In "A Separate Peace," Are Gene and Finny Gay?

Devon students are the "cream of the crop," the finest young men American aristocracy can produce. We hesitate to sympathize with kids who rail at a lack of maid service in 1942, but the fact that they are an exemplary, privileged class has everything to do with the eventual formulation of Knowles's theme.

No, I don't think Gene and Finny are gay. But a huge undercurrent of homophobia runs through the story, and Leper, who is entirely out of place among this crowd of preppy boys, might be gay - not to suggest there's anything wrong with that. If he's not gay, he's out of place for other reasons, among which, he's a tender-hearted loner.

The author draws together three "loners," Gene, Finny, and Leper, all of whom have tender hearts that they try to conceal to varying degrees. Despite their efforts to avoid it, an intense love/hate relationship develops between Gene and Finny, and if you don't read closely, you miss the sincere and mutual friendship between Leper and Gene, which happens during the summer before the "accident" in the tree.

Devon is ALL MALE, no girls allowed. However, early in the story, when Finny speaks of himself and Gene and Leper from a "sexual point of view," something odd is happening. It's easy to dismiss it immediately rather than to investigate, still easier to miss it completely; certainly, the other boys wouldn't want to "go there."

To state it clearly and simply, Finny and Gene find love at Devon, and Leper is left out. "Two boys in love" just doesn't work at a male prep school in 1942, even if their love is strictly Platonic, and it apparently is.

I've seen boys kissing on my athletic teams. So the rules for male-to-male bonding must have loosened up a bit in recent years. They'd just give each other "pecks" for the most part, but when they'd win something big, they'd do a lip-to-lip thing.

I ignored it. If I'd interposed and tried to stop it, I guess I'd have been doing something out of place. Then again, I don't know.

There are certainly taboos for the other extreme: If I'd done a Jerry Sandusky thing and taken part in the kissing, it would have been wrong - not that I ever had the slightest inclination to do so.

Teachers and coaches grow close to their students and athletes, without question. Most of us are reassured by rules of society that require female teachers to maintain their distance and manly men to ignore their tender emotions and remain separate. But it's difficult, and rarely any of our business, to control relationships among students.

A Separate Peace attempts to sift through many aspects of human relationships, with a special emphasis on the "manly" ones. Men get just as envious as women sometimes, and just as defensive. But unlike women, who don't have as much testosterone flowing through their veins, men develop harsh prejudices that too often stop their thought processes, and when they begin acting on these prejudices, they can be pretty dangerous.

This novel's importance has been overlooked. It's too often thought to be this little story about two boys and a tragedy at school, but it deserves more respect than that. Knowles explores the dimensions of love and discovers in its roots the same food for discord among individuals and societies that propogates conflict on the largest scale.

Maybe we'd be better off in the world with more female heads of state.

It's the end of January right now. I should have the study guide up and ready in a few more days. If you have other stories you'd like me to explore for high school and/or university language arts programs, let me know. I've got my own list of a dozen or more. I need to get back to Dickens soon, and I absolutely must deal with Julius Caesar properly as well.

Close Reading Study Guides: Of What Use Are They?

    Either we teach basic facts or we teach skills. We're required to teach both, but it's nearly impossible to teach them both at once. Facts can be delivered quickly and efficiently. But skills - oh, skills we must guide and practice many times over! When we have the opportunity, it is well to teach facts and skills simultaneously, but our teaching of skills is far more important. Absolutely without exception, in my judgment, we must at times choose to teach skills over facts

