To Sir, With Mild Disinterest and My Ipod Earbuds in Place
How do you get teenagers excited about literature? What got you excited about literature as a kid?
I’m wondering about this because I’m teaching a writing class at the alternative high school in the Valley (and as a follow-up to Brett’s post). The kids are great when they’re on and geared up, but when they’re not, I feel like I’m not very good at drawing them out.
Hey, kids, here's your role model
So I’m looking for advice — what short stories and poems are good for engaging kids? What kinds of prompts or exercises for writing would you suggest? What engaged you as a teen-ager? They all like to write, but it’s very personal stuff, and I’m interested in pushing them out of that style, if only for a little while.
Also, I’ve been told to avoid assigning home reading — they do writing at home and bring it in — because it simply doesn’t get done. Which is a whole ‘nother thing… But we read Cheever’s Reunion in class, and they seemed to really enjoy it (drinking, mild cursing, a lousy father). I’m thinking about trying Bullet in the Brain, and Sam’s Germans, too.
But I’d be curious to hear anyone’s thoughts or advice. I feel like these are some talented kids, and a few of them might be open to pressing forward as writers, or at least becoming engaged readers.
What would you teach them if you were me?
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On a less serious note, Bookseller magazine has announced its list of the year’s oddest book titles.
Here are a few contenders:
Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
Father Christmas Needs a Wee
I Stopped Sucking My Thumb…Why Can’t You Stop Drinking?
The Quotable Douchebag
Bondage for Beginners
For many more, plus an interview with the prize custodian, see this piece at The Guardian.
Hey Shawn, ask them what they are reading and use that as an example to show the kids how their favorite pieces draws techniques first used by the old masters. On my campus (SFCC) one of the poetry teacher had problems engaging her students until she found out that the kids were actually reading and creating poetry, just the spoken word kind instead of classics. In the end, she invited Saul Williams to come to campus and we had a fantastic time. He drew way more people from the school and the community than Robert Bly, who had been there the year before. (Although, Bly of course was awesome.)
Ask them what their favorite graphic novels are and use them to illustrate fiction techniques. Have they read Persepolis or Fun Home? Both of those graphic memoirs use fantastic (and traditional) nonfiction story technique and use the graphics to add to those.
Have fun!
I’ve taught poetry to third and sixth graders and have used work from Willow Springs. The kids you’re working with are older, but there’s still a bunch of stuff you could take from the website–poetry and prose.
“The Kettle,” a story by Eva Marie Ginsburg might be a good one for allegory, and might lead to stuff by Bender.
Stacey Richter’s “The Land of Pain” also sort of works in that arena, and is also really funny and weird, but might be too long.
The poem, “Encyclopedia of the Wheat,” might go well with “The Kettle,” in that you could talk about personification. And the 6th graders loved that poem, perhaps because it mentions desperation “for a taste of Earth’s huge breasts.” It’s also a list.
There’s a great story by Sean Lovelace called, “Andy Warhol and the Art of the Bullet,” which could lead to an exercise writing from the POV of a famous person in an attempt to humanize them, but that story might be too sophisticated.
Kids like and get absurdity. I bet they’d like Dan Pinkerton’s “Robot Crusade.”
Tony Hoagland’s “Western Movie Poem” plays with film cliche and stereotypes about the western US.
Another poem, “S. Sgt. Metz,” by Dorianne Laux weaves a current event, observation from daily life, and memory and the past, and I think kids would like this poem, and that the poem could be used as a model for an exercise.
Blake Butler’s “Hair Loop” would be a perfect model for a list exercise. I bet the kids would like working with lists, using elements of their lives as raw material, the list serving as the initial organizing principle for the work, maybe indirectly showing them how work starts to take shape or form. And how meaning sort of arises from and transcends the items of the list.
For voice, the little hellions might like, “Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too,” by Jim Hall.
And what about the sheer weirdness, tension, and economy of Robert Lopez’s “Bleeders?”
Two things have worked every time for me in my (slightly inner city) high school English classroom: reading to students aloud, and Literature Circles.
I read difficult pieces, emotional pieces, epic poetry, and samples of selected authors aloud to my students all the time, because most of our population is economically disadvantaged, and does not come from a text-rich home environment. Most of them were not read to as children, and average reading levels tend to be several years below grade level.
