The Class from Heaven

Every teacher has stories about The Class From Hell. Mine was my first freshman English class. When they were seniors, a couple of them admitted that they had tried to drive me out of the teaching profession. They nearly succeeded.

This is a story about The Class From Heaven: Modern Literature 012, whose final project I read and graded last weekend. But let’s begin at the beginning.
It all started with a puzzle, a 1,000-piece jigsaw called Famous American Authors. In a way, every class starts with a puzzle – a collection of students who come from different backgrounds, with different fears and longings. They have to learn how to fit together. Some succeed, some fail. All of them take risks, and all of them learn something new about themselves before the class is over.

I gave this group the puzzle pieces, but I wouldn’t let them look at the picture on the box. I said, “Your task is to put this puzzle together. The only requirement is that every member of the class take part. How you do it is up to you. Good luck.”
Then I waited to see who would step up and take charge. Sometimes nobody does. In this case, I was confident. Freight Train was in the class.

Freight Train is the nickname I gave this particular girl back in her freshman year. She was in my Mythology class, which was made up of students from all four grades. She may have been the only freshman. In any case, I began that class by challenging them to recreate the Greek creation myth in four days, from Chaos to Pandora’s Box. When I announced it, there was stunned silence. Then Freight Train got up and said, “Here’s how we’ll do it.”

She didn’t disappoint me this time, either. Within minutes she had the class organized – one group looking for edge pieces, another separating by colors. For the rest of the block, there was a nice, quiet buzz of conversation, with occasional bursts of laughter.
It took them three days to complete the puzzle. Every now and then I would say “Freeze.” Then I’d ask them to tell me what they saw – who was in which group, who had taken some pieces off into a corner to work with on their own. On the last day, as the final pieces were about to be fit in, I called another freeze.

“I want everyone who is bent over the table right now to walk away from it and sit down,” I said. Those people, our most passionate and obsessive puzzlemakers, looked disappointed, but they obeyed.

“Now everyone else move up to the table and finish the puzzle,” I said. And the folks on the fringes, who had been elbowed out of the process, plunged in.
“You know what, Mr. Clark?” Freight Train whispered from the sideline. “It’s kind of a relief to let somebody else finish.” That’s when I knew I had something special.
And it just got better. They did crazy skits about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We dressed in black and held a funeral for all the characters who had died in the books, plays, and films we’d studied. Some of the eulogies were so eloquent they drew tears.

I threw college-level concepts like micronarratives at them, and they gobbled them up. We took a field trip to see August Wilson’s Fences, then looked for connections to Death of a Salesman. They wrote poems about the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried, and recited them to music. Freight Train wrote and sang an original song for it.

For the final project, I challenged them to write a modern novel. The only requirements were that it be at least 210 pages long, exhibit some or all of the characteristics of modern literature, and every member of the class take part. Freight Train got up and said, “Here’s how we’ll do it.”

But this time, she wasn’t the only leader. Others were stepping up, offering ideas about plot and characters. One girl volunteered to type and edit the whole thing. They spent the last three weeks of class working on it, a quiet buzz of conversation, with occasional bursts of laughter – the sound of collaboration.

The novel is called Blackjack. It’s 233 pages long. It’s about a group of strangers who come together in a casino to play cards. They come from different backgrounds, with different fears and longings. Some succeed, some fail. All of them take risks, and all of them learn something new about themselves before the book is over.

I’m putting it in the ConVal library if you’d like to read it.