IT IS GENERALLY AGREED upon by most veteran teachers that middle school students are the most difficult to teach and to keep under control. Their bodies are changing, they are undergoing puberty, their hormones are raging, and they often don’t have the faintest inkling about what is happening to them. They are more temperamental, more peer-influenced, more alienated, and more sexually confused. Because of the proliferation of internet pornography, virtually all 12 and 13-year-olds have seen the whole spectrum of raw, unfiltered sex acts. But they do not know how to process it or make proper sense of it. Bringing all those unresolved emotions into the classroom presents a host of unwelcome behaviors that are a detriment to learning. Good teachers try to channel all those feelings into something productive, and I did everything I could think of to engage them and get some sort of positive interaction.
As mentioned, my Creative Writing course was an off-the-grid experiment by the Board of Education. It was based on a special government grant that funded the whole thing including my higher-than-average salary. There was no textbook extant for the course; I made it up as I went. I had to devise not only an entire curriculum, but had to figure out a way to grade the students’ efforts. Any type of reading for the students required a trip to the copy room to print out—illegally—scores of copies, most of which went straight into the overflowing garbage can. I also assigned many in-class writing projects and learned that some of the students’ reading skills were so poor that to call on them to read aloud their papers was a study in humiliation.
Some students openly mocked every assignment given to them; others, however, relished the opportunity to read their papers to the class, seeing the exercise as an opportunity for performance. In virtually every one of my classes there was one or two students who excelled at writing and could read their papers to the class at a near-professional level. The other students recognized this talent and were eager to hear these papers read to them and quieted down during reading time. Such events for African-American students are a communal experience; as the papers were being read there was often a collective gasp, a collective laugh, or a constant patter of commentary. White students typically sit silently until a reading is finished. Not so my students. And frankly it enlivened the whole process and made it more enjoyable for them and enlightening for me.
Occasionally I would read stories out loud, stories I thought would connect with the students. After reading these stories to five classes daily, my voice would be hoarse and sore. I had to go to an ear, nose, and throat doctor to help with the problem. The answer: drink water as I talked, which most certainly helped and is something I practice as a college professor today. I sometimes would pass out drawing paper and colored pencils and ask students to draw their impressions of a story I had read. One story in particular stands out: “The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger” by Robert Penn Warren. I well-remembered this story from my own high school English classes and thought it one of the most interesting stories I had ever read with a jarring ending. I wondered if it would translate well to students of the new millennium and in particular to young African-Americans.
Every class listened raptly as I read this story about a farmer and his family who loved going to town on Saturdays and eating hamburgers, which to them was the most exotically delicious food in the universe. The farmer had built a “patented gate,” which was a newfangled gate that could be opened without dismounting from a horse and carriage. The farmer felt it gave him a degree of status among the local farmers, but his wife aspired to more than just farm life and had her eye on the hamburger joint. At the end of the story (spoiler alert) the farmer hangs himself from his gate and the widow sells off the farm, buys the hamburger grill, and cooks a “mean hamburger.”
This story supercharged my students’ imaginations and they drew all manner of impressions. Many drew human bodies with angry-looking hamburgers for heads. Several drew the farmer hanging from his gate post. A mention in the story of “tow-headed” boys resulted in several drawings of boys with big toes for heads. I put the drawings up all around the room and the students were hugely pleased with their work.
I was a fan of the short stories of Richard Bausch, whom I had met at a summer writers’ retreat at the exclusive Bennington College in Vermont. It was there I met both Bausch and his good friend, the great George Garrett who in some ways became a mentor to me and helped promote my first book, the novel Pullers. Bausch is a master of the short story and in middle-age was granted the great honor of a Modern Library edition of his short stories. I can’t think of an author who writes better dialogue than Bausch. One of my favorite stories by him is “Aren’t You Happy for Me?” which is almost entirely a phone conversation between a father and his college student daughter. The daughter is hesitantly telling her father about a big event looming in her life. The conversation builds to the point where the father realizes his daughter must be pregnant. When this is revealed, the reader doesn’t see it coming and it is a surprise. As I read this to my classes, at first I thought they were bored by the story and were lulled by my reading. The silence, however, actually reflected how intently they were listening. When I read out loud the possibility of the pregnancy, the students practically jumped up and down in their seats. But Bausch fooled us. The daughter wasn’t pregnant. She was trying to tell her father that she planned to marry one of her professors. This stunned the father who thought a student-professor relationship totally out of bounds. But the big reveal, timed to perfection by Bausch, is that the professor is sixty-five years old.
When I read this my classes—every single one—screamed so long and loud that other teachers down the hall came to see what was happening. They talked about this story for days. I’ve often thought about how Bausch would have reacted to see this response to his story. I once had the honor of sitting next to Bausch in a restaurant. I asked him if the dialogue he wrote in his stories flowed naturally or if it required a lot of work and revision. Not surprisingly he told me that his dialogue, which seems so dead perfect when reading it, is the result of anguish and toil and lots and lots of editing and rewriting. The hard work shows and shows brilliantly.
Later in the school year when the results came back from the state of Tennessee’s standardized tests called TCAPs, it showed that 7th grade writing skills at Hickory Ridge were higher than the reading skills by many percentage points. Seeing as how I’m not one bit shy, I told the principal point blank that I thought those higher numbers were entirely due to my teaching these kids how to write. I haven’t changed my mind.