"River Town"

[fiefoe]

<In class:>

• Whether it was consolation or a form of self-punishment, I never knew. I simply liked having a tall camouflaged boy named Daisy sitting in the back of my class,
• "Thank you," Adam said. "You have very nice freckles, Keller." The classroom suddenly became very still. Keller's face fell and she sat down quickly.
• I sensed that I simply couldn't judge the students for anything they thought, at least in the beginning. 
• One student had him successfully reeducated over a fifteen-year prison term (upon his release he became a detective). But almost always Robin Hood was caught; there were no illusions about the idealized green world of Sherwood Forest.
• I defined the form of a Shakespearean sonnet and gave them Sonnet Eighteen in pieces, broken apart line by line. We reviewed poetic terms and archaic language, and I divided them into groups and told them to put the poem in order... But they were never suspicious of impossible tasks, which was part of what made it so easy to teach in Fuling.
• The Chinese had spent years deliberately and diligently destroying every valuable aspect of their traditional culture, and yet with regard to enjoying poetry Americans had arguably done a much better job of finishing ours off.
• There was an intensity and a freshness to their readings that I'd never seen before from any other students of literature, and partly it was a matter of studying foreign material. We were exchanging cliches without knowing it: I had no idea that classical Chinese poetry routinely makes scallions of women's fingers, and they had no idea that Sonnet Eighteen's poetic immortality had been reviewed so many times that it nearly died, a poem with a number tagged to its toe.
• ... and a classroom of Chinese students can listen to a Shakespeare sonnet and see the flawless features of a Tang Dynasty beauty. But along with this power there is a fragility, because it is always tempting to misappropriate the force of a great writer.
• This process had some value, of course, but for many readers it seemed to have reached the point where there wasn't even a split-second break before the sophistication started. As a student, that was all I had wanted-a brief moment when a simple and true thought flashed across the mind: I don't like this character.
• Everybody loved Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They loved their hapless prying and they loved their demise, the way the servants are tricked into carrying their own death warrants to the King.
• They were played by Vic and Lazy, both of them dressed in cheap Western-style suits, and before their scene they carefully spread newspaper across the floor so the Prince could die without getting dirty.
• Many of (these papers on Hamlet) seemed like good papers until suddenly that cursed sentence came from nowhere and boomed out, "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." I came to loathe the phrase.

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