Objective

11.06.09 By Kellyanne Mahoney

As I boarded the wooden spaceship reverberating with the sounds of Parliament Funkadelic, I noticed professors in tweedy blazers weaving through the fog and lights and crowd. They were carrying clipboards and seemed to be taking this gig, set in the thicket behind a Hampshire College student housing complex, very seriously. One of the band members was a hometown friend of my college roommate at UMass Amherst. When she explained to me that these guys were actually in the process of defending their senior theses, my initial shock quickly turned to jealousy. Though I had no musical talent to speak of, I was sure I could stage something similarly ridiculous and elaborate in the name of academia. This was 10 years ago, but recently—since all teachers at my school have been asked to produce a list of yearlong objectives—my mind keeps stealing away down that sylvan Western Mass. path.

This year I have been offered the opportunity to help redesign the seventh grade English curriculum at my school, including changing the entire canon of literature that is studied. These were the same books I read as a seventh grader at the school nearly 20 years ago. To some the book list we cover might be considered stodgy. The authors include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare. I have thus far been resistant to a total overhaul. It is not that I am overly attached to the books per se. It is that I do not cease to be amazed each year by my students’ innovation in interpreting the material in a way that makes it relevant to their lives. I think this is the heart of the tradition of our school. Our students are fierce meaning-makers.

And sometimes their efforts look as similarly ridiculous to that Parliament concert. There have been R & B infused love ballads dedicated to Miranda from The Tempest and whole social systems conceived to justify the rule of a jester. Each year my students debate whether or not Tom Sawyer should be banned from schools after they have read it themselves. This is a time when I am always particularly taken aback by some students’ propensity for quoting religious Scripture and their ability to use it to wage both sides of the argument.

I also always encourage the wearing of costumes for these events; typically the extent of this is that a debate team will all wear clip-on neck ties. But one year a student rushed up to my classroom door to show me that she had drawn in large block letters down the legs of her jeans with permanent black marker: “QUESTION AUTHORITY.” When I asked her if her mother had consented to this drastic alteration, she questioned whether I was a “hypocrite” for asking.

Mission accomplished, I concluded.