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.

The Window Watchers

'Nevermind, ' I want to cry out.
'It doesn't matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything's
a fragment and everything's not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can't separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow! '

-Al Zolynas, from "Love in the Classroom"

When I look up from the yellow legal pad where I've been recording our class discussion, his eyes are out the window again. I'm irritated. This is one of five students who has made this conversation--the creation of a class constitution to govern an unruly fifth period--necessary in the first place. With only fifteen students (and twelve showing up on any given day), the five denizens of distraction hold the destiny of fifth period in their never-still hands. And so, today, I'm sitting at the front of the room and filling out a chart to answer two essential questions:

What do you want (from this class)?

What are you willing to do (and stop doing) to get it?

It has been a while since I've been at the front of the classroom. I've faded into the background in order to give a teaching intern experience teaching and managing ninth graders. I've still been in the room, for the most part, but my existence there has been strictly silent. In all of those speechless hours, the Students and Teachers have once again grown distinct in my mind. My intern and I are in the well-defended Teacher camp, sternly administering punishments and directing discussions, while the rest have melted into the Student masses, loving nothing more than free time and noise for its own sake. They are not pleasant categories, and I've entered today's discussion with a scowl, despite my genuine pleasure at teaching again. The endless distraction of this student merely deepens the frown, as I follow his eyes to the window.

Outside, snow is falling sparsely. He loves all weather, this student with his averted gaze. He covers blank papers, backs of notebooks, and the margins of assignments with weather maps, complete with coded precipitation, wind direction and speed, and high and low pressure areas. Snow, however, is a special passion, and throughout this winter of more snow than usual he is often the first to tell me when flurries are on the horizon.

"Hey, over here!" I redirect.

"Hm, what?" the weatherman replies.

"So, what kinds of things will help us get to these goals up here?"

"Which ones are the goals?" someone asks.

"Um, number one. 'What do you want?' So, what kind of behavior?"

The kids stare at me blankly, more and more of them stealing glances to the windows. I look out again, and it's falling faster than before, a misty white veil between our windows and the science building and the trees across the street.

"Snow!" he sighs from the back row.

"Wow, snow," I repeat. "OK, you can look at the snow, but we need to finish this..."

The students shrug agreement, dragging mental attention back to the constitution we're writing. They call out a few helpful behaviors--coming on time, listening, doing homework every night--and I jot them down in a column labeled "HELP". This might help, I think hopefully, even as I ponder how a behavior like "Come to class on time" helps accomplish a goal as grand as "Better understand the meaning of life" (an actual desire of a fifth period student). But still, worth a try.

"OK, now what kind of behaviors will keep you from getting everything you want out of class?" I write "HURT" over a new column, draw a line, waiting for answers without looking at them. When I finally do, it's only as I'm repeating the question.

"Come on, folks, what kind of..." But when I look up to learn why they aren't answering, I understand at once. The snow is cascading past the window, so fast and weightless in front of the thunder-darkened sky that our whole classroom might be suspended in the stars. "Wow. That's... that's really distracting." It's all I can say before I, too, fall into mesmerized silence, staring out at the much-loved Seattle snow.

In an instant my caricatured Teachers and Students fall to pieces, the bizarre exaggerations of a teacher who's spent too much time outside of the classroom lately. Back with them, sharing a snowfall, I remember that we're in this together, all of us, learning every day.

It's a student who moved from Utah in September who breaks the spell.

"Snow!" he scoffs. "Whatever!"

"Shh." And I can't tell how many of us said it, as we blink against the black and white swirling around.

New Levels

“Is this Harry Potter?”

It’s the question most asked in the Boys’ Lodge, as boys of all shapes, ages, and sizes come trickling in through the heavy-falling snow, finished with their worship session and full of plans for the upcoming talent show. They blow in from the storm, shake off the snowflakes with whole-body convulsions as they stomp through the living room, and turn to the glowing blue of the TV, where three women, three tubs of cookie dough, and three foil-covered cookie sheets are working hard. We’ve been making cookies all evening, and having finished Prince Caspian a bit ago I slipped back over the path to the Girls’ Lodge, holding my breath through music and sermon to rummage through Erika’s bag to get the next feature of the evening, the next amusement as we bake cookies for 85 teenagers.

