Now the world is gone, I’m just one

About halfway through chapter 10 of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer (the narrator) and his friend Albert Kropp are both injured while in combat and their injuries are so bad that they wind up in the hospital.  It provides an opportunity for the novel’s author, Erich Maria Remarque to show yet another side of war, as he draws upon his own experience in the First World War to illustrate exactly what a soldier would have gone through.  There are moments of horror (men who are maimed) and sadness (Kropp has his foot amputated and declares he will commit suicide), but also camaraderie (the guys provide necessary cover so a fellow patient named Lewandowski can have sex with his wife) and triumph (a fellow patient declares that he will beat “the dying room” and does so, returning the next day), and they continue serve to give the reader the very well-rounded view of World War I that he promised at the beginning of the novel.

My advanced English class is nearly finished with the discussion of the novel.  We have spent the last six class days with student-led discussions called “read and leads,” where a group of 2-3 students are essentially the teacher for the day–they spend a solid 30-35 minutes analyzing the text, asking the questions, and taking everyone through that particular part of the book while I sit in the back of the room taking notes and occasionally offering a word or two up until the end when I have some questions of my own.  The only part of the class that I really take charge of is the beginning, which I usually use for admin/housekeeping stuff, but for our study of All Quiet, I have been bringing in poetry and songs that are from or about that era.

For the most part, they have been of the time.  We’ve read the poetry of Edgar Guest and Wilfred Owen, and have also spent time “In Flanders Fields.”  The songs have been the most notable from the First World War–”It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Over There,” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”

Oh, and Metallica.

If you are unfamiliar with “One,” it is the fourth track on Metallica’s 1988 album, … And Justice For All.  The lyrics are partially inspired by Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun (which is a reference to “Over There”) and are from the point of a soldier who has had most of his senses taken from him as a result of a land mine.  He cannot really communicate but his mind is completely intact, so he is lost in his own mind.  The instrumentation starts out slow and eventually gains speed, with the drums and guitar mimicking machine-gun fire.  The music video–Metallica’s first-ever–used footage from Trumbo’s movie adaptation of his novel intercut with the band performing in what looks like an abandoned warehouse.

After we finish chapter 10, I always play “One.”  While the long hair and head-banging in the video are a bit dated (when he heard the heavy guitar coming through the wall, the teacher next door to me came into the room, made the devil horns sign and started head banging Beavis and Butt-head style), the imagery is striking enough for just about anyone to get the song’s point.  Remarque is a bit more subtle or at least even-handed in his approach, even if Paul’s narration does get overwrought at times (but come on, he’s a 20-year-old guy who’d studied to be a writer), but the idea is the same.  While even in our modern culture we are more attuned to the more negative aspects of war and not always willing to swallow cheerleading-style propaganda (although that’s not entirely true), it might be possible to ignore the true details and the true human emotion of it.

The discussion that has come out of the second half of the novel has been insightful and even emotional at times.  The weight of the book–which gets heavier as it goes on until the point where Paul has more or less lost any hope that he or anyone in his generation will be able to function or be understood after the war is over (if they survive).  In “One,” the narrator is beyond even where Paul is, and by having something more modern and more visual, it reinforced the theme and helped provide a bridge to my point of the theme of the striking reality of war being a universal theme.

Plus, the song can be studied with other war literature or in and of itself as a way to delve into the mind of a soldier who is dealing with his own anonymity in the aftermath of war, which can be a scary experience.

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 …

Short, But Sweet: Anthem for Doomed Youth

Ever sigh and say, “I wish I could teach poetry but I … a) can’t find anything good, or b) don’t have the time.”? This occasional series of posts will focus on specific poems that I like and have even used that I find to be both engaging and amazing.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

I’ve written before about my affinity for Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and seeing that today is the anniversary of the end of the First World War, I thought it appropriate to contemplate another.  ”Anthem for Doomed Youth” isn’t a poem that I’ve used in class, at least not yet, but I think that in the great struggle we seem to have with the ability to make texts “relevant” for our students, this is another that wins out.  Well, depending on where you teach.

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.

Slut-shaming Helen of Troy

“She was a whore.”

He was referring to Helen of Troy.  We had been reading Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” which may or may not be about the woman whose face launched a thousand ships–of course, the subject of poems rarely are that clear cut.  Here’s the text:

To Helen
By Edgar Allan Poe

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!

I was using the Helen of Troy reference in class to contrast his putting her, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” on a pedestal, with the woman described in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130″ (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …”), who, well, like Bill said, when she walks treads on the ground.  We read the poem, talked about what the narrator thinks of his subject, and then I brought up Helen and asked if the class knew the story of Helen of Troy.  They knew the gist of it–mainly, that she was taken to Troy and the Trojan War started as a result–but when I asked, “Do you know how or why she wound up there?”

“She was a whore,” said one student.

A week later, with my advanced class, we read the same poem and I asked the same question.

“She was a slut,” said a student.

