Nice News
This week I started class with some games. One day we did Name Drop from The New Yorker website, which was really hard a lot of the time, other than when the answer was Taylor Swift. We also did a couple vocabulary quizzes from the Merriam-Webster website. I kept track of the high scores on the board, cut out a crown from yellow construction paper, and taped it next to the winning class each day. Yesterday the crown moved several times, and my fifth hour class claimed the number one spot on the very last answer and my students erupted with joy, so loud and so raucous that a vice principal walked in a few minutes later to see what the commotion was.
This has nothing to do with independent publishing; it has everything to do with independent publishing. The news is terrible all the time and there is so much bad news specifically about schools and students, and it’s nice to remember that young people actually do care about things besides Tik-Tok. (These students had written an in-class essay about Things Fall Apart the day before and they put everything they had into it. It was beautiful.) And there is so much bad news specifically about the publishing world, which, like the world at large, seems to be falling apart, but people still care about books, and maybe they’re more important than ever. I often feel like a failure in the classroom and often feel like a failure in the realm of writing and publishing, but then there are these times where a student tracks you down to hand you a nice note they wrote, or someone publishes a nice review, in an obscure litmag, that you didn’t even know was coming, and even though failure is inevitable, and so frequent, maybe you’re doing good things too. I don’t know what to do about the world, and I often feel hopeless and powerless, but I can try to build room for joy in the classroom. I can help bring more books into the world. They won’t be best-sellers, but I still think they’re important. I still think they make the world a little nicer.