We all became teachers for different reasons. Maybe some of us were seduced by the idea of shaping young people’s lives or were enticed by the thought of holidays off, but most teachers I know came to this career out of an intense love of their subject and a desire to share that love with others. Sounds naïve when you see it in print, doesn’t it? It’s true, though. You respect something so much, you think that if you can only explain to the students what the words in those books mean and the truth of that message in the larger world that they’ll value it all the same way you do. Your eyes shine with ambition and desire.
My first year teaching tenth grade English I was attempting to express my love for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I wanted my students to see the characters as Steinbeck wrote them, as real people. I wanted them to try to feel the desperation of the migrants’ situation, and evaluate what their story meant to the greater world outside the novel. I decided to read aloud from Chapter Fifteen, the scene in the hamburger stand on Route 66, when an unnamed Okie man asks to buy bread from Mae, the waitress. She’s reluctant to sell it: she thinks that the migrants always want something for nothing and, besides, the restaurant needs the bread to make sandwiches for its paying customers. The insistent humility of the migrant man eventually softens Mae’s heart to the point where she sells a fifteen-cent loaf for a dime. When the man pulls the dime from his leather pouch, a penny sticks to it, and taps the counter. Looking beneath the penny, through the glass case, the man sees peppermint sticks and asks if they’re penny candy. He’s seen the longing on the faces of his two starving little boys, and would like to make their lives a bit better if only he can afford to. Mae has seen the children’s frozen, dirt-smeared faces, too, so she lies and says that the candy is actually two for a penny. My eyes began to well with tears at this point in the reading. When I finally got to where I intended to stop, the part where one of the truckers realizes that Mae has lied about the candy’s price and teases her about it, I was snuffling loudly. I stopped reading and gazed at my students; then I wiped away my tears and said, “The way that Steinbeck wrote this scene, the way he uses these characters to show us the need to treat our fellow humans with dignity, always makes me cry.”
A boy I'll call Alex, in the front row, looked at me with utter disgust on his face and said with the condescension that only a fifteen year old boy can muster, ‘They’re not real, you know.’
‘I know,’ I answered, ‘but they’re based on real people that Steinbeck knew and they are representative of a bigger problem in the country at the time. What might it be? Think about it, then write it down.’
As their pencils scratched across their notebooks, I realized that my loving literature (and liking teenagers) wasn’t enough. Evidently Steinbeck’s voice didn’t sing to them as it did to me. More was required here than just an understanding of the words, the author’s intent, and the state of the world when the book was written. Merely reading the same words on the page as I was reading didn’t provide those kids with the same feelings I got, as I had mistakenly assumed that it would. Having learned this important lesson during the first marking period at my first full-time teaching job, I have tried to impart it to every student teacher who has ever worked with me by telling them that the first lesson is - in the words of a student in the first class I ever taught over 20 years ago - life is uncertain so don’t take anything for granite.
