Look on My Flow, Ye Mighty and Despair!

(c) Evalottchen - http://www.flickr.com/photos/evalottchen/4443853616/

NB: This is a re-post from a while back, but someone asked me tonight about my teaching style, and this post pretty much sums it up. This one's for you, Daniel Lippman!

Continuing on the "heady week" theme, Friday was simply one one those awesome days. I had a plan going in to English classes on Friday, but our Veteran's Day assembly lopped about twenty minutes off the front end of my seventh grade class. As the class after the assembly was an "open classroom" period, parents showed up in the back of my classroom to watch. No pressure there. Five moms, all less than easily impressed on a good day, waited to see what sort of show I'd put on for them.

At these times, I find it's best to let the class evolve organically rather than attempt to shoehorn fifty minutes of material into thirty minutes of class time. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Improv! Time to go with the flow. That's right. I went all Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on their asses.

I quickly gave the weekly spelling quiz of ten commonly misspelled words (the word "misspelled" happens to be one of them), and launched in to the final cultural literacy tidbit of the week, the poem "Ozymandias." I mentioned last week in "Things Fall Apart" that I had decided to scrap the whole Victorian novel theme and go with Yeats, "Second Coming," Things Fall Apart, and "Ozymandias" in order to soothe my own soul on the heels of a crappy week. I have to admit, I was also curious about whether or not my students could synthesize these topics into a coherent thematic journey come Friday.

Before reading "Ozymandias," I asked them to re-cap the week's cultural literacy for me. They had to explain each tidbit, then figure out how to move from one item to the next in a way that made sense. Why might Chinua Achebe choose a quote from Yeats' "Second Coming" as a title for a novel set in Nigeria?They had decided to define the "center" that cannot hold in "Second Coming" as "humanity" as it relates to the ethical standards of a society, they did a great job of tying that loss of humanity to what happened to the Igbo people as a result of the intrusion of Christian missionaries - or any European colonialists, for that matter. They had not read Achebe's book, I simply gave them a brief synopsis and let their brains run amok.

Once they figured out why I had presented those four items together in one week, I moved on and pointed out that Shelley also wrote a little poem called "Prometheus Unbound." My students really know their mythology, so we talked about why he would be bound in the first place and what it might mean to unbind him. Then, I mentioned that Shelley was married to another Shelley - Ms. Mary - and that she was inspired to write Frankenstein at the same time her husband was writing "Prometheus Unbound." And that Dickens took inspiration from Frankenstein when he wrote Great Expectations.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: These works are thematically related. Discuss.

I look at them and they look at me. For what seems like a wee bit too long.

Suddenly a gasp, and an arm flies up. Arnold Horseshack is in the house.

"Oh! Oh! I know! Prometheus made people, Dr. Frankenstein made the monster, and Miss Havisham made Estella!" This all tumbles out in one breath, so fast that some students have to ask their neighbors what the heck he said.

"Nice. Great first step. And what are people trying to be when they go about creating?"

Hands shoot up all over the place and one kid can't help but blurt out, "Gods!"

Sweet.

We finally get around to the other creator - Magwich - and his creation, Pip the gentleman. A couple of weeks ago, I'd asked them why they thought Magwich went to all that trouble to make Pip a gentleman. They mentioned gratitude, that he saw Pip as a son, that he wanted to show up all of those people who think badly of him because he's a criminal...but I had told them I thought there might be more and asked them to file the discussion away until later. Once we started pulling this this thread on creation and monsters, I felt they could bring the conversation home. And they did. They saw the full spectrum of Magwich's motivations, and we spent some time talking about all the people in literature, mythology, and folklore who come to bad ends when they try to usurp the power of the gods. The short answer? It never ends well.

And the alternate title of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? The Modern Prometheus. They loved that.

In the last two minutes of class, I opened up Great Expectations and read from chapter 40. Magwich has just revealed himself to Pip, who is clothing and housing him. Pip is sheltering Magwich from the law, but he's still freaked out by the revelation Magwich has lain at Pip's well-shod feet. As Magwich sleeps, Pip describes his feelings:

"The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me."

I look up at my students, raise my eyebrows, and close the book. "And that? What you guys just did there? That's where we'll start on Monday, with Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Buddhism and Siddhartha."

I Dwell in Possibility

In my last post, I described my students as people "on whom nothing is lost," and I thought I'd clarify my terms. 

