From the Bookshelf: For the Man Who Has Everything

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook. In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

There are fantasies we all have, ones that come from regret.  While we are often able to surpress them, there are times when we wish we could indulge those fantasies, to go back and live life as if that girl had never left, or as if you hadn’t missed that third strike … or, well, as if Krypton had never exploded.  Such is the premise of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1985 Superman story, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”

Published in Superman Annual #11, the comic is a story wherein Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman arrive at the Fortress of Solitude on Superman’s birthday (February 29) in order to celebrate.  What they are greeted with is not a jovial, one-year-older Man of Tomorrow, but a catatonic Superman who has a strange life form attached to his chest.  They try to figure out what is going on and soon get their answer in Mongul, an alien despot who as “poisoned” Superman with the Black Mercy, a parasitic flower that feeds off its host, giving him his heart’s desire while slowly driving him insane.

Naturally, our heroes begin fighting the big alien.  Wonder Woman goes right at Mongul while Batman and Robin try their best to get the black mercy off of Superman.  While they’re doing that, Superman is living life as Kal-El, a family man living on a Krypton that never exploded and from which he was never sent to Earth in a rocket.  Slowly, as the fight rages on, his ideal world begins to tarnish and then starts to fall apart.  When that happens … well, I won’t spoil it for you if you’d like to read it.  In fact, it’s on sale for 99 cents at the DC Comics digital store for 10 days!  (honestly, it’s a coincidence.  I didn’t write the post to get you to buy a 27-year-old Superman comic)

Now I am a big fan of comics being used in the classroom (and notice I’m using the word comics, not “graphic novels.”  I hate that phrase.), but I find that there is a considerable obstacle to using them.  No, it’s not the format; no, it’s not the perception of comics being “juvenile;” no, it’s not the lack of good material.  It’s availability and cost of said material.  Being a comics fan, I know of quite a number of great stories that exist outside of the catalogues I see in my mailbox periodically.  There’s no price break for a class set of “For the Man Who Has Everything” the way there is Moore and Gibbons’ other famous work, Watchmen, and the logistics of getting a cart’s worth of digital copies is often more of a headache than it’s worth.

What I had to do in order to get enough copies for my students is take the one copy that I had (in a trade paperback) and make 30 copies of it using the photocopier.  It wasn’t innovative, it was violating a few copyright laws, and it was also beyond tedious.  But as a piece of literature, it was worth the effort.

After all, by simply looking at Superman, you can take a look at the heroic ideal, the epic hero, and everything that goes along with that archetype. But beyond that, there is the look that the students who were leading their discussion group decided to take, and that is a look at dystopia on a very personal level.  The society of a Krypton that survived seems ideal at first but as the story goes on we see that what the Black Mercy has given Superman is a perversion of a perceived ideal and not his “heart’s desire.”  Put beside the other story we had read — Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” — the idea of a perceived ideal (in the case of the Vonnegut story, a society where everyone is truly equal) versus the horrible reality led to a fascinating conversation about the tropes of science fiction, the concept of utopia vs. dystopia, and how the perversion of an ideal such as equality can be applied to the American educational system.  The only downside, to be honest, was that the bell rang.

And all of that from a short story and a comic book?

I’ve found that if you give the medium the respect you’d give any other medium, then it becomes a very worthwhile work to study, which is what happened here with Moore and Gibbons’ work.  Now, if only I didn’t have to make 30 photocopies …

From the Bookshelf: Essays, Identity, and My So-Called Life

Angela Chase (played by Claire Danes), the main character of My So-Called Life (image courtesy of mscl.com).

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook. In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

One thing that I have always enjoyed about putting together lessons about short works such as essays and short stories is being able to link several pieces that seem disparate through a common theme. Teaching sophomores, I look for themes that might be relevant to their current lives and then search for works reflect that theme in myriad ways.

Identity is a favorite of mine. At 15 or 16, you’re at an age where you are discovering more about the world and might even be questioning a bit as well. Your identity, you discover, is malleable. Morever, this idea is a near-universal concept. Set aside outdated fashion or melodramatic moments in Rebel Without a Cause or The Breakfast Club and you still have a protagonist or protagonists struggling with the changing idea of who they are.

There are bits and pieces of these themes in the essays I do from Kick Me by Paul Feig, which starts the unit, as well as a piece by David Sedaris called “Us and Them,” which on the surface is a wacky neighbor essay but beneath the surface is an exploration of how we build the identities of other people in our own minds based on preconceived notions and perception.

