How House of Seven Gables Almost Ruined Jr. High English Class

In fourth grade one of the whole class (not pull-out group) required readings books was a novel called Finders Keepers by Emily Rodda. This is one of those books that sort of fundamentally changed me as a person, but I’ve not met anyone else who remembers reading it. Even people I went to elementary school with were convinced it must have just been my specific class. In it, a young Australian boy wins the opportunity to appear on an inter dimensional game show that featured all the trinkets and doodads we loose during the day to day. It was incredible, and I’ve read very few children’s books that filled me with the level and type of wonder this one did. But this book is also at the core of another, stickier memory.
As a full-class book, it was also our read-aloud book, and we consumed it via popcorn reading. I hate popcorn reading. I could tolerate a taped reading or teacher reading, but when dropped on the shoulders of my classmates, it was my least favorite class activity by a wide margin. Even more than one-minute math drills. I made it through by just reading ahead in the book, tuning out of the droning of the reading happening in the background. For most books we were forced to read like this, I was typically several chapters ahead at any given time, but I was clever enough to at least keep my finger on what page the class was reading. Finders Keepers was no exception. I was so enthralled with the book, though, that I had slammed through it quickly, keeping a solid three or four chapter lead. I finished it while the rest of the class had about a quarter left, and that’s when I made my first mistake. I set the book down, knowing I wasn’t going to be reading and lost my thumb in the page. Now, keep in mind, I was sitting quietly, staring off into space, doing that maladaptive daydream thing I was so good at in those days. I was not disturbing the class because that is very literally the last thing I ever wanted at that age.
And yet what does this teacher do? A teacher who had been my advanced pull-out teacher two years ago? Who’d been my current teacher for a semester already? Who knew I read and read ravenously? Who had seen my English class work first hand? She calls me out. She admonishes me for “not reading with the class.”
“But I’ve finished the book,” I tell her. This isn’t good enough, and she insists again. I’m not one for conflict, so I hop back into it. But it’s something that totally taints the memory of this amazing book. I think back on it, even now, as an adult, and I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why the interaction had to go that way. It was more disruptive, in that moment, to call me out, than to just let me sit there quietly. Call me up to the desk during free work time and talk about it.
It’s this hard sting in this long memory of loving reading and books, that I question why it needed to exist? Why did this interaction have to take place? Because it didn’t fix anything. The book was already read. I continued to hate popcorn reading. There was nominal value in my re-reading something I had read basically the day before when I remembered it just fine for the sake of classroom discussion. I didn’t gain anything from the redirection, and the class was disturbed for it. And this wasn’t the first time or last time I’d go through something like this.
The previous year, my reading pull-out teaching would go on to be one of the most frustrating teachers I had ever had. The kind of teacher that still haunts me academically. I could probably write a whole novella about the problems I faced with her. The big one, though, was the situation around our Silent Sustained Reading book picks, the extra book we had to read on top of the required in-class reading. And we had to get it from the SSR bin. And not a single one of those books sounded interesting. And I begged to get approval to make my SSR from the local library or one of the books at home and that wasn’t an option. Those books were picked for a reason I never would come to know the answer to. And it just felt like such an unnecessary conflict. You want to restrict the age range? Okay then why wasn’t the school library an option? Maybe you compile a list of fifty specific books that you approve.
And I recognize that teachers have a lot of stuff going on. But you have a third grader begging you to let Nancy Drew, a book she’s tested capable of reading, be her sustained reading book, and you say no? You say go read this boring book about a collapsed mine and ghosts, instead? (This is the only SSR book from that year that made a single impression on me, and I don’t even remember the title). It feels so counter-intuitive to what the reading classroom is supposed to be.
Then there was an incident in seventh grade that I’m weirdly salty about to this day, mostly because the ramifications lasted the rest of that year and into the next. So my junior Language Arts program, across all years and all classes, had something called Book Talks on top of our whole-class required reading. Every grading period we had to do a “talk” on a book that consisted of sitting down with the teacher one-on-one and giving a mini verbal report. We could pick any book we wanted, we just had to get it approved ahead of time. In the gifted and talented side of the program we were expected to knock out higher page counts (either by reading longer books or multiple books), but as long as it wasn’t under leveled or inappropriate, it was easy to get approval on basically anything. I loved this approach. Getting school credit for the things I was reading anyway? The joy lasted a year and a half then fell apart.
The summer before, my family had taken a visit to New England. Among the sites was the birthplace of Nathanial Hawthorne. Here, I picked up a really cool looking copy of The House of Seven Gables (Mom wouldn’t let me get The Scarlett Letter, and I learned why a few years later). During one of the grading periods, I realized my first pick of Metamorphosis was going to require me to read multiple books that period. My copy of Seven Gables at just under three hundred words seemed like it would be a good fit. My teacher gave me half a moment of hesitation, then approved it when I assured her I wanted the challenge. I had just read Kafka, after all.
This was another mistake.
I made it to page 110 before the deadline. I simply couldn’t make it through the book. It was dense and claggy and even as an adult, I don’t know that I would choose to read it. And I also had a hard time following the garden path style of Hawthorne’s writing and had to reread large passages to get what he was trying to convey. But I also busted my ass trying to grok this book. I wanted to conquer it. But because I didn’t meet my page count, I got a C on the Book Talk grade that period. And while it didn’t knock me out of the A’s, it was devastating for a gifted kid.
I was at an age where I was begging for academic and intellectual challenge, and I was being punished for seeking it out and falling a little short simply because of time. There was no offer of compromise like continuing to read the book and getting credit in the next grading period. No slight bonus for attempting to go higher level tempered by a conversation about choosing a little better next time. Nothing to soften the blow of “you overshot it and failed.” If in Olympic gymnastics you get points for both difficulty and execution, I feel like a little bit of that grace could have been extended to me in that moment as a thirteen year old.
More importantly, it made me super gun shy thinking about the years ahead. What if this happened again? Jr. High was a weird time where between extra curriculars, honors classes, and commuting to school, my overall time to engage in hobbies was dramatically reduced. I was really reliant on the “pick your own book” assignment to get in my hobby reading. What if I got something approved that ended up being more challenging than I expected, and I didn’t realize it in time? It’s such a dumb thing, in retrospect, to be so concerned over, but middle school was hard. It was full of even stupider, less abstract anxieties, so having this very real thing to be concerned about was almost worse. It was corporeal manifestation of all my fears around school and academic achievement.
The only thing that saved me is that 8th grade Book Talks were pushed out to a two grading period deadline because of some circumstances with the teacher, and that gave me way more space to read what I wanted.
There’s a lot of things from school that you look back on as an adult and go “Oh, okay, I understand why these things happened the way they did.” Hindsight gives you the ability to peer behind the curtain of grade-school management and have a better understanding of why things are structured the way they are. But some of these I look back on and go…what the f*ck? Why, as someone in the top range of achievement in terms of language class, was I meeting resistance for going above and beyond?
What if I had been a student that didn’t like reading or struggled with it and faced any of this resistance during a time I was actively trying? How much more devastating would that be? If I, as a giant nerd felt these fleeting glimpses of despair around reading because of reactions from my English teachers, what might be happening for the less inclined?