I've been re-reading Frances' Mayes book, The Discovery of Poetry. It's a really lovely introduction to poetry and has served as the backbone of my poetry unit this year for both the seventh and eighth grades. I have asked my students to create their own poetry glossaries based on our class discussions, and next week, they will have their final exam. I will give them a couple of poems that resemble forms we've encountered and ask them analyze them. Not in the tie-a-poem-to-a-chair-and-get-it-to-confess type of analysis, the sort that asks them to show me what they know. What do they notice about the poem's rhyme, repetition, images, allusions...that sort of thing. The test will be open notebook, and the glossary will count as part of their grade. While Ms. Mayes is best known for her Tuscan juggernaut, this little poetry book is where she really earns acclaim with me.

I was struck by the following passage from Ms. Mayes' book:  "The most important aspect of reading any poem is extensive reading - the more the better - of poems of all kinds, and the best reader is the one most open to the poems on the page. Novelist Henry James said, 'Be one on whom nothing is lost.'"

Be one on whom nothing is lost.

Right there. That's my goal. To help my students become people on whom nothing is lost. 

In the first chapter of the book, where Ms. Mayes writes about how to read poetry, she stresses the importance of reading. In order to understand many of the references in poetry, readers must share a common well of knowledge with the poet, and if the reader's well of knowledge is dry, much of the poem's meaning will be lost. For example, Leda and the Swan, one of my very favorite poems, is rendered almost meaningless without knowledge of the mythology behind it. 

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still    

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed    

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,    

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.   

 

How can those terrified vague fingers push    

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?    

And how can body, laid in that white rush,    

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?    

A shudder in the loins engenders there    

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.                         

                                              Being so caught up,     

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,    

Did she put on his knowledge with his power    

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 

It's still lovely and evocative and violent in its imagery, but if the reader is unaware that Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan and raped her, that she later gave birth to Clytemnestra and Helen and Castor and Pollux, who brought about the Trojan War, the poem is flat and one-dimensional. Wings? Agamemnon? Did she put on his knowledge with his power? These references go nowhere if the reader is ignorant of the allusions under the words. An uninformed reader can only skate across the surface, unaware that the best parts lie beneath their feet.

As I teach at a Core Knowledge School, I am encouraged to teach my students all the cultural literacy I can stuff into their heads. Every day, I teach my English classes one cultural literacy item. Last week, I taught them about films and showed them 2-3 minute key scenes from Roman Holiday, Rear Window, My Fair Lady and Singing in the Rain. This was a little out of the ordinary; most often we focus on biblical or literary references, but I like to spice up the darkest weeks at the end of winter with some really fun stuff. We had discussed Pygmalion last week, so the My Fair Lady seemed an obvious choice.

I pair these cultural literacy items with daily etymology. Yesterday, I taught them that the word "bachelor" comes from the Latin baculum, stick, because a bachelor means young man, as in a young man not old enough to be a knight, so these young men - squires - practiced fighting with sticks rather than swords. Come on...that's just so cool. Here's another one: While reading Catherine Friend's hysterical book, Sheepish, I found out that every family in colonies such as Plymouth were required to produce a couple of pounds of spun fiber a week for the government. When families were too busy to get that work done themselves, they would take in a relative to do the work to meet the quota. An unmarried aunt, for example. A..."spinster." Isn't that just so lovely? I mean, really.

The cultural literacy item of the day and the etymology item of the day take about four minutes, total, and the students record them in a daily log. Those items are then lobbed back at them in the form of extra credit questions on quizzes and tests, but sometimes they come hurtling back at me in the form of connections to the material we discuss. Cultural literacy terms often come back to bite me in the posterior when I least expect them to resurface. Just last week, a student informed me that I was "begging the question" when I flailed about for a way to explain a concept, so I awarded her an extra credit point for being a smart, smart-alec.

I have to admit a selfish impulse here; I love, love researching the cultural literacy and etymology items of the day. It's the first thing I do each week. My grandmother was a hoarder of stuff - magazines, newspaper clippings, things that may come in useful someday - and I guess the trait passed down to me. Luckily, my accumulated stuff takes up space in my head rather than my hallways and basement, and my kids are not going to have to hire dumpsters and an auctioneer in order to deal with my compulsion.

