Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

Author:Sarah Shun-lien Bynum [Bynum, Sarah Shun-lien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychological, Middle School Teachers, Contemporary Women, Women Teachers, General, Literary, Self-Actualization (Psychology), Fiction
ISBN: 9780547247755
Google: vHDIikLmj2QC
Amazon: 0547247753
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2008-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Crossing

Mr. Meacham, the department chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.

“I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.

“You don’t teach English,’’ Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”

It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide cafe windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.

“What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.

“Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.

“Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”

He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. "Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids,

when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!

"All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to nor mal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history ^ by the time they’re through. Just social studies!’ And Mr. Mea. cham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.

“When students look at history,” he said, “they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar star-ing back at them. They should see something utterly strange,”

But that’s what they do see when they look in the mirror, Ms. Hempel thought. Something strange.

“So, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Mr. Meacham continued, somewhat more cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school: not enough writing. A lot of reading, a lot of talking, but not much Writing; And that”—Mr. Meacham smiled at Ms. Hempel—-“is where you can help.”

“Me?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“You can teach them. Not only how to think about history, but how to write about it.”

Ms. Hempel saw that Mr. Meacham was mistaken. He had confused her with someone who liked teaching seventh graders how to write, who felt happiest and most useful when diagramming a sentence or mapping an idea or brightly suggesting another draft. This was not the case. The thought of increased exposure to seventh-grade writing made Ms. Hempel worry. What happened when one read too many Topic Sentences? Already she could feel how her imagination had begun to thicken and stink, like a scummy pond.

If only she could develop for her subject the same dogged affection that Mr. Meacham felt for his. People approached her,

possessed by their enthusiasms, and Ms. Hempel would think, How beautiful! She loved enthusiasm, in nearly all its forms. For this reason she found herself scorekeeper for the volleyball team, facilitator for the girls-only book group, faculty adviser to the Upper School multicultural organization, Umoja. a nd now, teacher of seventh-grade United States history.

Mr. Meacham handed her a book that weighed approximately ten pounds.

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