We're All Just Faking It in Grad School

Each year at my school, certain stellar students are initiated into the Williams Scholars Program, an honor that comes with a sum of money to be earmarked for some off-campus academic pursuit. At the annual assembly celebrating new Williams Scholars, it is customary for a faculty member to speak about his or her own academic pursuits. That year, I was that faculty member. Here's my speech, which I delivered two weeks ago before a full house of students, faculty, and parents.

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Every year, Williams Scholars use their scholarships to pursue their academic passions. But the pursuit of academic passions doesn't have to stop just because you've grown up. Today I want to tell you about my own experience, not as a teacher but as a student.
 
Because I'm an English teacher, everyone assumes I've always been good at English. But that's not entirely true. It's true that I've always enjoyed reading, and that I've always had a passion for stories dating back to the ones my parents read me when I was little. And I like to think I've always been a decent writer too. But I also took plenty of lumps in English over the years. When I was in high school, I did so poorly in English 10 Honors that I was demoted to a regular-level class for my junior year, which at the time was the biggest slap in the face I could imagine. English was supposed to be my best subject. And if I wasn't good at that, well then what was I good at?
 
(I blamed my teacher at the time, by the way, but it’s clear to me now that it was my own fault. My work just wasn’t up to an honors standard.)
 
In my last two years of high school I recovered somewhat, and when I got to college, I majored in English, along with a third of my classmates. Kenyon College, which has always been known for its writing program, attracted some of the best young writers in the country. It was humbling to be in class with peers who were clearly more accomplished than I was.
 
I made it through college with mostly B’s, but my love of literature was well intact, and a couple years after I graduated, I first tried my hand at teaching.
 
Once I became an English teacher, I developed a serious case of imposter syndrome. That’s the feeling that you don’t really deserve to be in the position you’re in. I didn't feel like an avowed expert in my field; I still felt like the high school sophomore who got a C+ in English, or the college student who struggled to finish every assigned reading, and earned a steady string of average grades. But I kept on teaching anyway, while doing my own reading and writing on the side.
 
Five years into my teaching career, I heard about a graduate program geared towards English teachers, called the Bread Loaf School of English, a division of Middlebury College in Vermont. Students took intensive courses for four summers, and after that, earned their Master's Degree in English Literature. (Among the program's famous alumni are Upper School English teacher Liz Hopkins, who had graduated before I got there, and former Middle School Head Brandon Mollet who was a "senior" when I was a "freshman." We met once at a party. We would meet again two years later in 2012 when I started working at Boys' Latin.)
 
Anyway, I applied to Bread Loaf and was accepted, and in the summer of 2011, I drove myself deep into the Green Mountains of Vermont to read and study with fellow nerds from all over the country. I was excited. But once I got there, I felt that same old feeling from undergrad and from high school: everyone was brilliant except for me.
 
My first graduate class – on Romantic Poetry – intimidated me fiercely. It seemed like everyone in class already knew everything about Byron, and Keats, and Shelley. One of my classmates had all of William Blake’s poems committed to memory, or so it seemed to me. Surely, I couldn’t compete.
 
Imagine for a second that you are just starting to get into lifting weights. Now picture entering a gym in which everyone is effortlessly benching three hundred pounds. The experience I’m describing is the book worm equivalent.
 
I wasn’t sure I belonged, but what could I do? I wasn’t about to turn around and head back home. Bread Loaf already had my tuition money. And besides, the program had accepted me, hadn’t they? Someone must have seen my potential.

So I started grinding. I pushed myself to speak up in class, even when I didn’t want to. I gave myself pep talks, and forced myself to believe that my insights about poetry were just as good as anyone else’s.
I got a B on my first paper, on William Wordsworth’s “The Prologue,” and the old doubts started to creep in. A B was ok, but how did that compare to what my classmates got? Did teachers even give grades lower than a B in grad school, where everyone but me seemed to be a super genius?
If one of my students had come to me in my situation, I would have advised him to meet with his teacher, so that’s exactly what I did. In anticipation of my final paper for the class, I had a conference with my professor, a brilliant scholar from a prestigious university in London, and she gave me a few tips as well as a little encouragement.