Letting them hear the beauty of the words, as they were meant to be heard, wakes something up in them.
Literature Circles, using everything from young adult to NYT best sellers, fiction and nonfiction, classics and brand new, has gotten my students reading because it ties that activity to something teenagers live for: talking to each other! :-)
The small group team aspect of the format encourages individual effort—they know they have to earn their place, not with me but with their group, through active participation and interaction. I’ve had students who could barely read struggle through Holes or Tangerine every night in order to be ready for their weekly meeting, and whole groups all go buy their own copies of Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper in order to keep up with the 40-pages per week required to finish it by semester’s end.
For poetry: I’d go with some of Russell Edson (some of his stuff is wicked-funny). Joe Milford had him on his poetry radio show, and it’s pretty funny. Bonus: His poems make for pretty quick reads.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-jane-crown-show/2008/08/22/russell-edson-tonight
Sherman Alexie’s poetry (and fiction) would probably go over well, I think, and would probably make worthwhile lessons.
Carolyn Forche’s “The General” is probably the perfect example of poetry as political commentary, and her anthology Against Forgetting, is a pretty decent collection of poetry written by oppressed folks.
Now a quick list (I’m at work):
Todd Boss’s book Yellowrocket
Tim Nolan’s book The Sound of It
Marvin Bell’s Mars Being Red is probably the book about the Iraq War
James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”
Also, his “St. Judas”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” and “One Art”
Mark Strand, “When the Vacation is Over For Good”
Campbell McGrath, “Wild Thing”
Billy Collins and his book (Poetry 180), all very accessible, and have the bonus of being wicked funny.
For short fiction, Barthelme’s “The School” is a riot, and a few others are pretty damn funny too. Maybe some of Calvino’s Cosmicomics.
For poetry, Todd Boss is wonderfully funny and the students will no doubt appreciate, especially “Book Five, and I Finally Get My Turn to Read a Few Chapters from the Laura Ingalls’ Little House Series to the Kids. I’m including it here; we ran it in Knockout a few issues back.
and what happens? Right off the bat,
Mary goes blind and Jack the bulldog
dies, and suddenly all the young
readers in our little house in the big city
are bawling their eyeballs out
into the pillows, and it’s just not fair:
for months my wife regales them
with tales of the harvest, the bear,
the best Christmas ever … and what do
I get? Sibling blindness and dead pets.
There wasn’t any warning, either—
Chapter One and Chapter Two:
bang, bang—one tragedy followed by
another. Apparently it’s going to be
slippery By the Shores of Silver
Lake, no lifeguard on duty there,
and it’s almost more than I can take
because tonight my kids finally
saw it in their hearts to release their
arbitrary ban on letting Papa read
the bedtime stories. So all of a sudden
it looks like it was me that struck
the poor girl blind and killed the dog.
All innocent prairie as far as the eye
can see. Yeah, till I come along like
scarlet fever. Nobody under the age
of eight within a hundred miles is going
to let me touch a storybook again,
I feel certain. Never mind that we’re
(every last one of us) at the mercy
of authors—not fathers—authors
who pull the plug on characters we
should have known better than to go
falling in love with in the first place
with our childlike love of love. It’s
authors above us in the firmament,
and authors below, playing musical
chairs with the demons, acting all
nonchalant, acting all Laura Ingalls
Wilder. I think my wife got all
the Laura Ingalls and I got stuck
with the Wilder, and it’s just no
fair. Yesterday a friend gave me an
unsolicited review of Seussical: The
Musical that was thumbs way down.
She’d been there the night before
with her five-year-old son. She said
the show had too many grown-
up themes. “This goose abandons
her egg,” she said, the shock still in
her voice, “and it made my little boy
cry.” So I say to hell with Dr. Seuss
and his deadbeat goose and Jim Henson,
too, and all their low-life friends.
Heartbreak should never occasion
literature, and anyone who thinks so
is free to meet Laura Ingalls Wilder
and me in the smackdown ring at ten.
I’ll be there with my gloves on, and my
pads on, and my mouth-guard in, and a
burly referee standing by who knows
the rules of the game and won’t let
anybody get away with any fouls. Why
I didn’t see this coming I have no clue.
