The Turtle Part

My 11th grade students are reading THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Okay, that’s a lie. They’re studying it, though. Because I have this goal – I want them to finish high school LIKING Steinbeck. I love Steinbeck. And so, instead of requiring them to read a book that they won’t likely finish and can’t hurry through and still understand, I chose to go about teaching this book a little differently.

I showed them the movie.

(That was different.)

And now we’re studying some chapters. Today we read the Turtle chapter (it’s chapter 3, if you’re playing along at home). In this chapter, we see a turtle struggle across some landscape and cross a highway. A car swerves to miss it. Then a truck swerves to hit it. It survives, and life goes on*. It’s three pages. Not painful. But so many good things are in there, and I want these kids to know it. So we talked about it. We talked about how it’s all a big metaphor and junk. About how it’s not about turtles at all, and about humanity and evil and kindness and victimization and everything important. And then I made them write about it. I made them write for just 10 minutes – when have you metaphorically swerved to hit? When have you swerved to miss? When have you been the turtle?

Oh, they’re clever kids around here. They wrote amazing, open-heart things about being a Hitter (and almost universally regretting it, minus the kid who confessed that he crumbled [and then stirred] saltine crackers into his little sister’s giant birthday jar of Nutella; he doesn’t regret his choice – Yet). They wrote tender, humble things about being a Misser and how they wish they could more often be a Stopper who gets out of the metaphorical car and makes sure the turtle is okay. And they wrote self-aware things about being the Turtle. About how those people speeding past don’t know anything of their struggles to get to the road, let alone across it. About how sometimes life is hard. About how sometimes people are awesome.

Listen: “Maybe to get to the stage of being the woman who swerves to miss the turtle, you have to have been the turtle before.”

“I see those turtles in the road and I have sympathy for them. I want to make up for my crappy former self that was the one trying to hit all those turtles.”

Maybe none of these kids will ever try to read GRAPES OF WRATH. Maybe none of them will ever like Steinbeck (but not because I wasn’t trying). But for at least ten minutes today, they thought about their actions, and how those actions look to others, and how they will affect the world. That’s why reading.

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* We talked about the weed-seed part, too – and about how Life Goes On, sometimes in spite of our trials, and sometimes because of them.

I love Steinbeck. Have I mentioned that lately?