An Origin Story
On being, becoming, and boulders
Before launching into my regular routine of posting resources, analysis, research, etc. I have a short series planned to introduce myself and this project to new readers. I hope you enjoy it!
Depending on your theoretical commitments and interests, you could have interpreted the name of my Substack in various ways. However, I’d imagine many folks assume becoming literary requires reading lots of books, sanctimoniously correcting your friend’s grammar, and knowing exactly why the author chose to make their protagonist’s curtains blue. These are the things that dominate the popular imagination when thinking about who English teachers are and what they do. They are symbol hunters. They are novel knowers. They are fiction-loving, cardigan rocking, red-pen-wielding grammarians who love big books—and I cannot lie, dear reader—some of that absolutely applies to me.
And yet, after my first year in the classroom, I chafed under those assumptions. I was not inspired to teach my students how to respond to canned prompts about the green light in The Great Gatsby. I was not motivated to deliver chapter quizzes and grammar worksheets. I loved my students and enjoyed teaching, but those perfunctory parts of being an English educator (the ones that seemed to anchor many of my colleagues’ teacherly identities) made me itch. At first, I could distract myself from those feelings by using Funfetti pedagogy; my teaching was energetic, colorful, and popular with the kids, but was ultimately low on nutritional value. I found funny Shakespeare videos, delivered dramatic readings of Beowulf set to Skyrim’s soundtrack, and devised elaborate web-quests to help kids understand Animal Farm. I was the proverbial ~cool young teacher~ who created meme-inflected Prezi lectures and planned elaborate digital projects. In one sense, I was quite successful for an early career teacher. My students were engaged. They learned. They liked me (most of the time). Things were going well!
And yet, something was missing. Kids were engaged and learning, but despite the bells and whistles, the work I had them doing felt fun but hollow. This was made very clear to me by one of my 10th-grade students (let’s call him Malik) on a slow day during my Lord of the Flies unit. Unlike most of my other students, my antics only landed with Malik about 50% of the time. He was often listless during class, half-engaged and half-daydreaming about his track meet after school. We had a rapport, but we also had a shared understanding that he had other priorities—ones that did not include opining about Modernist literature. On this particular day, though, he wasn’t having it. As I asked the class to take out their books and turn to page 84, Malik proffered a very poignant question:
“Respectfully, Mr. Aleo, why in the fuck do we have to read Lord of the Flies?”
I’d asked myself questions like this a million times, of course, and I had a million more answers prepared: to have meaningful transactions with texts (thanks, Louise), to access and critique cultural codes of power (thanks, Lisa), to understand the ideological structures and power relations of our time (thanks, Terry), to have aesthetic experiences that unlock insight into the human condition (thanks, Maxine), to construct meaning in community with others (thanks, Stanley).
But I said none of that. His question had struck me with all the force of Piggy’s boulder. Its sharpness punctured the artificial and schoolish packaging that had come to wrap my teaching. It laid bare the gap between why I taught English and how I taught English. So, instead of waxing poetic about the magic of literature or fussing at him for dropping an F-bomb in the middle of class, I just sat down on my desk and sighed.
“I don’t know, man.” I replied. “Why do you think we read books?”
I won’t act like the conversation that followed was filled with epiphanies and revelations that forever altered the lives of my students, but it was pretty darn impressive. We hit on (roughly) all the points I’d rehearsed, but the kids were constructing that meaning, instead of me disseminating it. We spoke frankly about the systems and structures of school and the limitations they placed on all of us. My students shared their hopes and dreams about what our class could be. I promised to find ways to co-construct that view vision with them.
More than anything, that one class my second year teaching nudged me on a slightly different trajectory that would have compounding effects for the rest of my career. It made me remember, at just the precise moment when I needed to, the moments in my secondary and undergraduate English classes that were most memorable: researching corruption and violence in European soccer, getting my brain rocked by Existentialism, synthesizing themes from TopDog/Underdog and 90’s gangster rap, wading through Marx, Freud, Morrison, Fanon, Shelly, Whitman, and hooks alongside a community of fellow English nerds.
In short, it reminded me that I’d gotten so wrapped up in being an English teacher that I forgot what it meant to become literary. More on what that means and what it looks like in theory/practice next week!