My Life in Books – Part 3

Welcome to the third installment of the “My Life in Books” series: Books I Have Taught.  

In Part 1, I talked about the books I read as a child. In Part 2 I talked about some favorites from college and young adulthood.

As you may (or may not) know, I was an English teacher in the California public school system for eleven years; it was a later-in-life career that I began when I needed to earn a living again. I taught 7th grade English full time for seven of those years. Then, when I started writing and publishing my books, I switched to a sixty-percent teaching schedule. And of course, first I had to student teach. Since I was planning to teach high school, I student taught both sophomores and  seniors.

That sophomore class is one I will not forget. Sophomores can be difficult; ask any high school teacher. This class was right before lunch, but they weren’t waiting for lunch. They would sit in a circle with paper bags strewn across their desks, the contents of which were laid out as they ate their lunches and listened to the teacher read to them. This teacher read to them for a long while every day. She was a pretty liberal sort, very popular. The semester that I was in her classroom observing (before I took over the class), she read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to them. After that she read The Secret Life of Bees. I must have been doing other things at the time because I heard only snippets of these books. When I taught the class, I taught them Bless Me, Ultima. Not one of my favorite books. And of course, not my choice. I must have made the mistake of trying to teach them grammar because I remember they called a meeting with me one class where we all sat in a circle on the floor, and they proceeded to tell me how I didn’t respect them enough. Sophomores.

 

In another English class I observed, they were reading Of Mice and Men, which I had never read. But I got lucky in the senior class I taught. I was quite surprised when the teacher told me I would be teaching A Clockwork Orange. I am quite sure I had read the book before. I still don’t remember what it is about, but I am sure the students liked it. That is, when they came to school. It was the second semester of their senior year. They were a pretty advanced group, they had already gotten into college, so why go to class?

 

I guess I was lucky to get a teaching job at all, even if it was junior high. Only one person in my credential program wanted to teach junior high! Everyone else wanted to teach high school. 

I had pretty free rein in the books I wanted to teach — as long as the school had them. There were only two of us teaching seventh grade English.  We both always taught The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and The Pearl by Steinbeck. Yes, they were pretty old books — and we must have had some of the originals. Some of them were very, very old, with yellowed pages and torn covers. Every year the student who was assigned the book wrote their name in it.  One book had one of the teacher’s names in it when he was in 7th grade.  I don’t think I had ever read either book before. I have now read them eleven times each. 

The Outsiders is a great book.The students loved it. And then we watched the movie with Patrick Swayze and some other hunks. The Pearl — well, that is a different story. It is a short book, just a novella, but the students couldn’t seem to understand it. I thought it was violent and boring. But it served its purpose of teaching about characters, plot, symbolism, and all those nice things. 

Although grammar was my thing — and I taught a ton of it — I got a lot of other things done. I guess my philosophy was throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. In addition to finishing the grammar book, I taught Greek and Latin roots all year and vocabulary all year. We did some short stories from our literature book including a teleplay of a Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” We did that one at the very end of the year in a readers theater setting,  where the students each got a part and they read it in front of the class, but didn’t act it out. Then, we watched that episode of the Twilight Zone, which was a perfect thing to do at the end of a school year. 

I also taught Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, since we had copies no other teacher was using. It was a shortened version, but it was in the original language. And we acted that one out. I guess the teacher before me had taught it because there were plastic swords and shields in the closet. I think they enjoyed that one, especially the sword fight.”Et tu, Brute?”

In addition to grammar, vocabulary, Greek and Latin roots, literary terminology, paragraph and essay writing, short stories, The Outsiders, Julius Caesar, and The Pearl, I assigned three outside reading projects with books of their choice. 

Then, the public library had some extra books they offered me, including Fast Food Nation and Nickel and Dimed, so I used them for a nonfiction unit with my advanced students. 

The last book of the year was the Dystopian Unit. And those are some of the great books. There has been a recent trend in dystopian literature for kids, but we read the standards. We did this book in small reading groups that would discuss the previous night’s reading. My regular classes read The Giver. I had never read that one. My advanced classes had a choice among Animal Farm, The Lord of the Flies, and (for extra credit) 1984. Actually, I think anyone in any of my classes had the choice to read 1984. I am quite sure no one had ever used 1984 for the seventh grade, but I thought it was worth a try. Those who read it loved it.  I had read all of those three books before. They are among my favorites. And we watched the movies — Animal Farm is a great movie But we could only watch the beginning of 1984.

Speaking of which: It is not surprising that I got a bit of trouble from a parent for assigning  1984. A very large man, a preacher, and father of one my students, said he was coming in to discuss the reading. I knew by now to have an ally with me and chose a tall, loud, deep-voiced male English/History teacher. I didn’t get hurt, but I did agree to move his child to another reading group without, of course, embarrassing him. So I did. The father had never read the book, but when it was assigned to his son, he started looking through it, I guess. But for some reason, the only part he saw was the tiny, unimportant scene with the prostitute that the kids either didn’t notice or didn’t care about. Draw your own conclusions there. I did. Oh, and when I showed the movie, I stopped when the prostitute came in. I don’t remember if I skipped it and showed the rest of the movie or not. 

Teaching those books really made me love Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies anew each year. 

I left teaching in 2015. I wonder if the students are still reading those same old copies of  The Pearl.