Recovering Literature Snob

I am a recovering literature snob.

Growing up, I read a lot of classics. I’m old enough that there wasn’t really a thriving middle grade or young adult category. At least, not one that I was aware of. Yes, I read The Boxcar Children, Little House on the Prairie, Babysitter’s Club, and Sweet Valley High, but by the time I was in the fifth grade, I was reading Jane Eyre and Pearl S. Buck.

In high school, I fell in love with Russian literature, so I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I went to college an English major, so I read Dante, Homer, Spenser, Milton, and lots of Shakespeare. I couldn’t wait to start teaching English so that my students could fall in love with these works as I had.

My junior year of college, I was required to take a young-adult literature course as part of my education hours. I was livid. I would not teach crap in my classroom. I would not dumb-down the curriculum. I would teach the classics, and they were going to like it.

The very first day of class, someone handed me Harry Potter. And I was a goner.

I did not become a teacher because I hoped to be overworked and underpaid. I did not long to spend my days surrounded by sarcasm and research papers. I didn’t think teens were so adorable and God I can’t wait to spend eight hours a day in a tiny room with those sweet little faces. I became a teacher because I knew the power of literature and I wanted to pass on the love of reading. I wanted to create readers.

I have now been teaching for fifteen years, and I can honesty sat that I have never, not even once, created a reader by handing him Shakespeare or Dickens. I’m sorry, but I just haven’t. I’ve had students fall in love with these stories after I’ve taught them, but those students who came to me hating to read and who leave as readers do so because I handed them a young adult book that spoke to them.

I do love Dickens, and Twain, Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and on and on, but I fell in love with reading first before moving on to the harder stuff. Reading shouldn’t be a chore. It should challenge you and make you laugh and question and cry, but if you have to force yourself to read, then you aren’t doing it right, i.e., you aren’t reading the “right” book. And the “right” book is the one that sings to you. The one that you think about when you’re not reading, that slips into your dreams, that leaves a mark on your soul long after you’ve closed it.

Yes, I want my literature to be good—but what makes it good is different for me than it is for someone else. It’s also different now than it used to be. I am a fluid person, so my reading tastes will be as well.

If I had continued on the literature path I began, I would have read a lot of dead white guys, and many other stories that professors who are nothing like me deemed worthy, but I would have missed out on Harry Potter, and Jellicoe Road, and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and yes, even Twilight.

If I had continued on that path, I would not be a very good teacher. I would have turned my nose up at books not in the “dead white guy” canon and I would never have experienced the joy of turning a student onto reading.

If I had continued on that path, I would have been able to brag, nose in the air, that I read literature, thank you very much, but my life would not have the passion that it does, because I would not be a writer. I would have known, as I did at a very young age, that I was not Shakespeare or Dickens or Austen, and I would have known that my writing was so far below that level that I would have been too ashamed to try.

Too ashamed to create stories of my own. Too ashamed to pursue my passion.

And what a pity that would have been.

It is sad to me that in 2015 we still let other people think for us. We let other people convince us that a certain book or author isn’t worthy.

So I have a suggestion. Why not, in this year two thousand and fifteen, instead of listening to closed-minded, misinformed, or ignorant people, we pick up a book and read it for ourselves.

Let the literature snobs sit on their homemade thrones and look down at “lesser” books. We’ll be prolific readers instead.

We’ll also be a hell of a lot happier for it.

RECLAIMED Common Core Unit

As many of you may know, in addition to being an author, I’m a high school English teacher. I began teaching English in December of 2000, one day after finishing student teaching and one week before graduation. I have Master’s degree in Education, and I am Nationally Board Certified.

I became an English teacher because I wanted my life to be filled with books. I always thought I would get my PhD and teach college, but once I started teaching high school, I knew I had found my place. I love my job. I love teaching and talking books all day long. I love interacting with teens. They are so fun and interesting and have incredible possibility. They teach me so much each and every day.

I had a blast putting together this unit for RECLAIMED. It was created using the Common Core Standards for English. Teaching novels is my favorite part of my job, and I especially love figuring out new ways to look at a text and discovering supplemental texts to use to connect theme, character, plot, etc. This unit uses RECLAIMED as a sort of anticipatory set, then takes students into readings of classic literature. Of course, this is just a start, a skeleton. Take what I’ve done and add to it. Shape and mold it to fit your classroom.

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. If you do use it in your classroom, I would love to hear from you. How did it work? What extra things did you do? I am available to Skype with classes, providing I can fit it around my own teaching. J

RECLAIMED Common Core Unit

A Life of Passion

My creative writing class
from last year.

I’m very fortunate that I get to spend my life pursuing my two passions: teaching and writing.

They are similar pursuits. They're both stressful. Both sometimes require patience and occasionally a little outside help in the form of an adult beverage. And both require a person to pour in love and hard work and then let go and see what happens.

 

See, no matter how hard I work on lessons, the results are up to my students. How much they learn, how well they perform, have only a small amount to do with me. If I do my job correctly, they won’t need me eventually.

But it’s delayed gratification, because I don’t truly get to see the results until years later.

This is writing. Writers pour their hearts and souls into a manuscript, but it will be years until they see those results. And once they have let the book out into the world, it’s out of their hands. It’s up to the readers then, who will hopefully see the detail, feel the nuances, climb inside the world and inhabit, just for a moment, a world that was born out of passion.

Teaching and writing can be frustrating. There are times when you aren’t sure if what you are doing is worth is. But those moments are brief. It is in the action that I am truly satisfied. It is when I’m discussing literature with students that I am the happiest. It is when I am cuddled up with coffee and revisions that I am most content. It isn’t the accolades or recognition or milestones that do it for me – it is simply the doing.

It is this life that I want for my students.

I want to teach my students to think, to examine, to create. I want my students to spend their lives seeking knowledge, whatever that may look like. I hope to teach my students to want more out of life, not to simply exist, but to live, and to live in the way that they choose.

Above all, that’s why I teach - because I want my students to have choices. I want whatever they do in life to be a result of a choice, not a lack of options. If they want to dig ditches, I think that’s great, as long as they have chosen that rather than been forced to do that. That makes all the difference. I teach so that none of my students will look back and realize they couldn’t pursue their passion, whatever it was, because they lacked the skills. I give my students the tools to succeed in college so that if they don’t go, it will be because their passion lay in another field, not because they couldn’t get in. I want my students to find their passion and chase it down. I want their lives to be full of the things they love. I want them to wake up each and every day and feel just as happy, just as lucky, as I do, because they aren’t existing, they are living.

Above all, I teach and write because not doing so isn’t really an option. Because I love learning new things and lighting a fire in others. Because sometimes my skin can’t hold the words in any longer. Because my passion drives me to do so.

May yours do the same.