#688 Suffer the Little Children- Stephen King

#688 Suffer the Little Children- Stephen King

“Kids these days just have no respect, they were so much nicer so many years ago.” This common refrain is often heard by educators who have been teaching a long time. Ms. Sidley is such a teacher. She teaches third grade and has a reputation for being very strict. One of her tricks is to use her glasses to reflect her students actions while her back is turned. She often catches them in unruly behavior this way. Her eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head routine usually shocks them into compliance. But recently she sees more students defying her authority. Robert is such a student. When her back was turned she swore she saw his face morph into something ugly:

“What was it I saw when he changed? Something bulbous. Something that shimmered. Something that stared at me, yes, stared and grinned and wasn’t a child at all. It was old and it was evil…”

She is taken aback but tries to remain calm. But the next day when Robert confronts her and admits his power to change into the monster, and tells her there are many more students that can change, she loses it. Eventually the changlings are everywhere and she decides to take matters into her own hands. 

Is she crazy, or are the students really shape-shifters? The metaphor of students morphing into monsters and leaving their old, more innocent selves buried deep inside, is one most teachers will understand. There gets a point where seeing students as evil monsters may be a sign you should probably retire, before you do something drastic.

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#664 The Creation- Maxine Clair

#664 The Creation- Maxine Clair

An outsider should be able to recognize another outsider. Irene has befriended the only girl from Redtown that goes to her school. The community of Redtown is a kind of closed-off religious sect. Irene likes that her new friend is a bit different and she likes that she is from the same town as the strange but intriguing boy that comes by the house each weekend selling chickens.

She is learning a poem called The Creation for an oration competition. She goes to her new friends house in Redtown to practice saying aloud to strangers but they scoff and drive her away, all except Dell, the boy she likes. He is a great storyteller, and they share a lot of time together while she is preparing for the competition. Things happen that force her friend from the school and Dell from coming by anymore, and suddenly her connections to Redtown are all but cut.

She can now focus on the competition, but something bad happens. She learns that the competition is not desegregated yet, and she will not be allowed to compete. It was a the mistake of her teacher—the only white teacher in school—to not take that into consideration. She has never been an outsider, how would she know?

Notable Passage: “We can use the same words you use, but it doesn’t mean we speak the same language.”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#586 Painted Ocean, Painted Ship- Rebecca Makkai

#586 Painted Ocean, Painted Ship- Rebecca Makkai

An albatross is a harbinger of bad fortune. When Alex, convinced to go hunting for the first time, accidentally shot and killed one of these majestic birds, misfortune was on its way. It wasn’t enough that she had to pay a huge fine, or that the story made it onto the campus newspaper where she was a tenure-tracked professor, or that she was the butt of jokes at every faculty function—her penance for the albatross would touch her career and her engagement too.

She decided to try to roll with it and started telling the story herself at parties: “The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.”

The irony of teaching Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner was not lost on her. But in the attempts to forget her mistake, she makes a bigger one in class. She accidentally assumes a quiet student of hers is from Korea, when in reality she is from Minnesota and of Chinese descent. The gaffe creates a stir on campus and Alex goes into a tailspin that ends in her dismissal from her position. 

“The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistake could be, How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it.”

This is some of the point. The other, perhaps more important point is that we all make mistakes. It’s how we act after those mistakes that determines the course of our lives, not the mistake itself.

“I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#517 Ambitious Sophomore- Kurt Vonnegut

#517 Ambitious Sophomore- Kurt Vonnegut

The Lincoln High School marching band is the pride of the community. The hundred piece band is marching in the parade and is poised to once again win the prize. It’s leader, Mr. Helmholtz has only one problem…money. He spends too much too fast and he needs to buy one more uniform, a special uniform that will enable the stage-stricken piccolo player, Leroy, to play his best.

“Helmholtz often gave the impression of a man lost in dreams, but there was a side to him that was as tough as a rhinoceros. It was the side that raised money for the band.”

A deal was struck, the uniform purchased and the band was in position to march to another victory. But tragedy struck before the competition and the special uniform was ruined. As it turned out no uniform was needed, Leroy found inspiration in an obvious place.

“That wasn’t school spirit—that was the love song of the full-bodied American male.”

Rating: 7-7-7-8 Total= 29

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

Lynnea finally got out of her backwoods Kentucky town…only to end up in Baltimore. Her freelance writing job wasn’t paying enough so she took a teaching program and ended up at a public High School.

Teaching public High School in a poorly funded, weakly supported bad part of a city like Baltimore isn’t as bad as you might think; It’s a thousand tomes worse. It is definitely not the place to go to find yourself, or figure out your own life. Children are self-centered creatures, they are supposed to be that way, that’s their job. If you can’t find a way to keep your own insecurities out of the classroom, things will spiral out of control.

I think that’s what happens to Lynnea in this story. Of course the children should behave, of course they should show respect, and want to learn. But if they don’t, is really isn’t their fault?

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

This is a touching first day of school story. A mother takes her daughter to kindergarten for the first time. She takes her to the wrong school though. She wanted her daughter to go to the older school that is across from her church. That’s the school she knows about and that’s where she has thoughts of her daughter learning all the things she hasn’t.

When they arrive at the correct school we see that the mother herself can’t read. This is why her daughter’s education is so important. Her mother is proud but a little out of her element. We see new vs. old as a symbol here, the new school, her new shoes, etc. When her mother leaves her in the hands of her new teacher, we see her old socks have been torn, and the sound of her fleeting footsteps echo like the sound of time marching on.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

Rattlebone is a fictional black community just north of Kansans City created by Maxine Clair for this collection. Written to represent the Midwest black lives of the 1950’s, it’ll be interesting to compare it to the Toure’s The Portable Promised Land I started yesterday that represents a fictional black community in the big city. 

