Liking It

I feel like a student today.

As the PA announcement voice clicks off over the loudspeakers, I quietly open a classroom door. It's not my classroom; my students are busily translating Shakespeare with their hardworking student teacher. I am using her independence and competence to visit other classes. I've seen most of my English colleagues teach at one time or another, so today I am following my students rather than my subject area. That's how I've found myself in Integrated Science.

The students, several of whom I see at other times throughout the day, look up as I enter, and their responses range from welcoming to abrasive.

"What are you doing here?"

"HEY!"

"Are you teaching today?"

"Why aren't you in class, Ms. D?"

"I'm just watching. Shh," I reply, shrinking into a desk at the back as the science teacher hands me a physics book, opened to the page of today's project.

"Today, we're simulating automatic trigger mechanisms!" she declares excitedly. I read the two-page lab instructions twice. They are brightly colored, written in several fonts to keep kids interested, but I don't understand. How can they make the lightbulb go on when the model car crashes, but not when it comes to a normal stop? How?

As the students get up to gather their supplies--wild supplies that include mousetraps and D batteries--my eyes wander over every inch of the deliciously unfamiliar room. Posters inspire me from one corner; they remind me to thank science if I use drugs to treat allergies or have never had polio, exhort me to keep learning and discovering. Drying racks are decorated with beakers and test tubes. The ceiling fixtures dangle with garlands of paper DNA and styrofoam and pushpin molecules. For a moment it's more than a visit; this classroom makes me feel like I'm in high school.

The kids are involved in their experiments with varying levels of commitment. I wander around and ask questions. I pause for a while with a disjointed collection of geniuses who describe themselves as "smart but not creative." They have decided to revive a broken mechanism left by the last class, but are overwhelmed with the meaningless motor attached to the top. Another group spends the majority of class trying unsuccessfully to get their lightbulb to turn on under any circumstances.

Further investigation leads me to an efficient team in the back, who creates a working car after only a few minutes.

"Wow!" I cry. "How does it work?"

An articulate young woman shows me the connection of bulb and battery, linked together with red and black wires.

"So," she concludes, "when the car crashes it pushes the battery in up here and that completes a circuit."

"So that's what a circuit is?" I ask, to the group's amusement. "I've never really known." I shrug as they giggle. "I don't teach science."

"Good thing."

I am mystified by circuits and the ninth grade textbook because of a decision to take a second year of chemistry during my last year of high school. In order to do this, I dropped the customary physics class most seniors took. I even remember asking the chemistry teacher for permission:

"Hey, can I take your AP Chem class?" It was a few days into the school year, only a handful of nonsensical lessons into physics class, but I had judged it and hated it already. Chemistry I liked. I wanted more of it.

He looked up from the lab he was preparing afer school, raised his eyebrows.

"Sure."

"OK, so I'll drop physics and..."

"No, no. You can't drop physics," he corrected.

"Why not?"

"You'll need physics if you're doing anything with science in college."

"Oh, that's fine then. I'm going to be an English teacher."

He scowled incredulously through lab goggles. "Really? English? The why are you taking more chemistry?"

I shrugged. "I just like it."

That's what I'm remembering today, in the ninth grade science class: liking classes because they were different and interesting and not what I would ever do in my life otherwise. I know it doesn't work for everyone and that I'll still spend days and days arguing for the relevance of finding rhyme schemes and reading fantasy stories. But for a moment, as I learn about circuits and watch ninth graders make light-up cars, I am excited by the possibilities of simply liking something new.

A Warning

Remarks to ninth graders will be taken seriously, no matter how flippantly they are delivered.

Example:

"If you win that fish, I'll put it in the classroom."

She will win the fish. Every time. And then you'll have a class fish. That's how it happens.

The Day of Math Without Calculators

The sounds of erasing fill the Japanese classroom where I am helping to administer the Math WASL. The Washington Assessment of Student Learning, criticized and fine-tuned since its introduction a decade ago, now takes eight days of approximately two hours each. Of those eight days, today remains the most stressful, even after the Math WASL was discarded a few years ago as the sole mathematical gauntlet that would allow students to graduate. Today is Day of Math Without Calculators.

