Lit Up Read online

  The knowledge gap that many of the Hillhouse students suffered from was created by poverty. Most of the students lived in large, mixed, even chaotic families, with fathers and stepfathers and their mother’s boyfriends coming and going, and sometimes with fathers or brothers in prison. Of the students I spoke to, only one, Malia, said she had been read to much as a child (by her grandmother). I talked to several of the students’ mothers, and they said they had been sorely tried just to get food on the table for two, three, four children while holding a job. They spoke of the difficulties of getting by, and said nothing when I mentioned childhood reading. How could they find time, I wondered, to get to the library and take out books for their kids? A lot of the parents may not have read much themselves, and if you don’t enjoy reading, why would you read to your children? The complicated tangles and sorrows in these teenagers’ lives, making them strong and weak at the same time, spiraled back a generation or two.

  The troubles for Hillhouse kids started when they were born in poor families, but Hillhouse had let them down, too. There were dozens of computers at the school, but computer education was intermittent, and the absence of a college office was a grievous failure. The school constantly spoke of prepping the students for college, but no one actually helped them get in. When I asked the principal, Kermit Carolina, about it, he mournfully said that the New Haven School District would not support such an office. In eleventh-grade English classes, some of the teachers would devote time to writing a college-application essay, some would not. Most of the students’ parents could not assist them. They were on their own.

  Yet there was a promise of aid. Yale University and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven had joined in developing a program called New Haven Promise. If you graduated from public school in New Haven with a 3.0 grade point average and were accepted at a public college or university in Connecticut, Promise would pay your tuition, up to $10,000 a year. When I asked students about college plans, they were generally vague, but several mentioned the program. The Yale initiative, it turned out, both helped them and trapped them in town. Many went to local colleges and universities—Southern Connecticut University, the University of New Haven, or Gateway Community College, a two-year school with vocational training. But if current patterns held, about 70 percent would leave four-year colleges by the end of sophomore year. They might run out of money, or find the work too difficult, the college life too hard to adjust to. Miss Zelenski knew all this, but she said that a larger issue than college entrance was at stake. They needed literature to live.

  * * *

  The curriculum Miss Zelenski was using in tenth grade was designed to be aligned with the Common Core standards, a set of guidelines commissioned in 2009 by the National Governors Association—a set of standards, not an imposed federal curriculum as some conservatives believe, or pretend to believe. The states and the local school districts make up the specific curriculum. The Common Core standards call for a partial shift from fiction to “informational” readings, but the absence of general knowledge—concepts, forces, words—frustrated the students when Miss Zelenski, late in the fall, asked them to read essays and journalism. Many had trouble following what they were reading. If they came to words they didn’t know, they quickly gave up. “Miss, why are we reading this?” said Anika when Miss Zelenski gave them an essay from Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space about technological change in the premodern period, the 1890s. (“Too hard, too hard,” Miss Zelenski moaned later.) She dropped the essay and discussed technology in the 1890s without any further reference to it. The unit was devoted to learning how to cull and synthesize information; the students had to answer a set of questions about the social and personal effects of technology, but it was a challenge to get them to write more than a few sentences.

  When Miss Zelenski asked her class to write ten sentences about their relation to nature, Philip Todd said, “We live in a city,” and others talked about indoor entertainment, video games, hanging out with friends in houses and apartments. “I hate nature because it interferes with sports,” said Denzel. “How many of you have gone hiking in the woods?” Miss Zelenski asked. “How many have gone camping?” No more than a few in each case. The nature exercise was a nonstarter. They did better, however, responding to excerpts from such controversial texts as Amy Chua’s boastful Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which inflamed everyone with its view of punitive parenting.

  And they were highly engaged in constructing public service announcements. They had watched a bunch of professionally created PSAs, for the environment and the like. They critiqued them: How effective were they as argument? To whom did they appeal? Miss Zelenski presented the “rhetorical triangle,” derived from Aristotle, which consisted of the three modes that successful argument depended on: ethos (credibility, sense of right and wrong); pathos (emotion); logos (fact and logic). They split into groups and used their cell phones to download and create their own PSAs. The work was good, but Miss Zelenski went through their subject choices with a sigh. “Drugs, pregnancy, violence. Is there any more to say about these things?”

  “This is what we know!” shouted Anika. She had lived with her father for a while after her parents separated, but her father had frightened her, and she moved back in with her mother and two young brothers. I visited them in their apartment about a mile from the school. Anika’s family life was complicated. A few years earlier, her older brother, now in jail, robbed a jewelry store with a pellet gun, an event recorded and broadcast on local TV news. “It was … difficult to go to school the next day,” she told me at home. When she lived with her father, her grades had declined, but, sitting next to her mother, she said, “I’m free now.” She was doing better in school. An all-around athlete (volleyball, softball, track), she sang in a gospel choir and composed songs in a notebook, then recorded them in a home studio at the house of her sister’s boyfriend. She wanted to be a doctor. English was less important to her than biology, but she liked Jessica Zelenski.

