BSG Reflection, Part III

There’s a lot to think and write about for the final third of the book. A lot. In some ways, I left the book a bit more satisfied than I was through the process of reading it. It came together, in a way. As Jason grew up throughout the span of the year, a lot of the fantastical elements seemed to slip away in favor of reality. Sometimes that reality was harsh: his parents’ divorce, the turning of the tides with the kids at school. But sometimes rites of passage—like his first kiss—also pushed him toward adulthood and the book toward a more concrete narrative. I’m left thinking, though, about the book’s “teachabilty,” which aligns with the second of our reflection questions: What is your thinking at this point about assigning students readings that are likely to lie outside their interests?

Somewhere halfway through the text, I realized why I was so irritated with the process of reading Black Swan Green. I had no choice in picking it. It’s been a long time since anyone has told me what to read, at least in terms of a novel. Since college, I’ve made up my own reading list. When I didn’t like a book, I could stop reading it. But, more often than not, I wasn’t prone to even start a book I wouldn’t like because I was doing the choosing. Reading BSG put e right back in high school. Dare I say it was almost an “aha! moment”? From then on, I started to build what I guess would be empathy for my future students. I got it all over again: no one wants to read something they’re forced to read if there’s no investment in it. And I read BSG as if in a vacuum. I had to choose one of two books, I recently read Oscar Wao, so the choice was clear. But other than my commitment to my group and this blog, there really wasn’t an investment. No one told me why I should read the book or why it would be “good” for me or what it would teach me. As for me, given my frequent frustration, there was little investment to be had. The book isn’t “bad.” Certainly not. But it’s not something I would teach, either. The issue isn’t that its content is outside of students’ interests. It’s a bildungsroman, after all. But there’s a denseness to it and a kind of otherworldly logic that kept e at a remove. Therefore, I couldn’t imagine asking students to read it. I think nearly any text can be taught in the classroom as long as the teacher finds the inroads to the personal connection of the piece. Why should students care? If the teacher can’t answer that, than they shouldn’t be bothered with reading the text.

But, given that denseness, there were reading techniques I had to engage in (and really pull out) that I haven’t had to use in years. And that brings me to our other reflection question: What kinds of things can a reader do (especially a student) in order to make sense of what might be confusing parts of the book? For this, I decided to use a technique that I’ve been teaching my sixth graders in my student teaching placement: Post-Its. To keep our students engaged with their independent reading texts and facilitate conferencing, we teach them to write Post-It notes to jot down questions, predictions, and ideas about characters and how they’re changing. So that’s just what I did. Along the way, I put Post-Its on pages with passages I particularly liked or to note the ways Jason was changing through the course of the novel and the development of his perceptions. I think conversation is also key. We’ve gotten to do this a bit in class, but in an actual classroom, I would very much encourage small and whole group discussions of the material—but prompted and free-form. It’s important to struggle through a text collectively and not in solitude. I think the teacher may sometimes need to take some role in directing this conversation, otherwise the discussions can lead to a lot of griping as they did in our group.

Now on to the text. As I said, the book became much more concrete in its final third. And it’s a good thing, too. The book would have been pointless had Jason not grown up throughout the year. Jason comes to some realizations about the world that I found really poignant. One motif that carried throughout the book was Jason’s relationships with trees. In the first chapter, he says spending time with trees is preferable to speaking with humans. He makes allusions to this idea a couple of other times, as well. [“What tree cares if you can’t spit out your words?” (234) he asks at one point]. But by the end, he demystifies the forest that has brought him both adventure and danger: He finds “the whole wood’s only a few acres… Hardly Amazonia. Hardly Sherwood Forest” (288). And (perhaps a bit too neatly) he comes to breakthroughs about his speech impediment. He learns it’s the expectations of others—and not Hangman “himself”—that trigger his stammer (289).

And then there are the harsh truths. Midway through the book, Jason opines “kids can never complain about unfairness ‘cause everyone knows kids always complain about that” (178). And yet, by the conclusion, Jason comes to see it’s not about fairness when the real question, he says, is “who says the world has to make sense?” (285). Again, my concern here, as always, is that Jason’s insights and understandings were always a little too mature for his age. I think the best coming-of-age stories truly capture the voice of the narrators at that age. (This is why The Cather in the Rye has always struck me as so false.) Mitchell hasn’t quite done that. Yes, Jason’s a poet and is given to lyricism. But it’s preternatural and, for me, a bit contrived. While the character is fully realized within the world of the book, it’s not a character that approximates a real 13 year-old boy circa 1982.

That’s how I leave the book, for now. A bit annoyed, but grateful for the occasional thoughtful turns of phrase. I’m grateful, also, that I have once again experienced that long lost sensation of reading as a student. In my Teaching Reading in the English Classroom course, we interviewed adolescents on their reading experiences. They spoke about the “forced readings” that were devoid of context. This experience really illuminated that concept and has definitely informed my future approach to choosing and teaching texts. (Should I have the choice!) But even when the selection is not up to me, I can do my best to help my students make the connections. A teacher, I think, should be as much a “guide” through literature as he or she is the occasional “giver” of useful (and, admittedly, sometimes not-so useful) knowledge.