if we could go look for fossils later. I reminded him that this would have to take place in the late afternoon or early evening since we all had school. He was a little disappointed by this, so I put down my paper and we put on our shoes and headed outside. It was eight and we had close to an hour to ourselves, so we walked up to a field behind a neighbor’s house where there used to be a pig farm. Cormac and I scoured the ground looking for fossils. We found lots of cool rocks, some charred wood, old scraps of pottery and porcelain, and three small bone chips, the spongy remains of the marrow calcified into a hard, porous substance. He was delighted; he had a treasure for show-and-tell. We hurried home to change into dry shoes, wash our hands, and then walk down to school. We were early enough for Cormac’s teacher to find him an old butter tub to put his treasures in, and I left him there at his seat waiting eagerly for the time when he would be able to show his finds to his new friends.

I walked home slowly along our sidewalk, beneath the old maple and oak trees that line our street. It was foggy rather than sunny, and I walked a little slow, reluctant to get home and break my reverie. I enjoyed the oddly pleasant mix of early morning autumn air—dampness and leaf-smell intermingling with diesel exhaust from the school buses—and then got into my car and drove to the university.

Less Is More, Or The Big Paycheck

Jejak PandaHallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Website Ini
judi bandarqI wrote a nostalgic piece last week, but I can’t do that two weeks in a row. Today, I have to comment on a conversation I had with a dishwasher repairman.

My dishwasher may be dying. It still washes the dishes and it isn’t spraying water across the kitchen floor (it did that once before and I had to change a filter), but it has been making this god-awful high-pitched screeching sound, which is why I have been doing dishes by hand all week. The repair guy was scheduled to come today, but like the cable guy, he gave me a four hour window of time during which he might come, and then he called with about twenty minutes left in that window to say he’d be arriving in thirty minutes, and then he arrived fifty-five minutes later—not that I’m bitter, as my colleague Gina would say.

OK, so Tim was a nice guy as appliance repairmen go, and while he tinkered around with my dishwasher he struck up conversation, and he asked me if I had to take the day off today to be there to meet him, and I said, “Sort of.” Now, I like the fact that my job allows me to be able to take a day like today for things like meeting a repairman coming to my house, but I hate being asked about it because I know what’s coming. It’s like when people ask teachers what they do and as soon as you say, “I’m a teacher,” they make some comment about all your time off and how nice and easy it must be to get out of work so early each day—yadda, yadda. You all know the conversation. Fact of the matter is, I rarely take days, and I only take days when I have things like repairmen who give me four hour windows of time and then arrive an hour late, or doctor’s appointments, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I’m a workaholic. I check my email in hotel lobbies on vacation. Heck, I’m writing this at 11 PM. So I know what he must be thinking, and I don’t want to get into it because I fear that I’ll sound like Hamlet’s mother, protesting too much. But then he surprises me by saying his mother was a first grade teacher, and I’m thinking, “All right. I can probably talk about education with this guy without the misperceptions and the innuendos.” But then he says, “Hey, can I ask you about something? What do you think of the dedication of teachers today? Is it the same as it was years ago?”

Well, I don’t know how to answer this question. I’m not THAT old, and I haven’t been teaching even twenty years quite yet (18 or 19 if you go back to student teaching), so I say something along the lines of how teacher preparation is much more rigorous than it once was, and the standards are higher, and the required content knowledge is greater. But he says, “No, I mean dedication to the field. Are they willing to do the things teachers used to do?” So I must be looking at him with a funny look, you know, my head tilted sideways like a dog does or something, and he proceeds to clarify that it was his opinion, gleaned from his mother, that teachers were more dedicated back in the day, and that these days they’re just in it for the paycheck. OK, now I don’t know where to begin responding. So I say, “Are you suggesting that in the good old days teachers worked harder because they were paid less?” And I’m thinking, Would you have gotten here about three hours earlier than you did if I paid you less? But I bite my tongue. He clarifies by saying no, not exactly, but that he thinks that when the pay was low only the truly dedicated went into the profession, and these days too many teachers just want the big paycheck. That’s what he said. The BIG PAYCHECK. He then proceeded to tell me a second-hand story about some student-teacher his mother had years ago who refused to do all sorts of unspecified things she was asked to do and how she just wanted the short hours, the vacation time, the pay. Et cetera.

Once again, I don’t know where to begin with this guy. For one, if the paycheck was so great and all, why do we have shortage areas in just about every area? At the secondary level, I believe Social Studies is the only non-shortage area. Two, why do so many teachers I know have second jobs tending bar, waiting tables, running a Christmas tree farm, or selling perfume in a department store? Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re paid well and that tenure, even though it is intended to ensure our professional rights, also functions to give us a great degree of job security. But most of the teachers I know work their asses off and usually spend their vacations (and weekends and evenings) grading and planning. If we got paid a decent hourly wage we’d make significantly more than our salaries. I’m sure everyone knows the old joke about getting five dollars an hour for babysitting your students. If you had 100 students and saw each one for an hour a day you’d gross $90,000 at the end of a 180 day school year. How many of you make that?

