Sailing Down the River
On doing too much too late as a teacher
I should be letting up now, but I’m not. My students are talking mutiny. They voice words like torture and punishment. I know where they’re coming from. I sympathize. Yet I press on.
It’s the second-to-last week of school, my last week with seniors. I have one class of juniors, AP English Language & Composition. All but one student took the AP exam on May 13th, and the next day, after the briefest of debriefs, I started them down a path none of us had ever been on.
When I was a junior in high school, I took honors English. If the school had offered AP English Language & Composition, I would have taken that. But to her credit, my honors English teacher my junior year threw a lot at us. The Scarlet Letter. Walden. The Great Gatsby. Black Boy. Our Town. The Grapes of Wrath. A Farewell to Arms. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s novel was the only tome I faked reading. I don’t know why I didn’t read it other than it was assigned toward the end of the school year and I must have gotten lazy. I was over English class by then.
I remember going to Barnes & Noble down the hill and purchasing a copy of the CliffsNotes for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reading it all in one sitting when I got home, then proceeding to wing my way through the quizzes and tests and writing assignments that came my way. I remember telling my well-meaning teacher that I was indeed reading the novel; I even reached the point where I believed, in a disturbing Orwellian doublethink way, that I was in fact actually reading the story of Huck and Jim traveling down the mighty Mississip.
I finished with an A that second semester, the same grade I’d pulled off the first semester, when I was legit. But at the end of that second semester I, like Jay Gatsby before me, was a fraud. When I got away with my deception, I felt no guilt.
Six years later, in the summer between my first and second years of graduate school, I picked up Adventures of Huckleberry Finn once more. I was alone for most of that summer, the weather was pleasant, and I found a tree to sit under. There I powered through the novel I should have read in high school. I was shocked at what I’d missed: Twain’s novel was a delight! I had no audiobook to accompany me; I was still a month or so away from giving in and acquiring my first cell phone. I just read. It was one of the most pleasurable experiences I’ve ever had, and I credit Twain. I adored his greatest novel.
Imagine my surprise when, twenty-four years later, I see stacks of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my school’s storage room. The high school is divesting this area of all printed material before the transformation into a classroom begins. I have a slightly ajar window of opportunity in which to snag the books I’d like to give sanctuary to in my classroom cabinets.
Forty-nine copies of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were delivered to my classroom a day or two later. I had copies for my students now, they were mine, and eight school days would remain after the AP Lang exam. I thought—I thought logically: I can do this. They can do this. Four hundred and seven pages, seven class periods plus an extended finals block on the eighth day. Obviously, the students would have to read outside of class a bit, but they were advanced placement, with several signed up to take AP English Literature the following school year, so they should expect this. This should come as no surprise, certainly nothing out of pocket and not seen as punishment.
The day after the AP Lang exam, my students trickled into my classroom. One of my gifted top flights assured a friend that the class would now be reading a play and writing their own. They’d have to perform it, too. The reference was to my final assignment for last year’s AP Lang students: the reading and performance of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, followed by the writing and performance of the students’ own small group one-acts. While last year’s students enjoyed this final assignment, I felt something else could have been given to better prepare them for the transition to analysis of literary fiction. Hence, the copies of Tain’s novel stacked on a table at the front of the room. After some small talk about the exam, we got right to it: each student received a copy of the old hardbound “enriched” edition. I released the ambitious reading schedule on Google Classroom. When the students saw they were required to read the first fifty pages by the time class started the following day, the first of what would turn out to be numerous uncountable groans over the next week and a half issued forth.
One student pointed out that the pages were smaller than normal, and I added that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn really was a quick read. Honest. It also happened to be regarded, not just by their teacher, as one of the two Great American Novels (the other being The Great Gatsby). Despite these assurances, the class turned on me quickly. Whatever relief the students felt over finishing the exam and dispensing with our doorstop of a course textbook gave way to an acute annoyance, dread and, for some, open hostility.
They thought I was doing them dirty; I thought I was finishing out this advanced placement course strong, the way it should be wrapped up. If they didn’t want to read a novel, I reasoned, why did they take this class?
Another of my top flights expressed in front of the class on our fourth day of reading, “It’s the end of the year. We’re tired.” I told the class I understood, but at the same time, in another bout of Orwellian doublethink, I didn’t accept that understanding. In my mind we were LOCKED IN, barreling down the track, unable to hit reverse. We had to finish Twain’s greatest work, one of the finest of all the novels ever created in our nation. I wrote, I posted, I cajoled, I threatened, I joked. I expressed my intense love for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The humor! The heart! The sheer number of verbs! The dialogue! The dialects! The situations! The allusions!
I thought I was doing all of it right. I addressed Twain’s use of the “hard R”—over 200 times—at the outset and braced myself for the fury, the calls and messages from families. No fury was directed at the infamous racial epithet. The potent fury that did exist was directed at me for assigning the novel in the first place. The potent fury was directed at the reading schedule, the fact that I had come around to reading this novel over 20 years earlier and it had taken a special place in my heart. Making copies of an excerpt from Percival Everett’s James, going over that excerpt in class and praising the revisionist narrative didn’t help. A modern update didn’t matter. Controversial language didn’t matter as much to these students as did the fact that they had to read well over fifty pages a day. One day the reading assignment clocked in at 75 pages. If I had seen that task as a high school junior, advanced placement or not, I too would have gotten nasty. I too would have moaned and sighed and shifted and made bunny ears behind my teacher’s head when he was speaking to the class and I was behind him and he didn’t notice until it was too late. I would have out and out rebelled.
To their credit, my students did not out and out rebel. They did not set fire to the classroom. My garage door was egged overnight only once—an attack that may have been carried out by someone other than a disgruntled AP Lang junior forced to read a four hundred-plus page picaresque narrative published in 1885. My students kept their cool, and they submitted. To alleviate the sheer weight of reading each day, I devoted a decent chunk of class time to reading while listening to the audiobook narrated by Elijah Wood. I did this, I now admit, for almost entirely selfish reasons. I wanted to listen to the audiobook, I wanted to reread Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I wanted to relive that long ago summer under that tree in Indiana, surrounded by silence save for the voice of Twain’s Huck talking to me as if was a friend.
But, I admitted toward the end of my mad experiment, this wasn’t Indiana, it wasn’t an institution of higher learning, I wasn’t alone and about to turn 24 and free. I was over two decades older, in California with a family to provide for. I wasn’t free, like Huck, like Jim at the end. I couldn’t light out for the open territory. I had a job—scratch that: I hd a career, and a main component of this career was knowing my students. That last week and a half of this school year, I showed I didn’t know my students, not really, and what’s more I didn’t care to know them, not really, in the way I could have known them in the end.
In Santa Cruz, at the Beach Boardwalk, I conferred with my seniors whom I’d taught in AP Lang the previous school year. One senior brought up a brilliant idea: assign AP Lang students the PIQs to write for their upcoming UC applications. This way, the senior said, AP juniors would be writing, the task would be meaningful, and the students would get a jumpstart on their applications to the University of California. Even if they’re not applying to the UC system, students can use their writing for scholarships or for personal essays required by other universities.
When I heard this idea it was as if someone had snapped their fingers in front of my eyes, and the spell was broken. I can’t say I’ll never take Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out of that classroom cabinet again. I have a lot of years left of teaching and plenty of opportunities to get some young person to love Twain’s novel in their teens as I did in my twenties. But to force a reading in so little time will never happen again.
Sorry, Huck. Sorry, Jim. Until the timing’s right, if it’s ever right, you’re on your own.