As the “Twilight” Fades …

photo credit: osiatynska via photopin cc

A student and I were talking in study hall the other day about some of the books that she reads, and she pointed out that she was reading the latest in a YA series, but followed that up with “because I read the other three, so I have to read this one.”  The conversation then turned to some of the YA books that have come out over the last decade or two that have staying power.  Right away, we both seemed to agree that the Harry Potter books fit well within that category, even though I have never read a single page of any of them (and to her credit, she didn’t recoil in horror as if I just punted her baby 30 yards because I’ve never read them.  I simply haven’t.  They came out at a time when I wasn’t interested in them, so I never read them.); and we tenuously agreed on whether or not The Hunger Games will be on teens’ hit lists in 2022 (we both agreed the first novel has the best shot).

Then we turned our attention to Twilight.

Okay, I brought it up because I knew she’d laugh because she knows my utter disdain for Stephenie Meyer’s sparkle sparkle vampire saga.  But I can’t help it because those novels are such an easy target.  After all, they have been incredibly popular during the past decade, and the quality of writing is suspect at best.  When I wrote for Change.org in 2009 about the “Twilight” of serious teen reading (which I’m pretty sure was their title, not mine, but whatevs), I was writing in regard to a columnist’s whining about how the big-name authors of his day are largely ignored by today’s teens in favor of what’s essentially popcorn.  The gripe is legitimate in a sense, although it’s not exactly a new one since our culture has been debating the merits of pop versus substance since Elvis first appeared on the scene and Annette and Frankie were making movies about going to the beach.

What has struck me as interesting during the time since I wrote that blog post is how many teachers seem to not only love the popcorn, but are buying and feeding their students the popcorn as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I read my fair share of it and am always up for talking about it.  But there seem to be so many teachers out there who are so focused on not having their classes be the derided “boring English class” that they have swung the pendulum completely to the other side and are eschewing most, if not all of the classics for stuff that’s engaging or is going to “work” in their classrooms.

The “Twilight” of Serious Teen Reading

photo credit: visual.dichotomy via photopin cc

[A quick note:  This post originally appeared on Change.org on March 13, 2009.  I'm reposting it here with some minor edits]

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wonders aloud what has become of the radical youth because college students of today, instead of reading seminal counterculture works by Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, and Anais Nin,  are reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Apparently, the idea that the younger generation rebel against the older generation, rise up and challenge the status quo was smothered to death in a cul-de-sac somewhere in the last 30 years (“On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats“):

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?

He goes on to lament that college campuses don’t seem to be what they were 40 years ago when his generation was stirring up trouble in protest for equal rights or against the Vietnam War (in fact, he mentions that a tour guide at Kent State University doesn’t mention the infamously fatal 1970 riot on his tour), and that the average college student has become more conservative in some ways, but simply less active in others.  Even though he does admit that the way today’s youth participates in politics isn’t the same way their parents or grandparents did, he doesn’t seem to approve:

“As young people shift toward the Internet and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters.’ What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool. For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot to offer, it’s time to start chanting, ‘Hell, no! We won’t go!’”

I’ve read this article three times now, plus what people have written in the Post’s comments sections (well, except for those beating the “liberals are destroying learning … all college is radical … teachers are communists … and what do we do with witches?  BURN THEM!” drum, which … *yawn*.  Wake me up when you come off it) and I’m still vacillating between two thoughts:  yes, we’re all doomed, because sometimes I’m amazed that my students read at all; and no, you’re just another whining boomer that I had to hear from when I was in high school in the ’90s and you people were calling everyone between 15-30 a “slacker.”  While I honestly admit that I didn’t really like On the Road, I took enough writing classes in college to be around people who had read and workshipped Jack Kerouac – and discontent coming from a kid at a private Catholic college whose biggest problem is telling mom and dad that he ran up the Visa buying clothes from J. Crew doesn’t exactly come off as genuine (I won’t go into the Sylvia Plath desciples, who I’m sure had already preheated the ovens in their dorms.)

Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?

“It’s so punk rock.”

This, coming from me, is one of the most hilarious things because while I love punk music I have always been the furthest thing from “punk.” Now, my friend Chris, whom I’ve known since we were four and teaches freshman English on Long Island? He knows punk. Me? I learned to play the piano so I could play Billy Joel songs.

So like I said, the word “punk” coming from me–a bald, slightly overweight, 35-year-old English teacher–seems more hilarious than anything, even though in my mind it’s true because I was describing one of my favorite novels of all time, The Catcher in the Rye.

[My friend Laura, who hates J.D. Salinger, just slammed her head into her keyboard]

I had been talking about banned books week in class the other day and brought up the many times the book has been challenged or removed over the years because of its language or themes (one of my favorites was a district in Texas that preemptively removed the look because they just didn’t want to idea with it), and gave a quick overview of it, saying that in many ways it is the original modern day teen rebellion story. Sure, Holden Caulfield is a whiny rich prep school kid, and this takes place in the early 1950s so it doesn’t have anything to do with 21st Century Skills, but as I have positive before, when there are so many tropes in literature and popular culture, it helps to explore where they come from.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to explore it too much more than recommending it to my students because it’s on the eleventh grade and not the tenth grade curriculum. And I have to admit that I’m a little peeved by that because I know that if I had the chance, I would teach the shit out of that book. the most I have ever been able to do with it is read it about six times and discuss it here and there with former students.

