Classroom necessity as mother of invention

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Teachers always know what’s coming next. When I first entered the profession, I was told, “If you don’t have an agenda, the students will certainly have one for you.”

So I have been very organized since then, knowing how I will get from point A to point B at all times of the year.

Until last week. I could whine a bit and tell you it was the primary election or the ice storm or doctors’ appointments — but then I’d begin to sound like a slacker student. The truth is that my mind was anticipating the three-day weekend, and it wasn’t until Friday morning that I realized I had no idea what we would be doing in class after the weekend.

Of course, I had it written down in my planner. But what was carefully recorded needed photocopying to the tune of 150 copies of a 20-page Advanced Placement multiple-choice practice test, and Saint Suzanne (as I call the invaluable woman who does our Xeroxing at Oakton) doesn’t work on Fridays.

Eliot Waxman, my co-teacher, merely smiled and said, “You’ll think of something.” And since Eliot is always right, I proceeded to do just that.

We had just finished the novel “Bel Canto” and the students, as always happens with this novel, loved it up until the epilogue. That put me in mind of another unsatisfactory epilogue, one all my students know well: The ending of the Harry Potter series.

Why are endings so important? We forgive authors plot inconsistencies and unrealistic characters, but we want the ending to be “just right.” I decided to make that the topic of Senior Seminar for the first half of the week.

Margaret Atwood has a witty and wonderful essay on “Happy Endings” in our textbook, so that will start the activity. We will then talk about what we think of the epilogues of “Bel Canto” and the last Harry Potter book. Why do they seem unsatisfactory? What do we expect from endings? Do endings in our lives usually meet our expectations, or fall short?

Eliot suggested we add a government component, since Senior Seminar prides itself on those connections. We will talk about public policy and end-of-life issues. Why are the topics of assisted suicide, Social Security, prescription benefits, and health care for the aged such hot-button issues? Do our expectations for endings in fiction have any relevance as we look to our expectations for endings in the real world?

This lesson has all the ingredients of a highly engaging activity: application to the real world (policy issues), relevance to students’ lives (high school is about to end), connection to school reading (“Bel Canto”) as well as to their pleasure reading (Harry Potter.) It’s a can’t-miss lesson plan that would never have existed had I not gotten distracted last week. And they will be connecting literature, government and life — which is the major goal of Senior Seminar.

The ending of this column will have to wait until I see how the students react to the class. Will it be the perfect ending, or an epilogue that falls short of expectations?

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