  * * *

  “I’m not good at the scaffolding,” Miss Zelenski said to me several times, by which she meant the lesson plans created by the New Haven School District. “I’m good at reading with them, pulling together information and responses.” Jessica Zelenski shaped the air with her hands when she talked, acting out all the voices in a story, screwing up her face in woe, disgust, happiness. “In high school, I was erratic. I would read a book in one sitting and then not write what I was supposed to.” She flung one arm across her chest, as if dismissing her high school years. “I flunked chemistry and biology, took summer classes and went to Southern”—Southern Connecticut State University, in New Haven. “I transferred to Northeastern in Boston because I liked Boston, finished up my BA there, and then got an MA in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.” In her twenties, she worked for a year with teenagers who were “transitioning” out of the juvenile justice system into school and jobs; and then, for two years, with autistic kids and disabled adults. She began teaching at Hillhouse when she was thirty.

  All through high school and college, she had waitressed. “I learned more of what I needed for teaching as a cocktail waitress than any other way,” she said, laughing. “Some of the kids here are tough. Maybe ten percent, no more. They won’t go to class, they won’t listen. I’ve had kids who drank and smoked weed in school, kids who were descended from gang leaders in New Haven and threw their weight around. There was this boy, Frank, who popped a Molly”—Ecstasy—“right in front of me.” Indignation was not part of Jessica Zelesnki’s classroom arsenal—anger, maybe, but not indignation. Yet now she glared, furious and disbelieving. “He said, ‘If you say anything, I’ll slap the shit out of you.’ Later he apologized and came back to class. He performed well, he’s brilliant, but at the time I thought, ‘If I’m gonna be this stressed, I’ve got to be getting more than $60,000.’”

  I asked Miss Zelenski if she did sentence work with her students—grammar, synt
ax, paragraphing, and the rest of the skills that Mr. Leon at Beacon spent so much time developing with his class. She shrugged. “I want them to read as much as they can and get sentences and words in their head so they begin using them well. If they aren’t reading, their language won’t get any better.” An eleventh-grade English teacher at Hillhouse told me the same thing—the students’ grammar would improve only if they read a lot. Reading a lot, you begin to think in sentences, or parts of sentences, and your writing begins to cohere.

  As the year went on, into the winter and the new year, fiction was clearly what mattered most to Miss Zelenski’s students. By January, they were reading at home, and some were eager to talk in class. When they filed in, they still milled around for a few minutes, but no one slept or slumped, and when Miss Zelenski raised her voice, they stopped talking and looked her way. They were beginning to be curious about the assigned texts—Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 story “Harrison Bergeron,” for instance, still another dystopian satire. Vonnegut begins as follows:

  The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better-looking than anybody else. Nobody was quicker or stronger than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

  The Handicapper General was a woman named Diana Moon Clappers, who shotgunned anyone who was born—or tried to be—better than anyone else. She ruled over a society in which athletes and dancers were hobbled, beautiful people masked, intelligent men and women outfitted with a government-made radio that emitted screeching noises into their ears. Vonnegut was parodying the kind of fake democratic dogma that encourages leveling off and mediocrity, and the students were shocked. His mischievous outrage hit the Hillhouse students harder than it did Beacon students.

  “If you’re below average in something,” Philip Todd asked, “do they bring you up?” which was something Vonnegut didn’t address. “Why do they do that to the ballerinas?” The ballerinas were laden with sashweights and bags of buckshot, and they wore masks. Philip seemed genuinely pained. The hero of the story was a seven-foot-tall boy, Harrison Bergeron, who was as powerful as Thor. The students were fascinated by the way he was burdened and diminished—his eyebrows shaved off, for instance, to make him ugly. “I guess I’d be handicapped,” said Philip, who was well over six feet and handsome. He was joking, but the students were, in their own lives, diminished by poverty, by social disorder and isolation. All year long, they demanded fairness, and the more ambitious wanted to excel; they didn’t want to be hampered.

  In March, they read Hemingway’s story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The class loved the bitter and perverse tale; they were openly enthusiastic, and Miss Zelenski asked them to write a short paper in which they assumed, in a court hearing, the voice of one or another of the characters—Robert Wilson, the laconic and fearless British hunter and safari guide; Francis Macomber, a rich American sportsman who, in front of his wife, loses his courage in a lion hunt, and then finds it the next day when facing a huge, wounded buffalo; and Margaret Macomber, who has sex with Wilson in the night and shoots and kills her husband in a seeming accident an instant after he recovers his nerve. It was a story about treachery, a woman’s contempt for a man who lacks conventional manliness and then turns predatory the minute he attains it. “Short Happy Life” was many other things—perhaps the greatest representation of wealthy whites at play in the late colonial period; a magnificent portrait of natural terrain and wild animals; a contrast between British cool professionalism and American emotionalism (Macomber can’t stop oversharing).

