Epiphany in Baltimore

Tuesday, May. 31, 2005

Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com

I'm so annoyed with one of my students right now, and I need to make sure I'm not annoyed with her for the wrong reasons.

First of all, this is a smart girl. Smart. She went on the Outward Bound trip that I chaperoned this fall and I was struck by her maturity and sense of responsibility. She is one of the smartest students in the 9th grade, is an active reader and writer, and partipates effectively in class discussions. Plus, I've had an easy, joking relationship with her this year, as I do with all eight kids who go on this trip with me. She is, for example, one of only eight students who know that I wait tables at the restaurant where I wait tables.

So things have gone well this year with her. But then we had a Literature Circles assignment in which kids got to choose one of six books that I had selected. She chose Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, which is probably my favorite book that I've read as an adult. It's this book that ostensibly about a spelling bee winner, but gets into so much more - it's characters searching for faith, living unhappy lives, trying to find connections with each other. In short, it's amazing.

So this girl didn't like it that much. But the reason she didn't like it was that she read it entirely from a Jewish perspective. She didn't like that the characters practiced Kabbalah, something she equates to being misused such trendsetters as Madonna and Britney Spears. It bothered her that characters were finding guidance and spirituality from it when she considered it an affront to her more traditional perspective.

That's fine. No one has to like everything I like. People go into the reading of a book with all sort of prejudices and assumptions. I probably liked the book so much because of my own response to works of art in which characters are trying to find meaning in the world.

But then I read her essay. The kids were able to write about any kind of literary aspect of the paper they wanted, provided they wrote with evidence and conviction using the analysis tools we learned this year. Her thesis statement was about how the main character, a young female narrator, was an outlandish and poorly drawn character. On the first page of her essay, I feel she argued her point well, and even made a comment like, "Even though I completely disagree with you, this is a good point, and this is a sign that you're arguing it well."

But on the second page of the essay, she started writing about Kaballah. Now, I don't think this is a particularly huge part of the book and it didn't bother me or plus me as I was reading it. For me, it was a type of spirituality, and the characters were gaining some meaning and redemption from it, and they're all so in need of it that, for me, it was just that it happened to be Kaballah rather than it was. Plus, I really didn't know anything about it beforehand. Now, in her essay, the girl talk about how Kaballah is totally outlandish (she overuses this word) and that the characters don't even follow the rules. And then she makes a comment "It's commonly assumed by most Jews that (the founder of Kaballah, I assume) is a quack." This comment is obviously inappropriate in a literary analysis paper (where reader response has no place), but it really made me question how I can buy anything of what she tells me if she read it with such a skewed perspective. It annoyed me, too, because her comment was religiously intolerant and her mother is this civil rights attorney in the city with her own domain name and everything. Mostly, though, it's probably because I'm disappointed in her.

But, is this valid? I think it is, and ran it by my (Jewish) boss to make sure. He says what she said was totally out of place and nothing was supported. I just needed to be sure. I'm passing back the essay tomorrow and it's probably going to be the first thing she's done this year that she didn't get an A on. And this one's a C.