Yesterday there were calculators, fortunate calculators for the ten out of sixteen students who neglected to bring their own and worked out the problems with state-issued four-functions. But on the Day of Math without Calculators, students are erasing, dredging through years of calculator-assisted learning for what they did before, as children, to arrive at solutions. I idly remember the day I found out about calculators. I thought it was sorcery; I tested the tiny machine with problems to which I knew the answers, then squealed with delight when the mindless, faceless rectangle got it right. Yet somewhere—somehow—the enchantment fades, until we, these tenth graders and I and everyone, look at them with cold utility. We treat calculators like many-buttoned limbs or rectangular mind-annexes, forgetting about them until days like today. On the Day of Math Without Calculators, we are all children and calculators are all magic.

As the students keep erasing, I return to the book I’ve been reading. I brought two today, actually: Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Before 8:00 AM I stumbled sleepily through the biblically repetitive cadence of the WASL instructions, murmuring several times that “on this portion of the test you may not use calculators, rulers, compasses, protractors, or other manipulatives.” Less than an hour later, I am still not awake enough for Steinbeck, whose cast of characters is so expansive and multi-generational that I have filled its inside covers with family trees decorated with question marks and names like “sinister husband from far away” or “the guy from King City.” That particular masterpiece will have to wait.

I have plenty of energy, however, for the casual, self-conscious narration of Arnold “Junior” Spirit, the “part-time Indian” of Alexie’s title. I have been charmed by nearly everything about this book, from its harsh, colorful and loving depictions of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation to the imaginative doodles of its cartooning protagonist (put on paper by the talented Ellen Forney). It is by turns hopeful and hilarious, moving and awkward. It captures the otherness of the world Arnold occupies, at the same time uniting him to the hope of all young people to belong to, explore and make sense of the lives they occupy.

An unusually vehement erasing distracts me just as I reach the last page of the novel. I look up and a young woman writes down an answer, swishes the hefty test booklet shut and carries it with disdain to the front of the classroom. With an irritated sigh she then throws herself back into the desk and stares at a point on the floor. I scan the final sentence, close the book, and hand it over to her. With a shrug she flips past thirty pages or so, then starts reading.

We did this yesterday, too. Yesterday, I had taken her cell phone, which she got out immediately after turning in the test. She had let out a muted wail of protest, which I recognized from her freshman year, when she was in my LA class. Then, we had gone through this ritual of cell phone confiscation several times a month, and each encounter was tempestuous, as if I were demanding her soul for eternity, instead of her cell phone for twenty-seven more minutes.

“You can’t have this out while we’re testing,” I whispered.

“Then what are we supposed to do?” she whined, glancing at the clock. There were fifty minutes left in the testing period, and no one was allowed to leave until they were up.

“Read a book,” I shrugged, holding mine up to demonstrate. She rolled her eyes so high that the pupils were lost, for a terrifying instant, beneath her forehead.

“I hate reading. You know that!”

I shrugged again, offering no solutions. If we were in my classroom, I would have had some ideas, or at least about seven different books she could have tried to read until the test ended. As it was, we were in a Japanese classroom, where the only books were in a language that neither of us could read. I had no books.

Not true, I reminded myself. I have two. And one of them is funny and accessible and charming. I shut it and placed it on her desk.

“It’s funny. You might like it.”

Another your-face-will-stay-that-way eye roll, and she picked up the book.

Now she opens it again, and I return to my seat at the front of the room and pick up with East of Eden. I realize, as I open to somewhere in the middle and begin to read about schoolteachers in California in the late nineteenth century, the need that everyone must feel for familiarity and some measure of understanding as we start to read. Sherman Alexie was my warm-up this morning, allowing me to transition into more difficult spheres with ease and confidence. Even proficient readers seek to understand what they are reading, try to find themselves in the words. I linger idly on the contrast of schoolteachers then and now, tasting the phrases as I go.

“And the schoolteacher was not only an intellectual paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher. Her children were presumed to have intellectual advantages both inherited and conditioned” (142).

