Tales for Young Men

"Grendel's plan, I think, will be
What it has been before, to invade this hall
And gorge his belly with our bodies.  If he can,
If he can.  And I think, if my time will have come,
There'll be nothing to mourn over, no corpse to
    prepare
For its grave:  Grendel will carry our bloody
Flesh to the moors, crunch on our bones
And smear torn scraps of our skin on the walls
Of his den.  No, I expect no Danes
Will fret about sewing our shrouds, if he wins. 
And if death does take me, send the hammered
Mail of my armor to Higlac, return
The inheritance I had from Hrethel, and he
From Wayland.  Fate will unwind as it must!"

(Beowulf, lines 442-455, translated by Burton Raffel, Signet Classic edition)

Emperor seems to read well enough.  It is not his favourite subject, but he likes Beowulf a lot.  "It's very pretty," he tells me. "I like writing that is beautiful and has a lot of adjectives in it.  This lets me know what is really going on." 

Yep.  There's really no mistake about what's happening in literature like this, and the character motivation doesn't seem to be so deep or introspective as many tales marketed to children seem to be.  It's understandable to Emperor in a way standard "kid" literature is NOT. He has a lot of trouble with your usual kid-fiction. 

Emperor is currently being tested by our school district to see if he needs any sort of special services.  Lately the tests they have been giving him are reported to be boring.  Emperor tells me they had him read and answer stories about some child and a dragon.  "But, the story had no taste to it."

No taste?  Surely my kid isn't getting all highbrow and pining for classic literature only?  I asked him a few questions about the readings he was supposed to do.  One is about a dragon and a small town, he told me, rolling his eyes.  Well what about it?  "Four letters," he said.  "L-A-M-E."

Stories about odd creatures such as dragons and Grendel and Orcs and what-have-you are usually very exciting! 

Ughhh... Emperor explained that this one is about a dragon that steals people away from the town.  Everyone was scared and didn't know what to do until some little kid went off to find out what the problem was.  "And ALL SHE NEEDED TO DEAL WITH THE DRAGON WAS A MAP AND SOME FOOD."

As if this weren't insulting enough to the reader's intelligence, Emperor reports that the kid brought along as her companion some fluffy thing called MISTER FEATHERS.  Here I got another good eyeroll from him at the stupidity of the story. 

"Mister Feathers and the girl find the dragon and then they just TALK with the dragon.  The dragon tells them he is picking up all the people to save them from the avalanche that will be destroying the town soon." He shook his head and put his hand up to his brow as though the whole ordeal were painful to recount.

"THE END."

"The story just sucked, Mom."

Well, maybe it did.  I don't fault the school for having sucky stories during the testing process because I'm thinking that it might be a test to see if the child is able to remain calm and polite under duress or something.  (I dunno.)  Usually these "tests" have a hidden objective and the thing you think you're getting tested on isn't the thing they're really measuring. 

But on the whole, I hear boys are "behind" on reading.  I wonder at us as parents for not having better literature choices than the Junie B. Jones series in our personal family libraries.  Sorry, I hate those.  They are just WRONG. 

Am I the only one with reading pet peeves?  Looks like I passed mine onto my children somehow.

Fine Literature

Patrick's English teacher is one of those East Coast liberal types, full of crazy ideas, Patrick tells me. She spouts off nutty ideas in class and runs the school's Native American Club after school. No, there's nothing wrong with "Native Americans," but basically, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture is pretty consistently denigrated by her. About half the works assigned weren't even originally written in English! In an English class, that's just wrong.

She's figured out by now that Patrick is a Christian, and a conservative one at that. She has a few snide things to say, and Patrick has a few snide things to say back. When assignments are handed out, Patrick gets the ones that refer to the Bible because she knows he likes all that stuff. We can't really avoid the Bible, she tells the class, because it's the most classic literature written by a committee, not to mention the fact that it gets referenced in the *older* literary works.

In short, Patrick is the God-boy of the class. He takes advantage of this unique opportunity to be an ambassador for Christ by using the cartoon assignment to portray his teacher as a two-headed worm that takes in assignments at one end and um, produces grades at the other. He writes things like "our honourable chairman said..." in his reviews. He compared the current public educational system to the Nazi concentration camps for his "satire" assignment. Obama, of course, is vaguely alluded to as the Communist, Nazi leader of the free world, and he writes about what a great thing that is that teachers will have more power than pesky parents with much sarcasm.

In short, he gets her goat and she grades him accordingly. Sigh. Brown-noser, he is not.

This is the same young man that I got a worried phone call about a couple of years ago. They were studying ancient Greece and he refused to look at the nudie statues, the social studies teacher told me. He needs to complete this assignment. Could you tell your son he can look at the statues? Um, ok... I told him he could look but not loooook. No ogling. Compromise met. Patrick wasn't particularly pleased, but he dealt with it.

Patrick said that he was just assigned a "mature" book in English class. He raised one eyebrow as he said it and told me I ought to look at it. "Mature," I guess, is eduspeak for "written porno that no way any decent, God-fearing American would allow to be distributed in the local library, let alone keep in his home."