Alice Adams’ short story “Truth or Consequences,” which is about a girl dealing with the minefield of middle school and the cruelty of the mean girls; and Alice Walker’s essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dance is the Self,” where she contemplates her scars and how they affect her outlook on the world, both touch on this theme as well. Adolescence is a time when we tend to be more self-conscious and hopefully self-aware.

From the Bookshelf: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod pursued by The Headless Horseman by F.O.C. Darley (1849)

I haven’t taught 11th grade English in about five years, but when I did I remember that I tried my best to follow American literature chronologically, intertwining it with American history (occasionally combining my class with another teacher’s American history class for a few days), because there is something about the literature of our country and our culture that follows along pretty well with our history.

Luckily, doing so meant that by the middle to the end of October, I was usually somewhere in the early 1800s, which meant that if I had wanted to do something seasonal, I had at least a few writers to choose from.  Edgar Allan Poe seemed to be the go-to choice, but I usually avoided him because by the time my students had me for a teacher, they had read so much Poe in middle and the early part of high school that he was a bit over-exposed.  Besides, one of my favorite stories for Halloween has always been Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

This isn’t much of a surprise when you consider that I, along with quite a number of people from my generation grew up watching Disney’s cartoon version of the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horesman on VHS (Disney has always been excellent when it comes to home video–when the first video stores in my town opened up in the early 1980s, the kids’ section was full of Disney tapes and we were constantly taking them out.  I got more exposure to literary classics through Disney as a kid than just about anyone).  I think that when I first attempted to teach “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” I had made the assumption that a number of my students had had a similar experience and might want to read the original material.  After all, Washington Irving is one of those American literary figures that you simply cannot skip over if you’re covering the history of American literature.  I mean, this may sound ignorant or off-base or something, but I’d put him right up there with Poe or even Hawthorne (whose “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” are two of my favorite short stories as well).

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as well as I expected.  I remember struggling to figure out why, after one day of working on the story, my class seemed pretty lost and frustrated.  So I did what I usually do in this situation–asked them why they didn’t seem to like it.

“It’s boring,” was the general response.

From the Bookshelf: American Graffiti

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook. In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections (or in this case, a film).

I don’t think that my students get enough pop history.  Oh sure, they’re living in a culture that is like one perpetual self-referential loop, but whenever we discuss allusion and I bring up allusions that are so second-nature in our p0pular culture that you don’t even need to have read or seen the source material to get it (i.e. Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back, Scarface), I get the same dead silence, tumbleweeds, cricket chirping, and perplexed looks that I would have gotten had I asked them to write an epic poem in Sanskrit.

It’s kind of a shame, really.  Pop history is so important to our culture, especially the culture of teenagers beginning in the late 20th Century because it’s the type of history that does have a direct impact on their lives, especially because it bleeds over into I guess what you’d call “anthropology” in that you can’t study the popular culture of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries without also looking at the societal shift to the suburbs that started after World War II.  Alas, I teach a course whose curriculum is supposed to be centered around “World Literature” and I don’t get a lot of opportunity to cover a topic such as this.  But every once in a while, I do, especially this late in the school year … and that’s how we’ve come to George Lucas’s 1973 film, American Graffiti.

Okay, I didn’t completely come to this film with some mission to try and teach history the last couple of weeks of school.  Showing the film in my advanced English class came from the AP 11 teacher’s summer reading assignment: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.  This is a book that I absolutely love and when I handed out the summer reading assignment, I told them as much (in fact, I think I said something like, “I don’t read war novels, but when I do, I read The Things They Carried.”  Allusion!).  It’s only one of two books about war that I actually really enjoy (the other is All Quiet on the Western Front, natch) because it’s so gritty and realistic and also has some great stories contained within.

I wanted to approach the book somehow without teaching it and without completely frying the class, which already has a final term paper due for me in a couple of weeks in addition to state exams and finals.  So, instead of pulling out yet another reading assignment or an extended history lesson and research on the Vietnam War (I figured that the book would pique their curiosity enough anyway and that they would seek out information on their own), I took a different approach and went for prologue.

Not to give Baby Boomers too much credit here (which is the cardinal sin if you’re a member of my generation), but the Vietnam War is still a part of our national conscience and our culture.  When both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq got underway, there was plenty of flag-waving, but the spectre of ‘Nam still loomed as the benchmark of military failure, the scar on a generation that took so long to recover from its wounds (and still chooses to lay them bare for future generations to learn).  And aside from that, the culture that my students currently embody as teenagers in modern-day America has its origins in the culture of my parents.  So, in order to get that point across, I showed American Graffiti.

From the Bookshelf: Literary Magazines

The 1999 edition of Loyola College’s “Forum” literary magazine for non-fiction prose and artwork. I contributed an essay and served as assistant editor.

