Lit Up Read online

  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

  Having read and discussed Shakespeare’s “That time of year thou may’st in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,” they had no trouble unpacking “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” They were getting comfortable with metaphor. The actual meaning of the opening paragraph was a little harder. Anika saw a depressed man who was going to commit suicide on a ship. Denzel, who had a few days earlier moved to the window and gazed outside longingly—“There’s a man riding around on a motorcycle when he should be working”—now nailed it: “He’s going to sea to calm his ass down.”

  * * *

  By late April, the students were waiting to speak, and were raising their hands. When they had to move around, for some classroom exercise—ten minutes of slow-motion chaos in September—they just got up and moved around. Miss Zelenski shouted a little less, and she had quiet personal conferences with students who wanted to talk something over. A number of kids who had chosen Elie Weisel in the Read Around now added Ishmael Beah’s book as well—word had gotten around that it was exciting. Reports were coming in from the front lines on the chosen books. “Several times students have approached me privately,” Miss Zelenski said to me. “Or even yelled out ‘I really like this book!’ They sounded surprised and even a little angry, as if I and everyone around them have been withholding the good stuff from them. Malia finished A Thousand Splendid Suns. She said she read for hours on the weekend because the book got so good she couldn’t put it down.” I knew this was true because Malia excitedly told me the plot of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, with its abusive husband and father. When I suggested that her fascination with the book may have had something to do with her feelings about her own father, who was no more than “around” when she was a child, she gazed at me silently.

  A little club had formed. Some of the students—the boys mostly—would skip lunch and hang out in the room. As Miss Zelenski chewed her way through a salad, Philip Todd and an athletic boy named Franklin Roberts, both over six feet, shyly poked around her desk, asking her questions, trading opinions on movies and on people in the school, going over their problems, likes and dislikes; they would tell her about their grades in other courses, and she would urge them to step up. Denzel grazed in the room, throwing in sweet and sour comments. In April, another of his friends had been shot and killed in gang warfare on the street. Again, he shrugged and averted his eyes when I asked him about it.

  Jessica Zelenski said that something like the skipped-lunch club had been happening for years. “We can navigate within the adult world within the school, and we provide a resource that their parents may not. We love them, but we’re not their mothers. So they speak to us about sensitive issues, and we can be supportive without making them feel insecure or calling them ‘gay’ as girls their own age might. We’re educated aunties for the boys. The girls tend to have better support systems and be more social, so they outgrow us.”

  On May 9, when Anika shouted “I want to read!” followed by deep silence, the students achieved a kind of communion. They read voluntarily—that was the victory—but they also enjoyed reading in company, the lines of sympathy going out to one another, enfolding the characters and dilemmas they read about. They enjoyed not just the books but the act of reading together. You couldn’t have asked more of any book club.

  In class, they discussed the themes the books held in common. The talk was ragged but intense. Miss Zelenski led a discussion of the moral ambiguities and perversities surrounding disaster—the difference between bystanders and participants, for instance, in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Miss Zelenski read them “The Good Samaritan” parable, from Luke, and they worked out the differences between witnesses and actual helpers. As I had noticed before, students came into tenth grade with an ardent and detailed belief in fairness. But the complications of morality—what they had understood when thinking about Mayella—extended the concept of fairness into a changed understanding of life. They puzzled over the fascinating pages of Ishmael Beah’s book in which he and other boy warriors had been liberated from army service by UNICEF and put into a gentle rehab facility—only to wind up hating it. The boys missed the companionship of war, the adrenaline high of live fire. It was impossible to understand such things with a simple division into right and wrong.

  That literature was marked by moral complexity was central to what Miss Zelenski wanted to convey to them. “Learning that there are two ideas when in the past there was only one,” as she put it to me. She warned the students against reading literature purely as political advocacy. “A writer completely devoted to social injustice politicizes literature and weakens it,” she said. She read the students some passages from Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel of 1906, The Jungle, with its disgusting scenes of the Chicago meatpacking trade—rats and men falling into the vats and getting ground up in Borax-speckled sausage meat. The students were appalled by the details. Some didn’t want to hear more, but others shouted, “Keep reading!” Miss Zelensi told them that conditions were now much better for workers than in 1906, when there were no hospitals for immigrant labor. “Hospitals are for white people,” a voice from the side said. “These people are white,” Miss Zelenski replied. “They’re just poor.”

  By this time the students were roused to the world’s troubles in a way that they weren’t (as far as I could see) at the beginning of the year. In class, they vented about the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria; they were contemptuous of the baby-selling Irish nuns in Steven Frears’s movie Philomena, which Miss Zelenski showed them. But she wanted more than outrage, and I remembered, from early in the year, her telling the class that she didn’t welcome easy moralizing from them.

  * * *

  As part of their commitment on Read Around day, the students had to give presentations on social issues suggested by the books they chose. They had to teach the class, ask questions, keep order. Philip Todd the movie lover gave a presentation on media violence; it was clearly his obsession. “Why are we drawn to these stories of tragedy and atrocity?” he mused, looming in his gentle way over the front of the classroom. He was saddened and puzzled. “Though all my life I’ve been really interested in violence. Why are we interested in serial killers?”