October Brown was a teacher in Rattlebone. Her story starts with a fit she had in public as a child when her father attacked her mother. The fit was so crazed that it left her with a mark on her cheek, a devil’s kiss, and a reputation that frightened and intrigued her new students.

“We imagined that a woman surrounded by such lore would have to have a bad temper, a flash fire that could drive her from her desk to yours in a single movement, dislodge you by your measly shoulders, plant you hard on the hardwood floor, tell you in growling underbreaths of wrath to stand up straight…”

It was a big year for Irene, not only because her new teacher wasn’t anywhere nearly as bad as she thought, but because she was about to become a big sister to a new baby brother. Things change quickly though, and change can turn quickly to chaos.

Notable Passage: “Intuition is the guardian of childhood.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total=30

#402 White Christmas- Sandip Roy

#402 White Christmas- Sandip Roy

It was Christmas, and this was Amit’s first year away from Calcutta, from home. He was in Binghamton, NY going to school, and couldn’t afford the trip back. He learned a lot this year, mostly about the differences in culture, His school mentor, Satsih, a PhD student gave him advice. “…he was Amit’s authority on all things American, like health insurance, bars, and race.”

It was race that confused him the most, the importance of it, the stereoptypes used by both Satish and his mother. He found that he had his own attractions to race as well. On this Christmas he went looking for something to eat and found himself in a bar alone for the first time. It would be a night of firsts.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#387 Allegiance- Aryn Kyle

#387 Allegiance- Aryn Kyle

Glynnis is new to her school and new to America. She and her mother just moved here with her American Father. She is confused at the differences in the classroom and baffled at the cut-throat social structure among the students.

Meanwhile at home, her mother is miserable and negative and trying to get her daughter on her side. Glynnis’ instincts at first are to be good and do the right thing, even if it leads her to be unpopular, but she follows her mother’s advice and stories falls into the same cut-throat activities gain the acceptance of her peers.

School kids can be cruel and insecurities from our childhood can sometimes last a lifetime.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#287 Okie- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#287 Okie- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Bernardo and his family have moved from Mexico to Palo Alto, fled is more like it. Nobody will tell him why they had to move or when they will move back. He is insecure and quiet and feels weird in his new school.

The teacher gives him special attention until he can find friends, which he does. Children are resilient but sensitive. It’s hard to fit in if you’re the new person, from a strange place with a weird way about you. But things change if you are patient.

He has a journal to write in, but he doesn’t need that as long as he can talk with his live-in nanny, Josephina (seriously, how many stories do we have with rich kids and live-in nannies...seems like every other one), but even that he will grow out of.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#341 Ado- Connie Willis

#341 Ado- Connie Willis

It’s springtime and the English Lit teacher is about to begin her section on Shakespeare. However, in this period of time, due to oversensitivity, most literature has been banned or halted by injunction. Just by announcing the start of Shakespeare, protests sprung up.

“Delilah was outside the school when I got there, wearing a red Seniors Against Devil Worship in the Schools t-shirt and shorts. She was carrying a picket sign that said ‘Shakespeare is Satan’s spokesman.’ Shakespeare and Satan were both misspelled.”

Trying to figure out which works were still allowed, the teacher and principle sifted through the objections:

-The Royal Society for the Divine Rights of Kings objected to Richard III because there was no proof that he has killed the princess…they in fact objected to all the plays about Kings.

-Angry Woman’s Alliance objected to the Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo & Juliet, and Love’s Labor Lost.

-The American Bar Associating objected to The Merchant of Venice…as did Morticians International due to defaming of the word casket.

-The Sierra Club objected to As You Like It because Orlando carves Rosalind’s name into a tree.

ETC.

They settle on Hamlet but now must go line-by-line taking out any and all objectionable lines. What they have left amounts to a few lines of nonsense.

“Hamlet…is that the one about the guy whose uncle murders the king and then the queen marries the uncle?”

“Not any more.”

Somewhere in here is a great idea for a satirical look at censorship in education, but this widely misses the mark. It follows a formulaic spiral down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole. The end, where another group gets a court order to make Delilah change her sign and she angrily asks: “What’s happening to our right to freedom of speech”—is so cliché it’s, almost a pun. I guess with such rich subject matter, I was hoping for a little more edge, a little more bite, more nuance. Maybe the editor cut those things out.

Rating: 7-8-5-5 Total= 25

#137 The Genius- Jabari Asim

#137 The Genius- Jabari Asim

The stories of this excellent collection are all connected, surrounding the life and circumstances of Crispus, his family and his neighborhood in the summer of 1968. This story is about education in the black community.

“Thirteen years after Brown…and Gateway City Schools are still separate and still unequal.”

Roderick is a rare 13-year old genius and beyond most people in the neighborhood. Only Orville, a genius in his own right can think on his level. But like most geniuses, while everyone else worries about your mental abilities, his thoughts lie elsewhere:

“For all his legendary skill with solving equations, conjugating verbs, or computing faster than the cash register…he had no knowledge of his own origin. He didn’t know who his father was…He’d gladly give up everything—his intelligence, his health—to hear a man call him son.”

He thinks Orville is his father but cant be sure. His bigger, more immediate problems are the local bullies. They resent his brains, his weakness, and dog him at every turn:

“Go on using those big words all the time and you’re just begging for someone to beat you up.”

What’s the value of education, what is it’s worth, to the individual, the family, the community?

Notable Passage: “Tout a ete realize, a l’exception de la facon de vivre…Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

Rating: 8-7-9-8 Total= 32