Summer Is Over and That's Okay

Getting back to school is difficult. The allure of summer is strong. At the end of summer, I am in mourning for my freedom. I still have stacks of books to read, errands to run, and tons of tasks to accomplish. I am not ready to pick up the pace and leave my leisure.

Yet somehow, I drag myself into school, and set up my classroom. I put posters on the wall, and plan lessons. I go to meetings with colleagues,  and realize I have missed them.

Then the kids arrive. First, it is only the seniors who assist in the theatre classes. Then it is the big freshman orientation program. Finally, it’s the first day. And instead of summer, I am focused on my new students. I am calling their counselors and parents. I am redesigning all the plans I made at the end of the summer because Julie reads at a fifth grade level, and Steven needs will do better with a different topic!

By the end of the first week, I know their names and faces well enough to want to know more. We have exchanged letters and laughs, and we are ready to start the learning in earnest. Summer lingers over the Labor Day weekend, but it no longer has a hold on me. Give me a few months and I will long for winter break, but I am in the honeymoon now, and I want to see what we can learn together.

It is not as if summer is never coming back. Summer has taken a nine-month holiday, and when it returns we will all be different people. Being a teacher means embracing these cycles. Fighting them is a losing battle anyway.

At one of the many meals that sandwich our meetings, another teacher commented that, since the kids are always the same age, so are we. When you work with teenagers, you experience the illusion that time is standing still. I see my older students around town, at social gatherings, and on Facebook. Then I see their younger versions sitting eagerly in the classroom – and it does feel like time has not passed at all. My former students are teachers in our building, and parents in our community. They are better and bigger versions of the children I met many years ago – and so I am.

It is a special spiral. I am not teaching the same children nor the same subject each year. It appears that way, but that is an illusion. New technology, books, or tests are not what change the plans. It is all about the new students in front of me, meeting their needs, and bringing the learning to them. No class, lesson, or child is ever the same from one year (or sometimes from one day) to the next.

That is why this job never gets old. I may lose my hair, eyesight, and waistline, but I will never lose my love for learning with these kids. Summer is over; bring on the school year!

Failing at the Ten Book Challenge

I do not participate in any of the Facebook games. I will not copy and paste a status statement. I don’t spend days listing things. I am not going to use the list to the left to identify characters from Doctor Who, and I have been giving to ALS for many years.

But the challenge to list ten books is very interesting to me. I love hearing about people’s favorite books. I love talking about what I am reading. My kids are embarrassed when, on vacation at a resort, I look at what people around the pool are reading.

Recently a former student and a former colleague invited me to list my ten books. Several other friends have done the same. I loved reading their lists, but I could not make a single list of ten titles. Even when I made smaller lists, they were too long - and they were constantly changing. Each time I looked at this post, I have added or removed a title – or a list.

I made lots of lists! I made lists of young adult novels. I made lists of books written by women. I made lists of books I have taught. I made lists of guilty pleasures. Some were ten titles. Some were four titles, and some were thirty-seven titles.

I settled on four lists. These were my most universal categories. I chose the books based on a simple criteria: which books stick with me. Which do I keep coming back to over and over? Whether I am teaching them, talking about them, or connecting them to my current reading, which have become my “classics” because of their staying power?

Here is my answer as of the moment I pressed the “publish” button. It will change later, and I do not promise not to return to this post and edit again – and again.

The lists are not in any particular order. I knew that if I tried to actually do a first, second, third ranking, I would most likely create a rupture in the time-space-book continuum.

So here are four lists of ten works that are important to me: 

Ten science fiction books: 

Stranger in a  Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guinn

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

Calculating God by Robert Sawyer

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

A Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. 

1984 by George Orwell

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury

Ten plays: 

Hamlet by William Shakespeare 

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertold Brecht

It is So, If You Think So by Luigi Pirandello 

No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

‘Night Mother by Marsha Norman  

All My Sons by Arthur Miller 

Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

The Madwomen on Challiot by Jean Giraudoux

Ten books that are not science fiction or plays: 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara 

The Trial by Franz Kafka

On Writing by Stephen King

The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

Ten books I have read in the last few years that could likely become my new classics in time:

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughhart

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

WWW.Watch by Robert Sawyer

Little Brother by Corey Doctorow

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahari

Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting his Kid into College by Andrew Ferguson

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

I could continue, but I will stop here. I will make more lists, and I will keep reading. My to-read stack is tall and getting taller. A reader’s list is never done!