Thursday, June 18, 2009

Professional beginnings

I've been a reader for as long as I can remember. But although I can't isolate the moment that I knew I wanted to study literature any more than the moment that I knew I wanted to write (which came much earlier), I think I can identify the first time I realized that analyzing literature was a thing one did--and maybe something I had an aptitude for.

It was in ninth-grade English. We were reading a novel whose title and precise plot I no longer remember, but its protagonist was a pre-adolescent boy. I believe he was an orphan, and he might have been a Native American (I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where we were assigned a lot of books about Native American boys). In one of the chapters the boy befriended, or maybe was just fascinated by, a wild or semi-wild animal; I think it was an unbroken horse. Our teacher asked us to look through the chapter and pick out the adjectives used to describe the horse, and as we called them out she wrote them on the overhead projector.

We had come up with perhaps a half-dozen words and phrases, not yet very far into the chapter, when I looked up, studied the list for a minute, and raised my hand.

"Those words?" I said, tentatively. "I think they don't just describe the horse. They also describe [the protagonist]."

My teacher gave me what may be the purest and most radiant smile of satisfaction I have ever received, as if I'd passed a test she'd set up in the hope but not the expectation that I might have exactly the skills--or talent or moxie--to succeed where others had failed.

The confident warmth of her approval is, in fact, probably why I remember this moment--for as literary insights go, it was not one for the ages. Maybe that's why I got into and persist in this business: in the hope of once again being told that I've gotten it exactly right.

7 comments:

Susan said...

What a great story -- and a reminder of the incidental moments in the classroom that may have a lasting impact!

What Now? said...

This is a lovely story ... and in fact sounds like the sort of moment I live for in teaching the 9th grade.

Renaissance Girl said...

Charming, but also wistful, I think, at the end there...the perilous and seducing need to get it exactly right.

Flavia said...

I'm curious, too, as to whether other people have moments they remember as holding intimations of their future paths (career or otherwise), if anyone is interested in sharing.

I hadn't thought of this episode in a long time, or at least not in any important way, until it jumped unbidden into my brain the other night. I had two amazing English teachers in high school, and I remember most of the books we read and (in a very general way) the things we discussed. But this is the only memory I have of an actual in-class activity. It may also be the first time it dawned on me that teachers structure discussion to produce certain results rather than just starting any old place.

Renaissance Girl said...

I used to work as an anatomist. Dissected cadavers, taught med students the parts. I remember clearly the day that I realized it was the mode of attentiveness that I loved so much, and that poems were perhaps more dynamic (and therefore interest-sustaining) texts on which to exercise that faculty....

life_of_a_fool said...

One classroom thing that I still remember clearly was in a first grade reading class. The teacher asked a question (a yes/no question? something we answered by raising our hands). I was the *only* person who raised her hand. I panicked at first, but held to my answer - and was right. I like to think that gave me a little more confidence to go against the grain. . .It's definitely one of my clearest (and few) memories of that age.

Flavia said...

RG and Fool: those are such interesting stories. RG, you're reminding me that at some point in college I started asking people, as a follow-up to my question about what they were majoring in, what they liked about that subject--it seemed a much more revealing question to me than assuming that people who majored in X had Y temperament, or whatever.

(I'll admit that this was partly inspired by one of my roommates, who once said--not in displeasure, but in puzzlement--that I didn't seem like an English major to her, because I was so anal! so precise and organized! and not, like, flighty and dreamy and vague and shit. So. . . what drew me to English?)