Room

The last book my seniors are reading for the year is called Room. Many of you probably get a chance to actually read for leisure and have already had the pleasure of this book. I'm a little bit late to the party. Still, I would like to add my resounding accolades for this fine piece of work.

No spoilers here, the jacket cover says as much, but Room is narrated, brilliantly, from the viewpoint of a five year-old boy. A barely five year-old boy. His experience is very limited because his mother happens to be enslaved by a man who kidnapped her when she was just 20 years old from her university campus and has held her in captivity for seven years. Her son is five. He knows nothing beyond the room in which they live. To him there is no Outside.

The novel is a fascinating look at the psychology of the first few years of life and how important that time is formatively, but even more so for what it says about the intense strength of the mother-son bond. It is the story of a remarkably remarkable woman exposed to the most prurient evil and the purest innocence at the same time and her heartbreaking effort to keep the two apart.

I remember that when my oldest was born, until he was about five, we only had ONE car. When I stayed at home, I very literally stayed at home. Of course, I could go on a walk, and I could use all the rooms of my house. But if you have ever been cooped up for days on end with a cranky toddler, you know how quickly the walls feel like they are closing in. I cannot even imagine. 

One of our other teachers, whose own tastes have always seemed less reserved than mine as we choose selections, emphases, etc. for for our seniors, says he finds the book rather appalling because of the subject matter. And yes, when you ponder this woman's existence, it is appalling--a crime of the darkest evil imaginable--but when you see her and their life through the eyes of her boy, you see only love and wonder and strangeness. Even smack in the middle of the most evil situation imaginable, he is innocent, perfect . . . a child.

The women who survived a ten year enslavement ordeal in the home of a Cincinnati man published their collective memoir recently and have been all over the news. I say the topic is timely and worth discussing; Room makes it possible to do so from this remarkably innocent viewpoint.

Four Hundred Years of History

For the first time ever, I taught Shakespeare this year. Oh, I've read Shakespeare, both in and out of classes. (Yes, that's right, I've read Shakespeare just FOR FUN, what about it?) But teaching it was a new thing entirely. I couldn't just read it, I had to be prepared to explain it, and, gulp make it INTERESTING.

Believe it or not, some people, actually lots of people, don't find literature just inherently wonderful or read just for reading's sake. They have to be encouraged. Enter the English teacher.

I think the others in my department didn't quite know what to make of me this year. I would sit in our preliminary meetings discussing literature and lesson plans and ideas with them, while all the time they are thinking I'm a science teacher. And some days, when the English classes are really going great, I think, "I can't believe I'm paid to do this!"

But toward Hamlet I didn't feel quite so confident . . . Shakespeare is the holy grail of English teaching, and Hamlet is the holy grail of Shakespeare. I didn't want to do what Mrs. Forsberg did to Romeo and Juliet when I was in the ninth grade (can you say butchered?); I wanted to bring all the subtlety and complexity and beauty to it that Mrs. Reed did with Othello. I read and studied and forced my husband to watch varying versions on Friday nights for movie night. I agonized.

For four-hundred years these plays have been taught because they are just so good. So many other plots are based on Shakespeare stories; indeed, there are few original stories left. Shakespeare is foundational to our culture and to refining your language and understanding. We celebrate this man because he was, truly, a genius. Oh, how I agonized.

And then I got some good advice.

That I actually listened to.

A wise English teacher (I hesitate to say "old" as she might be younger than I am) shrugged at my dilemma and said, "Don't get caught up in the symbolism and the imagery and the making it GREAT LITERATURE, just let the kids play with it. It is a performance piece, after all. Just engage them in the greatest revenge story of all time with a protagonist that is just an emo teenager." Prince Hamlet is actually 30, but like, whatever, he seems more like an angsty 17 year-old. Believe me, I know what angsty 17 looks like.

And it worked. The kids, not all of them, but by in large, they understood it and connected with it. They grumbled at Ophelia's brother and father who thought it was their business to tell her whom to love and could see that it was their interference that set certain events in motion. They argued about whether revenge and justice were the same thing and which Hamlet was really seeking. They empathized with his actions, even as they didn't condone them. They saw that truly dark path that revenge takes you on. They discussed mental illness and suicidal thoughts and how sometimes really hard things happen in your life that make you wish you didn't have to deal with them. They laughed at Polonius' famous advice and brilliantly translated it into modern English. The played the final scene for laughs, even as they recognized the waste and irony of it all.

It wasn't glorious. But it worked . . . and they connected in some small measure as so many English students have before. And, I hope, as they will for generations to come.

Science fascinates me because it explains the how of life. But literature . . . literature gets us closer to the why.

Where Have You Been?

Right here. Really. You know, when I'm not at work or running my children around or doing church stuff or home but working too. And I do blog very regularly. I appear monthly over at Aspiring Mormon Women, which is kind of awesome and the deadline thing really helps. I think it has also boosted my readership here. Why else would I have nearly 100 hits on posts that are months old? And in an almost impossibly tiny font? Yeah . . . I've got to fix that. I also keep two blogs for my students--one for my English classes and the other for my science classes. My science blog, in particular, is nearly always up-to-date and my class can just about be taken on-line for all the content that is there.

Anyway, I have some unusual "free" time tonight and decided to forgo my 85th round of Trivia Crack in exchange for something useful. What is this "free time" I speak of? Well, you may not be aware of it, but sometimes people actually get discretionary time in order to do things they enjoy. Or to recharge their batteries. It is probably good for me to get on board with that. I've been trying to use tacos, Dr. Pepper and chocolate to recharge my batteries. Newsflash: it just makes your butt bigger.

So I'm dealing with that too. The bigger butt thing. That will be in an upcoming post about the fact that I turn 40 this year. Free Geritol for everyone!

The thing is that I've really learned so much this year. About myself. About teaching. About living. Maybe it is the getting older thing, but I feel that I know less than I used to. I have more doubts and less surety about all kinds of things. . . but oddly enough I also am a lot less bothered by it than I used to be.

Anyway, while I have a space for doing so tonight, I am going to jot down some of these musings and schedule them to go out once a week or so . . . it might appear that I'm blogging that way.

In truth, though I blog regularly and really write all the time (curriculum creation), it just isn't the same. I miss both this format and my novel writing. I miss sharing my musings in a way that feels private (just me and my 100 closest friends, eh?) and I miss writing what I think so that my thinking gets better.

I know that to everything there is a season. At least I know it intellectually. But in truth, I want the season for everything to be now. I have a really hard time deciding how to spend my time and what to "focus" on. Yeah, I understand "focus" about as well as I understand "free" time. As I contemplate my upcoming birthday, the first milestone for which you can buy black balloons, I realize that I'm about halfway through this life--maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Is there time for all I want to do? See? Experience? Become?