My best friend, Tracy Wu, says I’m really tough on people. She says she wonders sometimes how I can like her. But we both know that’s a big joke. Tracy’s the best friend I’ll ever have. I just wish we were in the same fifth-grade class.
My teacher is Mrs. Minish. I’m not crazy about her. She hardly ever opens the windows in our room because she’s afraid of getting a stiff neck. I never heard anything so dumb. Somedays our room gets hot and stuffy and it smells--like this afternoon. We’d been listening to individual reports on The Mammal for almost an hour. Donna Davidson was standing at the front of the room reading hers. It was on the horse. Donna has this *thing* about horses.
I tried hard not to fall asleep but it wasn’t easy. For a while I watched Michael and Irwin as they passed a *National Geographic* back and forth. It was open to a page full of naked people. Wendy and Caroline played Tic Tac Toe behind Wendy’s notebook. Wendy won three games in a row. I wasn’t surprised. Wendy is a very clever person. Besides being class president, she is also group science leader, recess captain and head of the goldfish committee.
Did Mrs. Minish notice anything that was going on or was she just concentrating on Donna’s boring report? I couldn’t tell....
-It’s the end of the summer, and the thought of reentering the working world distresses me so greatly, I’m thinking about regression. I may read five to ten “young adult” novels in the next two weeks. Once, a snooty critic--maybe Harold Bloom?--moaned publicly about the fact that America is now made up of mushy-headed pseudo-adults whose only “reading material” is “Harry Potter,” among other middle-grade classics. Guilty as charged! In young adult novels, there tend to be actual stories; things are well-paced. Also, my own adulthood has been very luxurious; I sometimes think I am a twelve-year-old, trapped in amber; when reading, say, Alice Munro, I can’t fully relate to the terminal-cancer patient, or the man whose wife has dementia, or the woman who leaves her husband for the ornery managing director of the local community theater. But fifth grade? I know fifth grade well.
-My situation is somewhat similar to Lena Dunham’s, I think. Or, at least, to Hannah Horvath’s. In the iconic “Girls” episode “All Adventurous Women Do,” we briefly see Hannah’s Twitter feed. She’s interested in: Kanye West, Joan Rivers, Jonah Hill, and Judy Blume. Of course she is. A perfect snapshot of Hannah’s brain. It’s this kind of attention to detail that earned “Girls” so many hosannahs from critics in its first season. (Hannah seems so real, we forget she is the product of a trillion brilliant, careful, incisive, creative choices.)
-When I taught in an elementary school, Judy Blume had an important role in the daily curriculum. Like Hannah Horvath, I was smitten. My students were smitten. Blume writes with such authority, you imagine you’re simply transplanted into a child’s head. Like Beverly Cleary, she has that special ability to slip into the skin of a third, or fifth, grader, and to resist “winking” at the reader--resist, resist, as if her life depended on it.
-This excerpt, above, from “Blubber,” has a “Call Me Ishmael”-esque opening. The boldly generalizing: “My best friend, Tracy Wu, says I’m really tough on people.” This is presented as fact, as a calm statement, but it sets our gears turning: Maybe our narrator has something to learn in the course of the story. Maybe this will be a Bildungsroman about compassion. From the general to the specific: The second paragraph takes us to a physical location, a classroom. Elementary school is all about power and politics; very little academic learning happens, but a kid does acquire most of what he/she needs to know about the social world. In childhood, we are at the mercy of our teachers, who are more-than-infrequently troubled, or semi-troubled, souls. The special nastiness of refusing to open a window. The BS claim about “worrying about my poor neck.” Are you not immediately thrown right back into fifth grade? The powerlessness of the child: Recognizing the nonsense running through an adult’s brain, maybe having more acuity than the adult herself, but feeling incapable of speaking truth to power. All of this complexity--conveyed via an observation about a window.
-“Donna has this *thing* about horses.” “Michael and Irwin passed a *National Geographic* back and forth--for the naked people.” “Wendy is group science leader and head of the goldfish committee.” A good story should have characters with several mental illnesses: Each character should be crazy in at least one recognizable way. (This is simply an accurate reflection of reality.) So, Blume gives us the madhouse of fifth grade: The girl with the horse fetish, the boys getting their kicks, publicly, from some anthropological studies, the crazed type-A figure who needs to drum up new achievements, even if they involve voluntary work for “the goldfish committee.” You’re hooked. You want to learn all you can about this world.
-Since the actual experience of faux-learning is so tedious, we spend much of the time in our jobs, or in our classes, observing human behavior. Is the teacher really paying attention? This is the number one question on any student’s mind, I think, at least once per day, and there it is, in paragraph four. I’m eager to explore more of Judy Blume in the next two weeks. Do you have favorite writers-for-kids? And who are they? Join me in my reading!