I think that there’s something about being an English teacher that makes me a hoarder.

Okay, that’s a lie because today I handed something out to my advanced English class that a high school teacher of mine had handed out nearly 20 years ago and I had saved. So clearly I’m simply a hoarder.

Although I’ve also been to plenty of colleagues’ houses and apartments and seen stacks and shelves of books, which makes me think that maybe English teachers are a certain type hoarder. Hoarders of the written word, perhaps?

Those last three paragraphs clearly make little or no sense and to be honest I was just trying to come up with a clever way to explain why I have so many literary magazines. You know, other than the fact that they’re from my high school and college days and I am either listed as an assistant editor or contributor.

I’m sure that if you think back to your time in school or higher education, you’ll remember what your campus literary magazine was like: a collection of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction prose that was considered the “best” of what the school’s writing populace had to offer. There probably was even some sort of photography or artwork accompanying the writing. It came out every spring and you might have wanted to contributed but were maybe even a little intimidated by the talent represented (and then were amused to realize it was run by a crack team of editors who probably worked in a dank computer lab during what little time they had availble). But you remember being impressed by the abilites of your fellow students.

My copies of Loyola College in Maryland’s two literary magazines: Forum (featuring non-fiction prose and art) and The Garland (featuring fiction, poetry, and photography) spent the first decade or so after my graduation collecting dust either on a bookshelf in my guest room or in a box with the rest of my errata from high school and college. I probably would have forgotten about them had I not brought them into work last year because someone in the department was floating the idea of starting up a literary magazine and wanted some examples (it’s finally getting off the ground this year).

I forgot about my copies of the magazines again until earlier this year when I was straightening up my classroom and found a copy of Forum from 1997. My ego being what it is, I checked to see if it was one of the editions in which I had an essay published (it wasn’t–I simply was listed as “assistant editor” because I worked on layout), but then started thumbing through some of the essays inside and found one that actually went with a unit I was going to be teaching.

From the Bookshelf: “Lamb to the Slaughter”

Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) prepares to whack her husband over the head with a frozen leg of lamb in the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" version of Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter."

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

“Well,” I said after they’d finished reading the story, “I guess if you wanted me to get into the literary value here, we could talk about pacing in plot and character development and irony. But in all honesty, I just wanted you to read it because it’s fun.”

I think that my advanced English class appreciated me saying that after we had finished reading Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” probably because with two days to go before spring break, they didn’t feel like having a lengthy discussion about figurative language. And to be honest, I think the story was a little “below their grade level.” But I’ve used the story in 10th grade English for four years now and it always seems to be the one students remember the most and to me that’s because it’s the most fun.

If you are familiar with it, “Lamb to the Slaughter” is the story of Mary Maloney, a housewife married to a police detective whose husband comes home from work one day and tells her that he wants a divorce and is leaving her. We don’t know why, just that he told her and that it’s enough for her to grab a frozen leg of lamb from the freezer in the garage and hit him over the head with it. What she does with the leg of lamb afterwards is a master plot twist: Mary cooks it and then later winds up serving it to the police (the best line is one of the last, a police officer saying that the murder weapon is probably right there under their very noses).

The story itself is not in my English textbook. In fact, the stories in the textbook don’t seem to be too particularly entertaining. I have found myself over the last few years taking short stories from other sources–sample textbooks from other publishers, collections I have at home, literary journals and magazine–because a dearth of material provided by our school’s chosen publisher. And I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to use it so well as a teaching tool for literary devices to a “general-level” English class is because it’s an easy read. If you’re not getting stuck on the material, you’ll be able to grasp some of higher-order stuff.

After reading, one thing my students have had fun with is writing the missing scene from the story. Like I mentioned, in Dahl’s story, Mary’s husband telling her that he is leaving her is accompanied by the phrase, “And he told her” and that’s it. There’s no reason given as to why, just that he’s leaving. So having students write a dialogue where he tells her allows them to stretch creatively and also helps teach how to write dialogue properly. I’ve had the obvious (he’s leaving her for another woman) to the crazy (he’s actually a spy or he’s wanted or the mob is after him).

And of course there is a movie. “Lamb to the Slaughter” was adapted into an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” back in the 1960s starring Barbara Bel Geddes. The show fills in that missing portion, but is quite entertaining and really pulls off the irony at the end.  And … it’s available on DVD as well as on Hulu (provided the internet in your building is working properly; mine wasn’t last week).  I’ve done a classic compare/contrast between the two where we talk about why some aspects of the story were changed.  And I suppose if you wanted to go the full nine, you could use this as a way to teach writing plot twists.

