Teaching Writing: Novel Experience

Classroom View

Teaching a book is very different from reading it for pleasure or as a student. For one, as a student, at least as a high school student, I read with the intent of being entertained. As a college student, I read looking for text and subtext. In graduate school, I read with an eye for taking the novel apart and figuring out what made it go. Now, teaching college in the high school, I try to keep in mind all of these experiences, with the additional lens of interrogating the novel to see what central ideas, historical context, and relatability I can discuss with my students. The latter--relatability--was a word I started to hear from students the moment I began to teach an undergraduate creative writing workshop. The students wanted everything to be relatable and they wanted to experience its relatability without doing much work.

Teaching high school students is a bit different from teaching undergraduates. High school students are even more fragile than college students--almost as often as I heard the word “relatable” I heard the story of a high school teacher who ruined a book or whose criticism made a student feel incapable of writing. Since I am inherently a reader and writer, relatability never occurred to me--I didn’t read to find out about someone who experienced the same things as me, I read to expand my understanding and experiences. I welcomed criticism from my teachers, as I wanted to become a better writer, not just be heaped with praise. Although heapings of praise didn’t hurt, either. As an instructor, though, I have to keep in mind that not all students are aching to be better writers, and blunt criticism is not effective. I also have to remember to heap on the praise, as this does not come naturally to me. Maybe putting stickers on graded essay would help?

Reading The Great Gatsby for the first time since high school, and in preparation for class discussion, I discovered a lot of things I did not notice the first time around and quite a few things I had forgotten. For one, I am not sure I ever had a clue that Nick fled the midwest in part because he was escaping a relationship that had become too intense for him--he claims that “gossip had published the banns”. His cruel treatment of Jordan also alluded me. Even as we discussed Nick as an unreliable narrator in my high school classroom, it did not occur to me that part of his unreliability was his lack of culpability in romantic relationships, as well as intense denial any time things got serious. Having years of serious dating behind me, which included more than one cad who could have given Nick a run for his money, I was shocked to realize how callous he was regarding women.

The anti-Semitism, too, I had not remembered. Meyer Wolfsheim, not only the only Jewish character, but one of the few with a clearly labeled ethnicity, is one of Gatsby’s shady business partners, and he is quite proud of the fact that he helped rig the 1919 World Series. He also speaks in dialect and openly discusses seeing other gangsters murdered. There’s also the the “lovely Jewess” at Meyer’s office and the business name on the office “The Swastika Holding Company.”

I had also forgotten the stunning prose, the keen descriptions of lives built on idleness and money. Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the valley of ashes, the scene Nick encounters when he first enters the Buchanan mansion, and the exterior and interior of the Gatsby mansion are so present and wondrous on the page. I had not forgotten how juicy the plot is, how it unfolds like a true crime mystery, but I certainly enjoyed it just as much, if not more, than I did when I read it for high school.

The Great Gatsby not only stands up to my adult rereading, but it exceeded my pleasure. It offers so many complex discussion topics for the classroom, more than just the American Dream and the treatment of divinity, but also our complicated views of wealth and class, partying and hard work, and even family life. My students were shocked by the treatment of Pamela Buchanan, the daughter of Tom and Daisy. She barely exists in the presence of the novel, and it is implied that she is raised by servants.

While researching books to determine classroom appropriateness, I also became acquainted with the Focus on the Family website, pluggedin, which provides amazingly detailed information about any content that could possibly be considered objectionable in a book (the headings include “Authority Roles,” “Profanity/Violence,” and “Kissing/Sex/Homosexuality”). Never in my life did I think that I would be a visitor, let alone a frequent visitor, of a Focus on the Family website. But, as Justin Bieber famously said, Never Say Never.

If you haven’t read The Great Gatsby in years, give it another whirl. If you have kids in high school, consider reading it with them. It would be a good way to bond and encourage appreciation for great literature.