T.G.I.F.

I just want to say that this week was easily one of the most intense and work-heavy of my career. Getting 40 seniors to each get two excellent 1500 words essays in, especially when the deadline was preceded by seven snow days in the previous couple of weeks, was quite a challenge. And I got all of them, though the last one was emailed to me at 9:50 a.m. and the last correction was made in the early afternoon. Next year, I look forward to doing it differently - though the snow days pretty much eliminated the chance to work on them as planned throughout the month of February.

The deadline has pretty much made me work 15-hour days every day this week, and the weekend could not be more needed. I'm going to hit the sack by 9:30 tonight, and didn't even muster the energy to go to the requisite Happy Hour. Baseball season starts on Monday. National Board stuff (which I've not done very getting a start on) are due the last day of March. I'm starting two new units in my two classes on Monday, both units I haven't taught before. One is on a 600-word novel, East of Eden, that I read for the first time this summer. Loved it, but it's so much better to teach books you know really well. My throat hurts and I feel woefully out of shape. This is a very, very busy time for Epiphany in Baltimore.

February Intensity

Today, I really worked my butt off - almost literally a 17-hour day. This might well be the busiest week of the year for me, as all the World Literature papers are due to IB on Friday. A lot of the writing workshop time I had planned for it were lost to snow days, and so we've had to get them done in a very short amount of time. It's intense. I need to get 84 decent essays off to Switzerland (or wherever they're being scored this year) in about 72 hours from now. All of my students are at various stages of completion and quality. It's intense. I'm kind of loving it, but I'm more excited to do it again next year, differently.

Baseball season, unbelievably, starts up next week. I'm not sure how that's going to go with all the snow, but I am looking forward to it. Today was the rules meeting, across town, another of my commitments today. It was a long one.

Let There Be Love

If you get a chance, you should go see the brilliant play being performed right now at Center Stage, Let There Be Love. It's written by Kwami Kweh-Armah, one of the great young playwrights in the world right now (mark my words, we'll be teaching him pretty regularly in schools within the decade) and stars Avery Brooks, a pretty famous actor.

Powerful, intense, funny, moving. It's all there. Go see it.

Lit Circle Unit Begins

Back in the 2004-2005 school year, I taught Honors 9th Grade English to the great Class of 2008, and, for one of our spring units, I conducted a Literary Circles study for the first and only (thought I don't know why) time of my career. Students chose from a list of books consisting of The Catcher in the Rye, Bee Season, Life of Pi, In the Time of Butterflies, and probably a couple more I can't remember.

A few weeks ago, when JD Salinger died, a former student who had chosen that book as a 9th grader sent me a message expressing his condolences. That was cool, but what was cooler for me is that he remembered the unit. One of the things I try to get my students to think about is what they will remember from a book 10 years down the line, and this note from a student about a book he had read 5 years previous was a neat little reminder that I should do that sort of unit again.

We no longer have "Honors" 9th grade English at our school, and our class sizes have risen around 25% since that time. Thus, I have a large group of the most heterogeneous group of students I've ever taught, with reluctant, challenged readers along with readers who, say, read East of Eden over the summer. So I needed texts that a number of kids could attach themselves to.

Tomorrow will be the Book Talk day. I'm going to have the books around the room, they'll look at them, hold them, read the backs, and sign up.

I'm excited. I really want my students to not hate reading after my class, and hope this reader choice and self-direction will help create a love of reading.

I'm going to choose 6 from this list:

Does My Head Look Big in This? (Randa Abdel-Fattah)
Annie John (Jamaica Kincaid)
In the Time of Butterflies (Julia Alvarez)
Nectar in the Sieve (Kamala Markandaya)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Salman Rushdie)
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (Shyam Selvadurai)
Samurai Shorstop (Alan Gratz)

We'll see how it goes!

Maggie Estep

This is cool, reminds me of college. Caustic and funny and crazy. It's been forever since I went to a poetry slam.

Back from the Snowmaggedon

Ooooh, I have such good stories to tell this year but can't.

Instead, I'll talk about how today, even though it was my first day of work since Feb. 5, was incredibly stressful. One student looked over at me, and I was literally running my hands against my scalp, looking like I was trying to pull out my hair. I am trying to organize the printing out of perfect versions of 84 world literature papers in the next week. The preparation time I had planned all year for this was the second week of February, which was lost to snow days. The dates for IB don't change, though, so now I'm left with a lot, lot to do in the next 8 days. That's all fighting the forces of senioritis and trying to get it done in 30-minute class periods necessitated by the 2-hour delay we have every day for the rest of the week. If we have more snow days next week, I'm in trouble.

