Beth Cooper, The End

Just in case you were wondering, the students accepted the fact of the situation with great maturity. They got what I was saying, and surprisingly didn’t push back too hard. My boss got what I was saying, didn’t press too hard into why I didn’t use more foresight, which was nice, and not one parent said boo (which means at least they weren’t angry). We moved on to Miyazaki’s brilliant Spirited Away, and that swept them up good. It really is a brilliant movie.

I have yet to choose an alternate novel – I bought myself some time with this unit, and the kids are really keen to try and make their own movies, a la this class, so I think we’ll do that.

And that’s that. Coulda been better, coulda been way worse.

Teaching Beth Cooper, Question Mark, Exclamation Point

Wow: this has been an intense experience, this teaching of Beth Cooper. I am not sure how it will play out, but here’s what has gone on since I posted about starting it:

Nothing.

Everything going on is in my head. Between starting the unit and now, we’ve had exams, and the prep for the exams. I haven’t read a chapter in weeks. Nobody’s called me on the issue, nobody’s found the book and exclaimed, “Holy Lord, there are a lot of swear words in here!”

But I’ve been thinking about it, in bursts, at length. And I’m in a quandary. The quick skinny on what has happened in my class is this: I had a novel study planned for my grade eights of a fine enough book – Freak the Mighty -and when it came time to start it, the class rebelled.

I liked it that they rebelled: it showed a lot of growth for them as a class and as young teenagers. They were articulate about not wanting to read Freak, and although I did challenge them clearly and frequently not to judge a book unread, I could see roughly where they were coming from. Most of them did not care: most of them would have read it and been mildly bored at best. But a few of them reacted to the shortness of the book, and its large font size, and probably its odd protagonists. It really reads like a grade 6 book – a fine grade 6 book.

But I like group processes, and like helping healthy dynamics flourish. So when the group came together (as a whole, to a student: there are only 8 kids in the class, so this kind of consensus is possible) my inclination was to respect it. And they suggested this book of Ethan’s, called I Love You, Beth Cooper. Mostly because it was around, but also because it is slightly racy, and has a great comics style cover, and concerns teens and their drive to date.

The main character’s a geek who, during his valedictorian graduation speech, declares his love for the head cheerleader, to whom he has never spoken. The whole book takes place in one night, the night of graduation – like similar stories of high school. The geek is beaten up by the cheerleader’s boyfriend, gets to know the cheerleader, has some adventures, and learns a bit about himself. It’s a simple book, a funny book, in the same ballpark as American Pie, the movie. (Apparently it was originally intended to be a movie, and was published as a book when the author couldn’t sell the script.) It works as a book, in a strange way, largely because the author’s a good writer.

But. The book is also extremely racy. It has a lot of swearing in it:  a lot. It has sexual content – light, teen movie sexual content. And the violence in it is so clearly the violence of television – today’s television. Family Guy television. It’s cartoonish, slapstick, but gross and vaguely menacing.

Initially I saw this as a cool challenge: a good opportunity to teach time-and-place lessons about how to use expletive language, a good chance to discuss swearing, and certainly a good chance to hook these students, who do not read for fun (not the majority of them, anyway), on books, the same way Breakfast of Champions had hooked me when I was 16. (My students are 14, but that is much more like 16 now.)

I talked to the class about the responsibilities they’d have if we were to read the book. I talked about the difference between finding something funny and laughing, and going crazy. I asked them to rise to the occasion, and to a kid, they did. We have a good relationship, this class and I, and have good boundaries and good talks about boundaries. You have to as a grade eight teacher: you need them to be able to talk to you, and at the same time, you need to be able to teach them how to fit into society, so you’re always navigating and correcting their experiments with language and … I hesitate to say it, but I guess the word is civility.

I wrote to all of their parents, to inform them of the change in reading materials, and to check whether it was kosher to request they buy another book. I let them know that it was similar to American Pie, and I explained my reasons for agreeing to the text. I myself had to order one, and found it online for a good cheap price, and offered to order multiples for anyone who couldn’t get out to a bookstore (or didn’t want to go). I got responses from all the parents except one, and that student assured me his parents were going to take him to get one asap.

We read a couple of chapters. The kids love it. They can’t wait to read more. The book is really funnily written, in a very teenagery way. We analysed the pacing of jokes, and we discussed the huge amount of new vocabulary and what it all meant (I’m not talking curse words: the vocabulary in the book is very precise and challenging; it’s a part of the humour).

Then we stopped for exams, and during that time I posted here about teaching it. You can read that here. Larry Doyle, the author, wrote to offer his thoughts and support, and defended the heavy swear-count by saying he’d demanded it be marketed as an adult book. That was the first thing that made me really worry, incidentally. But in an excited way. Like, “I am so dang daring and up-to-date!”

In a better world – the world I’m pushing to have built – I really COULD read this book with them and it’d be fine. There are parts that would be embarrassing for me, and I likely would have done some censoring of my own: “I’m not reading that out loud to a class of teenagers.” It WOULD have been interesting.

BUT.

Today I had that class for the first time since exams, and I took what I thought were solid precautions. I discussed the issue with them – that the book had way too many swear words for a school book, and that there were community standards we had to fit in with. I suggested we put stickers over one particularly indefensible page, with really grotesque language in large letters, to indicate to anyone who might ask that we were aware of the controversial nature of our experiment. The kids took it well, we had a good discussion about it.

