Lesson Planning

Under new orders to increase informational reading in the classroom - nonfiction reading for content - I had a packet of articles prepared for my seniors. We read about James Holmes, the Colorado theater shooter - how he exemplified that dangerous "outsider" that seems to plague American society. We talked about how he never fit in, had no real social life. Those depressingly humiliating dating website applications and his description by friends and acquaintances as peculiar and shy. His extreme intelligence, combined with his social awkwardness, came together to open a dark door . . . .

Then we read of Wade Michael Page who shot up the Wisconsin Sikh temple. Unlike the quietly odd Holmes, Page was an aggressive outsider. His neighbors invariably spoke of the menace they felt radiating off him, the electric danger that was present in his Aryan Racist demeanor and his angry music thumping the walls of his apartment - but there was a similarity with Holmes in that he too was an Outsider: couldn't keep a job, failed int he army, no stability in personal relationships.

I took up the packets of news stories and then played a slideshow on my Promethean Board, a rogue's gallery of some of the more colorful Outsiders in American history: Albert Fish who had a horrible childhood and a life of instability, which led him to kidnap children, eat them and then send letters to their parents detailing how they tasted; Carl Panzram, in and out of reformatories during the late 19th century, hated and beaten, a rage fueled in him that would not be extinguished until he killed everyone he could get his hands on; Jeffrey Dahmer, like Holmes a geeky, unhappy loner, but with a delight in cannibalism and necrophilia.

What a crew! How did America end up with so many of these Dark Outsiders? I mean, look at Canada, for crying out loud! On the surface they're nearly indistinguishable from America but they don't produce ten percent of the crazies we do. It makes you wonder and you can debate endlessly population genetics and social issues and the proportion of violence that thrums beneath the surface of one society vs. another.

We turned the lights back on in the classroom and read the first line from Beowulf in our textbook, the Burton Raffel translation: "A powerful monster, living down/in the darkness, growled in pain, impatient/as day after day the music rang/loud in that hall, the harp's rejoicing . . . " Like the kid who sits alone in the cafeteria but within sight and hearing range of the Cool Table where voices are voluble and loud and there's laughing, Grendel is filled with hate - an Outsider with many of the same characteristics of James Holmes, Wade Michael Page, Albert "The Grey Man" Fish. Like them he can't fit in and it opens a dark door that he steps through.

Monsters exist, I tell the class. You wake up one day and you're not longer afraid of the Creeper with Long Arms who lives under your bed - the one who's reach you have to foil with an athletic leap when you need to go to the bathroom at night - but there are still monsters, real monsters. They're isolated and awkward and their inability to fit in causes some mutation in their brains to go into hyper-drive. That's Grendel - the author said he was the child of Cain, the Biblical outsider marked for all time so that people would see him and loathe him and reject him. He still exists.

The next day we read a story online about the entourage of one current Rap Artist fighting the entourage of a different Rap Artist in a night club and we talked about why anyone would want to be in one of these entourages: money, parties, women, being close to glory and fame and hoping for its residual luster to rub off on you. You'd fight for that - in a world of drudgery - who wouldn't? Then we talked about the character of these Rap guys: boastful, hyper-masculine, covered in jewelry and attitude. "All the drinks be on me . . . :" and "All the people I plotted with/is the same ones I'm dividin' the profits with."

In a new crib, so big, I'm talkin' town size
Sippin' somethin' cold, smokin' weed by the pound size
Yeah I gotta big head ho, I think it's crown size
Bitch I do it big and I never plan to downsize
People who talk shit, is feelin' like dickheads
Saw me on the web like I had a extra six legs
Lookin' at my highlights with a bitch with highlights
Crowd wavin' at me, all tryna say hi right

There's your Beowulf right there, folks. Who am I? I'm BEOWULF! Destroyer of monsters, bane of demons, giver of gifts and wealth to my crew, etc. etc. 

You take a thing like Beowulf, dated from the Dark Age and still relentlessly taught in American high schools, usually to seniors who don't give a damn about anything any more except moving forward towards graduation with a minimum of friction. How do you make it relevant?