Lit Up Read online

  * * *

  “So what?” might be a response to all of this. That was the mocking question Mr. Leon insisted students apply to their own writing. So what? Some suburban kids took up easy books, and some of them went on to better books. It’s hardly a revolution. No, it’s not, and that’s the point. The grudging readers and nonreaders had made a start, and they were likely to succeed only by degrees and only when propelled by enjoyment and perhaps by self-approval as well. Mamaroneck wanted to build a kind of reading ego: having chosen a book on their own, the students took control of it and enjoyed pride of ownership, a very American idea. They would become proud of what they were doing, just as they would be proud of mastering calculus or figuring out the best way to reduce turbidity in water. Awakened by pride as well as interest, they might be roused from electronic stupor. They might make a preliminary movement toward the compulsive habits of adults who couldn’t put a book down. “High volume, high success reading” was what some people called happiness.

  Of course, they didn’t always climb the ladder. Some of them chose the same kind of book over and over again. What then? The teacher would propose a friendly conference. “Why do you find horror stories so fascinating?” If the student responded, “I like being creeped out by weird stuff,” the teacher might say, “If you liked Asylum, maybe you’d like Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The teacher had to feel the student out and stick with it. It was marathon work.

  Miss Groninger wrote me about a ninth-grader named Lanier, who read the Pretty Little Liars series for months:

  I mean, who knew there were dozens of them? I was after her in every conference—we had to try something different. Her response was always that when she finished the latest installment, she would move on. Like any soap opera, there was always a next installment. According to my notes, she read Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld in the late winter [adventures of a South Bend, Indiana, girl among jaded kids in a New England school]. She loved it. She then started to read Ransom Riggs’s Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children [horror fantasy-adventure built from strange old photos]. She struggled with it and gave up after about 50 pages. She had a hard time with the characters, and the narrative was not as straightforward as she was used to. It’s really not a difficult book, but she didn’t respond to it.

  Even so, not a bad ladder. Certainly a few rungs up from Pretty Little Liars. Anyway, Lanier was right: Ransom Riggs’s book is strange. She made a critical judgment, not a simple rejection, just as Jack had made a critical judgment on Tucker Max’s rancid effusions. In the end, Lanier, after passing through John Green novels, did a paper on the work of Howard Gardner, the Harvard developmental psychologist, which is more like leaping into the sky than climbing a ladder.

  “My biggest failure this year,” Miss Groninger went on,

  is with Jose. I can honestly say he read less than one book all year, despite the dozens of hours he had in my class. My notes on him are full of my own frustration. Jose told me in October that he hated English class, that he never had seen the point. “Everyone knows how to read and write. Why do we need a whole class for it? That’s just stupid,” he said. Anyway, I threw books at him all year. He is the only one who never took the bait, yet one day I did find him reading The Fault in Our Stars under his desk. So I played it cool and didn’t ask too much. But the book disappeared.

  Flash forward: Jose almost failed my class—he actually did, but we worked out some overtime in June and he passed with a 65. He sent me an email apologizing for messing up my year. I asked him if he still had the book. He said yes, but didn’t offer to return it. I told him I dared him to read it and not cry. He did try Bodega Dreams [Ernesto Quiñonez’s Spanish Harlem noir] at the end of the year, but he didn’t finish it. I mention that, because I think part of my failure with Jose is the fact that I didn’t match him with the Right Book. Annie Ward and many other smart literacy experts argue vehemently that there are books for every kid. Annie moves mountains to make reading a reality for the most struggling students. I should have worked harder for Jose.

  But Miss Groninger didn’t fail, and neither did he. She got him reading, and she cared so much for his stubborn soul—Jose was her work—that he was embarrassed and apologetic. He felt he hadn’t come up to what she expected. My guess is that Jose will remember Margaret Groninger’s interest in him, and, out of guilt or affection or ambition, he’ll wander someday into the last bookstore in the United States, buy a book, and read it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEACON, JANUARY: SATIRE

  What Is Irony?