I kept reading, I kept writing. During the week leading up to my final paper, I practically lived in the Middlebury College Graduate Lounge, where for every page written I rewarded myself with a slice of mediocre pizza. I finally submitted my work - a fifteen-page paper about three poems, written by three obscure Romantic poets. I ordered one last celebratory slice of pizza and I waited.

Now comes the part of the story where I have to brag a little bit. Apologies in advance. In high school, it can be common to share your grade with a friend. In grad school, they tend to be top secret. But then, I'm not in grad school any more.

I got an A+ on the paper. An A+! In all of college, high school, maybe even middle school, I don't recall getting a straight A on a paper. I once got an A+ on a story I wrote when I was in fourth grade about a snorkeling trip with my family. That's how long it had been. 
 
As it turned out, it was the first of a bunch of A's I earned over four summers at Bread Loaf, though admittedly the only A+. The grades were nice of course, and so was the small scholarship I received from the school for my good grades. But the best result of my experience was the confidence it helped me to build. Everyone needs validation, whether they're in lower school or in graduate school. The validation I received at Bread Loaf helped me to feel I was a worthy student, and a worthy teacher.
That fall, I walked back into my classroom with my head held high. Maybe I was pretty good at this English stuff after all.

Bread Loaf School of English: a beautiful campus in the Green Mountains of Vermont, perfect for lounging in an Adirondack chair with a cup of coffee and a book of poetry.

It intimidated the hell out of me.

Overdressed

 For the rest of your life, would you rather be chronically overdressed or underdressed?

For the first six years of my teaching career, I taught at Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. It was there I came across a boy named Mack Hollins. I taught his older brother Brian in my AP Lit class, but I can't say I knew Mack well. Mostly, I noticed him for two reasons: 1) he looked a lot like his brother, and 2) he wore a suit and tie to school every day and carried his papers in a briefcase. The attire was especially unusual for a public school, where a t-shirt and jeans were generally par for the course. Maybe he started his tradition ironically, but to see that kind of a joke through for all of high school takes some serious commitment. If I had to guess, he wore a suit because it helped him to take school seriously. It helped him to differentiate himself from the other 2500 odd kids at his school. And I imagine he was confident enough not to let anyone's smartass comments bother him.

It helped that he was good at football. A few years later, when he was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, scouting reports noted his sartorial habits as kind of a charming quirk, and evidence of good character. Apparently, he's also handy with a Rubik's Cube, though I don't remember seeing him with one at Wootton.

It's impossible to imagine Mack having had the same success had he been perpetually underdressed, rather than overdressed. Whether fairly or not, he would doubtless have been seen as a slacker, someone with a questionable work ethic and maybe a problem with authority. It's probably not impossible to succeed while being chronically underdressed, but it has to be a lot more difficult.

If you show up to every event in a three-piece suit, you risk being subject to mockery and confused reactions, but people may assume you are an overachiever. If you show up dressed like a bum, people will assume you are one. I'd rather be overdressed. It seemed to work well for Mack.

Summer of Sam

2/4 Stars

What works:

- Somewhere in this mess, there's a compelling story about friendship, and betrayal, and trying to escape the confines of a provincial community, all against a backdrop of angst and paranoia in 1977 New York. - Richie (Adrien Brody) is a memorable character: an Italian kid from the Bronx, fascinated with the British punk scene.

- Son of Sam is more important to the atmosphere than the plot, which is a good thing. The film keeps returning to him without allowing him to overtake the rest of the story.

What doesn't:

- There's a lot of overacting here, especially from John Leguizamo. The blow-ups between his and Mira Sorvino's characters are borderline unwatchable.

- With the exception of Richie, every Italian male character is a walking stereotype. There's a lot of: "Hey paisan!" "Whatsamatta?" "Ay Marone" etc. Two of the characters are - I kid you not - Mario and Luigi.

- The female characters, Dionna (Mira Sorvino) and Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), feel underdeveloped.

