#memorablemomentsineducation #29:
I’ve discovered I have a complicated relationship with Huckleberry Finn. Watching the film The Peanut Butter Falcon recently reminded me of the book, the character, and my past as a man and his new buddy with Down Syndrome head south on a raft in search of freedom. The many allusions to the book don’t end there, and my well-trained English teacher antennae perked up as the movie unfolded. But I have to admit I wasn’t always so sophisticated, people!
I first read the book in Mrs. Watson’s sophomore honors English course where I encountered the crazy literary theories English teachers cook up to torture their students (or so my own students have claimed). Mrs. Watson would lean across her student desk, grabbing its edge as she assaulted us with intense passion–and a little spittle–all conjured from the mysteries of Twain and his apparent symbolism. I remember believing she’d lost her mind when she told us $40 was symbolic of man’s inhumanity to man.
Fast forward five years, and I was taking a course in American literature, in Dublin of all places, and I was assigned to read this seminal text again. This time, my Irish professor discussed the irony of Huck and Jim floating into the Deep South in hopes of achieving freedom for a runaway slave. Being the only American in the room, and thus an expert by comparison, I silently scoffed at their ignorance of the obvious, yet missed, fact that South is the direction the Mississippi flows….it’s not like they had a motor on that raft!
So when a decade had passed, and I’d spent enough time teaching to develop some wacky ideas of my own about what authors are doing behind the curtain of common characters and expected plot twists, the fates decided it time to take a stab at teaching Huck Finn myself. As I reread and relearned what happened in this funny, disturbing little novel mistakenly lauded as a children’s book, I kept going back to all those wild ideas I’d heard from teachers of English Past. Not only did I recall what I had been taught, I realized there might be some merit to all of it. Soon enough, I was grabbing the edge of my own desk, trying desperately to point out the genius of what Twain was doing while my students directed me to Facebook pages created by other freshmen who’d been similarly put upon by these cockamamie ideas invented out of thin air by teachers wanting to beat literature to death. By this time, though, I knew enough to just smile and nod because what I teach you today may not immediately resonate, but the seed is planted, it will germinate in the dark, it will eventually grow towards the light, and it, too, will blossom into you understanding what the hell I was talking about!
(Or at least this is what I tell myself all those time when my students doubt my obvious wisdom…)