This one was a particularly charming specimen of the genre. I had been told that he "hated reading" and "lacked focus." (This is code for: he's not doing as well in school as we'd like and balks when assigned Virginia Woolf in fifth grade.) As soon as we sat down at his desk, I noticed that he had all four "Twilight" books in a stack on the floor. "Did you read those?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he said. The first one I read in one day. I started it, and then I couldn't stop."
"I read it too," I said. He looked at me as though I had sprouted antlers.
"Really?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. We sat in silence for a moment, my student contemplating his mother's sanity in hiring me, me contemplating the wisdom of full disclosure. And then. In a quiet voice, hesitant but buoyed by conviction, he spoke.
"I loved them. All four of them. And I can't wait for the next one to come out." I smiled. He smiled too. And then, as if scripted, he spoke again, in a whisper, so as not to alert any other members of his family who might be within earshot. "And I don't really hate to read."
"I can see that," I said, resisting to the urge to hug him or grasp his shoulders and shake him, shouting, Holden Caulfield-style, "Don't let the phonies get you!" Or, like Johnny: "Stay gold, Ponyboy! Stay gold!"
Because that, of course, is the problem with eleven-year-olds, so true, so clean, so honest, so open, so unabashedly, unselfconsciously, deliciously themselves. They turn twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, and the world, and their parents, and their peers, and their schools, do their damnedest to shake that purity out of them, and they become not teenage zombie drug dealers or drunk drivers or sex addicted derelicts but grown-ups, who care too much what other people think and don't worry about hurting their parents' feelings when they confess their passion for vampire lit and never stay up all night reading under the covers with a flashlight and can't remember what it feels like to know that about some things, all of the rest of the grown-ups are actually wrong.
Stay gold, my young friend. When it comes to reading, I will do what I can to help.
5 comments:
You have a great understanding of these kids Amy. In your sole you, like your mother, are a teacher. It's something you have and can't learn. Great post. I miss seeing you.
I loved that post. He will be better off just having had the opportunity to hang out with you, forget the reading. I taught a freshman this year who got straight Cs in school but loved to read during class--never something that had been assigned--but always something interesting that he was discovering for the first time, like 1984. Sometimes he would read for half a class period, totally silent, while the rest of the class was dutifully studying dependent clauses, and I rarely had the heart to stop him. Then he would want to talk about the book with me.
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so what is up????
Amy...where are you?????????????????
You could say good-bye.
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