- Gratuitous sex scenes gets in the way of the story. There was probably some moral outrage when this movie came out in 1999. To be clear, I'm not outraged - I just think it hurts the film.

- It's over-directed. Too much music, too many sex scenes, too little story.

Also, too little focus on Richie and too much focus on Vinny, whose story is a lot less interesting.

When It Comes to Teaching, I'm Down for Whatever

When you’re in college, it’s amazing what can pass for a sleeping surface in the absence of an actual bed. Seriously, I used to have the tolerance to sleep just about anywhere: futons, couches, easy chairs, the trunk of my car, the ground. I remember visiting a friend in DC during my junior year of college, and being thrilled that he was allowing me to sleep on the common room floor of his one-bedroom apartment. At a certain point, I lost the inclination to sleep anywhere other than in my bed. It’s not just a matter of preference; it’s that my back no longer physically allows me to do it. Last week I dozed off on the living room couch for a half hour, a couch that would have made a fine sleeping option twenty years ago, and spent the next twenty-four hours hobbling around like a nonagenarian.

I can’t say I bemoan having higher standards than I used to, but then again, there are situations in which it would be helpful to be able to sleep anywhere, any time, on anything. For a veteran teacher, the act of classroom instruction is a bit like sleeping. Hear me out. I don’t mean that it requires minimal effort or that we’re just going through the motions. (Although then again, I’ve come across a handful of teachers for whom the analogy fits a little too well.) What I mean is that we like everything to be just so. Just as in bed we require a stack of three pillows, the thermostat set to 66 degrees, and the Sleep Number set between 35 and 40, in the classroom we have can’t fathom being without our Smartboards, our laptops, a strong internet signal, and our own meticulous arrangement of desks.

Of course, to state the obvious, teaching is, unlike sleeping, a communal activity. Students are counting on me to guide them, or at minimum, to determine how they will spend the next hour of their lives. The stakes are higher, and so are the chances that things will go off script.

Teachers need to be able to roll with the punches. Every teacher learns this lesson on the first day the power goes out in the building, or there’s an unscheduled fire drill. Class is now twenty-five minutes long instead of fifty. What are you gonna do, hotshot? It’s just that we didn’t know until this year just how many punches there could be.

Oh you like teaching? Try teaching online. Now try teaching half online and half in person. Now try teaching everyone in person (except for one kid, just to keep things interesting). You’ve spent fourteen years making copies? Now try teaching without paper.

I’m not sure what’s next – Teaching by pantomime? The return of the overhead projector? The replacement of facemasks with spandex body suits? – but whatever it is, this past year of teaching has left me feeling like there is no adaptive challenge I can’t face. Like the college kid looking for a place to crash, I’m flexible. I can roll with it. Just tell me where to do it, and I’ll do it.

Set aside the lyric about making love on the floor and this song is basically about teaching in a pandemic.

Why Do People Like Caddyshack?

 Every movie lover has at least one or two glaring omissions from the catalogue of films they've seen. There are many classic films I've never seen. (All About Eve and 2001: A Space Odyssey come to mind.) But the "classic" that people were almost most surprised to learn I had never seen has always been Caddyshack. If ever the word classic deserved to be in quotation marks, it's in description of this movie. No one thinks this is a great movie and yet, it unmistakably holds a place in the cultural zeitgeist. It seems like everyone in the world can quote Bill Murray's Dalai Lama's speech or at least shout, "It's in the hole!" 

I noticed it was on HBO the other night so, on a whim, I watched it. I was disappointed on just about every level. To be fair, I didn't have high expectations going in. There was a reason, after all, I had avoided it for this long. I assumed - correctly, as it turned out - that I had already seen all of the funny bits in some forum (Reruns? Youtube top ten lists?). It's like one of those movies where the trailer gives away all of the funniest parts and the rest is just filler.

So many scenes just aren't funny. It's hard to imagine they ever were. Big set pieces like the yacht scene and the explosion at the end just come off as loud and dumb. (Likewise, I've always found the parade at the ending to be the least funny sequence in Animal House. Bigger does not necessarily equal funnier: quite often it's the opposite.) Other scenes, like the fight between Noonan and the other kid, or pretty much any scene with the Irish girl, are essentially pointless. 