But it’s also a good story just for the heck of it.

 

From the Bookshelf: World War Z

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

“Wait, why do I have to die?”
“Well, somebody has to die.”

I know this sounds weird, but when I heard two students say that to one another in the middle of class I knew that my lesson was working. We had broken into groups and were working on the plots to stories that involved a real-world, authentic scenario that had them using vital 21st Century skills.

Zombie warfare.

Earlier in the year, when we were preparing for a benchmark test that had a section of functional reading, I wanted to find some test prep materials that was more interesting than what we usually have to deal with, like a driver’s license application or the VCR manual troubleshooting page that prompts students to ask “What’s a VCR?” So I went to the school library and found Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, copied part of the chapter about the best weapons to use when fighting zombies, wrote up some multiple choice questions, and passed them out. It worked as a practice and the test scores were pretty good but we had more fun with the reading and flipping through other parts of The Zombie Survival Guide that I wanted to do more.

Money being scarce, I didn’t have the ability to order a class set of ZSGs and I didn’t necessarily want to go bit by bit through Brooks’s book (plus, I returned it to the library so a student could take it out and read it); however, I did have a copy of the sequel at home and a photocopier and what ensued proved to be one of the more worthwhile parts of my English classes so far this year.

One of the graphics from The Zombie Survival Guide, which helps citizens know how to stay alive when the undead begin their attacks.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is Brooks’s more serious follow-up to the tongue-in-cheek survival guide, as Brooks uses the central “narrator” of a reporter interviewing various people who played major and minor roles in a war against the undead that almost wiped humanity off the map to tell that war’s story. While it does have its racy parts, the novel’s structure is such that it is more like a series of separate stories with an overarching narrative than a single story. So it winds up becoming one of the few novels that I have no problem excerpting (you can find a great summary of the book on Zombiepedia).

I chose two particular stories which make up a vignette of their own, and both of which take place in Japan (I don’t know if I was trying to fulfill a “world literature” curriculum requirement or if I simply like this part of the book). The first is that of Kondo Tatsumi, who is a teenager who does nothing but sit on his computer all day and communicate with friends over the internet where they try to one up each other regarding the facts of the zombie plague. When the internet goes down completely, he is forced to turn his attention to the outside world, which is aflame. The second is that of Tomonaga Ijiro, a blind gardener who manages to not only survive, but becomes an incredibly effective zombie killer. The two meet up at the end of the section with Tomonaga becoming a sensei of sorts to Kondo.

It’s a great way to look at character development, plot, tension and suspense, and even problem solving as both characters are rather incapable of combatting the zombie hordes and manage to survive based on their own resourcefulness. We discussed all of this after reading it, but as I was drawing up lesson plans for this, I decided I wanted to try to take our look at World War Z one step further.

From the Bookshelf: Kick Me

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

When I was fresh out of college in 1999, teen television shows and movies were experiencing a renaissance.  American Pie was one the biggest hits of that summer’s box office and Dawson’s Creek was still going pretty strong on the WB.  Having seen this success, television networks did what they always do when a concept is successful: copy it and hope that it works.  That fall, we were treated to teen aliens in Roswell, inter-clique fighting with Popular, and the angst of Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway on Get Real.  But my favorite show out of the teen explosion–well, the only one I actually watched–was Freaks and Geeks.

Set at McKinley High School in Michigan in the 1980-1981 school year, Freaks and Geeks follows a brother and sister, Sam and Lindsay Weir, through the travails of going to McKinley.  When the series opens, Sam is the geek, finding himself tortured by a bully and having a hopeless crush on a cheerleader; conversely, Lindsay has thrown aside her geek friends and is hanging out with the stoners and burnouts who make up the “freaks” of the title.  NBC cancelled the show in the middle of its season due to terrible ratings (it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, losing in the ratings to COPS and Early Edition), although fans poured enough effort into a “save the show” campaign that three more episodes were aired in July 2000 (I contributed myself and have a T-shirt to prove it).

The men responsible for getting this show off the ground were Judd Apatow (he of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame) and Paul Feig (who recently directed Bridesmaids).  Feig is credited as the show’s creator and in 2002, he published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence.  The stories about torture at the hands of bullies and ineptitude around the opposite sex (something he would further document in Superstud) are clearly the inspiration for a number of the storylines on Freaks and Geeks, as Feig is brutally honest about the ridiculousness of his formative years while at the same time being hilarious enough to not have a pity party.  It’s kind of like he found the correct way to answer that torturous standardized test writing prompt, “What is your most embarrassing moment?”  and answered it enough times for an entire book.