The second quarter of the school year just ended, and my 9th graders and I spent it talking about definition.
That may sound boring, but we start the quarter with two books excerpts. In the first excerpt, from Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, Pinker uses a debate about whether the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center counted as one event or two to put forward the idea that how we define things in our heads shapes how we view reality. In the second, from The End of Education, the late author and cultural commentator Neil Postman discusses a law that forbids joking with TSA agents at the airport. He does so in order to make the claim that whoever makes the definitions in a society has all the power.
From there we look at definition from a variety of ways. We define a table as its essence (the number of legs and the shape do not matter; only form and function). We define what a hero is. We define the human mind metaphorically. We define what school is, metaphorically. About a third to half of students say school is a prison. This is, of course, sad. We also discuss that if the human mind is like the human body and must be fed well and exercised regularly, then school should be like a health club.
Shortly before they choose a word of their own and write a definition essay, we discuss our definition of success. I give them descriptions of 8 fictional high school students and ask them to rank them from most successful to least. We then discuss their choices. Some students rate the drug dealer as most successful because he makes a lot of money. Others rate the techno-savvy student who plans to drop out of high school because he has already started a business as most successful. Most vote for a character named George, a straight-A student on the track team who literally runs himself ragged, has no close friendships, and is perpetually exhausted. Very few students vote for Fred, the B-student who plays in a garage band, likes to read, gets along with his divorced parents, holds down a job, and is just all-around enjoying himself. He’s my number-one choice – he has balance. The system has persuaded most students that grades are everything, apparently.
We also read Robert Fulghum’s essay about a man named John Pierpont, who he says failed at everything, but left behind a very famous holiday song.
We ended the quarter this week by doing a film study of the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life. Most students had never seen it, and were a little dubious at first.
But by Friday, the last day before break, we are in George’s Twilight Zone alternate reality and then his return to a life he thought he wanted to throw away. In one class a girl cried – but I told the class that I cry a bit every single time, even after watching the ending five times in a single day. I’m a sap.
I asked students to annotate the movies either as we watched it or at the end of each class, and after the movie was over, we discussed it. A student made a connection I hadn’t: that when George “saves” Clarence the guardian angel from drowning, it echoes his saving his own brother near the very beginning of the movie. We discussed George as a hero who never gets to answer his archetypal “Call To Adventure” despite repeated attempts to do. We discussed why George was a success, and not, as he thought, a failure.
I pointed out that in the movie Elf, when Buddy the Elf is at his lowest and feels he has ruined everybody’s lives, he to goes and stands on a bridge over a river – and obvious call back and tribute to It’s A Wonderful Life. We then discussed that when these characters are at their lowest, it’s trying to help someone else in trouble that snaps them out of their despair. George saves Clarence. Buddy goes to help Santa after his sled crashes. And indeed, one of the best ways to combat feeling down is to focus on helping someone else.
I asked them in their final notes for the movie, after it ended, to write about what it has to say about perspective taking, hypothetical scenarios (a seriously underrated writing tool for both fiction and non-fiction), and fiction itself.
They got it. The only thing that was different about the George who wanted to kill himself and the George who was thrilled to find his lip bleeding and Zuzu’s petals in his pocket is his perspective. Nothing about his situation has changed. But perspective has given him a whole new take on his predicament. “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m going to jail!”
And so I ended the quarter talking about how fiction helps us take different perspectives, helps us see the world differently, helps us define things like success differently – helps us see reality differently. And so the quarter came full circle – but also looked ahead to To Kill a Mockingbird next quarter: perspective-taking means standing in someone else’s shoes.
Fiction is not fluff, I told them. It is a magical form of story that can help us redefine how we see reality.
Will any of this raise my students’ test scores? I don’t care. If even a few of them take away some ideas about the power of… well, ideas, or take away the idea that helping someone else is the best thing to do when you are down, or take away that idea that fiction can help take different perspectives, and that perspective-taking can sometimes be a matter of life and death… If any of them take away any of those ideas, I consider it… a success.
Which I don’t define by my test scores, but by enriching my students’ lives and helping them to be better, happier humans.