I hope I have taught my students more than literature, Roman society, the Latin language, and composition. I hope I have taught them that learning never ends. That knowledge builds on knowledge, connections beget connections. To read, and then to read some more. 

To become one on whom nothing is lost.

On Monday, we will meet Emily Dickinson. We will dwell in possibility, hear a fly buzz, and envision a bird unrolling the feathers that rowed him softer home. I will do my best to convey that the object of Monday's lesson is not next week's test, but to see these lovely poems as a beginning, a foundation stone for all the cloud-capp'd towers of knowledge they will build for themselves someday.    

Launching Forth Filament, Filament...

As I closed up my windows, shut off the lights, and took one look at the white boards in my classroom before leaving school, I marveled at the tangents one teacher can explore in one day. Today was a slow day - I taught only English 7, Latin 7, Latin 8, and English 8 - but we still covered a lot.

The white board was covered with Roman numerals (MCMXXXVII = 1937, 245= CCXLV), an etymological explanation of the word "cognate," a big red arrow between "cognate" and the word "renaissance," a breakdown of the clauses in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the words "natural man," "blind," "eyeless," "bedlam," words for Roman time and space. Hora, nundinae, pedes, mille passus, librae.


Kalendae, Nonae, and Idus, oh my.

As I happen to be a woman with a short attention span,  teaching is my perfect job. The more variation, the better. But even I revel in the moments when the word "cognate" (related by birth or origin) can tie in to the word "renaissance" (a rebirth of art or culture) as it's related via the Latin verb "nascere," to be born.

I am talking about the First Amendment because Robert Pondiscio challenged me to ask my students the question [and I paraphrase] "If President Obama has made a statement in favor of same-sex marriage, why isn't it simply the law of the land? Why can't he decide that the national color is purple or that we should have to eat beets at every meal because they are his favorite food?"

The questioning revealed some holes in my students' knowledge base, so the cultural literacy items for the next ten days are set. Today: What is the content of the First Amendment? Monday: Second Amendment? Tuesday: Third? And on and on...

Connections made in class today: 

1. The term "libra," or "pound" is related to the modern abbreviation "lb."
2. The word "nascent" is related to the word "nascere."
3. The term "bedlam" has to do with Edgar's insanity, and his association with the inmates from the Bethlehem, or "Bedlam" hospital for the insane.
4. The idea that places like China don't allow citizens to have access to social media is contrary to our freedom of assembly.
5. The Bill of Rights might just be related to the similarly-named Rights of Man.
6. The modern days of the week with the Roman days in between the market days that occurred every eight days. Beginning with Saturday, the days were: dies Saturni, Solis, Lunae, Martis, Mercurii, Iovis, and Veneris. Readers with French or Italian experience will see the connections more quickly, but the seven days in between the market days coincide with the modern days of the week.
7. The storm brewing on the heath (Act III, scene 1) is analogous to the storm inside King Lear's head and portends his coming insanity.
8. The rostra, or speaker's platform in the Roman Forum, is not named for the speaker's platform at all, but for the rostra, or battering rams from ships, placed on the front part of the Forum's stage.
9. The speech Marc Antony made after Caesar's death - was that made from the Rostra?

I have to run now as I am obliged to dress up in "semi-formal dress" for my students' graduation dance. The next couple of weeks promise to be an amazing mix of wrap-up and new moments, and I can't wait.

I announced the final project for 8th grade English and King Lear: Create some an artistic, 3-D representation of the storm on the heath. You may represent the internal struggle, the external struggle, or both. Surprise me.

And they always do.

Fine Word - 'Legitimate'

I love words. I love that words have history, and ancestors, and family trees. I love that geography, culture, economics, and historical events give birth to words and shape their evolution over time.

I never wanted to be a Latin teacher, but I suppose it was inevitable. After I accepted my current job as an English and Latin teacher, my aunt revealed that my grandmother had wanted to be a Latin teacher more than anything in the world, but she could not, due to marriage, family obligations, all those things that kept women of that era from being able to fulfill their dreams. She became the first female (and, as I understand from my family, the youngest) court stenographer for the Indiana Supreme Court. Her father had to go to work with her, she was so young. She deserved to do whatever she wanted to do. And so it's fitting - and more than an honor - to fulfill her posthumous dream. It's in my blood, I suppose. 