    My judgment has not always dwelt at its current residence, incidentally. In the English/Language Arts classroom, it's not hard to kill off skills (execute them! hang them! electrocute them! guillotine them!) or at least bypass them, and instead, chop up all the information students need and hand it to them so they can pass tests. Instead of requiring them to read the substance of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, it is much easier to provide summaries, hold classroom discussions, watch a video, and occasionally, read a passage or two aloud.
    We may claim that we don’t want to harm our students' respect for the great writers by dwelling too long on the cumbersome language of their stories; yet, the great stories are great precisely because of their language. So we distribute vocabulary lists and force them to look up words. That becomes the pitiful substance of our language instruction.
    A Tale of Two Cities, in my opinion, is among the finest examples of 19th Century English Literature. In all honesty, however, it is already a daunting task for me to understand Dickens myself, let alone impress him upon my students. We all know that "getting" Dickens isn't just about vocabulary words. It's about waking up to his clever way of diverging from a story and rejoining it, dropping in little flashbacks that never slow down the telling but always enhance it and always reward the reader's efforts, and his lovely, endearing way of walking with us through the whole of it, never quite fading into the background, always holding our hand with every fascinating step through.
    But alas, we hesitate to spend too much time reading again what we had to read in college. After all, we need to get on with Shaw next, and it's nearly impossible to instill in our students true respect for an author's art and craftsmanship in the little time available.
    To beat an excuse into absolute submission, we certainly don’t want to “turn the kids off” by getting them too bogged down in all of that! So we “cut to the chase,” to the substance, the delicious substance of the story, and we deliver it: Sidney let them chop off his head because he loved a woman more than anyone else in the world. He loved her so much that he decided to die for the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
    The chase has been cut to; the heart of the story has been cut out; Sidney's head has been cut off. We hand it all over to our kids. There. They now have all the bloody facts. Test time.
    The bigger entity, the thing that lived in the hearts of all the strange and wonderful characters of that story, the thing that gathers life and meaning from every wrinkle of every event of that whole narrative and places it all into Sidney's final sacrifice, the thing that grows to live in the heart of a reader for the rest of his or her life, that thing we have aborted. It has died before it has lived. It has had as quick a death as poor Sidney himself. It lies twitching, just as heartless as a guillotined body is headless.
    Hail to the educational revolution! The kids have got it now. Take a test. On to Pygmalion!

    It's unbelievable, but it's understandable. We teachers live it every day. But from the outside looking in, some of our methods of instruction today seem just as chaotic and senseless as does the French Revolution from the perspective of history.
    I’ve been there - not at the French Revolution, no - I've lived as a citizen of the chaos of modern education. I've witnessed its descent into further chaos. I did all the same stuff. I assigned reading, then I quizzed students on that first reading, but that was it. Their reading was exercised no further until they’d been exposed to at least one retelling. Most of the time, their first reading was their only reading; I would give kids the story in about two or three different forms afterward. I would kill off the story, chop it up, and hand over all the dead, cold "facts" in exhaustive reviews, and only after we'd studied the parts would I test them. 

    I neatly guided students past the difficulties; I skirted the instruction of skills. I aborted it, delivering facts to kids in English classes from seventh through twelfth grades, classes from which many of them emerged boasting that they had not actually read a single word of great literature all year. Usually, their grades were nothing to boast of - a portion of my students’ grades leaned significantly on reading quizzes - but they could fail reading quizzes, listen in class, and pass tests without too much strain. If they worked hard at writing, they could earn "B's" in my class without ever exercising their reading skills.

    Those were fun years, though. I did a lot of acting for my kids. I became an Anglo-Saxon scop! Like the teller of Beowulf, I dramatized the major events of stories. I engraved those events into my students' memories!
    Then I prepared them to watch with care as those same events were dramatized in the video versions of the stories. When we finished viewing, we invariably discussed liberties taken by the actors, directors, and producers. Most of my kids could  tell you where a movie delivered accurate representations of an author's intentions and where it failed. When we studied a story, my kids knew it and loved it.
     That didn’t mean they’d read it; it didn't mean the story really lived in them;  their skills for reading more stories like it went woefully lacking. Nevertheless, that’s the way I taught it.

    Those methods are not out of date. They continue in use to this day. And yes, I still use them; I still dramatize. I still provide interpretive insights for the delicious substance of stories.
    But now I also require students to complete in-class reading, a second reading, after they've taken their first quiz on the material. They must complete that second reading, along with the corresponding study guide work, for some portion of the great literature. I decide what portion. I make my determinations based on how much work they prove capable of doing (and yes, based also on how much time we have before we need to start on Shaw). I start with small amounts of work and build to larger amounts. As dearly as I love telling them what I think of the great classics, I have learned to hold back and insist that they first tell me what they think. I design the course so that they must engage in that activity in order to pass.

    We are not doing our kids any favors “sparing them the pain” of reading. We English teachers should love and respect the pains Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dickens took to turn a phrase. That's why close reading study guides became useful to me, and since I was unable to locate the sort of close reading study guides I needed, I began creating them myself.

    Now you know. I hope you have read closely. I hope your reading has been rewarded. I realize I'm no great writer, but I hope I have told the facts well enough so that you not only know, but also appreciate them.
    So, "Vive la Revolution!"
    But enough with the guillotine. Let's support the lives of the great works. Let's stop hacking them to pieces. Let's get back to teaching our kids the whole skill of reading.

