When I look at the framed book jackets on the wall at the Lion’s Head Bar I suffer with envy. Will I ever be up there? The writers travel the land, signing books, appearing on television talk shows. There are parties and women and romance everywhere. People listen. No one listens to teachers. They are pitied for their sad salaries.
But there are powerful days in room 205 at Stuyvesant High School, when discussion of a poem opens the door to a blazing white light and everyone understands the poem and understands the understanding and when the light fades we smile at each other like travelers returned.
My students don’t know it but that classroom is my refuge, sometimes my strength, the setting for my delayed childhood. We dip into the Annotated Mother Goose and the Annotated Alice in Wonderland, and when my students bring in the books of their early years there is delight in the room. You read that book, too? Wow.
A wow in any classroom means something is happening.
There is no talk of quizzes or tests and if grades have to be assigned for the bureaucrats well then students are capable of evaluating themselves. We know what’s going on in “Little Red Riding Hood,” that if you don’t follow the path the way your mother tells you you’re gonna meet that big bad wolf and there will be trouble, man, trouble, and like how come everyone complains about violence on television and no one says a word about the viciousness of the father and stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel,” how come?
From the back of the room a boy’s angry cry, Fathers are such assholes.
And for a whole class period there’s a heated discussion of “Humpty Dumpty.”
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
So, I ask, what’s going on in this nursery rhyme? The hands are up. Well, like, this egg falls off the wall and if you study biology or physics you know you can never put an egg back together again. I mean, like, it’s common sense.
Who says it’s an egg? I ask.
Of course it’s an egg. Everyone knows that.
Where does it say it’s an egg?
They’re thinking. They’re searching the text for egg, any mention, any hint of egg. They won’t give in.
There are more hands and indignant assertions of egg. All their lives they knew this rhyme and there was never a doubt that Humpty Dumpty was an egg. They’re comfortable with the idea of egg and why do teachers have to come along and destroy everything with all this analysis.
I’m not destroying. I just want to know where you got the idea that Humpty is an egg.
Because, Mr. McCourt, it’s in all the pictures and whoever drew the first picture musta known the guy who wrote the poem or he’d never have made it an egg.
All right. If you’re content with the idea of egg we’ll let it be but I know the future lawyers in this class will never accept egg where there is no evidence of egg.
As long as there’s no threat of grades they’re comfortable with the matter of childhood and when I suggest they write their own children’s books they don’t complain, they don’t resist.
Oh, yeah, yeah, what a great idea.
They are to write, illustrate and bind their books, original work, and when they’re finished I take them to an elementary school down the street on First Avenue to be read and evaluated by real critics, the ones who would read such books, third and fourth graders.
Oh, yeah, yeah, the little ones, that’d be cute.
On a bitter January day the little ones are brought to Stuyvesant by their teacher. Aw, gee, look at ’em. So c-u-t-e. Look at their little coats and earmuffs and mittens and their little colored boots and their little frozen faces. Aw, cute.
The books are laid out on a long table, books of all sizes, shapes, and the room blazes with color. My students sit and stand, giving up their seats to their little critics who sit on desks, their feet dangling far above the floor. One by one they come to the table to select the books they read and to comment. I’ve already warned my students these small children are poor liars, all they know for the moment is the truth. They read from sheets their teacher helped them prepare.
The book I read is Petey and the Space Spider. This book is okay except for the beginning, the middle and the end.
The author, a tall Stuyvesant junior, smiles weakly and looks at the ceiling. His girlfriend hugs him.
Another critic. The book I read was called Over There and I didn’t like it because people shouldn’t write about war and people shooting each other in the face and going to the bathroom in their pants because they’re scared. People shouldn’t write about things like that when they can write about nice things like flowers and pancakes.
For the little critic there is wild applause from her classmates, from the Stuyvesant authors a stony silence. The author of Over There glares over the head of his critic.
Their teacher had asked her pupils to answer the question, Would you buy this book for yourself or anyone else?
No, I wouldn’t buy this book for me or anyone. I already have this book. It was written by Dr. Seuss.
The critic’s classmates laugh and their teacher tells them shush but they can’t stop and the plagiarist, sitting on the windowsill, turns red and doesn’t know what to do with his eyes. He’s a bad boy, did the wrong thing, gave the little ones ammunition for their jeers, but I want to comfort him because I know why he did that bad thing, that he could hardly be in the mood for creating a children’s book when his parents separated during the Christmas break, that he’s caught in the bitterness of a custody battle, doesn’t know what to do when mother and father pull him in opposite directions, that he feels like running to his grandfather in Israel, that with all this he can meet his English assignment only by stapling together a few pages on which he has copied a Dr. Seuss story and illustrating it with stick figures, that this is surely the lowest point in his life and how do you handle the humiliation when you’re caught in the act by this smartass third grader who stands there laughing in the spotlight. He looks at me across the room and I shake my head, hoping he understands that I understand. I feel I should go to him, put my arm around his shoulder, comfort him, but I hold back because I don’t want third graders or high school juniors to think I condone plagiarism. For the moment I have to hold the high moral ground and let him suffer.
The little ones get into their winter clothes and leave and my classroom is quiet. A Stuyvesant author who suffered negative criticism says he hopes those damn kids get lost in the snow. Another tall junior, Alex Newman, says he feels okay because his book was praised but what those kids did to a few of the authors was disgraceful. He says some of those kids are assassins and there is agreement around the room.
But they’re softened up for the American Literature of the junior year, ready for the rant of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. We chant Vachel Lindsay and Robert Service and T. S. Eliot, who can be recruited for either side of the Atlantic. We tell jokes because every joke is a short story with a fuse and an explosion. We journey back into childhood for games and street rhymes, Miss Lucy and Ring-around-a-rosy, and visiting educators wonder what’s going on in this classroom.
And tell me, Mr. McCourt, how does that prepare our children for college and the demands of society?