The Land of Arrested Development

My room has become the haven for boys so intensely geeky, so not self aware of their own stereotypicalness that they make me laugh every day.

Right now this is what is happening:

Someone’s iPod is plugged into my speakers playing a mix of Yngwie Malmstein, Matchbox  Twenty, and the Mai ai Hee guy (O-zone) – loud.

Three young men are discussing how many rings your character can wear if they have more  than two arms.  As a part of this discussion they are talking game levels, strengths, damage points, and guild association.  Who knew you couldn’t just get your own armor?

Someone is reading.

This goes on for hours every day.  There are six of them that routinely use my room as their base of operations.  One young man keeps all his books, gym clothes, papers and stuff in a box in the corner.

Thursday is Dungeons and Dragons day.  They have brought in their game board, their boxes of figures, and their books about damage and strength and powers and they keep them tucked away so that no one else knows that they are there.

They usually take good care of the space.  I let them eat lunch in there as long as they clean up and recycle everything they can.  One young man is going to have to be reminded about manners and boundaries tomorrow, but he is the exception certainly to this group of polite young men who just need a place to hang out.  I let them use the LCD projector to watch films though I did insist that they go outside to enjoy the fabulous day that we were having earlier this week.

I know I’m not their mother.  I like their mothers.  I guess I’m their school mom.  They remind me of my little brother who played endless games of Monopoly in our basement when we were growing up.   I don’t feel like I’m enabling some anti-social group – on the contrary – this is the Robotics team and they really don’t have a place in school that is their own. I can share.

But as my cousin Al reminded me: Friends don’t let friends play dwarfs.

World of Warcraft miniatures photo by Jay Adan

 

Something About Daisy

Daisy at risk of a Winterbourne frost

Yesterday I had the very best discussion of Daisy Miller, the novella by Henry James, that I have ever had with a class of juniors.   I have had this book on my reading list six times, and it was this year that the discussion was lively, honest, funny, and unlimited.

Why?

I can think of a couple of different reasons why this year was different.  Immediately prior to assigning the James we read another nineteenth century text, Ragged Dick: or Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks by Horatio Alger.  We are going to read The Great Gatsby next, so you can see my drift here – Crossing Social boundaries: how’s that working for you?

My students loved the Alger and felt just a bit cheated when Dick’s success comes not from his hard work and ingenuity but from a chance occurrence and his reaction to it.  And now they have read three of four chapters in the James.  It was clear from the discussion that no one had read to the end (one more chapter!) .  One young man asked if this was a cautionary tale and did Daisy end up in bordello somewhere.  Cautionary?  Probably.  Bordello?  No.

The big reason this year, I think

My class is made up of twelve boys and three girls.  Yes, that’s right.  Twelve very different thinkers and learners with lots of different strengths, but definitely male.  We were talking about idioms and euphemisms the other day, and one brought up the Bud Light “cut the cheese” commercial – which he enacted for me as I am television-challenged.  I laughed so hard I looked like Tammy Faye Baker, and he, of course, had to find it on YouTube to show me.  That’s my boys!  Well, I guess I’ve always thought that Daisy was a Chick Story because it is all about social mores and this girl who either doesn’t get or won’t try to get how she is scandalizing the American ex-pat community.  There is a lot more to the book than that, but that is usually where the class starts. Two years ago, in a class made up of thirteen über-smart girls and four boys, the girls all decided that Winterbourne was “a creeper.”

But it’s not a Chick Book.

It’s a Guy Book.  They totally identified with Winterbourne.  They completely got how baffled he was by Daisy – how attracted and repelled, how teased and unsatisfied, how jealous yet unwilling to pay the social cost to secure her affection.

I had the best time in class, and who would have thought it possible at 2:00 pm on a freezing Friday afternoon at the end of the first week of the new semester?

Daisy photo by flickr member aussiegall