I'm suddenly struck with the lenses through which each of us read. This passage makes me laugh because I am a teacher, reading and drawing comparisons between this Olive Hamilton and myself. Across the room, my former student reads Alexie with a completely different perspective than I do, possibly based on her life experiences, but definitely because she is simply nearer to ninth grade than I am now. And suddenly, just like that, I am thankful for the infinite variety offered in literature; on the edge of possibility, we might together exhaust the canon, but I will never tire of sharing books with others, seeing the stories in new eyes. There are as many stories as there are readers.

The erasing comes to a gradual halt at the end of the test, but by then most of us are reading novels. Away from the harsh one-answeredness of Math Without Calculators, a place where the only grace is offered by the eraser, forbidden from electronics to tempt unethical behavior, we escape into otherworlds of fiction.

"Beautiful but Awful" vs. Twilight

“These young-adult novels I’ve been Hoovering up are not light in the sense that they are disposable or unmemorable. On the contrary, they have all, without exception, been smart, complicated, deeply felt, deeply meant. They are light, however, in the sense that they are not built to resist your interest in them: they want to be read quickly and effortlessly” (91).

Nick Hornby, Shakespeare Wrote for Money




On a snowy Spring Break morning, I’m buying John Steinbeck’s East of Eden at Third Place Books. I thump it on the counter and the bookseller sighs affectionately, stroking its second-hand cover before warning that “this book made me hate the human race.” Taken aback, I peer down at the novel, the one praised by some of my most important and respected literary influences. I’ve been thinking vaguely that it looks longer than I expected; I hadn’t dreamed that it is heavy with the weight of human wickedness.

“Hate the human race?” I repeat blankly.

“I mean, it’s beautiful. But by the end of it, I just wanted to murder one of the characters. Really. I wanted to find her and kill her.”

I try—and fail—to find the appropriate response to this declaration. My lack of experience with Steinbeck leaves me unable to continue the conversation in any direction, so I’m relieved when she moves on to ringing up the other book. It is a recent release, a book that an English teacher might be forgiven for not having read and loved by the time she’s twenty-four. I mutter something about its being recommended by a student, then quickly put both books away, as the literate salesperson returns to praise of Steinbeck.

Even as I leave, though, I am mystified by her words about East of Eden, which I reduce down to “beautiful but awful.” Of course I have read dozens of books that express horror in terms of shocking beauty. If life itself can encompass both the lovely and the broken, I shouldn’t be surprised that excellent fiction reflects that truth. (I wonder why we love this so much. Is it because we are so jaded that we won’t believe in beauty unless it is wrapped around pain? Or because we would never take on extra pain, by reading it in books, unless it were expressed in a beautiful way?) This mini-review at the book counter reminds me of the distancing language of fine art and fashion critics. It also reminds me that I have been reading in a friendlier section of the literary world for a while. I’ve been reading books written for teenagers.

Though I’ve always been a secret fan of young adult fiction, my formal investigation of the genre started only this school year. Back in November, I was wandering around the classroom during a lesson and discovered six or seven novels on top of as many students’ desks. The desktop, territory technically forbidden to all but class materials, is sacred space for ninth graders. It’s where they like to keep thick binders covered with photos, or cell phones and iPods if they can get away with it. Books are almost never found up there. I was curious about the novels that the self-proclaimed book haters had left out, waiting for me to stop talking so that they could return to where they’d left off. I picked up the first one I found, eliciting a cry of dismay from the girl who was halfheartedly writing in her class journal.



“Don’t!” she wailed. “It’s Twilight!”

I scanned the cover, black and red and ominous. So this was the book that was causing all the commotion. The first in Stephanie Meyer’s series regarding the relationship between the human Bella Swan and the vampire Edward Cullen, Twilight and the other three novels have been changing hands several times a week in our school library. “The next Harry Potter!” kids cheered. “Trashy, but so fun,” shrugged the few adults I knew who had read the series. The most striking review had come more than a year ago, from a shy and brilliant student, whose approval is rare and whose taste I respect more than most. “They’re… they’re just really nice books,” he had sighed back then.