  A Teacher’s Life

  The Alanis Project

  Yawp

  Celebrity

  Some of the Beacon students read on their own, of course; I got an idea of the class’s reading habits with my questionnaire in the middle of the digital fast. Choosing their own books, however, was not part of schoolwork. Mr. Leon had other ways of giving students something of their own—explicitly, something they could kick around and have fun with. God knows they deserved it.

  Both Brave New World and 1984 were satires, one jaunty, even gleeful, the other embittered and fatalistic. Mr. Leon asked the little groups that he had set up at the beginning of the year (four or five students each) to create their own satire of something. Not a strange idea for them; the media are full of josh and play, mockery and snark, travesty and ridicule of all kinds, and some genuine wit. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are smarter than anyone I can remember on TV from years ago. Together, those two had changed the tone of public discourse.

  Still, this was school, so there had to be lessons, definitions, an organization. Mr. Leon came in for the satire classes wearing a striped dress shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, a vest, and loosely knotted tie. Some sort of key chain on a lanyard was hanging from his right pocket. He was a little jauntier than usual. He led the class through the different meanings of satire, parody, spoof, and then the conversation turned to irony. What is irony? There is the literary kind in which you say one thing and mean the opposite; the dramatic kind, in which the audience understands something that someone on stage or in a movie does not understand; and the “situational” kind, harder to isolate and define, in which you expect one thing out of life and get upended by a completely different result. That was the kind Alanis Morissette was talking about in her hit song from 1996, “Ironic.” Mr. Leon played it for the class, projecting the Alanis video onto a screen (every Beacon classroom had a similar setup). There she was, driving though a snowy highway, larking with different versions of herself in the backseat, hanging out of the window, and singing such lyrics as:

  A traffic jam when you’re already late

  A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break

  It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife …

  And isn’t it ironic … don’t you think

  A little too ironic …

  But how much of Morissette’s lyric was ironic? Mr. Leon then played another video. It was a stand-up routine—the beanpole Irish comic Ed Byrne tearing the song apart. “She’s a moaning cow,” was how Byrne began. Jumpy, pale, and narrow-faced, with stringy hair hanging down the sides of his pale puss like damp curtains, Byrne attacked relentlessly: “She kept naming all these things in the song that were supposed to be ironic. And none of them were. They were just unfortunate.” He slated in particular the “ten thousand spoons” line—“That’s not ironic. That’s just stupid.”

  What, then, is irony? The students came up with examples of situational irony. Lauren, whose name no one could remember on opening day, now spoke up, and said, “People asked if they could give blood to a children’s hospital and they didn’t realize their blood was infected with AIDs.” That was a kick in the gut. 1984 may have gotten to the students more than I had thought. And was it irony? Nino said, “It reverses the expected outcome,” and Mr. Leon, wincing a bit, agreed, saying, “I like it. It’s kind of awkward saying I like it, but it’s iron
y.”

  Nino took a shot: “A sword-swallower chokes on a chicken bone.” Okay, next! Marina said, “It’s from Hamlet, actually. Hamlet kills Polonius when he means to kill Claudius.” But that’s not ironic; it’s a mistake. John Gruen came up with the moment when Yankee first baseman Wally Pipp sat down with a headache, in 1925, and Lou Gehrig took over and played the next 2,130 games. “I don’t see irony there at all,” Mr. Leon said, and he offered one of his own: “A water vendor dies of thirst.” Mr. Leon bombed with that one, but he meant to bomb. “See, it’s irony, but it’s so obvious. We want to craft an irony that has more levels.”