I find it fascinating that denied the opportunity to teach others about her love of words, she spent her entire career recording spoken English, condensing its sounds into squiggles and lines. She used to hone her shorthand skills by transcribing entire soap opera episodes and telephone conversations on. Ask her what my father ate for lunch during a mid-day phone call in 1972, and she could have flipped right to the combination of squiggles for “soup, a pickle, and a Heineken.”

I like to think she would have enjoyed my classes; particularly the time I spent on etymology, the study of word origins. I teach one vocabulary/etymology word a day at the very beginning of class when I teach my cultural literacy item of the day. Today's word? Spurious. A great word, one that my grandmother would have loved.

‘Spurious’ describes something that is false, or inauthentic, but it comes from the Latin spurius, meaning “bastard” or “illegitimate.” Spurius was related to all sorts of lovely words such as spurcitia, meaning “filthiness” or “dirt,” and spurcare, “to make dirty” or “to defile.” The Romans thought highly of their illegitimate children, clearly. They even turned spurius into a proper name for all those illegitimate offspring roaming around ancient Rome. If your name was Spurius, you were likely illegitimate.

Which segues nicely into my cultural literacy item of the day. I got to thinking: If the Roman naming convention had continued into the Elizabethan era, and Shakespeare had known about it, and he'd named Gloucester's illegitimate son Spurius instead of Edmund, the first speech in Act II of King Lear would be even more awesome than it already is.

Edmund (a.k.a Spurius) was the illegitimate son of Gloucester, close advisor to Lear. Gloucester lavishes all of his love on the legitimate son, Edgar, which drives Edmund nuts. He hates being a bastard because it renders him less than - more base - than his bookish brother Edgar. Anger drives him to deceit in the form of a tragic plot against his brother that leads to Oedipus-style eye removal, nakedness, and rampant baseness among all concerned. The fact that Edmund is, in fact, the spurious (illegitimate) son causes him to become spurious (false) and deceive his father. See that? That's just lovely, if you ask me.

I recommend this PBS performance of King Lear, as the Edmund is a hottie and does this extremely appealing L- and T- thing with his tongue on the word "legitimate" that causes giggles among the middle school girls. Oh, not me. I would never. Not in English class, anyway.

Act I, Scene 2

The Earl of Gloucester's castle

Enter [Edmund, the bastard] alone, with a letter [the one he's going to use to trick his father, Gloucester, into disavowing his good and true son, Edgar]

Edmund (Spurius, the bad-boy hottie I mentioned)

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I                       335

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,                        340

My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take

More composition and fierce quality                                  345

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,

Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops

Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund                         350

As to th' legitimate. Fine word- 'legitimate'!

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,

And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top th' legitimate. I grow; I prosper.

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!                                       355

The girls may adore the hunky, bad-boy Edmund, but despite my dorky enthusiasm for the nickname, they absolutely refuse to call him Spurius. My love for the symmetry of it all was loudly and eagerly trumped by the fact that 'Edmund' sounds a lot like 'Edward,' the vapid vampire guy from Twilight - or, as I like to call it, "That book I won't give you independent reading credit for, so don't even bother to ask me."

Did I mention that my preferred word for the time of day between daylight and nighttime is not, in fact 'twilight,' but gloaming, from the Old English glomung, a derivative of glom, from...aw, crap. Crappity-crap-crap.

From glom, Old English for 'twilight.' 

No Vampires Were Present

I spent an afternoon thinking about what I teach and how in order to answer some questions from Education News' Michael Shaughnessy, and here's how that turned out:

1) Jessica, first of all where do you teach and what kind of students do you teach?

I teach at Crossroads Academy, an independent K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. We draw students from as far as an hour away in New Hampshire and Vermont. We base our curriculum on the Core Knowledge Curriculum created by E. D. Hirsch and the Core Virtues Curriculum created by our school’s founder, Mary Beth Klee. My students are a talented and motivated bunch; they attend Crossroads for the academic rigor, supportive environment, and focus on individual character. I teach English and composition in seventh and eighth grade, and Latin in grades six through eight.

2) Let’s first focus on writing–why do you see it as important and how do you encourage it?

I believe writing is one of the most important life skills I teach. The ability to persuade others through words will serve my students well, no matter what they do with their lives. I teach a very structured composition class focusing on exposition and persuasive writing, with the occasional descriptive or personal narrative piece thrown in. The students spend a lot of time on four-paragraph essays, moving from specific pre-writing tasks, through development of thesis, to full sentence outline, to rough draft, and finally, final draft and reflection. All work is done in class, in small groups so they have the benefit of my advice and editing during the process.