In an effort to become conversant in teenager, I started reading. Twilight, a frantic and repetitive account of Bella discovering and falling for Edward in the gloomy town of Forks, occupied most of a sick day in November, and I closed it with both alarm and curiosity. It tempted me to disagree with Mr. Hornby’s generous assessment of YA fiction: I found it neither smart, complicated, deeply felt, nor deeply meant.

Still, at the snail's pace of one book a month, I finished the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, a few weeks ago. I bored my friends and roommates with criticism that ranged from literary (“These are really terrifying if you attach any symbolism at all to them”) to petulant (“Honestly, if she uses the word ‘dazzling’ to describe Edward one more time…”). I skimmed, read ahead, read and reread the endings a long time before I had earned the knowledge: in short, I read the books poorly and haphazardly. But I was consumed with curiosity on a few points:

1. Why has Edward Cullen, a century-old vampire so arrogant that he constantly claims to know what’s best for his fragile human beloved, become the ideal man for legions of young (and even adult) women?

2. How have these books become so overwhelmingly popular without the aid of common literary devices, like narrative arc or interesting characters?

3. What does this popularity tell about the tastes of young people, who hate most other books and can’t get enough of these?

4. What on earth will happen to these flat characters in their always-cloudy world?

Having finished the series, I now concede that while each novel stands poorly on its own, taken together the four create a fairly compelling narrative. Chapters lead fluidly from one to the next, demanding to be read quickly in that magical suspension of disbelief that forms the foundation of escapist fiction. Even the characters, which I at first found bland and static, took on some shape, especially Edward the vampire and his werewolf competition, Jacob Black. The writing is straightforward and emotional, two magic components for young readers.

Yet, while the causes of the series’ popularity are no longer a mystery, it continues to concern me somewhat. The most common theme in the YA fiction I’ve read is the search for individual purpose in worlds that seem to package meaning in impossible forms. I read John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines at the same time as New Moon (Twilight #2), and I was struck by the contrast. Though both protagonists work through the world-shattering of ended relationships, Green’s Colin Singleton decides to engage on a quest to matter to the world in a larger sense than having had nineteen girlfriends named Katherine. Bella Swan, on the other hand, dissolves into a pool of nothingness, revealing how completely, in the short span of a few hundred pages, she found meaning solely in the worship of someone else. Throughout the novel I tried, again and again, to remember what Bella had been like before Edward, or outside of him, but I came up short. She is a character without tastes, interests, or hobbies. When, in the last few books, she invests in a friendship apart from Edward, the endeavor threatens her sense of self-worth, seeming to shake the foundations not just of her relationship, but her entire identity.

The Twilight Saga makes me wonder if writers of fiction for young people bear any responsibility to their readers for content or message. Children’s literature is governed mostly by the tastes of parents, who choose the books for their children. Perhaps toddlers would like more books with profanity and existential themes, but since they can neither read nor buy the books themselves, none are published. Young adults have enough disposable income to govern, at least in part, the content of books written for them. But are they discerning enough to realize what that content means? As an adult I can read The Great Gatsby as social commentary and Romeo and Juliet as a series of irrational decisions leading to tragedy; as a teenager, I might have taken them at face value, loving the romance in both.

While the treatment of sex and substance abuse in YA fiction is a charged issue, starting valid discussions about realism in the genre, the discussion of education provides more common ground. A reverence for education is perhaps the most absolute value preached to adolescents. In the Twilight books, the every-woman protagonist mocks the idea of higher education, consistently demeaning her own capacities by comparing herself to her vampire lover. Bella’s only concept of the future involves spending eternity with him by becoming an immortal vampire herself. In the fourth book, she makes a brief concession to attend college for the most bizarre reason imaginable, but this is quickly snuffed out by the demands of motherhood and immortality.

As I start East of Eden, I realize that young people are also looking for the mixture of beautiful but awful in the books they read, simply because they experience a world as intense and imperfect as the rest of us. I struggle with the worth of Twilight because it offers neither the heartbreaking beauty nor the critical awfulness of the best books. I have finished the series wanting to tell kids to read J.K. Rowling for fantasy, Jane Austen for romance, John Green for humor, and a variety of graphic novels for coherent reflections on the meaning of growing up. I probably will tell them, in fact. Or maybe I’ll stop complaining, and write something for them myself.