CHANDLER: Searching for greatness on the moors

I’m making my debut — my very first day of teaching in my hometown, situated on the moors of West Texas. (See Bronte, Emily.)

I had been given a textbook called Adventures in Appreciation published by Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich. Clutching that book as a baby clutches the blanket with the satin lining, I walk into my classroom and fall in love — with the book.

(I’ll bet you thought I was going to say the local version of Heathcliff wearing cowboy boots was there waiting for me, but I fooled you, didn’t I?)

What a book. It was so full of wonderful reading that no one, not even Super Teacher, could cover it in a year, especially if one had to work in grammar, a couple of novels and composition and also check attendance and make lesson plans and herd sophomores through the Mastery Management System, hopefully long forgotten.

Not familiar with textbooks in use today, I reassure myself that we shared some fine reading in that series just by thumbing through the worn copy I kept when new books were adopted.
“Teaching” literature is not a good job description for English teachers — when we read great works with students, we are only experiencing greatness together.

Greatness as in Michel de Montaigne, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson and Wm. Shakespeare. I’ll be out of space here long before I’m out of names.

It wasn’t easy but maybe a bit rubbed off, even with the most resistant.

Just for the heck of it, let’s take a little test and see if you recall a fragment of English II literature. All these stories were in that book. Ready? (Cliff’s Notes not allowed.)

Match the following writers to the first sentence of their short stories and/or essays: Jack London, Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekhov, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain.

• 1. On Saturday afternoon, Billy Buck, the ranch hand, raked together the last of the old year’s haystack and pitched small forkfuls over the wire fence to a few mildly interested cattle.
• 2. Sergei Kapitonich Ahineev, the writing master, was marrying his daughter to the teacher of history and geography.
• 3. Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth bank where a dim and little traveled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.
• 4. When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
• 5. The “Red Death” had long devastated the country.

If you matched them up in this order, Steinbeck, Checkhov, London, Twain and Poe, you just passed English II. Look back at the sentences now. Aren’t they perfect examples of what a writer can create with the simplest of words? Great oaks from little acorns grow.

No? Maybe this isn’t the book for you after all, but if we went back to sophomore year together, we’d have a good time sharing these adventures.

I’m speaking for myself — I can only hope, perhaps naively, that my former students share my sentiments.