Last year, we began participating in NaNoWriMo as a way of fulfilling the student’s desire to write creatively and freely, without the strict structure of composition class. That has been a wonderful addition to our year, and about 75% of the middle school students write novels in the month of November. Many have gone on to edit and self-publish their novels as well.

I am a writer as well as a teacher, and I love to talk to the students about the process of writing professionally. They have shared in my quest for an agent, my successes and failures in publication, and often, I read drafts of my blog posts to them. They are, after all, my muses. Some have aspirations to write professionally themselves, and that just thrills me. If I am able to teach my students the value of words, the weight and power of language, the beauty of a particularly well-wrought passage, I feel pretty good when I go to bed at night.

3) Now, literacy–in this age of Half Moon, and Full Moon and Eclipse and Breaking Dawn and all this vampire stuff—what do YOU encourage kids to read?

I keep a well-stocked independent reading shelf in my classroom, and offer up extra credit points for those books. Students may choose their own titles, of course, but I have to approve their selections if they want credit. When a particular novel does not score credit, they get frustrated with me, but I stress that it’s not that I don’t want them to read the Twilight series, I just don’t plan to give them credit for it. I like them to stretch themselves, try new things. I even push students who generally read challenging material to move out of a particular genre if they are stuck. If they are readers of fantasy and science fiction, that’s great – I hand them H.G. Wells or Mary Shelley – but if that’s all they read, I will urge them to read something outside of their comfort zone.

4) Let’s put you in charge of a state—What would be your TOP TEN required books in high school?

Oh, how I hate these questions. It all depends; am I teaching these books or simply handing them over to the students? If I am teaching them, I go with novels that will ease even the most literal students into the realm of the figurative and give my students a broad base of cultural literacy – Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, Song of Solomon, To Kill a Mockingbird, King Lear… the usual. As I talk a lot about Joseph Campbell’s Journey of the Hero, I also include The Once and Future King, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and short stories such as "A Worn Path." The journey is a theme we come back to over and over again, and as I also teach Latin, these books are really great dual-purpose texts. Finally, my students don’t get out of my clutches without a good dose of rhetoric, so speeches are definitely on the list as well – Kennedy, Lincoln, and Churchill are always on the menu.

5) How do you communicate to parents that writing, and reading GOOD literature is important?

This comes up so often that I wrote a “position paper” on the teaching of good literature at Crossroads Academy. Here’s a [very] short version of my position:

We must require students to read great works of literature because, when we hand them Dickens, Twain, or Shakespeare, we offer students so much more than a good story. We give them the opportunity to step beyond the safe boundary of the known world and journey into the uncharted territory of challenging vocabulary, unpredictable plot, and shifting perspectives. Students must brave these works armed with their own experiences and ability to reason, because great works of literature require more than simple retrieval and regurgitation of other’s ideas; they demand feats of intellectual bravery, patience, and trust. Great books are literary proving grounds, safe places for students to try, fail, and in the end, find unexpected moments of wonder and pride in their own abilities. When students learn to ask more of the books they read, they learn to ask more of themselves.

6) You have several blogs and commentaries- what do you see as needed changes in our educational system?

I’d love to see a shift from all this discussion about testing to discussion about what needs to be taught in order to prepare students both for higher education and life as productive members of American society. Now that I have taught in schools without a cohesive vision or agreed-upon curriculum and my current school, where the curriculum is well planned-out and executed, I am a firm believer in the power of content. Of course I teach critical thinking, and of course I teach my students to apply their content knowledge across disciplines, but without a solid foundation in literature, history, math, science, music, etc., there’s no solid footing on which to place and contextualize new knowledge.

7) Sometimes, some good movies come out based on half decent literature–The Three Musketeers seems to be continually be revived and I understand an Ayn Rand book has been made into a movie- are these good things or bad things?

