Teaching Teens to be Troubled

It's fun teaching honors students. This is my first year doing so, and it has been really rewarding. These are honors freshmen, the perfect demographic: smart enough to hold a sophisticated discussion on literature, but young enough to still be eager to learn. It's one time in my week where I know for certain I will have a good time in class, which is certainly not something many teachers are able to say. Considering this, imagine my excitement in assigning my students to write short stories. Many of these students actually enjoy creative writing in their free time and certainly read for fun, so I expected them to have more original ideas and a better grasp on narrative logic than my other students (not to knock on my other students, they can come up with some very creative stuff, too). I left the assignment open ended intentionally, allowing my students to write something they would enjoy.

I have now finished grading these stories (And all of the other essays I had to grade. You can't see it over the interwebs, but I am smiling about this). Some of these stories were real gems: poignant, suspenseful, or fun. I had one student write from the perspective of a mathematician trying to decide whether or not to ask a girl out on a date who solved his predicament using the same logic used to solve a geometric proof. It's these sort of stories that made me excited (yes!) to grade an assignment. Other unimpressive stories covered topics I expected; stories about relationships and prom and other mushy stuff. No less than six involved being asked out by a boy with "piercing blue eyes."

However, almost half of the stories submitted to me involved something I did not expect: violence. Now, I knew that I would have some stories with a little bit of violence, but this bordered on disturbing. Here's the general plot outline of one of these stories: A teen and his girlfriend accidentally allows his younger brother to drown while he was supposed to be watching him. Out of anger, the teen's father attempts to murder him for his negligence. In the ensuing scuffle, the teen accidentally kills his father. When the teen returns home, he and his girlfriend are murdered by his mother in anger. THE END. Another involves a teen who is obsessed with a girl in his class, seemingly romantically. In an ironic turn, once he gets her alone, the boy kills the object of his obsession and skins her. That one made me light headed. It did not help that I had been grading for hours when I stumbled upon it.

Teacher instincts said to talk to these students in private to make sure they did not need counseling. That was my plan until I finished, violently disturbing stories numbering in double digits. That means that this is a far reaching problem, not an individual one. Sharing this with Mary and friends, they reminded me that these kids are surrounded by violent media. They all go home and watch marathons of CSI. I have to admit, I can relate. At that age, I was a huge fan of Braveheart and Boondock Saints. These are the stories many adolescents are surrounded by, so it makes sense that these are the narrative they would weave themselves.

Part of me wonders if I, as an English teacher, am partially to blame. It's not that I make my students write about violence, but let's face it, literature read in high school is always depressing and often violent. I am concerned about my students writing about teenage violence, yet we are currently reading a play about two teenagers who commit suicide in the end. After reading Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, and 1984 next year, I'd be surprised if they could write an optimistic story if paid to do so. "Great literature," on the whole, is full of books that are total bummers.

I'm not writing this post to say that I am against that. I certainly don't think that William Golding should have gone to see a psychiatrist because he wrote about some little kids who murder a fat nerdy boy (though it might have done the guy some good). There's some good in writing about the dark parts of the world, and literature helps us come to terms with it. In reading these depressing stories, students are able to confront life's ugliness and process it through discussion in a safe environment. After reading these stories, though, I do worry that they are failing to see the parts of life that aren't all that bad. Oh well, maybe they go to church for that.

Now that I'm caught up on grading, I'll return to Marquez, who surely won't write about anything disturbing like war or incest.