  “Philip, you gotta take control,” Miss Zelenski coached. “Don’t ask. Tell them.”

  He didn’t speak about books, but his obsession with movies was the strongest passion in the room. He showed them a bunch of movie clips—the frightening opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, scenes with Tom Cruise as a mangled vet in Born on the Fourth of July, and so on. He had put a number of questions on the board: “What was the injustice shown in this film? Was the clip effective? If not, how could it be more effective? Why do you believe that this happened? Would this happen in America now?” These were feature films, not documentaries or newspaper columns, and part of me rebelled at the thought of kids’ judging them merely as persuasion. But the class was alive, and Philip showed more and more savage clips, until Miss Zelenski and the female students protested it was too much. “You’re as much attracted to violence as repelled by it,” I said to him, which was often the film critic’s dilemma. He nodded and smiled and shook my hand.

  Philip lived in a borderline neighborhood in Hamden, just north of New Haven, in a small, darkened house with three dens outfitted with screens, including a man cave in the basement with DVDs and Stephen King books stacked on a shelf. He downloaded films from various file-sharing outfits—all sorts of movies, including independent films
and foreign films. Mostly, he watched them alone. Only one friend—a boy in the class—shared his tastes. Philip’s gentle manner and movie-nerdish habits had led some of the other boys in the class to call him “Uncle Tom” and “Oreo.” They accused him of “acting white” and turning into “an elitist.” He told me this without bitterness.

  His parents had been divorced since he was ten, and he lived with his mom. His father had odd jobs. “He drives a truck,” and did “other things.” He wanted to go to a place with a good film program, like Wesleyan or NYU, but he didn’t see how his mother could afford either school. Yale’s tuition program would subsidize his attendance at a Connecticut public college or university, but none of the local schools had a decent film program. He was a great movie nut—as obsessed as any I had met—and I wondered if he would have the strength or the luck to make his way out of his cave into the professional world of moviemaking.

  I wasn’t able to see the other presentations, but Miss Zelenski gave me the highlights: “Malia and friends did oppression of women. It was more of a report, but it was very well done and engaging. Denzel joined a group in the fourth-period class and they did child labor in the U.S. and then elsewhere. They did their presentation Friday morning. Exams were over and students didn’t even need to be in classes, yet these boys packed the house! They recruited students from all three of my classes and all of them actively participated. Denzel even had a great hook—asking us to hold up our iPhones and Nikes, then launching into readings and videos on child labor in China and elsewhere in Asia, where these things are made. Anika and friends, using video clips, had a very detailed lesson about child soldiers in Africa.”

  At the end of the year, it may not have been literature that the students were expounding, but they had learned to master one of literature’s gifts, the ability to get out of themselves and to enter other people’s lives. Azar Nafisi’s book had bombed in Miss Zelenski’s class, but her humanist principles of literary study had taken hold. Miss Zelenski had been working toward this end all year. She wanted the students to flourish. They needed information, they needed morally informed instruction in the ways of the world, they needed to be able to “read” themselves and other people. She didn’t protect them or condescend to them by giving them easy assignments. Like Sean Leon with his largely middle-class students, Jessica Zelenski combined literature and ethical inquiry. The students were entering a forbidding economy; they needed to be armed with the intellectual and moral strengths that would enable them to succeed—or at least survive. I don’t think anyone could know whether literature would be important to these students in the next year of school or later in life. But they had made a beginning step into literature’s pleasures and complications. Literature could be part of their strength.

  * * *

  The performance of Hillhouse students in standardized tests had never been stellar, and it had been dropping in recent years. How were these kids going to get through college? There had been rumblings of drastic action all year at the school, and in the spring of 2014 the ax fell. The Board of Education in New Haven and school superintendent Garth Harries (who had worked for Mayor Bloomberg’s administration in New York) announced plans to break Hillhouse into three “academies,” each with a separate principal. Perceived as a failure, the school was being broken up. Miss Zelenski was gloomy about the coming disruption—yet another in the school’s recent history of such changes. She stood at her desk and raised her voice even though we were alone in her classroom. “How dare you experiment with the real-life human kids? It’s not fair.”

  Just after the long school year was over, however, Miss Zelenski and her students got an unexpected lift. Ishmael Beah turned up in town. The author of A Long Way Gone was giving a talk in New Haven, on June 29, at Southern Connecticut State University, and Miss Zelenski bought tickets for those who wanted to go.