But. I was lying in bed – I have an ear infection – after work today, and I started weighing the arguments, and considering the arguments, for and against reading Beth Cooper. And in a harsh blast of clarity I realized in capital letters: This Will Not Fly. I had about six heart attacks about possibly losing my job, about destroying the momentum of the class, about having to explain to my boss what had happened… I had a two hour talk with the Info Pusher, and then settled into the new reality.

I have to go in tomorrow, gather the books, and let the kids know that we can’t read the book together. I have to have a letter ready to give to their parents explaining the sudden second change of course. I have to let the class fume and rant for a week – maybe I’ll get them to write about why I suck – and then I have to dash right into Spirited Away, a really fun film study. After that I guess we’ll read Freak the Mighty – again, I do not impugn it intentionally,  it’s a great book. And I’ll move on, a little … I want to say wiser, but I don’t know if that’s the word. I don’t think it is.

What a thing. If I’d just stayed the course it’d all have been just fine. Now I could get blasted by anyone with a chip on their shoulder. Live and learn. My apologies to the class, to the book, and to the author.

An Interesting English Class

I have been teaching English this year to grades 7 and 8 students, and enjoying it. Since I didn’t have much planning time I had to rely on some of my favourite old chestnuts: Star Wars as an intro unit and Fiddler on the Roof and Spirited Away as film studies. For novels, though, I had to teach what the school already bought back from last year’s students (in true school style, I was actually told I could teach whatever novels I wanted, as long as I had the list in within the hour) – so my 8 course’s novel had to be Freak The Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick. It’s a good novel, good story, nice ideas, but if I’d had time I’d have chosen something more suited to 8th grade sensibilities (navel gazey, relationship focussed, funny). Freak‘s a better book for grade 7, or maybe 6.

But whatever, you do what you can. The rest of my 8 course was a good plan, and when my class groaned over Freak, I cautioned them to relax, that it was a good book, don’t be resistant for no reason. My class, by the way, is tiny and wonderful. I have 9 guys – no girls, sadly – who are all extremely talkative and excitable and into each other. They’re hard to guide sometimes, as they have a powerful collective will, but their energy is fantastic and I look forward to second period every day.

I was surprised, however, when their groaning about Freak continued consistently; the book was bought already, there was material ready (sheets of questions, project ideas, etc), and most importantly, one doesn’t ditch a novel usually; one usually just tries hard to barrel through and make the unit a positive one. But I was faced with a wall of kids who were all calling me on this – pointing out to me that reading a book they wanted would be more fun, get them more involved, be less rankist.

In the middle of one such conversation – very civil, mind you, and serious – a student pulled out a book from his desk and asked why we couldn’t read it instead. He’d lent it to me to read the previous week, and I had: it is called I Love You, Beth Cooper, and is a  comedy, a novel along the lines of films like American Pie or SuperBad: the story of prom night, concerned with social hierarchies and sex and friendship, and pretty damn dirty for a school book. Swear words are not avoided, sex is not dodged or implied, even the violence is huge and cartoonish. Which is to say, the book resembles the art the kids are consuming on the  weekends.  The rest of the class appauded the idea, and chose collectively to petition for Beth Cooper, eloquently.

Well, I’m up for a challenge, and I think school should be relative, and I work in a school that gives me a lot of leeway, and I have good relationships with the parents of these kids. So I wrote parents and asked them to register objections asap, and otherwise to purchase this book in the interest of empowering the kids and getting them engaged in literature as an art and not a chore. They went for it, and last week we started reading a book out loud in class that  makes me both nervous with the potential for controversy, and excited for a powerful teaching experiment.

I have already had to read the word Fuck out loud to a group of eighth graders. THAT takes some prep, and sounds like this:

Denis turned the corner to see his arch nemesis winding up a punch. Holy – …Now, listen guys. We’ve agreed to read a book that has swearing in it, but you’re going to have to also agree to be mature about it. The words might be funny – they’re meant to be funny – but funny means you can laugh. It doesn’t give you permission to scream and fall out of your seats. If they language is that distracting, we’ll have to skip those words. OR go back to Freak the Mighty. I’m counting on you to be mature about this stuff. Okay? Alright. … turned the corner to see his arch nemesis winding up a punch. Holy Fuck! he exclaimed…

Whoooo! It’s a tightrope to walk, for real. I really do fear the moment somebody comes in to complain. But the kids really dig the book, and they really are rising to the occasion. We have lots of small conversations about the contextual use of language – where’s it okay to swear, where’s it not? Where is it alright to engage in funny conversations about sex? Not on a crowded bus; not around little kids or old people; by the basketball net’s fine. Why do people swear? Why are certain words taboo? What are the rules, and why?

I know very well that many people will consider this double-plus ungood. For god’s sake, there was a program on Goldhawk Live the other night about banning a Margaret ATWOOD book in schools. The Golden Compass got people crazy.

But really, I think somebody’s got to push this boundary. Somebody’s got to bridge the gap between the popular culture that IS – where eighth graders know what fecophilia is (thank you, South Park), where eighth graders have seen a dude make love to a pie (thanks, American Pie), where they come to sex ed classes with questions about what “felching” is (thank you, internet) – and the popular culture teachers are willing to discuss in school.

Adults, in my humble opinion, have a duty to help kids navigate their world. We have a duty to listen to find out what that world contains, how it appears to them. I’m supposing that maybe, in the best case scenario, education might be able to be done in a 360 degree fashion rather than the uni-directional style that keeps classrooms 25 years behind the times.

I’ll update you on how this is going. I doubt it’ll be smooth, but it’s already more interesting than most units.