Not counting the stuff I had already seen, there were exactly two parts of this movie that caused me to crack a smile. One was the bit about the Bishop who gets struck by lightning while golfing the best game of his life, with Bill Murray's character as his caddy. The background music from The Ten Commandments is the icing on the cake. It's a funny bit. The second is Rodney Dangerfield roasting everyone at the club in the funniest ways possible. "This is the worst looking hat I ever saw... Oh, it looks good on you, though." It's pure wish fulfillment: some day, I'd love to storm through one of my freshman classes spouting out one-liners left and right. I was always under the impression that Caddyshack was a Bill Murray movie, or maybe a Chevy Chase movie. But no, it's without a doubt a Rodney Dangerfield movie. That's essentially what Roger Ebert wrote in his original review, and he was right on.

I can imagine that if you find Chevy Chase funny, you're undoubtedly more likely to enjoy the movie. What I can't imagine is finding Chevy Chase funny. Sorry, not sorry. I have friends who love his movies - Fletch in particular - I just don't get it. Here he is at his most arrogant and smug. The movie clearly thinks he's the coolest and assumes we agree. But all I can think of is the crotchety jerk who got booted from the cast of Community for being generally terrible to everyone.

Speaking of casting, Caddyshack is an oddity in that it has a protagonist so forgettable that almost no one can remember his name or the name of the actor who played him. Incidentally, his name, which I just looked up on IMDB, is Danny Noonan, and he's played by Michael O'Keefe. There's nothing really wrong with O'Keefe's performance. The problem is that 1) he's a straight man surrounded by flamboyant comedy stars, and 2) the movie has so little in the way of plot that we really don't care much about what happens to him. The main plot, such as it is, concerns his attempts to win a scholarship for caddies by earning favor with a pompous judge.

The subplot about Bill Murray and the gophers is infinitely more memorable, but just so very dumb. There's also a subplot about the judge's niece. And another one about Rodney Dangerfield's character, a real estate developer, buying the club and the property it sits on. Whatever. Even the movie doesn't care what happens with these half-assed story strands: the point is very obviously the jokes.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a movie emphasizing jokes over plot. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Airplane, and Naked Gun all do it, and they're all hilarious. But if that's your approach, your jokes had better be funny. And so many of Caddyshack's just aren't. Or aren't any more.

But hey, at least I no longer have to deal with people's incredulous reactions when I tell them I've never seen it.

I'll concede that Bill Murphy vs. the Gopher is kind of amusing.

Oscar Round-up

As every movie-related article will tell you, it's a weird year for the Oscars. Release dates were delayed, which has probably contributed to what is probably a weaker crop of films than usual. Weirder still, most of us haven't been to a movie theater in over a year. I think the last film I saw in theaters before the pandemic was 1917, which would have been in January of 2020 (and would have been as good a theater experience as any to tide me over for a while). Usually, I try hard to see as many of the Best Picture nominees as possible. Last year, I saw all but one. (Ford vs. Ferrari, which I rented shortly after the ceremony. It was fine.) This year I missed three, which was a bummer. As much as I prioritize seeing as many of these films as possible, I am not, as a matter of principle, willing to pay $20 on a rental.  The good news is that more nominees than ever are available on streaming, including non-English Language films and documentaries, so I ended up watching plenty.

I missed Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, and The Father. Here are the other five, in the order I enjoyed them. Spoilers for all, of course!

5 - Mank

Here's a movie that relied too much on the audience's appreciation for another movie. I can't imagine really enjoying Mank, or even "getting" it, without having intimate familiarity with Citizen Kane. Heck, I've seen Citizen Kane a bunch of times, outside of a few moments of pride in feeling like I got the Easter Egg (the broken bottle to echo a broken snow globe, etc.), I was left cold. The dialogue was witty but so stylized it was hard for me to empathize with Mank, et al as real people. Clearly, this is a well-made film and between its black and white moodiness and its history of Old Hollywood, I'm not not surprised critics went nuts for it. Didn't do it for me, although bonus points for Bill Nye the Science Guy as Upton Sinclair, a truly inspired and deeply weird piece of casting.

