“But then we did not think of ourselves ever as poor. We did not accept it…. We ate well and cheaply and ate well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway “Are you ready?” I ask my Period 3 Honors American Literature class as they file in,…
Category: Literature
We Didn’t Always Live in Kandern
As often happens, I have words stuck in my head. These ones aren’t the common song lyrics, though. I’m the only person I know who is haunted by lines of prose. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street.” Those used to be first words I read to my students, back at Ingraham, nine thousand miles…
What Is Love?
“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no…
The Use of Stories
“What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories Snow is falling hesitantly, halfheartedly over Kandern this Sunday afternoon. Our living room is the picture of calm, complete with soft Christmas music and my sister, Holly, cutting out snowflakes while Emily’s brother, David, writes emails. I compare…
In the Forest
In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. Ralph Waldo Emerson It is grey November, a Thursday afternoon,…
Knowledge of Good and Evil
The epilogue of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible hangs in silence in the last minutes of class, images of haunted farms and wrongly-executed non-witches dispersing like smoke into the sunny Friday afternoon. I congratulate my students on finishing the first book of the year, and ask them what they think. The reply is nearly unanimous: We don’t like…
Miss Gruwell and Miss Potter
Like all good teachers, I went to see the 2007 film Freedom Writers as soon as it came out. As some people are with sports or science fiction movies, I am with teacher movies. I love them. Long before I was a teacher–even when I was struggling with teaching as a calling–I would watch Dead Poets’ Society or,…
Of Books and Places
“So, do you like English?” I know that the question, directed at the future eleventh grader beside me, is a long shot. All questions related to school seem distant and unreal in this first week of summer. Like half a dozen others, we’re working at the new middle school in Sitzenkirch, prepping it for painting tomorrow….
The Way Home 