For Thursday, May 14, 1998 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 723 words

Book binding

I'm wrapping up another wonderful year of freshman literature. It's time for the final unit, the comprehensive one that supposedly sums up all we've studied. This is our most challenging and creative unit of all. Our goal is to find, or at least search for, common threads running through all our books.

What, pray tell, could the following books have in common: Medea, Inferno, Candide, Inherit the Wind, Siddhartha, Night, Hiroshima, Frederick Douglass, Romeo and Juliet, Harold and Maude, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie?

It appears a good thread would have to be quite general, if not downright vague. It might be something like this: appealing characters strive against great odds to achieve worthwhile goals. That's safe to say. It's also lifted straight out of a creative writing textbook.

No. We're going with a different theme. The title of our final unit is "Breaking Away." Here's the prompt: Each of us reaches a point in our lives where we say goodbye to parents, teachers, authority figures, and go off as ourselves, masters of our own destinies, creators of our own rules. What decisions will we make then? What philosophies will guide our lives?

We examine all the student/teacher relationships found in the stories: Dante and Virgil, Dante and Beatrice, Candide and Pangloss, Candide and Martin, residents of Hillsboro and evolutionist teacher Bert Cates, Harold and Maude, the girls of Marcia Blaine prep school and the well primed Miss Brodie, to name a few.

We examine all the child/parent relationships: Siddhartha and his father, Siddhartha and his son, Elie Wiesel and his father, Romeo and Friar Lawrence, Juliet and her nurse, Harold and his mother.

We examine citizen/society relationships -- the roles of governments and religions: Dante and the Pope, Candide and the Grand Inquisitor, Douglass and the slave holders, Cates and the jury, Wiesel and the Nazis, the residents of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.

What we find is a full mix: good teachers and bad, good and bad students, good parents and bad, good and bad children. Some learned bad lessons and missed the good ones. Some did the opposite. People broke away from good authority and bad, for better or worse.

What we wonder for ourselves, now, is how does one recognize the best parenting, the best teaching, the best lessons, and go on to make the best decisions? We are in pursuit of quality. We are questioning the nature of evaluation. Perhaps I should include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the reading list.

Preparation for this comprehensive close begins with Romeo and Juliet. We watch these fine, exuberant young people lose touch with their distant parents and die. What goes wrong? What forces are most responsible for this tragedy?

We then switch to Harold and Maude. We see Harold distanced from his mother and suicidal, until he meets Maude. Here's a story with similar circumstances, but with a positive outcome. What makes the difference?

Then we switch to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The parents aren't even in this story. Everything revolves around Miss Brodie, her curricular choices, and the influence she has on her students. Here is a story where some children break away, and some do not. Here is a story where school ends and real life begins. Here is a good book with which to close the year.

The students will write an essay comparing Maude and Brodie. I won't say much on that topic as they haven't written the paper yet.

Our closing activity will be small-group one-act plays. Students will script and enact a scene that involves "breaking away" in some form. It must involve at least one character who is at first guided by others, but then begins to think for him/herself. The guidance can be good or bad, the character can improve or degrade, succeed or fail. It can be a comedy, tragedy, or surreal and avant-garde. The deciding factor will be the underlying theme; will viewers learn something from the performance that will help them make better decisions?

What single literary image stands out most for me? It's always the same one -- watching Siddhartha's son defy his father's teachings and wander off to make his own mistakes. Sid is the Buddha, for goodness sake. If the Buddha has a problem raising a teen-ager, what hope have we?