4 - Nomadland

If Nomadland wins Best Picture - and I think it's the favorite - it will quite possibly be the Best Picture I've enjoyed least. Ever. It's not like I don't get it: Frances McDormand is a national treasure, the cinematography was brilliant, the politics are subtle but timely. But it was slow and meandering, and had only the bare bones of a plot. The character wasn't uninteresting. She's dealing so much grief - for a husband, but also for a town, a job, a way of life - and I wanted to see her find happiness, and end up with David Strathairn, even though I had a feeling it wasn't going to happen. But I felt like the movie was more interested in nomad culture itself than in Fern's character, and to me, the interest felt misplaced.

3 - Trial of the Chicago Seven

There's a big divide between #3 (a movie I liked) and #4 (a movie I didn't). This was a lot of fun. A fascinating moment in history, with obvious resonance for our own time. A quick, witty script by Aaron Sorkin, (still) at the top of his game. A whole bunch of excellent character actors having a good time together. A lot of the credit has rightly gone to Sasha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne, as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, respectively, who represent two opposing ideologies even though they're on the same side. (Their argument before the end of the trial is one of the film's best scenes.) And how about Frank Langella in the totally thankless roll of Judge Julius Hoffman?

2 - A Promising Young Woman

This is the kind of superhero movie I can go for: one in which the heroine uses her wits to put every entitled, douche-y guy in his place. Take that, McLovin'! Like many superheroes, Cassandra has a tragic backstory, but the movie's greatest strength is its tone, which is full of energy, dark humor, against a backdrop of righteous anger. It's a great revenge story, and its twist ending feels earned. The problem for me is (SPOILER ALERT) the reveal that Ryan witnessed, and failed to intervene in the rape of Cassie's best friend. It's a gut punch, that left just feeling sad and kind of gross. Would it have killed the film's creators to depict one token example of non-toxic masculinity? Would the movie have really suffered for it? I get that to some, this kind of criticism seems based in my own male fragility. Maybe it is. Still, in the past year I've watched a bunch of films that deal with #MeToo-related issues: this one, The Assistant, and Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, as well as the limited Netflix series Unbelievable. I liked all of them! I'm down with believing women! I think harassment and assault happen all too frequently and need to be stopped! But I mean... I also think a lot of guys are pretty decent. Or at least more than these movies seem to suggest.

1 - Sound of Metal

The synopsis sounds like standard tearjerker stuff: Musician has to cope with loss of hearing. What's amazing is that this film never felt overly melodramatic or manipulative. (And at several moments, it made me a little misty.) I think part of what works is Ruben's character: he's not especially kind of pleasant. He can be prone to outbursts. Basically, he's a human being instead of some sort of tragic angel, and  Riz Ahmed (who is awesome, by the way) makes us relate to his suffering, even when Ruben is being a bit of a jerk. Paul Raci's deaf guru provides a great counterbalance. The final sequence, set in Paris, is strange and poignant. And of course the sound design just makes the movie. Is it Best Picture material? All I know is it's a good one.

A few more nominated movies I saw:

Another Round (Best International Feature)

Diverting comedy-drama about four high school teachers in Denmark who start turning up to work buzzed. (Because what could possibly go wrong?) Every time Mads Mikkelsen is on  screen, I kind of can't look away. It has some sweet, funny, human moments (as well as some insights into Danish culture), but I didn't find it especially weighty.

Collectiv (Best International Feature and Best Documentary)

I wouldn't have believe that this year's best documentary is about the illegal dilution of cleaning supplies in Romanian hospitals, but here we are. Collectiv is like the Romanian answer to Spotlight, a movie in which you spent two hours rooting for intrepid reporters to expose a corrupt system. Those clips of the nightclub fire are totally horrifying.