It's good work, though, all of it, and I'm actually getting excited to do it again next year. Mostly because I'll have it organized and figured out all the much better. But this year is going pretty well. All these assignments, though, which is why I really like IB because it caters to kids' strengths, whatever they might be, make it quite a bit to organize and navigate.

As for the 9th graders, it was actually pretty great to see them again, too. Attendance was not very good, but they rarely are on delay days. At least we're back. Part of me is still surprised (I hated seeing kids walk in the streets because sidewalks aren't clear, and I hate those big mounds that make it hard to see kids) that we went in, but what are we going to do? Wait until April for all the snow to melt? It was time. I really, really hope no one got hurt.

Indeed, a snow day

School was indeed canceled for Tuesday (2/16/10). I was a bit worried for a while, because I went out, as I have been lately, all cocky, but when I returned, I went through my neighborhood, and ended up getting in some pretty treacherous areas that I just felt like weren't very safe for the kids. Baltimore City was just about the last school to cancel, and I felt a little bad about it - news stories have been featuring the community coming together to shovel sidewalks, Dr. Alonso all but guaranteed we would be back to school - but it got to the point where I felt like they were holding out because of stubbornness, a dogged determination to have school to show how tough Baltimore City was. I'm glad cooler heads prevailed, because it just wouldn't be safe to have the kids walking to school or waiting at bus stops in the current conditions. The news did an interesting story today where they showed a snowbank that was actually a bus stop, and you couldn't see the kid behind it at all.

The question is, now, when will we head back? I'm going into the school tomorrow to get some work done and make sure I'm ready to go. I think we'll probably be in on Wednesday, probably with a delay, and would like it to be a really studious day because I'll be having to fight the kids' instincts to go a little nuts their first day back in a week and a half. We'll see.

School Tuesday? TBA.

Superintendent Dr. Alonso sent all teachers a nice Valentine's Letter today, telling us to help start involving ourselves in getting sidewalks cleared so kids can walk to school on Tuesday. He suggested looking at our neighborhood school, try seeing it from the perspective of a child, and determine whether a child would have to walk in the road or not - then to get neighbors, community associations, and ourselves involved in clearing them.

He really wants the kids to be able to attend school on Tuesday, and I share with him this desire. The stories on the news feature a bunch of hard-working people trying to get the schools ready.

I just don't know, though. It's unbelievable to me how many roads appear to be untouched, how many sidewalks are full of snow, how many busstops are covered, how many roads are still one lane. At the same time, I'm amazed by how quickly the city has cleaned up. And I know this sounds paradoxical, but it's true - the cleanup was such a big job that a lot of progress can be made and still plenty needs to be done.

The weird storm that may be coming tomorrow night will determine whether we have school. 3 inches, 6 inches, 1 inch and a bunch of ice? Doesn't seem promising.

I remember back in 2003. A colleague told me today that we were out 2.5 weeks then. I don't quite remember it being that extreme, but I remember being out for a long time.

My prediction is still a better than even shot of a snow day on Tuesday, plus probably delay on Wednesday. It's not what I want, though - I want to get back to school. (In fact, I wish Dr. Alonso could call a Teachers-Only Day on Tuesday if it's determined to be unsafe for the kids. It will be nice to get back into the classroom and start getting materials ready that I can't at home.)

Rest in Peace, Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton, great poet, died Saturday.

Here's my favorite poem of hers:

Praise Song

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.... See More
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.



This is another great one, about her alma mater here in Baltimore (the former Eastern High School):



This morning (for the girls of eastern high school)

This morning

i met myself

coming in



a bright

jungle girl

shining

quick as a snake

a tall

tree girl a

me girl

i met myself



this morning

coming in



and all day

i have been

a black bell

ringing

i survive

survive

survive

-Lucille Clifton

School on Tuesday?

I did my usual Saturday trek out to the Towson Target and Trader Joe's this morning, heading from my Bel-Air/Edison neighborhood through Lauraville, Hamilton, and up Loch Raven to Towson.

Here were my adventures:

1) Trying to go up one street out of my neighborhood, and finding it impassable.