“Yep. Number six.”

“Six isn’t out yet.”

“Oh, right. Five, then.”

“Wait, are you making cookies? Can I have one?”

Erika emerges from the kitchen, where she’s been overseeing the erratic camp ovens with their precious treats, a steaming cookie on her spatula. The boys’ eyes widen, their hands extend like urchins’, and Erika tips the hot cookies into them with a grin.

“Enjoy!”

Soon we have gathered a number of disciples, and their comments are an amusing mixture of Harry Potter commentary (“Ugh. I hate that Umbrage lady!”) and requests for more cookies.

After almost four years as a small group leader for five girls at Bethany Community Church, this is my tenth winter retreat. I’ve come as a student, all mixed up in the thrill of going away and the drama of boys and learning to ski, and as a leader, full of enthusiasm and eager to draw everyone in to the spirit of frenzied excitement that seems so integral to all youth retreats. This year, for the first time, I am coming as neither: I am the cook. One of three cooks, actually, I have spent three days helping to prepare and serve food to kids and leaders from the city, reveling in the glory of time in the snow without cell phones.

This moment, like so many others this weekend, reminds me of something else, taking me so quickly back to being a child at another mountain retreat chalet, where I assisted my mother in silence while she prepared French bread pizzas or baked potatoes to the college kids listening to my father’s Bible teaching in the living room. I remember handing hot cookies to boys twice my height as they came in from the cold, when they patted my head and their faces bore that same amazement that these ones do tonight.

Still, as much as it recalls childhood, this weekend stands in striking contrast to more recent retreats. There has been no coaxing and cajoling, no confiscating of cell phones or odd games for which I exaggerate enthusiasm. There have been no kids hanging off me, no squeals of admiration or inside jokes. Indeed, this weekend has been quiet, time spent in the kitchen with adults, interacting with kids only as I serve meals. And, I’m surprised to realize, that has felt right. I know that I am doing something important here, even sacred, in providing for basic needs; it’s just different than it was.

I’ve been considering lately the expectation for Young Adulthood, where challenges and lessons pop up like obstacles on Super Mario, at predictable intervals, with a time-tested method for conquering them. But what happens in this game when the protagonist doesn’t go to graduate school or move around the world, when neither marriage nor parenthood looms on the horizon? Instead of having levels that change when goals are reached, does this game look like a long Career Staircase, begun at an early age and climbed for the rest of adulthood? Even if the Career is a good one, like teaching, might she get to the point where climbing is mastered and wish to ascend to some other level, grow in some new way?

I lean across the counter in the kitchen, pushing a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies out to the edge of it along with a frigid gallon of milk. A boy barely taller than the counter, who I’ve watched grow up from infancy to now, in a snow hat and wide-eyed and full of Harry Potter opinions, approaches the cookies. Closing his fingers around one and breathing deeply, with satisfaction, he turns back to the movie with a nod of thanks. I nod back, thinking how things change, how I change, without expecting or demanding transformation. I'm thinking of the myth of static circumstances, and the growth that is not only possible but completely inevitable to those of us who live with eyes and hearts open to the people and places in which we find ourselves. The challenges are different in these unpredictable levels, outside of seeming conventions I find in unfair comparisons. But there are twists here, too, because I am growing within my profession and relationships, changing in a place that is changing with me. And I’m thankful, all at once, for the moment and the kids and the life to which I’ll return from this retreat, one that is never the same as I wake anew each day.

Our Islands

When you’re on a golden sea
You don’t need no memory
Just a place to call your own
As we drift into the zone

On an island in the sun
We’ll be playing and having fun
And it makes me feel so fine
I can’t control my brain

We’ll run away together
We’ll spend some time forever
We’ll never feel bad anymore

Weezer

"OK, turn your desks to the front, folks," I request. "We have time to hear a few stories. Let's hear them."