The New York Times ran an editorial today by Timothy Egan titled “Lesson Plans, 2009.” It’s a cynical piece that the Times staff chose to highlight with a box that says “It’s back to school with bad teachers, bored students, and baffling parents.” In it, teachers are accused of being overpaid, selfish, incompetent, insubordinate, lazy, and—to beat all—drunk. Nice. I finished reading the column and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if they paid us all less …”

Journeys, Innocence, And Suffering

Jejak PandaHallo Ketemu Lagi Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
daftar bandarqEach Fall I have been teaching American Literature To 1880, where I can teach Hawthorne, but this time I was given a section of the companion course, American Literature Since 1880. What’s more, because budget cuts have made it necessary to fill seats, I have a section of forty students rather than my customary nineteen. I was initially concerned that it would be difficult to have a decent discussion with so many students, but so far the class has been going well, and I have a good dozen students who participate regularly and intelligently.

This past week we have begun reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! I love the novel, but I had to wonder if interest in the book would fall along gender lines. I’m pleased that it hasn’t. Anyway, one of the reasons I love the novel so much is that it is deceptively simple yet filled with many seemingly insignificant lines that, upon closer inspection, are simply pregnant with meaning and significance. My favorite line in the book, and perhaps my favorite line (or at least one of my favorite lines) in all literature is uttered by a character named Carl Linstrum. Observing changes that have taken place on the Nebraska prairie during his long absence, Carl observes, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” I like to throw that line to my students and ask them what they think the two or three human stories are, and then to ask them to identify those archetypal stories in works from different periods, right up to the contemporary era.

Over the years I have gotten lots of good responses to this question, but the students’ initial answers are usually pretty generic. They suggest things like Rags to Riches or Coming of Age, which are fine answers, but I press them to be more specific. Inevitably they want to know what I think the stories are. I preface my answer by saying that I don’t think my two or three are THE answers, but I tell them that there are a few stories I see recurring in literature more often than any others. To me, these are the stories of Odysseus, Adam and Eve, and Christ. To phrase them generically, I could say Life is a Journey, Loss of Innocence, and Deliverance through Suffering. One could even say that the generic examples I gave above from students are versions of these three stories. Coming of Age is essentially the story of Adam and Eve, and Rags to Riches is a materialistic version of the story of Christ.

Nonetheless, it’s a great question to use as a framing device for the course, and in fact the selesai paper the students have to write is on a version of this question. I began this fall’s course with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, and I use the line from Hemingway that “all modern American literature comes from” Huck Finn. I said to the students that I agree with Hemingway to the degree that I think Twain is using one of these three basic human stories (the story of Odysseus) but that he is telling a modern American version of that one human story. (I might argue that thirty-four years earlier Hawthorne had done the same thing with the story of Adam and Eve and The Scarlet Letter, but that’s an argument for another day). So for the selesai paper, after we have read nine major works of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century works, the students have to tell me an American version of one of the two or three basic human stories. They have to name the human story, identify its manifestation in at least two of the works we’ve read, and then connect it to a contemporary text (which can be fiction, nonfiction, print, film, whatever).

Half way through the second book of the semester, the students seem to be getting the hang of it, and this is, in part, because O Pioneers! is such an exemplary text for what I’m talking about. We had a great discussion this past Wednesday about how Cather was alluding to both the stories of the Garden of Eden and Pyramus and Thisbe, and treating them as versions of each other. At one point there is a beautiful description of an orchard (the apple tree from the Garden of Eden) bordered on one side by a Mulberry hedge (like the Mulberry tree from Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe) and on the other side by a new field of wheat (good old American ‘amber waves of grain’). I asked the students if they could see how this one paragraph of description gives readers a tableau that provides an interpretive image of Cather’s idea of a singular human story and three permutations of that story—one Biblical, one Classical, and one American.

I was especially pleased the following day when one of the students from my class stopped me in the hallway outside my office to tell me that her professor for her Milton class came in and wrote just the word “typology” on the board, and then proceeded to explain to the students what typology was and how Milton was using it in Paradise Lost, and, as the student said, she suddenly realized that I had been talking about basically the same thing without using the word itself. And she was right. Nice when that sort of thing happens.

For Tuesday, I have an invitation from a colleague to sit in on her Beat Literature class. They’re discussing The Catcher in the Rye and its possible influence upon Kerouac’s On the Road, two books about disaffected male youth—another human story that seems to repeat itself as if it never happened before. Can you think of a Biblical or Classical precedent?