2) Trying to go up another street, and finding a plow there working (good).

3) Trying to go up another street, and getting stuck behind a city plow driver that had himself gotten stuck. After sitting there around 15 minutes, I backed the entire block length to get out and find another way to escape.

4) Sinclair Lane is one lane and really backed up because of it.

5) Turning cars on Erdman have vision blocked by snowpiles that are really high.

6) No one on Bel-Air Rd has a place to wait for the bus except out in the street. It's down to just one lane on either side, meaning if you're stuck behind a bus, there's no way to go around.

7) Kids walking on Walter Avenue, hand in hand, because there are no sidewalks clear. Same with most of the streets.

8) Northern Parkway is fine except for turnarounds, which have really limited visibility. MECU parking lot and area esxepcially hazardous.

Once I got out of NE Baltimore and into the county, things seemed better. Of course, I was on major roads only. The Towson Circle streets are all single lane and Trader Joe's was crazy busy (couldn't even find parking in the mall parking lot there), but that's to be expected. Took 695 to 95 home; that was fine.

The verdict? The city has two days to get the city ready to have kids go to school. I don't know if it can be done. You can have 3rd graders walking on the still full-of-snow roads on their way to school. If more snow is on its way, as forecasted (chance of 6"-12"), then I don't know when we'll be back.

Dr. Alonso thinks that the city can pull together and clear sidewalks so kids can get to school. I hope he's right. All the plows are putting the snow back on the sidewalks, though.

These snow days aren't fun anymore. Time to go to work.

Adding a wikispace

No school at all this week, and likely losing a day or two next week because of the next snowstorm coming, so I was left in a lurch. IB Exams begin on May 4th, and we have 4 pretty huge novels to get through by then. And, by "get through," I mean we have to read, discuss, understand, and write about them, as well as practice two very challenging assessments that will be tested on that date.

We read The White Tiger in a week and a half. That was the quick, "easy" read of the quarter. Now, onto Native Son, then onto East of Eden, and finally, Oryx and Crake. I passed out a semester schedule, detailing every week. We average 150 pages of reading a week, plus plenty of work.

Losing a week hurt. I was already down to 50-something days with these seniors before the big test dates, so I began a little bit of freaking.

Then, I started a wikispaces for my class. A colleague had done one, and it seemed approachable, despite my general fears of new technology. Setting it up was not that bad. Then, I stalked the students for a couple of days via email and Facebook getting them to sign up for it. I invited parents to join if they wanted to do any discussions, as well.

So far, the site is only around 24 hours old, but 23 of my 42 students have signed up for it. There have been 52 comments made on the discussion board (ahem, 21 are mine, but that includes me asking discussion-type questions - I'll back off as they get more into it). The kids are saying really insightful things about the first section of Native Son, and I'm monitoring their reading, and I just couldn't be happier. In my snowed-in state (I got out today for the first time, shoveling the street, but have been unable to leave since Friday), I'm checking the site all the time for new comments. Honestly it's one of the more exciting things I've added to my instruction in a long time.

Now, the key is getting the rest of those kids on-board that I'm missing so far. However, I think this is a much improved use of the discussion board format over nicenet (if you remember, my nicenet board was compromised by an internet prank and the kids were subjected to racist jokes and porn because of it). For this site, I have to give permission to join - much better.

12 month versus 10 month salary

I've been asked by the head of the Teachers Union to research about what districts (in the state?) offer 12-month pay versus 10-month pay. I'm talking about the district offering it, not having to set up a savings account at a crummy credit union (re: MECU) to do so.

This is something I've always wanted - my salary spread across 12 months instead of 10 months, so I'm not left with only a savings account to get through the summer. I've done okay in recent years with it, but it still makes me very nervous. My friends who have gone from public to private school cite the 12-month option as a huge advantage over the 10-month option, which is the only one that the city offers.

So, I would appreciate any feedback about 12 month contracts versus 10 month contracts elsewhere in Maryland. Does Baltimore County offer a 12-month salary? Other counties?

A Beautiful Struggle passage

Finished Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir A Beautiful Struggle. It was a beautiful memoir - moving, poetic, grounded - but most interesting, for me, is the portrait it offered of growing up in Baltimore.

If you've never read it, this is the kind of passage you're missing?

