TWO

Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us”. I once shared this sentence with a class of seventh graders, when we’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. Reading the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little. They understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that they realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public school, I’ve taught kids with imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent neighborhoods. They understand, better than I, the novel’s terrible logic-the giving way of dreams to fate.
For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school-one that often attracts the literary-minded children of Manhattan’s upper classes-into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates, who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph.D.’s. I thought additional” culture capital” could help such students develop better in high school.
Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The students didn’t always read from the expected point of view. About The Red Pony, one student said,” it’s about being a man, it’s about manliness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduce to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical view was broadened, his sense of his own country deepened and outlook improved. Year after year, former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in the first year in college as a result of the classes.