9th Grade English Curricula
Sep. 20th, 2023 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutMy daughter’s English class has been reading short fiction/non-fiction about kids their age. They read “Eraser Tattoo” by Jason Reynolds. We read _Long Way Down_ by Jason Reynolds in book group a while back, and that book was amazing. It was emotionally powerful, sensitive and beautiful, and also very sad. Apparently, Reynolds has also written some Miles Morales novels that look really great. “Eraser Tattoo” is a poignant story of Shay and Dante, who have grown up together, but now Shay’s family is moving because the brownstone she grew up in has been sold to a white couple and now Shay’s family is moving to Wilmington, NC. In the short story, they are being edged more and more to the side of the stoop until they have to get off it completely (synecdoche!), as they talk over the years they have known each other, what they plan for the future individually and their tentative thoughts about the future of Maybe-Us, and Shay gives Dante an “Eraser Tatttoo” (scarification). Love that story.
Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” perfectly depicts the absolutely intense mortification that one can feel more at 14 than maybe any other age ever. Her family has the minister’s family over for a holiday dinner, and mom is making all of her favorite dishes: whole steamed fish, squid, prawns. But she is now seeing the holiday dinner and her favorite dishes through the eyes of white Americans — the minister’s son who she has a crush on in particular — and the difference in simple but important things like how a group of people shares food (reaching vs. passing platters) and expresses delight in a good meal. It’s a beautifully told, extremely brief tale.
Unfortunately, for all that “Eraser Tattoo” and “Fish Cheeks” are wonderful stories, “The Bass, the River and Sheila Mant” by Walter David Wetherell is kinda gross. Another 14 year old, another crush, this one at the summer place on the Connecticut River in or near Hanover. I’m not sure if the one town mentioned — Dixford — is real but I think probably not. The 14 year old invites the crushee, a 17 year old, to go to a fair / listen to some music in Dixford, and offers to bring her there in his aluminum canoe, which he normally fishes in. Surprisingly, she accepts and shows up dressed up really nice, and while the 14YO surreptitiously fishes in paragraphs full of masturbation related double entendre, Sheila talks about how she thinks fishing is boring, says she’s thinking of having her hair done to be more like Ann-Margret, her uncertainty about tanning given that Jackie Kennedy seems not to tan at all, her possible college choices, which include Bennington and UVM, and her interest in Eric Caswell, who strokes 4 for Dartmouth. The narrator has already noted that Sheila looks at the Dartmouth crew (20 YOs) in much the way that he looks at her. The narrator eventually cuts the fish loose and is nauseated at having done so, loses track of Sheila at the show, and she comes to tell him she’ll be leaving the fair with Eric, who drives a Corvette, and that the narrator is kinda strange. The last paragraph, without explanation, refers to her as “Poor Sheila!”, leaving the reader to wonder _why_ is Sheila pitiable? She just left the fair with a 20 YO who thinks she has a figure for modeling, in his ‘61 (ish) Corvette, ditching the 14YO she left her family’s place with. They didn’t think she’d be getting into any trouble with the 14YO, he’s just a kid, amirite? So why is the middle-aged author of this thing getting such a nasty chuckle out of how he’s never made a similar mistake again, picking the Sheila over the fish? And why “Poor Sheila!”? I feel like there are three explanations, none of them great and one of them really, really bad. The least toxic is that Sheila was grounded for the rest of the summer after her safe return home in Eric’s ‘61 Corvette. The next up is that the author legit thinks that Sheila missed out on her opportunity to date someone who would grow to be heavily anthologized and a part of 9th grade English curricula around the country. Call that, Team Narcissist. But the third is that Everyone Knew later one that Something Happened to Sheila that night at the fair, and thus, “Poor Sheila!” Which is gross. I think the text points pretty unambiguously towards this interpretation. Meanwhile, I can’t find anyone who else who unprompted noticed the “Poor Sheila!” And a reader I trust quite a lot is Team Narcissist. Whatever. Just on the basis of all the masturbation double-entendres, this is a yucky story.
But you know. At least the kids got to read Fish Cheeks and Eraser Tattoo.
I am sort of curious tho, about just how autobiographical Wetherell’s story is. I re-upped over at e-yearbooks to get a look at the crew team in the relevant years. That got me last names which I’m trying to connect to full names elsewhere in the book and failing. And I don’t really know what to make of that, because I don’t really understand genre conventions of college yearbooks in the early 1960s. Also, wow, Dartmouth really dragged their feet on going co-ed.
I _had_ thought reading the story that it really oozed Oh Look at How wtf We Are, with named fishing gear that at the time would have been high-quality gear (still is good value for money gear), and Sheila talking about skiing which would have been a niche, not particularly cheap hobby back then. That Sheila has no concerns about whether she can get into college, and a good, elite college, speaks to her social status as well. But Wetherell’s publicly available information says he was born in Mineola and went to Hofstra, so it is tough to see the narrator as running in quite the same circles (for that matter, while I _can_ find him in his high school year book ‘66, and I can find The Mast for the obvious year — ‘70 — and surrounding years, I cannot find him in it, so I don’t really know what to think _because I don’t know genre conventions for college yearbooks_. Altho I’m getting really good at navigating them online.). The narrator's mother turns her nose up at the loudness of Sheila's family, which initially struck me as possible Not Our Kind Dear, I'm now thinking the narrator's longing for the glamour of Sheila's family as more telling. I'm not sure if we're told what the narrator's hair color is, but he's a red-head, like Sheila is described, if this thing is truly autobiographical.
I will say this, tho. Hofstra looks like a pretty good school.