My Octopus Teacher (Best Documentary)

It's one of the oldest stories: man meets octopus, man films octopus, man waxes poetic about his place in the universe. Seriously, it's a pretty incredible story, and the relationship between man and octopus is probably as close as we can hope to get to the nonfiction version of ET.

Crip Camp (Best Documentary)

It starts out as kind of a nostalgic reminiscence of Camp Jened, a summer camp that, during the 1970s, provided disabled kids with a safe space and way to find their voice. Many of the campers would one day establish themselves as important voices in the Disabled Rights Movement, which culminated with the twenty-five-day occupation of a San Francisco federal building. Crip Camp presents this relatively obscure chapter of recent history in an engaging and personal way. The title, which suggests gangs more than disabled right advocates, is the worst thing about it.

Life (Best Documentary)

An African-American wife raises three sons while her husband/their father serves time in prison. The combination of home movies and original footage is really affecting here. The film's main focus is the strength of the mother, who does seem like a total badass, and the human cost of having a father in prison. I get that the crime (armed robbery of a credit union) wasn't really the point. But... I wanted more about the crime and the ensuing punishment. The film seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion that the sentence (sixty years, I think) was longer than the crime warranted. And I'm prepared to believe that was the case. But why not spend at least a little proving it?

It's more important to actually read MLK than ever before.

I confess I haven’t always “observed” Martin Luther King Day, at least not in the true sense of the word. Sure, I’ve always enjoyed the day off from work, but my observance pretty much ends there. (The date is often the same as my mom’s birthday too, which only makes it more likely to be overshadowed.) Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always been as pro-MLK as the next guy. It’s just that, until recently, I hadn’t thought about him much.

There are two main reasons for my neglecting him. The first one is that I’m white, and white privilege affords me the choice not to think much about MLK or Civil Rights or anything race-related if I don’t want to.

The second is that years of annual school assemblies celebrating King’s life and legacy have essentially left me numb. In thirteen years as a student (pre-college) and fifteen more as a teacher, I’ve attended a lot of them. They’re always earnest and well-meaning, and bland. They always include something about MLK’s having had a dream and a reference to his famous line about judging people by the content of their character, instead of the color of their skin. They always steer clear of any whiff of controversy, which makes sense since their audience is comprised of students no older than eighteen.

I don’t want to criticize the convention of the MLK assembly, which schoolteachers put together in good faith and with the best of intentions. But all too often, their net effect is to reduce King to a cardboard cutout: a saintly figure preaching banalities about loving one’s fellow man.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot more to him. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I learned King was targeted by the FBI. (A documentary on the subject is now streaming on Amazon Prime.) I haven’t seen it yet, but I have read Why We Can’t Wait, his 1964 book, which amounts to a manifesto about Civil Rights, and shows him as a charismatic leader, and a true intellectual, not to mention a clear and forceful writer. I’ve taught “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to my AP Lang students several times. Addressing the eight clergymen in Birmingham who claimed to be sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement despite praising police response to demonstrations, and criticizing King’s tactics as “unwise and untimely,” he politely but firmly defends both his cause and its timing. It’s the centerpiece of Why We Can’t Wait, and it also happens to be a masterclass in rhetorical writing. I’ve also read Malcolm Gladwell’s chapter on King from his book David and Goliath, which paints him, as well as his compatriot Reverend Wyatt Walker, as a shrewd and cunning trickster who outwitted Birmingham’s racist Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor.

There’s a danger in remembering King as a caricature, rather than a flesh-and-blood human being. When we reduce him to a handful of famous soundbites, his words can be manipulated and taken out of context to support causes he would obviously have opposed. In recent years, and especially in 2020, I’ve seen critics of Black Lives Matter practically weaponize King’s words, especially the line we all learned back in school: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

These critics’ perverse logic goes like this: Because King wanted individuals to be judged on character over skin color, we should stop paying so much attention to race. The more conversations we have on race, the more we exacerbate the problem. The best course of action (I guess?) is to leave the problem alone and it will naturally fix itself. (Just watch this guy in the white t-shirt try this argument in a sit-down between advocates of police and BLM. And then watch the woman in gray succinctly shut him down: “Martin Luther King would be down for Black Lives Matter.”)