"I had made it through Lemell because my teachers blocked all other doors. They met, organized, double- and triple-teamed us, held us after school, pushed, prodded, until they obliterated job descriptions and fell somewhere between pastor, parent, and counselor. I could match passion with passion. But at Poly teaching was a job. Teachers did what was expected, and thought they could get the same. I demanded more of them, and virtually nothing of myself.

"So this is how my first year in the royal city ended -- handcuffed in the office of the school police. My second semester English teacher was a small man with a small voice. He was my last period, and talked with the sort of dead voice that bore down on my eyelids. I accorded him all the esteem of an anthill, and expected great deference in return. It was one of those spring afternoons at the end of the year, when all your hormones are fighting to break loose. But still, we had to stomach some boring zero prattling on about adverbs, clauses, and conjunctions. Who give sa fuck when you spent the whole day watching Tamara Garrett in tight jeans, and you know she's gonna be on the 44 bus, after school, her lush brown eyes dazzling all comers.

(Coates 139-140)

Happy Birthday to Alice Walker

Alice Walker turns 66 today.

When Salinger died a few days ago, I wrote about how The Catcher in the Rye was one of those books that changed my life. The Color Purple is another one of those books, for completely different reasons. Whereas The Catcher in the Rye taught me the value of re-reading, it was The Color Purple that made me realize the universality of human experience. Calie might have been a black lesbian growing up in the early 20th century south, and I might have been a 20-year old middle-class guy coming of age in the midwest, but I had some Celie in me. I got her, and never would have imagined that I could. Before that, I pretty much read literature of those who looked like me, but Walker extended the world of reading way beyond myself and my own experience. But, ironically, it taught me that human experience is universal.

Plus, it's such a beautiful, gut-wrenching read. Way, way better than the movie.

Then there was that time I heard Alice Walker speak in college. It confirmed my desire to be a teacher and change the world. I've continued to read her work whenever she writes a new book (The Way Forward With a Broken Heart is another amazing read. Especially if you have a broken heart.)

Here's my favorite Alice Walker poem. Happy Birthday to one of my favorites!

I Said to Poetry

I said to Poetry:"I'm finished
with you."
Having to almost die
before some wierd light
comes creeping through
is no fun.
"No thank you, Creation,
no muse need apply.
Im out for good times--
at the very least,
some painless convention."

Poetry laid back
and played dead
until this morning.
I wasn't sad or anything,
only restless.

Poetry said: "You remember
the desert, and how glad you were
that you have an eye
to see it with? You remember
that, if ever so slightly?"
I said: "I didn't hear that.
Besides, it's five o'clock in the a.m.
I'm not getting up
in the dark
to talk to you."

Poetry said: "But think about the time
you saw the moon
over that small canyon
that you liked so much better
than the grand one--and how suprised you were
that the moonlight was green
and you still had
one good eye
to see it with

Think of that!"

"I'll join the church!" I said,
huffily, turning my face to the wall.
"I'll learn how to pray again!"

"Let me ask you," said Poetry.
"When you pray, what do you think
you'll see?"

Poetry had me.

"There's no paper
in this room," I said.
"And that new pen I bought
makes a funny noise."

"Bullshit," said Poetry.
"Bullshit," said I.

The case for literature

Nancy Atwell: The Case for Literature

I hear what Ms. Atwell is saying. But I also agree, in a way, with the first commenter, who says, "English education has never had a convincing rationale for teaching literature; thank heaven for writing, as at least a teacher knows when a student does it! Literature has always been--and continues to be--use-less: it doesn't have a clear use that translates into a value for non-literature-teachers. What Ms Atwell notes as a positive point, the intimate and private nature of reading, is its Achilles' heel as well. Teachers don't know if and when students really read. They can't know; reading is wonderfully private. If we really want to talk about changing the way literature is viewed, we have to propose a new measure for assessing the reading of literature. I suggest that we devise a way to track students' interest in reading and the pleasure they take from it. To Ms. Atwell's point, it is only by reading that students become readers. So let's find a way to self-report on their readership."

Interesting point, especially the idea that reading is so intimate and private.

My 9th graders read only 5 books the entire year, with two of those being plays and one of them being a graphic novel. Yet, I graded final (re-takes) of the A Lesson Before Dying quizzes the other day, and, while most students did well, there were a troubling number of students who are scoring aroudn 10% on a short answer quiz - clearly not having done any reading at all. What to do?