This is interesting: https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/bdc/css/css_conf_0301b.pdf
There was a dramatic reading from one of Wetherell’s books at Hofstra for an academic conference about suburbia (it’s the levittown book, obviously). The person who _did_ the reading his named and his degrees are described, one of which is from Hofstra. But Wetherell is not named as ever having attended Hofstra, much less graduated, and while Wetherell’s older online information says he went to Hofstra and/or has a degree from there, the more recent entries do not. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but in this case, questions arise.
Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” perfectly depicts the absolutely intense mortification that one can feel more at 14 than maybe any other age ever. Her family has the minister’s family over for a holiday dinner, and mom is making all of her favorite dishes: whole steamed fish, squid, prawns. But she is now seeing the holiday dinner and her favorite dishes through the eyes of white Americans — the minister’s son who she has a crush on in particular — and the difference in simple but important things like how a group of people shares food (reaching vs. passing platters) and expresses delight in a good meal. It’s a beautifully told, extremely brief tale.
Unfortunately, for all that “Eraser Tattoo” and “Fish Cheeks” are wonderful stories, “The Bass, the River and Sheila Mant” by Walter David Wetherell is kinda gross. Another 14 year old, another crush, this one at the summer place on the Connecticut River in or near Hanover. I’m not sure if the one town mentioned — Dixford — is real but I think probably not. The 14 year old invites the crushee, a 17 year old, to go to a fair / listen to some music in Dixford, and offers to bring her there in his aluminum canoe, which he normally fishes in. Surprisingly, she accepts and shows up dressed up really nice, and while the 14YO surreptitiously fishes in paragraphs full of masturbation related double entendre, Sheila talks about how she thinks fishing is boring, says she’s thinking of having her hair done to be more like Ann-Margret, her uncertainty about tanning given that Jackie Kennedy seems not to tan at all, her possible college choices, which include Bennington and UVM, and her interest in Eric Caswell, who strokes 4 for Dartmouth. The narrator has already noted that Sheila looks at the Dartmouth crew (20 YOs) in much the way that he looks at her. The narrator eventually cuts the fish loose and is nauseated at having done so, loses track of Sheila at the show, and she comes to tell him she’ll be leaving the fair with Eric, who drives a Corvette, and that the narrator is kinda strange. The last paragraph, without explanation, refers to her as “Poor Sheila!”, leaving the reader to wonder _why_ is Sheila pitiable? She just left the fair with a 20 YO who thinks she has a figure for modeling, in his ‘61 (ish) Corvette, ditching the 14YO she left her family’s place with. They didn’t think she’d be getting into any trouble with the 14YO, he’s just a kid, amirite? So why is the middle-aged author of this thing getting such a nasty chuckle out of how he’s never made a similar mistake again, picking the Sheila over the fish? And why “Poor Sheila!”? I feel like there are three explanations, none of them great and one of them really, really bad. The least toxic is that Sheila was grounded for the rest of the summer after her safe return home in Eric’s ‘61 Corvette. The next up is that the author legit thinks that Sheila missed out on her opportunity to date someone who would grow to be heavily anthologized and a part of 9th grade English curricula around the country. Call that, Team Narcissist. But the third is that Everyone Knew later one that Something Happened to Sheila that night at the fair, and thus, “Poor Sheila!” Which is gross. I think the text points pretty unambiguously towards this interpretation. Meanwhile, I can’t find anyone who else who unprompted noticed the “Poor Sheila!” And a reader I trust quite a lot is Team Narcissist. Whatever. Just on the basis of all the masturbation double-entendres, this is a yucky story.
But you know. At least the kids got to read Fish Cheeks and Eraser Tattoo.
I am sort of curious tho, about just how autobiographical Wetherell’s story is. I re-upped over at e-yearbooks to get a look at the crew team in the relevant years. That got me last names which I’m trying to connect to full names elsewhere in the book and failing. And I don’t really know what to make of that, because I don’t really understand genre conventions of college yearbooks in the early 1960s. Also, wow, Dartmouth really dragged their feet on going co-ed.
I _had_ thought reading the story that it really oozed Oh Look at How wtf We Are, with named fishing gear that at the time would have been high-quality gear (still is good value for money gear), and Sheila talking about skiing which would have been a niche, not particularly cheap hobby back then. That Sheila has no concerns about whether she can get into college, and a good, elite college, speaks to her social status as well. But Wetherell’s publicly available information says he was born in Mineola and went to Hofstra, so it is tough to see the narrator as running in quite the same circles (for that matter, while I _can_ find him in his high school year book ‘66, and I can find The Mast for the obvious year — ‘70 — and surrounding years, I cannot find him in it, so I don’t really know what to think _because I don’t know genre conventions for college yearbooks_. Altho I’m getting really good at navigating them online.). The narrator's mother turns her nose up at the loudness of Sheila's family, which initially struck me as possible Not Our Kind Dear, I'm now thinking the narrator's longing for the glamour of Sheila's family as more telling. I'm not sure if we're told what the narrator's hair color is, but he's a red-head, like Sheila is described, if this thing is truly autobiographical.
I will say this, tho. Hofstra looks like a pretty good school.
This is interesting: https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/bdc/css/css_conf_0301b.pdf
There was a dramatic reading from one of Wetherell’s books at Hofstra for an academic conference about suburbia (it’s the levittown book, obviously). The person who _did_ the reading his named and his degrees are described, one of which is from Hofstra. But Wetherell is not named as ever having attended Hofstra, much less graduated, and while Wetherell’s older online information says he went to Hofstra and/or has a degree from there, the more recent entries do not. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but in this case, questions arise.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-21 08:42 pm (UTC)