"Wohlsi"? What's Up with That?

    The kids I coached in football and track shortened up my last name to the first syllable, “Wohls,” and added the “i.” When I first heard them using that, I was a little irate. I used to think respect made everything happen. You can’t call me a pet name like “Wohlsi” and respect me.

    I was wrong.

    They were paying me the highest respect. It was a token of familiarity, but it was their own, one which they all liked to use. And every time they used it, they were telling me how much they loved me.

    As a coach, you don’t understand that for a while. You think that kind of affection destroys your authority. But you’re wrong.

    So I - being ignorant about all that and helpless about what I should do - I let it happen, just like I’d always allowed my daughters to think whatever they wanted to think of me as they grew up. And today, I’m as proud as a dad can be of his daughters.

    Cory saw me in the bar last night. I saw him, pointed at him, and smiled. And he came over and hugged me. “Coach!” he said. “God, it’s good to see you!”

    I think he said “Wohlsi” once or twice too. But that doesn’t matter. He proceeded to tell me of all the work he had done in New York, relating to the energy field and development of computer applications to suit the needs of various companies. And now he’s back in town performing the lead role in application development at a major energy company here.

    He was my offensive guard and an excellent shot-putter. He was also my student in English. I’m very proud of Cory.

Two Boys Shook My Hand

So I did my little substitute teaching lecture on Macbeth a while back. Retired teacher, now guest lecturer. Kids liked what they heard. Two boys came up after 4th period and said, “Thanks, Mr. W. You made it [real].”

But it was an exceptionally good group of kids. And I had an opportunity to teach my favorite scene, the one where Lady MacDuff is visited by Ross while she is with her son, Act Four, Scene Two (AS 42).

Then her son, and she, and all the others, are mercilessly killed by a man desiring, not power, which he already has, but security.

Security. We all want security. But is that worth killing for?

Tuesday I'm doing another one on Beowulf.

Getting Your CDL and Shakespeare: A Conversation

All teachers have had parts of this conversation with their students at some time in the past. Here is the conversation in its entirety:

“I don’t get it. You told me to read it. I read it last night. I don’t get it. You can’t give me a quiz on it, ‘cause I don’t understand what I read.”

“You’re taking the quiz anyway.”

“ But you can’t give me a quiz on it.”

“I can, and I will.”

“But I’ll get an ‘F’ on it!”

“Next time, maybe you’ll do better.”

“Next time you assign Shakespeare, I won’t even try reading it. I’ll just take the ‘F.’ Reading it’s a waste a’ time.”

“Is driving a waste of time?”

“Driving? What does that have to do with it?”

“Never mind; just answer the question. Is driving a waste of time and effort?”

“No. I drive a lot. I have to drive.”

“Can you drive a semi tractor-trailer rig?”

“Well, no, but what has that got to do with-?”

“Just cooperate with me a minute and answer the question.”

“No, I can’t drive a semi. I don’t have no license to drive no semi. I don’t have no CDL; that’s a commercial driver’s license. I don’t have none. I don’t need it.”

“You many never need a CDL, but you absolutely will need to read and comprehend at an advanced level. How are you going to do that?”

“When I need to, I will.”

“You need to now.”

“Why?”
“You have to start passing some of these quizzes.”

“But I don’t understand what I’m reading. I told you that.”

“So someday, you might want to get your CDL. If you ever do, will you just slide behind the wheel and start the engine and have the examiner check out your skills?”

“Well, I’ll practice first.”

“You’ll have someone teach you how to start it.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll have someone teach you how to shift, how to make those wide, difficult turns, how to back it up to a loading dock.”

“Right.”

“Then you’ll take your test?”

“Right.”

 “Without any practice?”

“Well, the guy teaching me will give me practice!”

“This first Act of the play is your practice. Are you going to do the practice or not?”

“I told you, I don’t understand it. There’s no use failing a quiz and wasting the time.”

“So, if there was no quiz, would you practice?”

“No. I mean, why should I?”

