"My goal as I finished my degree...was to be a twelfth-grade AP literature teacher. I'd expected to walk down polished hallways of a well-ordered high school to arrive in a small, cozy classroom that held well-read volumes of the great works of literature, thus giving the room that slightly musty smell of a small-town library or a used book store. I anticipated moving down the school halls (holding my steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of brilliantly written essays in the other) only to be constantly stopped by students wanting to know if they could drop by after school to continue our discussion of The Great Gatsby or Native Son or My Antonia. I thought I'd be the sponsor of the grammar club, where we'd celebrate the triumph of traditional grammar over transformational grammar, and debate the finer points of that and which and the serial comma. It never entered my mind that some of my students would not know how to read; I presumed they would embrace books with the same passion I did. They would mourn the moment when our class would end and they would have to leave the world of Dickens or Ellison, Poe or Hughes to reenter the corridors of our school.
And then I got my first teaching job."
--From When Kids Can't Read by Kylene Beers
No comments:
Post a Comment