As I mentioned in the review of the recent KRIEGSHÖG album that I wrote a few weeks back, I have a hard time staying away from hyperbole when writing about hardcore punk. The sound of the genre is extreme, so the words I use to discuss the music need to match that intensity. Or, so I think. It’s kind of the same with the books I choose to read for myself or to review for this blog. I am selecting certain books from a list of all possible books and I am not going to waste my own time with reading something I might not like all that much. Were I accepting submissions for materials to review here, I wouldn’t be so eager to heap praise on the things I spend my time thinking and writing about. In that light, it makes sense that much of what I have to say about the media I feature on the blog would be positive. It’s not that I’m afraid to be negative or critical. There’s just a selection bias at play with what you’ll read here. Maybe someday I’ll be more willing to write about things that are mid, things I only low-key enjoy, or things that are kind of whatever. For the time being, you’ll have to bear with a little more of my effusive encomiums.
I’m a sucker for a book or movie or show with a teacher as the protagonist. It’s as simple as wanting to see how much I can relate to or connect with the characters and caricatures in the text. It might have nothing directly to do with teaching, but the way Gillian Linden handles the incessant rumination of her nameless narrator really hit home for me. There are at least two times in the course of the week that comprises the novel where she reflects on preparing for a class discussion of a given text with her sixth- or ninth-grade students. It’s as important for her to plan what to say as it is what not to say. That second-guessing, that boundary setting when dealing with literature and with children, can be a source of joy and worry in equal parts. The chance to turn a group of students on to a new idea or to make them see a familiar topic in a new light is exhilarating and represents one of the deeply satisfying aspects of teaching. Just the same, considerations of how much is too much—especially for young adolescents such as those in the school where the narrator teaches—can be debilitating. Add to that the prospect of teaching some students in person and some via videoconferencing due to COVID protocols, and the narrator’s decision process is even more fraught. Teaching is hardly the only job where tough or unclear choices are a daily occurrence. Linden has done well to express this part of our shared humanity through a teacher’s eyes and mind.
Some of the paradoxes and complexities that are specific to teaching appear in conversations the narrator has with her colleagues or her husband. In discussing her conflicted feelings about being an authority figure, she compares leading her class to steering a ship. She doesn’t want that level of authority or responsibility. She wants her students to feel just as involved in steering the classroom as she is. She wants to flatten the hierarchy, but then catches herself and says to her husband, “the thing is… not having a hierarchy only works if they listen to me” (p. 24). It’s a tough balance to walk as a teacher when you want to give up some control of the classroom to the students in the class. There’s a need to have an escape hatch, a safety ripcord, an emergency brake that you can use to restore order if the time you share begins to slide into oblivion. That’s where that elusive pursuit of control, of authority can easily go astray. No one likes being ignored, especially when they gave up their power to be heard in the first place.
Later in the week, the narrator finds herself at a new faculty meeting. New faculty in this case being defined as having spent up to six years at the school. She notices an administrative assistant, Miles, at the meeting and it prompts her to recall an interaction she’d had with him previously. He’s apparently very attuned to how much he eats and quite candidly shares that he is always trying to be smaller. She confides in us that “if Miles had been a student, he’d generate streams of emails to grade deans, department chairs, the school psychologist” (p. 49). The charge of hypocrisy, or even the pointing out of inconsistent behavior, is low-hanging fruit when critiquing another person’s habits. Still, it can be hard not to turn into a know-it-all version of a teacher when dealing with another adult’s apparent shortcomings. Learning to have tact and give grace to students as well as to the adults in the building is one of those mental gear shifts that teachers need to enact multiple times a day. It can be exhausting to know what to say or what not to say in these situations, too.
Equally present in the text are the narrator and her husband’s children. They are younger than the students she teaches, so the need to switch conversational registers when speaking to them provides further exhaustion. I’ll admit to howling when I read the following passage. She is explaining to her children that she recently learned about how the universe is constantly expanding. Her daughter Jane, the older of the kids, asks her a question she cannot immediately answer, so she replies, “I have to read more before we can discuss this.” Marvelous. A wonderful phrase. I often use “I don’t know, but let’s find out” in similar situations. Her daughter is having none of it, though. She tells her mom “Let’s just find a video.” Deadly. Why read a book when a video can tell you the same information, but faster? (You and I know it’s not the same, but try explaining that to a child in a way they will understand.) There are earlier scenes in the book where Jane is shown to be enraptured with “the otter show,” which also provides a string of interesting facts that she shares with her mom. Whether these disparate pieces of information can be said to be an education or represent knowledge when compared to the deep inquiry in a disciplined way of thinking about the world is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching students in 2025. They have more access to more free-floating data than any teacher could have had at their age. How to help them shape it into useful or actionable information, as well as why that process is even necessary, remains fundamental to education itself. Linden understands this difficulty and has done an excellent job of revealing some of the negative space in a teacher's inner life.
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