This idea of "tracking students' interest in reading and the pleasure they take from it" is something we are trying to do with the next unit, which will begin shortly after whenever we come back to school. We're incorporating more student choice with both the books being read and how they will be assessed. We're going to focus much more on skills and hardly at all on the content of the novel (especially since it's a Lit Circles unit).

Yet, I'm still not sure how to gauge the interest and pleasure from reading. In my nearly ten years of teaching, students are coming up less and less as readers, and I want to head it off, but am not sure how. I'll keep trying.

Response to snow days... Losing spring break? Tests pushed back?

No school today, of course, and with none of the secondary roads plowed around my way and another 6-12" of snow coming on Tuesday, I don't see how we can have school this week. In previous snow experiences here in Baltimore, I was able to get up and around - I'm from Michigan, damn it, so I can take this stuff - but, this time, I'm a complete shut-in. I can walk around the block. No one has driven on our street yet and I'm not expecting to be able to get out of here anytime soon. In other words, it's bad.

I'm already pretty much banking on being out of school all week, though with an outside shot of being in school on Friday. So, where does that leave us? I currently have around 55 days of class left with the seniors, who take their first IB exam for my course on May 4th. I am not teaching an HSA course, but those tests start at the beginning of May as well. Will IB, or, at the very least, the state of Maryland, change testing requirements because of all the missed school days? Or might we be forced to attend school during our spring break instead? I'm really not sure what will happen, nor do I know what I would do if I were in charge (actually yes I do - I'd push back the exam dates for as many days as we've lost), but it will certainly be an issue for the rest of the school year.

Back to catching up on my reading.

Big Kahuna storm

Baltimore has been slammed with an amazing amount of snow - seems more than two feet out there, and it's not relenting.

Foot's Forecast is calling it a "Katrina-like event". Seriously. I'm not condoning this comparison, but just saying the impact that this thing could have if roofs start caving in and such.

I've literally not seen another human being out on the roads today from any direction. No one is even shoveling yet, except for me - just my ten-foot walkway (not the sidewalk yet).

It would not surprise me if we have no school all week. It doesn't look like that field trip will happen. Thank goodness.

Field Trip - some consequence, yet hanging in the stars...?

Our 9th grade students are all going to a field trip at American University to see a production of Romeo and Juliet on Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Unfortunately, we're scheduled to get a massive, historic snowstorm starting on Friday, with secondary storms on Tuesday and Thursday.

Big decision by Friday, when we have to sign contracts for food service and buses. Should we go ahead and continue with the field trip at the risk of financial loss, or just nip it in the bud?

I don't want to get involved with the mania of Baltimore snow weather, but it sounds like this snowstorm could be something else. We could have nearly three feet of snow by next week.

I'm ready to be done with it. I have 59 school days with the seniors left, that's all.

Woah.

All school book: The Beautiful Struggle

For years, a colleague has organized an all-school book event, encouraging students, parents, alumni, teachers, and other school community folks to come together and read a book. Each year, there is a culminating event with discussions and an appearance/talk from teh author. This year, we are doing Ta-Nehisi Coates' A Beautiful Struggle.

I haven't yet read the book (it's sitting next to my bed, ready to be read in between preparation of the novels for my classes), but he's become one of my favorite writers in recent months as a result of his tremendous blog. I hope to get a bunch of my students, especially my 9th graders who need a bit of motivation and excitement from reading, to participate.

Christ Figure It Out

Today's 9th grade lesson: a little bit of literary theory for the 9th graders. I created this handout (mostly transcribed, paragraph for paragraph, from Foster's great little text linked below, with my own paragraphs about "The Scarlet Ibis" weaved in there too). Students then completed a graphic organizer, and a discussion, about how Gaines creates Jefferson as a Christ Figure. I'm working out what I want them to finish with - I'm thinking of a "poster essay" assignment for over the weekend. We'll see.


Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too

Adapted from Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003)

This may surprise some of you, but we live in a Christian culture. This does not mean that everyone is Christian, or even most people, but it does mean that knowing something about the Old and New Testaments is essential to understanding some key components of literature. Similarly, if you undertake to read literature from an Islamic or a Buddhist or a Hindu culture, you’re going to need knowledge of other religious traditions. Culture is so influenced by its dominant religious system that whether a writer adheres to the beliefs or not, the values and principles of those religions will inevitably inform the literary work. Often those values will not be religious in nature but may show themselves in connection with the individual’s role within society, or humankind’s relation to nature, or the involvement of women in public life, for example.