  One male student, speaking as Wilson, said bluntly, “Margaret shot her husband on purpose. She and I know it.” And a girl spoke as Wilson, too: “She knew he was going to divorce her, so she killed him.… I taunted her about it because I knew she did it on purpose.” Miss Zelenski read parts of a paper written by a boy in another of her tenth-grade classes. The paper began: “I Margaret Macomber plead innocent.… I felt like that buffalo was going to gore Francis. You think I was just going to sit there and watch him die?” But then, in midplea, she switches course: “Okay, okay! Yes, I shot him. I was afraid that Francis was going to leave me and I couldn’t stand the thought.”

  At which point, Raymond stood up and shouted, “No, she’s a bitch! She would never confess!”

  Debate broke out in class over Margaret’s motives. They were excited, but, soon after Raymond’s outburst, class was over. Miss Zelenski said, “This was the best I’ve ever seen you. No one seemed to be squandering his time.” She asked them to hand in what they had done, and she said they could come back to the room later in the day, get their paper, and finish it at home. Deadlines were less important to her than responsiveness.

  * * *

  In the spring, Miss Zelenski showed the students the movie Shakespeare in Love as a way of easing her class into reading a few of the sonnets. They enjoyed it, but when Miss Zelenski asked them their impression of Shakespeare the character, one girl said, “He old. Why isn’t the movie in black-and-white?” This stunned me for a second, but I realized that she knew that there had been black-and-white movies, and black-and-white meant the past to her, and she was making connections, however strange.

  After that, the class got off to a rocky start. Philip Todd read aloud Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” in a delicate falsetto voice, and Miss Zelenski fired him as a reader. Many of the students had difficulty with the language, which was unfamiliar and odd for them, as it is for almost all American teenagers—the use of the second-person “thou,” for instance, as a way of conveying intimacy. “Was this written in English?” one boy joked. Teaching Shakespeare was required by the New Haven School District, and Miss Zelenski had considered asking the students to read The Tempest but had chosen the sonnets instead. She asked them to go through the sonnet line by line, “translating” it into standard English. They guessed what the words of the poem might mean, and shouted out silly things. Again and again, Miss Zelenski said, “I need you to stop guessing. I know it’s the first time with this language, but you’re not thinking.” After a few more derisive responses, she blew up. “Don’t be proud of yourselves. Are you saying ‘I’m not smart enough? I’m not trying?’ I want you to make some sense of the difficult language, not to withdraw from it.” And with that, as Anika, Malia, Denzel, Philip, Raymond, and the others looked on in disbelief, she stormed out.

  She came back a few minutes later and apologized. Then she added, “I love you, but I want you to learn even more than I love you.” Later, after class, she said to me, “They accept a lot from me because I’ve gone to bat for them. I fight for them within the school. You’re asking them to open up. You have to give them something of yourself.” Including anger, I thought. “If you’re austere or utterly professional, the students don’t like it. A few years ago, there was a white teacher who stood at the door and shook hands with everyone. The students hated her. If you want to be a total professional in manner, you won’t be a success here.”

  After her apology to the class, they moved to Sonnet 130, “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.” The poem, an ambiguous (putting it mildly) homage, offers a series of extremely ungallant comparisons: “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.” Miss Zelenski and the class went through the ritual of translation again, and after a while the students said that there was something false, something sarcastic in the poem. They were angered by it. “It’s a lie,” said Anika. The girls said that flattery or put-downs of any kind from a boy were always manipulative. But this was mocking flattery. The final couplet—“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare”—seems to refute and redeem everything that came earlier. The sonnet was possibl
y Shakespeare’s mischievous parody of an Elizabethan love lyric.

  If Sonnet 130 made the students angry, Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold,” which chronicled the poet’s diminishing passion for a lover, moved them in its evocation of decline. They pulled apart the metaphors that linked the poet’s diminishing vitality to the bareness of fall, the waning of light into darkness at day’s end. I realized Miss Zelenski had picked the trio as a kind of progression—from Shakespeare’s adoration of a mistress to ironic praise of an ugly woman to grief over a passion consumed by its own strength. At the beginning of classes about the sonnets, the students were sarcastic and bored, but, stung by Miss Zelenski, they stopped guessing and gave literal but accurate readings, and I thought: They’ve read some Shakespeare in tenth grade, which is more than Sean Leon’s students can say. They weren’t done with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare wasn’t done with them.

  The work on Shakespeare, however scrappy, helped them when, a few days later, Miss Zelenski asked the students to tackle the opening chapter of Moby Dick. She read them the verses from Genesis about Ishmael, the cast-out and wanderer: “He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” They read lines from the opening paragraph to each other, over and over again.