  He asked the groups to come up with what he now called the Alanis Project—it could be satire, parody, or spoof. They would create scripts, songs, videos, posters, whatever they wanted. “You need to choose your form and your target,” he said. “You may not be original, but you must be fresh. Satirizing political candidates or what it’s like to be a Beacon student—those things have been done again and again.” Alanis herself, after getting swatted by Ed Byrne for “Ironic,” had parodied the sexy-sleazy 2005 Black Eyed Peas video, “My Humps,” in a video of her own. Slowing the number down, Alanis took over Fergie’s role as a jewelry-loving vamp. Mr. Leon showed the kids the video, and they then proceeded to have a Very Correct conversation about women degrading themselves by complying with stupid stereotypes. Most of the girls in the class hated the Black Eyed Peas number and appreciated Alanis’s mockery of it. John said, “Fergie is hot,” but no one paid him any mind.

  Mr. Leon showed us a couple of videos put together by tenth-grade students in earlier years. There was a spoof of an Internet-dimmed family, with zombie kids, unhitched from their computers, walking into walls. There was a joint parody of 1984 and Sean Leon. A bunch of students gathered in Central Park. “LEON IS WATCHING YOU,” said a sign. “His English class has become a place of terror!” screamed a malcontent. “We must move past English and attain freedom in history!” A mash-up video of Hitler and Stalin haranguing their followers came next. “English class must be eradicated altogether!” shouted a Radical Girl. The point of view was a little confusing, both totalitarian and revolutionary at once, but the spirit was willing, and Mr. Leon was greatly amused.

  After the troubled 1984 conversations, he was getting them into the mood. “We need a barbaric yawp to get us going,” he said. The reference was to Whitman: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.”

  “Yawp,” they said.

  “Louder!”

  “Yawp! Yawp!”

  * * *

  How, I wondered, did Sean Leon summon the energy and emotional resources to do what he had to do day after day? You could ask the same, I suppose, of any dedicated teacher. As I heard, Margaret Groninger ran the English Department at Mamaroneck; she taught “only” sixteen hours a week, prepped for each class, did all that extra reading for the book talks while raising three kids with her husband. In class, like Sean Leon, she seemed to be in touch with everyone in the room, checking them out, revving them up. Many Americans worked exhausting hours while raising kids, but teachers had to be responsible, at the same time, for the educational, moral, and spiritual progress of perhaps ninety students in different sections—well, it surpassed ordinary understanding.

  Sean Leon, a bachelor with no children, lived in Harlem, at 152nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in an apartment he shared with a roommate. By Friday afternoons, he was dead, and he tried not to do any schoolwork on Saturday. He would shop, hang out with friends, maybe play basketball in playground pickup games. He liked to sit in Riverside Park, along the Hudson River, reading near the water and perhaps writing a little. On Sunday, he was back at work again, prepping, reading journals, reading drafts of papers and then the papers themselves. He had started as a teacher ten years ago at a salary of $39,000 a year. He now made $80,000 a year, which would be good money in many places other than New York.

  Talking to him at length in school was impossible, since students always wanted to grab him for conferences or just to chat, so we met for lunch on a Sunday at PD O’Hurley’s, an Irish pub on West 72nd Street. O’Hurley’s was like many such traditional places in New York: a narrow, deep room, with a long bar on one side; above the bar, an endless row of dark bottles and TVs playing soccer and rugby; high oak tables along the opposite wall; and a surprisingly substantial menu. We sat midway through the pub, and I ate an enormous platter of smoked salmon while Sean ate much less. He had arrived with a gym bag and was obviously on his way to a workout. We talked for about ninety minutes on that day, and met again later in the semester, and then again a year later, and Sean also wrote to me, answering further questions.

  He was always a bit of an outsider, a man born Catholic in largely Protestant Northern Ireland. I knew that his mother was Irish, his father an American navy man of Italian descent stationed at the U.S. base at Derry (the base is now closed). Lamont Leon was his name. He told me in O’Hurley’s that he was the couple’s second child (he has an older brother), but that soon after he was born, in 1972, his father took off. “I’ve never met my father, but I’ve heard that he was charming and funny,” he said.

  “As I never knew my father and his family,” he wrote to me later, “I never came to understand my Italian heritage. Growing up, I came to know myself as Irish. I came to self-identify with being solely Irish due to my mother, of course, but also because of my continued relationship with my family in Ireland. To this day, I still visit Ireland and spend my time with my family there.”