Okay, so not everyone is Christian around these parts, nor do those who would say they are necessarily have more than a nodding familiarity with the New Testament, aside from John 3:16, which is always beside the goalposts at football games. But in all probability they do know one thing: they know why it’s called Christianity… While we may not be well-versed in types and archetypes from the Bible, we generally recognize, whatever our religious affiliation, some of the features that make Christ who he is.

Whether you do or not, this list may be helpful:
1) crucified, wounds in the hands, feet, side, and head
2) in agony
3) self-sacrificing
4) good with children
5) good with loaves, fishes, water, wine
6) thirty-three years of age when last seen
7) employed as a carpenter
8) known to use humble modes of transportation, like donkeys or feet
9) believed to have walked on water
10) often portrayed with arms outstretched
11) known to have spent time alone in the wilderness
12) believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted
13) last seen in the company of thieves
14) creator of many aphorisms and parables
15) buried, but arose on the third day
16) had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted
17) very forgiving
18) came to redeem an unworthy
19) unmarried, preferably celibate
20) Christian holidays are important to the character

You may not subscribe to this list, may find it too glib, but if you want to reed literature well, you need to put aside your belief system, at least for the period during which you read, so you can see what the writer is trying to say.

Say we’re reading a book, a short story. And let’s say this short story has a boy (not a man) in it. Let’s say the boy lives his life in pain from an illness he has had since his birth, and, when he was born, he still had the caul (or amniotic sac, sometimes called Jesus’ nightgown) wrapped around his body. Throughout his life, he feels at home in the in the woods, even spending a great deal of time on the water in a canoe. He is good with animals and outcasts, particularly an exiled red bird that ends up in his yard. The character – named Doodle, I hope you now recognize - meets his end when someone who is meant to be closest to him turns against him. When dead, he bleeds a lot, and the narrator shelters his body from the “heresy of rain.” Afterwards, the character provides an opportunity for the Brother to learn and exercise the virtues of unconditional love and compassion. Though Brother fails to absorb this lesson while Doodle is alive, his reflections elsewhere in the story on the dangers of pride show that he has learned at last, albeit at the cost of Doodle's life. In other words, Doodle has to die so that those left alive could learn the gospel of love and compassion.

Yup, you guessed it: Doodle is a Christ figure!

So must all Christ figures be this obvious? No, they don’t have to hit as many marks as Doodle does. They don’t have to be male. They don’t have to be Christian. They don’t even have to be good. There, however, we’re starting to get into irony, and that’s a whole different area where I don’t want to go just yet. Yet. But if a character is a certain age (or not), exhibits certain behaviors, provides for certain outcomes, or suffers in certain ways, your literary antennae should begin to twitch. How should we know? Use the list above.

Are there things you don’t have to do? Certainly. Consider Doodle again. Wait, you say, shouldn’t he be thirty-three, or around that age? And the answer is, sometimes that’s good. But a Christ figure doesn’t need to resemble Christ in every way; otherwise he wouldn’t be a Christ figure, he’d be, well, Christ. If there are several good comparisons, you can probably make an argument that a character is a Christ figure.

Here, as elsewhere, we must remember that writing literature is an exercise of the imagination. And so is reading it. We have to bring our imagination to bear on a story if we are to see all possibilities; otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her. At the same time, this doesn’t indicate the story can mean anything we want it to, since that would be a case of our imagination not bothering with that of the author and just inventing whatever it wants to see in the text. That’s not reading, that’s writing.

On the flip side, if someone in class asks if it’s possible that the character under discussion might be a Christ figure, citing three or four similarities, I’d say something like, “Works for me.” The bottom line is that a Christ figures are where you find them, and as you find them. If the indicators are there, then there is some basis for drawing the conclusion.

Why, you might ask, are there Christ figures? It’s because the author wants to make a certain point. Perhaps the parallel deepens our sense of the character’s sacrifice if we see it as somehow similar to the greatest sacrifice Christians know of. Maybe it has to do with redemption, or hope, or miracle. Or maybe it is all being treated ironically, to make the character look smaller rather than greater. But count on it, the writer is up to something. How do we know what he’s up to? That’s another job for the imagination.