Day 3 - Uh, What's this book about?

Today I was the angriest I have been this entire "teaching" year.  While it was not an entirely new experience, I reached a level of rage I haven’t encountered in some time.  Those of you who are teachers, or who have ever found yourselves reasoning (or not reasoning) with a sixteen year old, will likely sympathize with today’s story.

So today, in four of my six classes, I began introducing the novel A Tale of Two Cities.  Dickens is a lot to handle for most functioning human beings, and beginning one of his novels can be a daunting task when you are dealing with young people whose class title is literally derived from the word sophomoric.  This is my third year teaching the unit, and I finally feel like I am doing it justice.  I take two days to introduce the novel, focusing on the two-fold background of Victorian England and revolutionary France.  I pace. I gesticulate. I draw analogies to Super Bowl advertising and the product sales of the latest blue-ray technology.  I work my tail off to explain both the historical context of the novel’s publication as well as its setting.  The words, “Listen, Dickens was a rock star” may or may not leave my mouth. 

The first three times I taught this lesson today – it went swimmingly.  Students raised hands, made connections and laughed at my corny jokes.  I told them to think of A Tale of Two Cities in the way they would a girl or boy they weren’t sure they wanted to date.  Just give it a chance, I told them - you might just fall in love.  This novel might rock your world.  (Chuckles abounded! I’m so funny!)  Cue – my seventh period class.  The period started with the usual, infinitely irritating string of tardies which I dutifully marked and reprimanded.  Already on edge, I took a deep breath and started the lesson I now had down pat.  Fourth time’s a charm – it had all gone so well so far, and this period appeared to start off in the same vein.  With minimal shuffling of papers and grumbling about notes, my students settled in.  I made brief comments about the setting of the novel, and moved seamlessly into a discussion of Victorian publishing.  About five minutes in, I asked a question.  "How would the family oriented nature of Dickens’ audience affect the content of his novels?”  A hand was raised.  I called on him.  His response?  “Uhhhhh.  So what’s this book about?”

The effect of this response on my central nervous system was immediate and staggering.  If this were the Stone Age, I a caveman, and this student a saber tooth tiger – he wouldn’t stand a chance.  My face flooded with color, my heart rate reached dangerously high levels, and I’m pretty sure my hands went numb.  I was mute for 30 seconds, as I tried to formulate a coherent response.  A thousand thoughts ran through my head as I tried to assess my own feelings as well as the severity of his transgression – all of this under the gaze of 28 other students, each of them acutely aware that their teacher was now furious.

Every fiber of my being wanted to ask him to leave the class.  However, in the seconds I took to collect myself, I managed to come to the conclusion that this was not the best option.  I asked another student to explain why that was not an appropriate question or an appropriate time to answer it.  As calmly as possible, I told him that my lesson plans for both today and tomorrow were engineered to answer the very question he had just asked.  “I wasn’t listening” was his response.

I’m not sure I’m at a point yet that I’ve found the lesson in this experience, but I do know that it lies somewhere in listening and in perception.  How often do we fail to listen to another person, and in our responses incite a level of rage or hurt that we can’t even comprehend?  When I asked this student to stay after class, I actually said to him – “Do you understand how angry your question made me?”   He could see it on my face, but from his perspective, he didn’t do anything that wrong.  This experience taught me to be that much more mindful both of how well I listen as well as how I respond.