If I did get to teach The Catcher in the Rye, I’d probably start with the statement that began this post. I know that Salinger’s novel is a little more suited to the jazz of the time, but i spent my formative years feasting on John Hughes movies and ’90s alternative, metal, and punk music (well, when I wasn’t playing selections from The Stranger), so as I read the book, I can hear The Ramones, The Replacements, Green Day … which aren’t all 1990s but you know what I’m getting at. In other words, it would be kind of the culmination of what is a running joke between me and a couple of my students–I connect every piece of literature to movies or music.

But in a way, that’s what makes literature like this survive, the fact that there is no adaptation helps The Catcher in the Rye more than any other “watch the movie” exercise could. There’s no set visual or audio to accompany it means the novel’s open to a certain amount of interpretation and even though Salinger would be pissed at my saying it, that kind of makes Holden belong to the reader. Sure, he wrote the words but our getting into his head and then putting him into our is what makes him just as relevant as any of the copies–from Jim Start to John Bender–that he inspired.

Hating Nora Helmer

Sir Anthony Hopkins as Torvald and Claire Bloom as Nora in “A Doll’s House.”

In the great struggle for English class to remain relevant, I am sure that there are plenty of teachers who are looking to have their students read what interests them instead of required texts that we tend to refer to as “the classics”. I see the point in that; however, I have to say that I am pretty old school, meaning that I don’t want the classics to die just because they were written centuries ago and don’t feature vampires or post-apocalyptic murder contests (unless, yunno, they do). So the struggle therefore turns to not just teaching “the classics” (and yes, we can have an argument over what defines “the classics” but that’s a whole other post entirely so just go with me here), but making them relevant as well. Like I said about Shakespeare, there has to be a reason we’re reading him 400 years after the fact or still working through The Odyssey and Beowulf even though we have a good millennium on each of those, right?

Enter Henrik Ibsen and A Doll’s House.

Half the audience just groaned. In fact, when I told my assistant principal that’s what we were studying when he popped into my room he said, “Yeah, that’s one I never liked.”

It’s okay. Before I started teaching it a few years ago, I hadn’t really liked it and I had read it twice. Why did I start teaching it, then? Well, it was my first year of teaching sophomores, I was in a bind as to fill up a month’s worth of classes, and the entire play happened to be in the textbook.

Hold on a sec, the doorbell just rang and I think it’s an angry crowd of innovative educators carrying iPhones and iPads that are displaying pitchforks and torches.

Pithy comments aside, I can understand the groaning. I mean, Henrik Ibsen isn’t exactly the type of writer who gets your blood pumping. He’s Norwegian, sure, but he lived about 800 years after the days of the vikings; his characters tend to be the uptight middle-class sorts we’ve come to expect from boring-assed 19th Century literature; and his stage directions remind us that anal-retentive does, indeed, have a hyphen.

Plus the story, which was revolutionary for its time, seems pretty run-of-the-mill for modern audiences. The realism in the portrayal of the Helmers and their marriage is taken for granted by generations of people who have watched television dramas that are designed to reflect real life and real people. But as I point out, there has to be a reason that we keep reading it … and with the case of A Doll’s House, it’s two things: the main character, and the ending.

Watch your f—in’ language

It’s banned books week!  I love banned books week!

No, seriously, I do, and I think it’s because when I look at the ALA’s list of “Banned and Challenged Classics,” I see a number of books that I either read for English class or that are taught by me or a colleague.  And just because I love pumping my own ego here, I’ll run off a quick list:

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (was taught in honors 11 in my h.s.; I read it a few years ago)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (read it in high school; taught in 9th grade)
• The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• 1984, by George Orwell (read it in college; taught in 12th grade)
• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck  (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (taught in the AP course of the first school where I taught)
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (on 11th grade curriculum of school where I first taught)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey (read it in high school)
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (read it in 7th grade)
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (while not on the curriculum, popular among my students)
• The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (on AP curriculum of school where I first taught; however, the department was forced to put a sticker over the cover of the Penguin edition because it featured an impressionist’s painting of a half-naked woman)
• The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (not taught, but a copy was in my high school library)
•  A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (read in 11th grade)

That’s quite a bit (there were 97 books total on the list), and that doesn’t count a few others that I read in college or that may be on other school districts’ reading lists.  A quick search of the “Why they were challenged/banned” page shows that the word “violence” shows up 11 times, “language” shows up 43 times, and “sex” shows up 62 times.  I’d say I find this surprising or not even interesting, but it’s not–our culture has this weird, almost puritanical objecting to sex and language yet allows violence that makes the Tom & Jerry cartoons I watched as a kid look tame.

I tell my students three things about literature that we often call “classic.”  First, that there is a reason it’s called “classic” and is still taught even though it may be hundreds (even thousands) of years old and that’s because the insights those writers had into human nature are still applicable today.  Second, literature does not happen in a vacuum–it affects the world and the world has an effect on it.  Third, all great literature usually contains one or both of two things:  sex and death.