“Because you need the skill. Your CDL instructor will have you practice skills. He’ll give you small amounts to do at a time. He won’t send you from here to New York or Los Angeles for practice, but he might take you on a twenty-miler. He’ll tell you when you’re doing things wrong. You’ll fail. They’ll be small failures, like failures on little quizzes, not major tests. He’ll tell you that you’ve failed, and he’ll show you what you’ve done wrong. You’ll do better on similar situations later, as they come up. Then you’ll try something else and fail. Then you’ll get better at that too. But if you don’t practice and fail, you’ll never practice and succeed.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So I don’t want you to read the whole play. I want you to read a couple scenes from Act I. Then you’ll take a little quiz. And it will be a quiz that will count for something, but not for too much in terms of grade. And then I’ll show you how to negotiate the twists and turns. I’ll show you what questions to ask yourself when you run up against obstacles. I’ll show you when to back up and how to do that. You’ll learn how to get around better. Then we’ll try reading a few more scenes, and you’ll get just a little better. Your quiz scores will go up gradually, not all at once, but gradually, if you keep practicing, and I’ll show you how to get from here to there. So when are you going to start practicing?”

“Look. I’ll get better at reading on my own, better at the basics, I mean.”

“Just like you learn the rules of the road and apply them as you drive your little car around.”

“Yeah, right. And then I’ll read better and better, and then I’ll be able to understand. Someday. Maybe.”

“So, without ever actually sitting behind the wheel of that semi and without actually starting it and putting it into motion, and without practicing driving that rig, you’ll learn how to control a tractor and fifty or sixty feet of machinery behind you, all by driving your little car around? Someday? Maybe? Is that how it works?”

“One thing has nothing to do with the other! I don’t need a CDL! I have no interest in getting a CDL!”

“But you need to start reading at an advanced level.”

“Yeah, for your class, you said!”

“Not just for my class; for all sorts of standardized tests, for college entrance exams, for entrance into the military, for any sort of educational program you might try for the rest of your life, for the operation of modern computers, even for instructions on how to put together your child’s swing set someday.”

“Most of those things are easier to read than Shakespeare, and they’re more relevant to my life.”

“Some of those things are harder to read than Shakespeare, and none of them is more relevant. Shakespeare always has something to say about all of human experience, virtually every moment of it.”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t care about all of human experience?”

“No. I don’t care about Shakespeare. It’s too hard. I won’t need to read that good to get along in the world. My dad and mom can’t, and they did OK.”

“That’s true. Many of our citizens can’t. In fact, most of our congressmen can’t, and some of them are even foolish enough to condemn the reading of classical literature. Sometimes they even admit that they don’t read themselves. They have lots of excuses. Some say they don’t have time.

“While denigrating the classics, they also insist that high school students pass standardized tests on math and reading. So you students are forced to learn calculus in high school and you’re required to show proficiency in your use of language. They make you take tests in which you read passages of college level text, Shakespeare passages among them, that significant numbers of those congressmen would have very serious trouble reading, and they further require you to answer complex questions that test your comprehension, questions that many of them would be embarrassed to tangle with.”

“They can’t do that. They can’t make me do what they’ll never do.”

“They do that.”

“Why?”

“Because the rest of the world is getting smarter than we are, and frankly, smarter than our congressmen for that matter. We’ve got to catch up if we’re going to remain a great nation.”

“So they put it all on us.”

“All on us.”

“Not you. Us. Us students!”

“Us teachers too, Young Student; us teachers too. Don’t be too hard on the congressmen, though. Most congressmen can’t operate a semi either.”

“But I’m not even sure I want to go to college. If I had a chance, I’d study truck driving, or welding, or auto mechanics, or maybe even computers. Then I’d learn the language I’d need to know, because I’d need to. So why do I have to read Shakespeare?”

“Well, if you lived in other countries of the world, you wouldn’t have to. They’d either give you a test, or give you a choice, and if you proved more suited to a program of technical education, or vocational education, or if you had special interests or talent, or both with regard to computers, or carpentry, or any other real skill, you wouldn’t be studying Shakespeare; you’d be studying –“

“I’d be studying things I’m really interested in! I’d have more freedom to choose in other countries than I do in this country, which is supposedly the freest country in the world. Ha!”

“Yes, but at the end of your high school years, you wouldn’t have the freedom to enter college.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t want to.”

“But we need you to be college educated here in this country. We need people like you to do technical and professional work, because that’s where the jobs are today in our country, and that means-”

“I don’t have much choice.”

“Sounds like you’re criticizing the system?”

“The education system.”

“The whole system. Society. You’re criticizing America’s de-emphasis of manufacturing and the rise of technology, its collective decision to lead in finance and in various other professions, not just traditional professions like lawyering and doctoring and educating, but also those connected with innovations in new energy sources, advances in technology and -”

“I don’t care about those things. I just want to have a simple job, own a little place, raise a family …”

“But your freedom to live that way is diminishing more and more all the time. