Teacher in America:
55 Thoughts
27 May 2014
¶ At The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone offers a list of 55 considerations for any teacher of high-school English. I read it as Lydia Davis without the irony. Sample:
25.
You will often have young women in class who love to write, and who outnumber the men, and yet these young women will stop writing. Teach them to keep writing. Show them their words matter. Introduce them to Mary Shelley, Marilynne Robinson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Toni Morrison, Tayari Jones, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Alice Elliott Dark, Virginia Woolf, Stacey D’Erasmo, Roxane Gay, Jamie Quatro, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Mary Karr, Susan Sontag, Natalie Diaz, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and, please, Flannery O’Connor.26.
Do not try to sanitize Flannery. Let her live on the page.
All well and good. But we want to send Ripatrazone a book by Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future mostly likely, to encourage him to teach his students that they are invaders, unknown newcomers to a complex world that they cannot begin to improve until they know something about it. This is the whole point of education; it’s why we require something so tedious of young people. But we’ve never been good at telling them why the ordeal is necessary. It is our conviction that a teacher who could convey the necessity of education to his or her students would dissolve the ordeal altogether.