Again, it depends. Thankfully, my students read The Iliad in the sixth grade, so they were not fooled – they know there’s no Sword of Troy, let alone a sword that got handed to Aeneas by Achilles. Without a grounding in the original story, they might assume that the Brad Pitt version is the real story, and that would just be sad. But that’s just a plot device, so whatever. It doesn’t bug me that much. What really upsets me are films such as the Disney version of Hercules. The story of Hercules is eviscerated. The entire reason he has to go out and complete the labors stems from the fact that Hera sends him in to a blind rage and he kills his family. He seeks to atone for his sins, and thus the labors. The Disney version is a sad, pallid version of the story, and I hate to imagine that children around the world would only know the film version.

On the other hand, there are film adaptations I adore. Andrew Davies’ Jane Austen films, of course, the recent BBC versions of Hamlet and King Lear are brilliant, and frankly, Atonement was a masterpiece. I can’t wait to see Julie Taymor’s Tempest, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I am not one of those sticklers who can’t enjoy a film because it’s not perfectly faithful to the novel; they are simply different beasts.

 How do you motivate a student to read any specific author in depth- (I am currently working on Arthur Conan Doyle myself)?

I actually think it’s easier to get a student to read an author in depth than to read the first work. Once my seventh graders have read and understood Great Expectations, they are ready to move on to A Tale of Two Cities in the eighth grade. To round out the experience, I offer up double extra credit for certain independent reading books that enhance the literature we read. Right now, some of my students are reading either Oliver Twist or David Copperfield as an adjunct to their reading of Dickens in English class. Once they are in a groove, and if I am willing to dish out the extra credit, they are usually game. Last month our double extra credit was The Great Gatsby, as I wanted to be able to draw parallels between Daisy and Estella and Pip’s great expectations and Gatsby’s green light. That went well, and I used that as a launching pad to talk about “Bernice Bobs her Hair.”

9 ) I thank many English teachers now for exposing me to Hermann Hesse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cervantes and MANY teachers for encouraging poetry. Why don’t we hear more about great writers and poetry?

I think poetry freaks people out. Too many adults have had it shoved down their throats by a teacher who only taught it because they had to. I happen to love poetry, and one of the reasons I adore teaching middle school is that I often get to be the first person to hand them Frost, to show them the magic in Dickinson, to explain the significance of Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider. Some years, I read a poem a day at the beginning of English class (I have a two-year rotating schedule, one year of poetry, one year of cultural literacy daily facts and connections). I am in the cultural literacy year of my cycle, and I have to admit, as much as I adore the cultural literacy lessons, I miss the poetry.

Students can tell when teachers are faking enthusiasm. If my love of poetry is genuine, if my heart soars when I read the words to them, they know. They feel it. And hopefully, with time, their hearts might soar as well.

10) I have nothing against Stephen King- in fact, let me say to him, that I think his writing HAS gotten better- but why do some pupils go overboard on reading his stuff?

I am not a fan of horror, myself, but I absolutely adore two of his books, Misery and On Writing. Misery is an incredible description of the healing power of writing and the magical mystery tour that goes on in some author’s brains. I don’t channel characters, as King describes in both Misery and On Writing, but I love reading about that process. On Writing is simply a wonderful account of a writing life. I love it the same way I love accounts by Annie Dillard or Carolyn See or Anne Lamott. Besides, King’s description of his process always motivates me to write. My thirteen-year-old writer son feels the same way.

I just picked up King’s new book, 11/22/63 because I needed a good “escape” book and it got a good review from Errol Morris at the New York Times. Besides, I was curious – King said he wanted to write this book thirty years ago when he was still teaching English but did not have the chops to pull it off…I like that sort of honesty in a writer.

11) Let’s close this interview, with the close of the Harry Potter series—Your thoughts on the work of J.K. Rowling, and perhaps her use of some themes from Charles Dickens ??

As I mentioned before, I use Joseph Campbell as a thread throughout the two years I teach my students. We start off with an introduction to Campbell in the first semester of seventh grade, just after they read The Once and Future King for summer reading. My presentation on Campbell uses Arthur, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter as exemplars, and I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have a story that everyone knows. Like mythology, Harry Potter serves as a useful touchpoint for so many concepts. I use Voldemort when I explain one-dimensional characters. I use the Latin translation of Harry Potter in Latin class. I return to the Harry Potter series over and over again in order to explain everything from the definition of Bildungsroman, to the biblical fall from innocence, to the use of Freytag’s Pyramid. Cultures have always had their stories – mythology, folklore, whatever – that bind us together as a people. Harry Potter is firmly entrenched in our cultural consciousness, and I, for one, am grateful for the addition.