This line of thinking is of course ridiculous. And the notion that King would have supported this nonsense is even more ridiculous. The central idea of Why We Can’t Wait is that America’s problems with race will not take care of themselves. Proactivity, not passivity, will lead to change.

Still, this intellectually dishonest misinterpretation of MLK persists. King himself has become a talisman for right wingers: as long as he is on their side, they are protected from charges of racism. Even if the King they invoke is really some bizarre funhouse mirror version of King who never existed.

In this moment of extreme political rancor, teaching MLK is potentially more challenging than ever – and also more important. If we are going to celebrate the man, we ought to study him so we know who we’re celebrating, and so we can clear up once and for all what he would and wouldn’t have stood for.

The Hate U Give - If not now, when?

For those who have never read The Hate U Give, it's a 2017 novel by Angie Thomas about a black teenage girl, Starr Carter, who witnesses the death of her friend Khalil at the hands of the police. The central incident bears of course more than a passing resemblance to the real-life cases of Philando Castile, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and many others. In the novel, Starr must deal with the aftermath of her friend's death while simultaneously navigating between her home community, the black working-class neighborhood of Garden Heights, and her predominantly white private school, located a thirty-minute drive away.

Most of my students agree that it's a good book, and a decent movie. All agree that it's one of the most memorable books we read in ninth grade English.

This will be my third year teaching The Hate U Give, and I think it's more important and timely now than ever before. The novel does what all fiction does best: it allows readers to see the world through the eyes of a character whose experience is different from their own. In doing so, it offers a new perspective, while (I hope) helping to foster empathy. For every student, Starr Carter's story will feel at least somewhat familiar. She attends a predominantly white private high school, and her pop culture frame of reference (Beyonce, LeBron James, Fresh Prince of Bel Air) is similar to that of our students. For many black students in particular , this novel is bound to strike close to the bone, especially in its depictions of the code-switching Starr needs to do in order to get by in both the affluent, mostly white world of her school and her all-black, working class neighborhood, Garden Heights. "This is exactly like my life," one of my ninth graders told me last year. At the risk of generalizing, the novel tends to broaden the perspective of my white students, while validating the experience of my black students.

Of course, tension between police and African-American communities lies at the center of the novel. Many of our students don't think much about political or social issues. To some, Black Lives Matter is only an abstract concept, if it's even on their minds at all. This novel gives the idea a human face. I know that since I've read it, I haven't been able to think about Black Lives Matter, or about any of the all-too-frequent police-related tragedies, without thinking of the Starr Carters of the world. 

To be sure, teaching this book has also presented its challenges. Although from my perspective the book does not vilify law enforcement at large - Starr's beloved Uncle Carlos is a policeman - some students have complained that it has an anti-police agenda. Two years ago, a student voiced that he thought it was propaganda. In discussions, I try to take a neutral tone when appropriate, a challenge in and of itself because I believe so strongly in Thomas's message, while pushing back against comments more insensitive or demeaning than political. I also attempt to stress that neither the author nor I are trying to "brainwash" anyone. Like any author, Thomas has an agenda, which readers are free to accept or disregard as they see fit. In teaching her book, my goal is not to indoctrinate, but to broaden my students' view of the world.

In the past, I have also presented - without comment - a conservative takedown of the novel, which appeared in the New York Post. For the record, I think it's total bullshit but I try not to tip my hand, instead allowing students to react to for themselves. It's fun to read their righteously indignant responses: they're allowed to say everything I wish I could.

At the same time, it's important not to attack students who question or challenge some part of this book's message. A couple years ago, a conflict arose in my class when a student rightly took exception to being called a racist by one of his peers after he asked an innocent question that had been misinterpreted. (The three of us talked about the incident outside of class, and it ended up a good teachable moment.) 

It's always risky to expose students to such sensitive subject matter. There might be hurt feelings, and tense moments in the classroom. To me, it’s all worth it. In the current climate, it’s more important than ever to examine our attitudes, which sometimes means reading texts that make us uncomfortable.