Chasing Hellhounds: A Teacher Learns from His Students Horror Book Review

very well written.  Favorite passages include the following.


It is the unchanging school ballet - order and authority aligned against limit testing and restlessness.  18


(on his in-class “library”)  Every year, a certain percentage of the collection walks out from under my porous record-keeping system, but I console myself with visions of these books on bedside tables or sharing valuable shelf space with Al Green and Boys II Men.  20


For three years, I watched some wonderful word magicians ignite children’s interest in language, instill in them the realization that words can be pleasurable, not the leaded mallets with which they had been bludgeoned into muteness in the previous classrooms.  42


There was a second group of parents and kids who desperately needed the school and were determined to make it work.  These were the misfits, kids unsuited for what passed for the normal teenage world.  For them, the goal was not so much achievement as sheer survival, negotiating the treacherous straits of early adolescence en route to a less judgmental, more tolerant adulthood.  67


The work of teachers arouses as little curiosity from the general public as that of garbagemen and mechanics.  Perhaps the fact that all of us have spent at least twelve years in the thrall of one teacher or another is sufficient to convince us that we already know all we ever care to know about teaching.  81


(the classic school desks)  Is there an official name for those cursed objects with the fixed arm on which to rest your test paper or your binder?  Strapped into this contraption, every man is alone, pitting his triumphs against those of his adversaries, never to reach out and join forces with them.  83


Where does the teacher’s desk go, and what does that tell us about the guy who operates in this space?  Does he hold court from behind or does he just use it as a place to unload his papers?  83


the whole thing on selecting books for the class year, pages 84-92


As my lists of possibilities proliferates, I get excited over the prospect of introducing some of the books I love to an audience innocent of them.  84


I’m partial to books that open out onto other vistas - literary, political, psychological.  85


In general, I don’t believe in textbooks for English students at any level.  There are real books students can and should be reading regardless of age or ability.  Textbooks will never produce literate adult readers.  85


...when it’s clear that even at the early grade levels, the way to promote reading is by exposing kids to the plethora of good books capable of exciting them about reading.  86


Students need to inhale great quantities of literature in their school years in order to get a reasonable sampling of the universe of inspired and inspiring writing they can choose from as independent adult readers.  86


Providing a good education means attuning students to the fact that there are a richness and diversity of cultures, experiences, and styles that await… 88


... white students need to know of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison as much as black students should experience Dickens and Edith Wharton… we have an obligation to stretch and extend students beyond the level on which they come to us.  89


(on a downside of “young adult fiction”)  Once students are fed on the bouncing first-person colloquial… whose voices mesh seamlessly with those of their readers, they have little tolerance for an unfamiliar voice, an embellished vocabulary, an alien style.  Students are all too often irritated by language different in any way from what washes around them every day.  89


Although fantasy literature at its best can be imaginative and entertaining, it is short of characterization and detail and long on action.  89


The net effect of the proliferation of juvenile and young adult fiction is to reduce students’ tolerance for reading cloaked in unfamiliar styles, spun out in denser detail, or following unfamiliar characters.  Children are the world’s true conservatives.  The want exactly what they’ve already had.  Dickens and Shakespeare are weird.  the Sound and the Fury and Death of a Salesman, although they’re more contemporary, are also weird because of their nonlinear structure.  ...but students are generally programmed to expect lockstep chronological writing.  90


Good teaching is an odd mix of artistry, vulnerability, and technical prowess.  We reach down into our own interests and experience to sketch our plans… 95


(on helping one student edit her work)  ...I tried to explain that all this melodrama wasn’t necessary to make a good story.  Smaller, more subtle things could happen.  Characters could change in more interesting ways… 97


I was awestruck.  Kristen had made a literary discovery on her own that was beyond the reach of a lot of adult writers:  the significance of voice and point of view in fiction and the ways in which the final product is shaped by the choice of who tells the story.  98-9


(on standardized achievement tests) ... but one with potentially disastrous implications for education.  First it defines the goals of teaching and education in an unacceptable narrow way (the content of the test is what should be taught).  100


The important thing is that the kids got to see me in a role and context different from the one in which they encounter me every day.  I think it’s enormously important for everyone to be able to see the people in their lives acting in many different roles.  One of the prime virtues of small-town life ...106


Let’s not forget that it’s a two-way street, too.  ... so often we see our kids only in their role as student and forget what a small part of their lives that is and how many other dimensions to their behavior we’re not seeing.  107


Fortunately, teaching is more similar to baseball than it is to the Olympics.  When you have a bad day in baseball, you’re right back in the ballpark the next day with a chance to make adjustments.  An Olympic flop may be forever.  121


Why do we read except to live symbolically all the lives we will never live, to feel compassion for characters who, although they are not us, share with us a common humanity?  The empathy reflected in these student journals and in the class discussions that sprang from them confirms the need to put aside our timidity and risk introducing unheard voices to our classes.  134


(upon being challenged by a parent that all the books were dark and gloomy)  After playing back the reading lists… With very few exceptions, the books both young adult and adult, that appeared on my reading lists have been a dark lot - tales of mental illness, suicide, racial hatred, religious prejudice, sexual abuse, divorce, and death.  But in spite of the depressing subject matter, the books are often uplifting testimonials to the power of the human spirit to survive adversity and even be ennobled by it.  An encounter with social and religious prejudices leaves a character not crushed but strong, and clearer about who he or she is; a family wrestling with the suicide of a child is drawn closer by the bond of their common tragedy; a sexually abused child blossoms into a renowned writer.  141


We have to keep in mind Tolstoy’s famous dictum that happy families are all alike; the stuff of serious literature has always been tragic…  Most vital fiction draws on the underside of human relationships and human emotions.  The lives of the students who inhabit our classrooms are suffused with the same dark material that is the stuff of literature.  141  


(when a call home to a student’s grandmother had a deeper effect than expected)  During a year of journal writing and truncated conversations, the story of Arthur’s amazement that I had cared enough to call home, that I was upset by his departure, emerged.  This simple gesture was enough to draw him back to school.  205


(in discussion with a student who liked popular novels, such as those by Grisham)  It’s taken some effort of both our parts for Monica to arrive at this formulation of the difference between escape reading and literature…. you’ll see how hard it is to communicate what sets enduring art apart from airport books.  216