My teacher is Mrs. Minish. I’m not crazy about her. She hardly ever opens the windows in our room because she’s afraid of getting a stiff neck. I never heard anything so dumb. Somedays our room gets hot and stuffy and it smells--like this afternoon. We’d been listening to individual reports on The Mammal for almost an hour. Donna Davidson was standing at the front of the room reading hers. It was on the horse. Donna has this *thing* about horses.
I tried hard not to fall asleep but it wasn’t easy. For a while I watched Michael and Irwin as they passed a *National Geographic* back and forth. It was open to a page full of naked people. Wendy and Caroline played Tic Tac Toe behind Wendy’s notebook. Wendy won three games in a row. I wasn’t surprised. Wendy is a very clever person. Besides being class president, she is also group science leader, recess captain and head of the goldfish committee.
Did Mrs. Minish notice anything that was going on or was she just concentrating on Donna’s boring report? I couldn’t tell....
-It’s the end of the summer, and the thought of reentering the working world distresses me so greatly, I’m thinking about regression. I may read five to ten “young adult” novels in the next two weeks. Once, a snooty critic--maybe Harold Bloom?--moaned publicly about the fact that America is now made up of mushy-headed pseudo-adults whose only “reading material” is “Harry Potter,” among other middle-grade classics. Guilty as charged! In young adult novels, there tend to be actual stories; things are well-paced. Also, my own adulthood has been very luxurious; I sometimes think I am a twelve-year-old, trapped in amber; when reading, say, Alice Munro, I can’t fully relate to the terminal-cancer patient, or the man whose wife has dementia, or the woman who leaves her husband for the ornery managing director of the local community theater. But fifth grade? I know fifth grade well.
-My situation is somewhat similar to Lena Dunham’s, I think. Or, at least, to Hannah Horvath’s. In the iconic “Girls” episode “All Adventurous Women Do,” we briefly see Hannah’s Twitter feed. She’s interested in: Kanye West, Joan Rivers, Jonah Hill, and Judy Blume. Of course she is. A perfect snapshot of Hannah’s brain. It’s this kind of attention to detail that earned “Girls” so many hosannahs from critics in its first season. (Hannah seems so real, we forget she is the product of a trillion brilliant, careful, incisive, creative choices.)
-When I taught in an elementary school, Judy Blume had an important role in the daily curriculum. Like Hannah Horvath, I was smitten. My students were smitten. Blume writes with such authority, you imagine you’re simply transplanted into a child’s head. Like Beverly Cleary, she has that special ability to slip into the skin of a third, or fifth, grader, and to resist “winking” at the reader--resist, resist, as if her life depended on it.
-This excerpt, above, from “Blubber,” has a “Call Me Ishmael”-esque opening. The boldly generalizing: “My best friend, Tracy Wu, says I’m really tough on people.” This is presented as fact, as a calm statement, but it sets our gears turning: Maybe our narrator has something to learn in the course of the story. Maybe this will be a Bildungsroman about compassion. From the general to the specific: The second paragraph takes us to a physical location, a classroom. Elementary school is all about power and politics; very little academic learning happens, but a kid does acquire most of what he/she needs to know about the social world. In childhood, we are at the mercy of our teachers, who are more-than-infrequently troubled, or semi-troubled, souls. The special nastiness of refusing to open a window. The BS claim about “worrying about my poor neck.” Are you not immediately thrown right back into fifth grade? The powerlessness of the child: Recognizing the nonsense running through an adult’s brain, maybe having more acuity than the adult herself, but feeling incapable of speaking truth to power. All of this complexity--conveyed via an observation about a window.
-“Donna has this *thing* about horses.” “Michael and Irwin passed a *National Geographic* back and forth--for the naked people.” “Wendy is group science leader and head of the goldfish committee.” A good story should have characters with several mental illnesses: Each character should be crazy in at least one recognizable way. (This is simply an accurate reflection of reality.) So, Blume gives us the madhouse of fifth grade: The girl with the horse fetish, the boys getting their kicks, publicly, from some anthropological studies, the crazed type-A figure who needs to drum up new achievements, even if they involve voluntary work for “the goldfish committee.” You’re hooked. You want to learn all you can about this world.
-Since the actual experience of faux-learning is so tedious, we spend much of the time in our jobs, or in our classes, observing human behavior. Is the teacher really paying attention? This is the number one question on any student’s mind, I think, at least once per day, and there it is, in paragraph four. I’m eager to explore more of Judy Blume in the next two weeks. Do you have favorite writers-for-kids? And who are they? Join me in my reading!
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