  The group spent time with Beah after his talk. “The kids were so nervous and starstruck,” Miss Zelenski said. “I had to bite my fist to keep quiet and not try to ‘teach’ them when he was talking.” The girl who had said “This doesn’t interest me,” and then read the book, came with a friend. Anika, who became a fan of the book and did a presentation on boy soldiers, was astonished by Beah’s physical presence. “You’ve been through so much,” as she put it to me later, “and you are here today giving this talk!” Beah was precise, restrained, eloquent; he had a charming, boyish smile. He had survived hell; he had come through, and had told his story in a book that reached people all over the world. The students took pictures of themselves with him—jubilant group shots and also individual shots of the smiling American-African author with Raymond and then with Denzel. The students had met a real writer whose book many of them had chosen to read. A writer and his book; they read it, and they met the author, and they were close to happiness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MAMARONECK, SPRING: TENTH-GRADE ENGLISH

  Taste

  Ta Dum

  Mary Beth Jordan Risks Ridicule

  Soliloquy

  If Mamaroneck began by dumbing down part of its curriculum, the goal in the end was to elevate it. As I came to understand in the spring, when I returned to the school, there were actually two kinds of reading ladders. There was the progression of increasing difficulty and quality, the kid who went from I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell to David Sedaris’s stories and the girl I heard about who climbed a triumphal ladder, from Rebecca to Jane Eyre to Pride and Prejudice. But as well as pushing some of her kids upward, Miss Groninger asked her students, at the end of the year, to make a hierarchy among the work they had read, putting the hardest books on the top and the easiest on the bottom. That was a kind of laddering, too, and they had to explain their choices: What made one book harder than another? Was the hardest the best? Was difficulty a guarantee of quality? They wrote an essay—more fun for them, they agreed, than a standard book report—explaining their choices. They justified their taste. Suddenly they had taste in books, a new idea for many.

  “They now know when it’s an easy beach read,” Annie Ward said to me, “and when it’s something else,” and I realized she was talking about cultivating what used to be called bookishness—a way of living, at least partly, in books. Bookish people never stopped exchanging opinions; they matched their friends or topped them, and for many reading a book was completed by talking it over. Today, much of book culture, as everyone in the publishing industry knew, flourished in reading groups, in informal gatherings of all sorts, in online chat rooms, on Goodreads and other websites. The English Department at Mamaroneck wanted to achieve in ninth- and tenth-grade students something like the morale of a good book club—what Miss Clain called “a social culture of reading.” (That was also what Miss Zelenski’s students achieved when they read together in silence.) What began as personal choice became an exercise of judgment. Nothing could be more obvious or natural, but how many teenagers talked that way about books? Nerdiness in teens usually bent toward technology. Mamaroneck was pushing against the habitual self-deprecating tone of so many American kids when they talked about anything in culture beyond pop. The school wagered that enjoyment of reading could conquer diffidence and self-parody.

  * * *

  But a question remained, at least for me. What was the intellectual relation between the core texts and the personal reading books—between, say, a Shakespeare play and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, which I knew some of the students were reading? Yes, students might see the difference in quality between them, but apart from that how did core reading and personal reading connect with each other? Did they connect at all? Was there any cross-fertilization? Or did they just exist side by side? I wasn’t sure how to answer these questions until I stepped into Mary Beth Jordan’s tenth-grade classroom.

  She was working through Macbeth with her students. They all read the play; then they acted out portions of it, plowing through act 5 in a large performing space. Lady Macbeth has died, and one boy, Sean, with a surprisi
ngly baritonal voice, read Macbeth’s last great soliloquy: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” He read with weighted emphasis; he had teen gravitas, maybe even a future as an actor. A moment later, wielding a plastic gray sword, he fought Macduff, played by a student named Evelyn. “I have no words,” said Evelyn. “My voice is in my sword: thou bloodier villain / Than terms can give thee out!” Unfortunately, Evelyn had left her sword in the regular classroom, so the two passed a single weapon back and forth and took swipes at each other. When Sean fell in combat, Evelyn with a triumphant look dragged him off the stage by his feet. No matter how you do it, Macbeth never fails. I missed those words in Sean Leon’s class.

  The performance was actually preparation for the main event. I had been there a few days earlier, when the class discussed at length Shakespeare’s use of soliloquies. “You’re seeing the character raw,” said Miss Jordan. “They’re thinking on the spot.” On big sheets of paper she printed out a number of famous soliloquies—passages from Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet (which they would read the following year). Mary Beth Jordan had a class of twenty-eight students—twelve boys and sixteen girls. Three of the students were Hispanic, one Asian. They were mostly an eager and attentive group, except for a few boys in a stupor of half-sleep and a girl studying her fingernails (purple) as she giggled with a friend. Miss Jordan and the class did the usual analysis of poetic and dramatic devices—alliteration, imagery, metaphor, foreshadowing, and so on. But she also said she wanted to try out something special.

  She read a soliloquy from act 1, scene 3 of Macbeth: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good.” Shakespeare wrote it in iambic pentameter, the standard metric line: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. As she read, a student, on cue, pounded out the rhythm on a tiny African drum: ta Dum ta Dum ta Dum … The effect was almost comical, but the class stayed with it. In order to do what Miss Jordan wanted next, they needed some feeling for the rhythm of the poetry.