Dressing up schoolwork as a toy. It’s such a hoary old cliché it might just work.
I’m hoping to coax out some actual written words from my students by inviting them to play with the paper itself; dirty it up a little for display purposes.
Harper Lee herself describes it as a “filthy piece of paper”, the note that two children try to post through the broken slats of the Boo Radley house, “Boo” being the nickname of the mysterious recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird.
If successfully coaxed, my students will be writing words to coax out a man who, now in middle age, has been in perpetual lockdown since his late teenage years.
To the book’s children, aged 12 and below, it seems perfectly logical that a recluse of 20 years will come out, play Blind Man’s Buff and share ice cream with them, if simply asked politely.
To my students, already 14, that already seems less logical. Evidently, they quite enjoyed 2022; used it to play more video games. I don’t yet know if they’re actually going to write words for this invitation note which Harper Lee merely describes.
I’m hoping the invitation to add spelling mistakes and soil the paper will sweeten the deal.
I’ve begun a sample tanning process myself; my draft Boo-notes are three days into their soak. In my impromptu dark room, the paper is submersed in a dark liquid, all yellowing slowly.
“But what is this staining agent?”, I hear you ask. “What kind of tea will Strainer be employing for this task?”
Why, of course I’m using the worst-tasting, most gratuitously-fake, horriblest teabag-tea I have in my possession. This tea was a gift from someone at school. Though exquisitely-packaged, with beautiful pink tins (which I’m sure to be re-purposing), the tea itself delivers headaches and a nasty taste. Meaning I am suspicious of the current fashion for pairing oolong tea with peach flavour.
Even in these months of peach blossoms, this is not well with my soul. I’ve had good formosa oolong ruined with candied peach chunks. At least this oolong was never good, just grey scraps in bleached paper bags with annoying strings.
Actually, I added this tea-trash talk into my pitch to students. In my Thursday lesson I showed them photos of those floating teabags in the plastic tub.
I laughed at the contrast between the tea’s glamorous packaging and its lousy quality. I mocked the kind of person who would spend money on such tea.
I gave students the remaining bags to sample for themselves. The bags were tossed aloft among the boys for the next forty minutes.
It went well. These Thursday kids seemed to have grasped the literature thing, and they were already planning to go home and try coffee, chicken stock, excrement, whatever it takes.
And then I taught exactly the same content to the Friday class. Again, I successfully made them jump with the “BOO” word. But the tea jokes weren’t getting the same laughs. I ploughed on, before hamming up the haunted-house story. And then it hit me:
This was the very class that had given me the peach oolong for Teachers’ Day last September.
Oh no. That was bad. Much worse than bad-mouthing generous gifts here in this column; it really is the height of ingratitude. Thank heavens most of this class will graduate this Summer…
Publish and be damned? I am deservedly damned. If a member of the class gets to read this, I hope my public apology will be accepted.
But make no mistake: the deadline is still next Monday.
