Three bullets says it all

I love to read out loud to my students. One of my favorite books is Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, by Bruce Coville. It’s a gripping tale of love and loss, friendship, family, pets, bullying. It pretty much covers all the big issues middle school kids face, and does so with plenty of humor and a ton of heart. 

I’ve gone through at least a half dozen copies of the book, in the dozen years or so that I’ve been reading it. Mainly because once I lend it out to one of the kids to read on his or her own, I usually don’t ever see it again. 

I just finished reading the story to my current class. They burst out in guffaws when I read the first chapter title, Love Letter of Doom, partly because of the phrase, but also because I’ve gotten really good at reading the book pretty dramatically. I know it almost by heart. As I read, I do my best to channel some of my favorite comedic actors, like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler,  William Shatner.

  

See, that’s yet another thing the public doesn’t get about teachers. We’re actors. Some days, like on state testing days for example, we get to follow a planned script. But that’s rare. Most times, we’re improvising, doing our soft shoe singing/dancing/ juggling, part of our brain focused on the words we need to say,  the other part gauging the audience reaction, and re-adjusting according to kid body language, eye messages, comments, and so on.  One minute I’m Cookie Monster, reminding kids that C is for characterization. The next I’m Beyonce telling kids to look at the board, to the left to the left. 

According to Google, David Scott set the world record for stand-up last year in Dubuque, Iowa, performing for forty hours and some change. Please. That’s minor league stuff.  Teaching IS stand-up. It is as mentally and physically exhausting as performing on Broadway, but without the glitzy after parties, the multi-million dollar contracts, the respect.

When I finished reading the Coville book, I went back and reread my favorite section, like I always do. We talk a lot in class about big ideas/ themes. This one particular paragraph is the heart of the book. The speaker, Hyacinth Priest, is trying to soothe Jeremy, who doesn’t want to let his pet dragon, Tiamat, leave his world for her new home, her ultimate destiny, the world of the dragons.   

Here’s the section:

Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart. 

It makes me cry every time I read it.

We talked a bit about this quote and why it’s important. As in other years, the ensuing conversation left me shaken, sad, worn out, hating my job, loving it at the same time. Because I need to respect boundaries, I can’t say what my students said. But because I’ve had a dozen or more conversations about this particular paragraph over the last decade or so, I feel comfortable relating previous responses. They don’t leave your head.

Sometimes you get students who’ll talk about deaths of a loved one, like a grandparent who died way back when the student was teeny. Sometimes kids will talk about longing to see family members who live thousands of miles away. I’ve taught many kids over the years from families that immigrate to the United States one at a time; for example dad first, then mom, then oldest sibling, next oldest, etc. It can take five, six, seven years for those families to re-assemble here in Massachusetts. You see the sadness in their eyes as the kids talk about living with aunts, uncles, family friends either here or in Ghana, Colombia, wherever, while they spend their childhood waiting for their family to be whole again. 

 You make mental notes of the kids who are nodding their heads in understanding, the kids who add in their own stories. You tattoo on your brain the names of the kids who hide their eyes, look away, pretend they don’t care.  

Sometimes a kid will catch you off-guard with this: “The man next door killed a cat just because he didn’t like it. He put it in a bag. I saw him.”

Or will make you dizzy with this: “Miss, why do people have to kill pets? It’s so mean, isn’t it?”  Then in a rush of words the student, I’ll call him Jake, told all of us how his dad had given him a pitbull puppy that he’d named Silverman (not the real name). At six weeks old Silverman’s fur was solid black and so soft. Jake talked about how he loved patting his dog, how he still remembers the feel of that fur. 

The puppy got in the habit of cuddling up next to him in front of the television. They slept together every night. The puppy grew strong and big. In class, Jake stood up to demonstrate how massive that was. He sucked in his stomach and pushed out his chest to show just how powerful Silverman had become. 

Then one day, Silverman bit a kid who was tussling with Jake in the fenced in yard. Jake is convinced the dog was just doing what he’d been trained to do – protect his owner. 

“Miss, my dad had to use three bullets to kill the dog. He was such a strong dog. Three bullets to the chest. One bullet wouldn’t do it. Why did my dad do that? Why did he kill my dog?”

You hear these stories, and you get overwhelmed, because it’s just so sad. You never endured, until adulthood, the grittiness some of these kids live with every day.

But on the flip side, you’re glad the kids are talking about this tough stuff, because you know you got to them. They’re showing empathy and compassion. They get the story. They showing you they're starting to understand how to relate to good literature. Your teacher instincts tell you that they are on their way to falling head over heels in love with reading, which means that maybe Jake and kids like him will stay in school, go to college, grab those lives they want to live.  

And then there's the other reality. You think about the MCAS, the MAPS testing, the WIDA, Fountas and Pinnell, PARCC, and all the other time-sucking assessments that your city and state insist are so important, and how none of those reflect much at all about authentic learning and what it means to teach the whole child. 

Good books teach us how to live and help us figure out who we want to be.