And don’t tell me it was bound to
happen. I cried my own eyes out last
month finishing Joan Didion’s un-
believable Year of Magical Thinking,
but that’s me, I can take it, I’m a big
boy. I want my kids kept innocent,
thanks, for as long as possible, like
Jack (the miserable mutt, who I didn’t
even know—but then, who really ever
knows a dog?) with his sad eyes and his
wagging tail, and that way he had of
shoving his graying muzzle under Laura’s
hand in search of a little tenderness.
that is awesome. and thanks for the good ideas
“Bullet in the Brain” is a good call. We’ve read it with the high-schoolers at the Institute both summers. I know the group is slightly different, because they’re the kind of HS students who do their work and go to writing camp, but that story is so engaging in so many ways.
Other stories we used last summer that you might consider: “Emergency,” Dybek’s “Death of the Right Fielder,” and Aimee Bender’s “Off” (are there any girls in there?).
On the other note: I gave my brother-in-law The Quotable Douchebag for Christmas. It’s a good book for someone who doesn’t read books.
Anything subversive, ideally with some sex and violence thrown in, will probably grab them. I have a 14 year old in my class who hadn’t been to school since he was 11 and had been living in a car with his drug-addicted father for 3 years. He thought reading was “faggy.” I gave him a copy of “Manchild In The Promised Land,” and he loved it. Your post made me think of Charles D’Ambrosio’s “American Bullfrog,” as something that might hook your kids.
An exercise I like to use with young people is to assign them to eavesdrop on adults and write down ten lines of dialogue (preferably from different conversations) and then use them to build a narrative (though it could easily be used to build a poem as well).
I know it is not original (The Onion recently made fun of teachers that assign it), but I loved “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson when I first read it. Other favorites in high school or thereabouts were “The Open Window” by Saki and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. I liked dark and mysterious.
Students in developmental college writing class have been known not to do outside reading, but mine seem to be doing it this semester with the introduction of the reading journal. Chris Howell assigns them. Naturally the reading notebook assignment I give has to be far more structured than the one he gives.
My students have to be prepared to tell me the main idea of the essay (we’re reading essays from the New York Times Writers on Writing series) and the key details that support the main idea. Then they get to choose from a more creative list of things to write about–one is to imagine a narrative, what happened to the writer that made him or her sit down to write this essay–to what or whom the writer is responding in writing this piece. I have been THRILLED by how carefully my students are doing the reading. And I act like I expect them to do it. That is vital. They read our expectations. Students of all sorts tend to be very good at that kind of reading.
you know, the outside work thing is a real issue here. I’m not the official teacher, I’m technically a volunteer and the teacher of record created and described the class to the students basically without me. long story…but anyway, he’s now gone and i’m kind of doing my own thing. these kids are plenty smart and able, and i feel like they’re getting used to being handled with kid gloves or something….they know they can get away with a lot.
Another part I forgot to mention is that I make the students lead the discussions. Another Chris Howell trick. And it is working BEAUTIFULLY with my developmental students and with the engineers. Of course, I get to jump in and push the conversation wherever I want whenever I want, but the students are reading more carefully, taking more responsibility and initiative in the discussions, and they want to help each other out. Plus they are likely worried that no one will talk when they are in the lead if they don’t talk when someone else is in the lead.
thank you all very much. there are tons of great ideas here…
Shawn,
I don’t know how much poetry you’re doing, but one way I’ve tricked my H.S. students into writing detailed, fantastic-image-ridden poems is by showing them some performance poetry clips. Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Maggie Estep (look up “Emotional Idiot”) are both good. My students seem to like the mix of angst and image. Then we look at some of the “page” poets. Some they’ve liked so far are Ntozake Shange, Cornelius Eady, and there’s this poem called “Crater Face” but I can’t remember who wrote it. But they love the Drano on the face in that poem. They are still talking about it. And these poems have encouraged them to explore similar angst/image experiences in their own teenage lives. Hope this helps! I’d be interested to hear a follow-up from you and new strategies, readings, and activities you’ve implemented. I’m always looking for suggestions, too.
p.s. I saw a little blurb about you in the Eastern alumni magazine. Congrats!
thanks…and i’m curious. i haven’t seen that, though the magazine is here somewhere…
[...] one thing, there’s the matter of my aforementioned creative writing class at the alternative school. And we’ve had some fun here at Bark with lists [...]