The kids have been writing disaster stories today. We began reading Lord of the Flies about a week ago, but today is the first lesson after wrapping up the endless details of a research project. Research, as it happens, is my least favorite subject to teach, and one of the only strict directives given to me by my department: "Ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, and all graders shall participate in a yearly research project. They shall be given class time for research, class time for drafting, class time for revising, presenting, cutting out pictures for their visuals. Yea, verily, this shall be done." And so we do it.

I've never loved research; it reminds me of these nights in college, when I would finish a paper full of quotes and citations, woven together into a peice of writing that was technically correct and clever, but lacking in voice or artistry. Research papers were chores, asking little of me but the synthesis of other people's facts. As a teacher, I've struggled to bring any joy into this process; even when I can get excited about the body of knowledge and the pursuits of curiosity represented by these projects, I'm filled with dread at the reality of mentoring ninety individuals through the dark valleys of paraphrase, citation, and commentary. So the great fair, a culminating celebration of tri-fold poster boards and wandering teenagers, is over, to our great relief.

The weary students have just spend the first half of the class writing their own versions of Lord of the Flies. Last year, I'd written the first page of a macabre tale in which I was transporting a select group of ninth graders to Australia when our plane crashed on an island. (In an early draft, I'd written that I had died, along with the pilot, in the crash, leaving no adult survivors. But, unable to deal with my own mortality even in fiction, I had bumped myself off the flight in Hawaii for the final revision.) I asked the students to imagine how they--the kids in the classroom around them today--would deal with the challenge of surviving in the wild.

There was something magical about wandering around a mostly quiet classroom for twenty minutes, watching stories take shape on the page. Later in the week, the poet who teaches my second period on Thursdays would talk about the energy of a group of people devoted to a common and creative process. I would remember this moment. When pens began to slow, I tossed out ideas for them. "Make someone fall in a hole," I suggested once. "Just throw in a twist. That's what these stranded-on-a-island stories are about. Anything can happen."

"Anything?"

"Sure."

"Like a dinosaur?"

"Yeah. Dinosaur. Good one."

And they kept writing.

When the stories are finished, the kids spend several minutes sharing them with one another in small groups. As they share, my intern and I pace the classroom, eavesdropping on the most interesting creations we've heard in weeks. Gone are the stale details of research writing; here are students devoted to the cause of creating imaginative catastrophes. Now they turn their desks to the front. They know what's coming next.

"OK, are there any nominations? Any stories that the rest of the class must hear?"

A hand shoots up at the back of the class. It's a hand I see often, a hand I like to see, because it's often attached to thoughts that offer surprising depth and nuance.

"Yes? Who do you nominate?"

"Um, me. Myself."

"Good. And do you accept this nomination?"

The young boy, who's lived in Somalia and London and Seattle, raises his eyebrows at me.

"Course! OK," he weaves his way to the front of the room. "Here it is."

The tale, beginning when my students wake up and realize that they are stranded without adults on a beach, whisks us away on the ferris wheel of fortune. First the ninth graders return to the remains of the plane to discover "party snacks, drinks, and a turntable." (I recall hearing this student, when he was first sharing the story with his peers, saying, "Oh, don't worry about how there's power on the island. That's not important.") The party is in full swing when a tyrannosaurus invades, and this heroic boy fights it until he "tripped over a limbo stick." The rest of the one-page story is a darkly comic descent into disaster fantasy.

As he reads, as my intern, my students, and I break up into cascades of laughter at each new plot turn, I'm thinking about the joy of shared experience. Though I've often thought of teaching as an isolating experience, in that there are few other adults with whom I work on a daily basis, I'm realizing that this is more of a community than I once expected. In a school where differences sometimes threaten to divide us beyond reconciliation, how beautiful to find these places where we connect, places where age and ethnicity, education and even language no longer matter. Stranded on an island, away from cell phones and schools and responsibilities, we are united in the unknown, even if the island is only in a book we're reading together.