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Steal This Book!

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca
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Last week I collected term papers from my undergraduate students in the Advanced Composition course. One of the women in the course wrote about a time during high school when she fell in love with Gabriel García Márquez. It was the spring semester of her senior year. One day she went to the school library to see what they had by García Márquez, and she discovered a book that hadn’t been checked out in over a decade. On a whim, she stole the book. The weather was beautiful and she was suffering from a serious case of senioritis, so she skipped class and snuck out to the parking lot to stretch out on the hood of her car and read Love in the Time of Cholera.

I love that story. I told her that it made me want to be nineteen again so I could meet that girl. But the story also made me think that, despite the fact that there are several things she did that were ostensibly wrong—stealing a book and cutting class—my student demonstrated a love and appreciation for literature that would have made me proud. She probably had a deeper, more meaningful experience with that novel than if she had read it in class and completed weekly reading quizzes and a five paragraph expository essay with a thesis statement in the last line of the first paragraph. Etc. Etc.

This week is the last week of the academic semester at UConn, and so this blog entry is going to be my last till the fall. I was thinking about this as I was thinking about what I wanted to write this week. And my original idea was to write about the kind of learning, reading, and writing we do over the summer. I know so many of us long for the summers so we can actually do some serious pleasure reading. So we can read all the great new novels that came out this past year that we couldn’t find the time to read amid all the paper grading and progress reports and PPT meetings and such.

But that got me thinking about all sorts of unstructured and unsanctioned learning that takes place within and without school.

Though this admission may annoy some of you—it certainly annoyed a few of my colleagues when I was a high school teacher—I used to let students hang out in my class when they were supposed to be elsewhere. My last year at RHAM, I had one senior who used to cut class to come to my second and my fourth period classes in American Literature. She didn’t have me for American Lit when she was a ingusan because I was on sabbatical, so in a sense she repeated her ingusan year by coming to my class regularly. She especially liked when we read plays. She would take parts and did a great job reading her lines.

I had another student who was in my fourth period class who used to skip her seventh period class to come to my class a second time each day. It was the same prep but a nicer class—better behaved and more involved. In this girl’s case, she had some serious problems going on at home (a parent was in the process of getting arrested for embezzlement, of all things), and I guess my room was a safe place. The teacher whose class she was skipping was a good friend of mine, and I used to call him to let him know the girl was with me. We both preferred that she be with me than leave school grounds and go who-knows-where to deal with her problems. I don’t recall if the girl passed the class she cut so frequently, but because of the better rapport in my seventh period class, she learned more in there than she did in the fourth period class she was actually enrolled in.

So I don’t mean to encourage cutting classes as a means to educational attainment, but simply to make a point. In this periode of high stakes standardized testing, merit pay for teachers tied to state tests, and even property values tied to CMT and CAPT scores, we should remember that not all learning happens in the formulaic, sanctioned ways we intend it to occur. Sometimes our best discussions of our subject matter take place in the hallways between classes and the best papers our students write are in personal journals they never share with anyone.

Today we had a department meeting and yet another debate about our merit pay policy. Let me tell you, listening to a bunch of English professors quibble about whether a certain committee should be worth one point or two or whether a poem is equivalent to a scholarly article was simply disheartening. I kept asking myself if anyone else in the room besides me remembers falling in love with words, remembers reading novels beneath trees in autumn, or writing love poems to people out hearts pined for desperately.

I spent ninety minutes in a windowless room on this glorious day thinking, I shouldn’t be here. I should steal a book and go read it on the hood of my car in the parking lot. Could you imagine if you had your class do that as a lesson? Could you imagine your building principal or superintendent doing that?

Anyway, I know this summer we’ll all be teaching summer school and writing curricula and doing book orders and preparing new preps and such, but I hope that most of you find the time to read a book or two beneath a tree, or to write a poem or letter to someone you love. Just take the time to remind yourself why you fell in love with this field in the first place. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and we might as well be stacking boxes in a warehouse, or denying insurance claims in a Dilbert cubicle in some basement office of an insurance giant.

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