“That classroom can be your battleground or your playground,” Frank McCourt said is his memoir Teacher Man. That sentence has stuck since I first read it, embedded deep into my mind (and, in fact, I have the words hanging on my classroom wall), the thought reemerging almost daily when I feel my blood pressure begin to rise, when my hands begin to sweat with frustration over whatever it is that the students are resisting or complaining about on that given day. Make this our playground, I remind myself. Don’t fight them.
“Why don’t you want to read this?” I remember asking the students against my better judgment. What are you doing? I then asked myself, immediately regretting that I had taken the bait that was the collective groan of the class. You’re the teacher. Don’t ask them. Don’t enable this defiance. Just do it.
“I’m sick of reading,” one student finally chimed in.
“How could you possibly be sick of it? You don’t even know what we are reading yet,” I responded - and they didn’t know. This was the Roaring Twenties that I was teaching the class. Gangsters! Gambling! Moonshining! Violence, guns, prostitution, and lawbreaking! It was everything that would quench their thirst for chaos. If I couldn’t get these fifteen year old kids interested in this, then what hope could there possibly be for me?
“The only reason we even bother to read any of this is because there’s going to be a stupid test on it,” the same student added without a hint of condescension. “It’s all we ever do in school. Every single block. Read. Test. Read. Test. Read. Test.”
I considered what he was saying and stood quietly in front of the class of twenty-nine freshmen, unsure of what to say. All eyes were on me, waiting to see my reaction. Yet, I had engaged this conversation and another preaching session on the value of reading wasn’t going to cut it… and I couldn’t simply end it. I had to find a way to put a positive spin on it. In my mind, I pulled up a task list of options, looking desperately for a solution that wasn’t in any of the educational theory books that I had read in college. Where do I take this conversation from here?
“Well, I’m still pretty new at this teaching thing, you know,” I said. “So fill me in here. What don’t you like about reading?”
“Tests, man,” the student told me and his classmates nodded along, as if I were now in on some ancient secret that they all knew.
“Tests.”
“Tests. It’s not the reading for most of us. At least I don’t think. I’m just so sick of filling out stupid tests. First block, second block, PSSAs. Can’t we just read something for once and enjoy it without having to fill out all those stupid questions afterwards?”
I again considered this. “Point taken,” I replied. “But in the meantime, let’s get reading.”
The class groaned again and we began to read.
I learned a lot during that brief conversation. I hadn’t quite been sure how the handle it at the time, but I did realize one important lesson: I need to let the students talk. I need to let the students explain to me their frustrations and why they are groaning instead of simply telling them to knock it off. I learned that if the classroom is a battleground, the tests are the landmines that the students want so desperately to avoid. They want the classroom to be a playground just as I do.
I remember going home that night and laying on my couch and thinking the conversation over. Tests, man. Who could blame them?
The next reading assignment that we read as a class was an excerpt from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. When we finished reading it, I told them that I didn’t have anything to go with it, but I wanted to know what they had thought. There was silence for a moment. Then the student who had spoken up in protest of testing chimed in.
“It was pretty good, I guess,” he said.
That was the only response volunteered by the students, but as the class ended, I still felt pretty good about the whole situation. It may not have solved anything. Most would probably never remember the story. And I just may not have had the most effective solution to the problem right then and there. I realized in that moment though that if I just learned to listen sometimes, the students had some pretty good ideas.
![“Oh all the world loves you,” Ruth says suddenly. “What I wonder is why?”“I’m lovable,” he says. [Rabbit, Run]
So begins to story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in Rabbit, Run, a former rustbelt Pennsylvania high school basketball star who is now in his mid-twenties, married, and selling cheap kitchen gadgets door to door. At this point in his life, Rabbit’s existence can be described in one word: discontent.
Written by John Updike in 1960, roughly corresponding with his own age, the author would go on to follow the life of Harry Angstrom in three sequels (Rabbit Redux [1971], Rabbit is Rich [1981], Rabbit at Rest [1990]) two of which would go on to win Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award.
The novel is brutally honest in its depiction of the protagonist Rabbit, and it’s heart-wrenching as his apathetic, depraved, and selfish behavior hurts those around him time and time again. Updike does not shy away from the darker side of our humanity, the parts of ourselves that we wish to not speak about.
Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he’ll always know. [Rabbit Redux]
Through Rabbit (and eventually his son), Updike explores the depravity of our minds, the honest darkness that lurks deep in each of us, yet rarely do we exert, shedding political correctness all while exploring each era’s mixed feelings on the evolving political and social makeup of the time. The prose is not always easy, a conversation may explore a single seemingly irrelevant topic for pages at a time, and the long stream-of-consciousness passages that pepper the series can be exhausting, but the reward is well-worth it. I’d wager that Rabbit Angstrom is amongst the finest and most developed characters in American literature.
If you’re yet to have a taste of Updike’s prose, I’d recommend checking out his short story A&P, which introduced me to his work during a Introduction to American Literature class back in my freshman year of college. It’ll give you a sense of his style. Then, do yourself a favor and purchase these novels. You may be depressed afterwards, but you won’t be disappointed.
When Harry looked down at him rouged in the coffin he saw it had been coming, Fred hadn’t much changed. From the way Janice and her mother carried on you would have thought a mixture of Prince Valiant and Moses had bit the dust. Maybe having already buried both of his own parents made Harry hard. He looked down, noticed that Fred’s hair had been parted wrong, and felt nothing. The great thing about the dead, they make space. [Rabbit is Rich]
Purchase Updike’s “Rabbit” novels:Rabbit Run ($0.35 used)Rabbit Redux ($1.76 used)Rabbit is Rich ($1.98 used)Rabbit at Rest ($1.61 used)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwjch74WNs1qa9jp3o1_1280.jpg)