  After his father left, his mother remarried in Ireland—another American navy man. His stepfather, Maynard, eventually had three girls with Sean’s mother. When Sean was four, Maynard moved the family to Opelousas, a Louisiana city of roughly 20,000 about two hours west of New Orleans. Opelousas calls itself “the spice capital,” but it’s also known as the yam capital, celebrated annually with the Yambilee Festival. Outside of town, there’s a large Walmart distribution center where Sean’s older brother once worked. But Maynard took off, too. Sean’s mother and stepfather have been divorced since 1996. His mother was now alone; all five children have left. Sean talked frequently of her loneliness.

  In class, his voice was normally so lively and penetrating that it seemed to dominate every corner of the room, his eyes darting and flashing as he kept track of thirty-two students. I was a little startled by how softly he spoke now. Teaching, among other things, is a performance; a teacher must construct a classroom version of himself as much as an actor creates a character. The voice was still clear, distinct, and expressive, even in quiet, but he spoke intimately, with a steady gaze.

  “We had a public school, a parochial school, and two private schools,” he said. He went to the public high school, which was 75 percent African American. Most of his friends were black or Hispanic. “During the day, I heard one sound, southern, another at night, Irish. So I wound up with a neutral accent,” which ended my puzzlement over his untraceable tones. But I still couldn’t figure out who he reminded me of, even then, sitting across a high table from him in O’Hurley’s.

  He majored in English at Louisiana State University, and graduated in 1995. After school, all through his twenties, he went back and forth between Northern Ireland and Louisiana, where he was getting a master’s degree in mass communications at LSU. The Irish Troubles was part of what drew him back to Ireland. In Derry, in 1996, his eleven-year-old cousin, Stephen McConomy, was shot in the back of his head with a plastic bullet by the British and died three days later. Other relatives died or were imprisoned fighting the British military and police. “I did a lot of writing about that,” he told me at O’Hurley’s.

  Back in the States, in the summer of 2002, he participated in a summer program with a New York City Teaching Fellowship. “That summer before we entered the classroom was spent taking three theory-based courses. Frankly, I don’t remember the course titles, nor do I remember what I learned in tho
se classes. I only remember a developing anxiety as the summer wore on. I, and my peers, did not know what to do in the classroom in those first few weeks of school. The basic logistics of classroom prep and management were not covered. We were assigned to Jordan L. Mott Middle School in the Bronx. Within days of assignment, the New York Post ran a story on the city’s “Dirty Dozen Schools”—the twelve schools with the highest rates of criminal reports. Jordan L. Mott was the only middle school on the list. The rest were high schools.

  “I didn’t sleep at all the night before my first day. I remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of inadequacy before I even started! How was I going to help these kids?” Once Sean got to school, the principal turned out to be furious that he had been assigned to Mott without her approval. The room for his sixth-grade class was dirty, filled with stacked desks, broken chairs, and rodent feces. He and the children cleaned the place up, reordered the desks, and turned it into a classroom. “The principal who gave me such a hard time lasted the first couple of months of school before she was replaced.”

  Caught in hostile circumstances, he was thrown back on his own resources at the very beginning of his career as a teacher. Jordan L. Mott was split into two schools, and, in his second year, Sean became a seventh- and eighth-grade English and social studies teacher. His new boss gave him some freedom in choosing what to teach and how to teach it, which turned out to be the moment of salvation. He was neutral in tone in describing his early years as a teacher, but now, in the pub, his voice rose in contempt. “Every year the teachers were presented with a new solution to raising text scores. A huge box of instructional materials would arrive in September. Everything shiny and glossy, but dumbed down and uninteresting. So I ignored it, and we read the likes of Poe, Shakespeare, Emerson, Hawthorne, Maya Angelou, Neruda, etc. My students felt ready for the seventh-grade state test. They knew those were the scores used for high school admission. Long story short: twenty-four of the thirty students scored 3s and 4s, in the upper half of test scores.”