My. This book is the most smutty, disgusting, amazingly bad work of "literature" I think I've ever seen. I tried to give it a good chance... tried to see some redeeming literary value in the OVERALL of the book. Sometimes when a rape scene or the like is included, it's used to demonstrate injustice or bring to light some element of the human condition, etc. I really tried to give this book a fair chance.

I got through about 20 pages. Lots of incest. Large breasts. Genital smells as turn-ons. Chastity belts and marital rape. Spears through the throat. I finally put the thing down when it went into some detail about how the mom in the book is checking out her young teen son's penis and thinking about its size in comparison with his dad's.

Done. Just done. So I wrote the following excuse note:

Dear Mrs. English Teacher (note I did not use preferred MS. title, sure hope she's married):

Please excuse Patrick from reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in English class. Surely some other, more ennobling work can be selected that fulfills class requirements. We would like one that does not cater to the prurient interests or is otherwise unwholesome.

Thank you for your prompt consideration on this matter.

Mrs. C
email address here

Patrick had a good chuckle when he read the note. "This is just what she needs to hear," he said with a big grin. "Perfect." He wanted to know why I wouldn't just email his teacher and why I handed him the note.

Honestly? I am giving him the note because he is nearly 17. In a year and a half, he will be able to watch porno without my consent if he's out of the house. He will be able to do all kinds of things without my permission. Patrick knows my preference on the book. I told him, though, that if he wanted to fill his mind with that smut, that he is old enough to understand the potential consequences.

But I am giving him the note so that the decision is truly his. He can hand in the note, or not hand in the note.

I have a feeling that he will hand in the note because not only does he not want to continue reading this book, he will also drive his teacher batty with the parental backup.

Bible Verse of the Week!

I want you to listen *carefully* and tell me who the Bible verses are about and why we might be learning them, ok? Listen:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53:3-4)

*gasp!*

"MOM!" Emperor jumps up like a little frog. "The verses are about FRANKENSTEIN, the creature FRANKENSTEIN made! THAT's why we're reading these verses this week! I didn't know the Bible had Frankenstein it it!?? Can we read the rest of the book and find out what happens to him?"

Um... sure... we... can... finish... Frankenstein. And ummm, Frankenstein's monster was certainly a "man of sorrows" and "rejected of men," but the verses aren't... really... about that...

Elf rolls his eyes. "It's about JESUS. Everyone knows Bible verses are all about JESUS."

"Wellll, yeah," Emperor says defensively. "I just thought maybe Mom was reading from another version besides the King James."

Just in Case.

Emperor models the latest anti-Dracula fashion in Mrs. C's house. Things aren't looking so good for Lucy in the book right now. I skip some of the advanced vocabulary, but you'd be surprised how into the story the children have become.

Monsters!

Picked this book up at Michael's craft store for about $5. It has "how to" step-by-step instructions on drawing monsters. After we drew some monsters, I had the boys make and cut out their own symmetrical monsters, draw background and tape the monster down. Elf's monster has glasses because Elf got very upset thinking about how this large monster can't see people, and keeps stepping on them and killing them... *sniff* because he can't see... Well, I think I've fixed it because Emperor had some pink paper left over. Elf thinks pink is a strange colour for the monster's glasses but I assured him that NO ONE would make fun of his monster's glasses considering that the frog-monster accidentally squishes very tall trees without them. Emperor's monster must see very well (with all those eyes!) and lives in the lava.

On Homer's Odyssey

Well, the elementary-school version anyway. The sex and stuff cleaned up a bit. It isn't in iambic pentameter rhyme like the old versions I remember, full of olde vocabularie and the like. This version, covering just the first part of the adventure, was a thrilling read for the boys. We were introduced to the gods on Mt. Olympus and this idea that if you made one god happy, other gods might not like that because they fight with each other. Athena is Odysseus's friend, and the men pray constantly to Zeus, the king of the gods or the god of thunder.

The best part of the story was the skewering of the Cyclops's eyeball. Wonderful description of the heated spear sizzling in his eyeball, too. We finished with the story in a day (like I said, it's the kids' version and doesn't even cover the whole story).

Elf was jumping and stimming through the whole thing. Emperor wanted to act out the eyeball popping part. We read a bit of an explanation on the gods and goddesses and I talked about how people REALLY worshipped these gods and godesses long ago. The apostle Paul talked with some of them. So don't expect Odysseus to start praying to Jesus instead of Zeus at the end of the story, because he wasn't a Christian.

Elf's jaw dropped. He wasn't a Christian? You could tell the kid is wondering how such a horrible thing could be. Um, Elf... didn't you hear the guy praying to Zeus and Athena the whole time? Yes? Ok... and you thought he was a Christian... ? You did?

??

Sometimes you think these little ones understand so much, but then you realize every now and then you have to go back and re-explain stuff. Elf was VERY UPSET when I told him what happened to Persephone. Elf... these are STORIES. You know, made up people? How could Persephone spend only "winter" in the underworld when you know that "winter" happens during our summer in Australia? This is not possible unless there are two Persephones. It's a pretend story, like Spongebob. You don't think you're really going to meet Spongebob, do you?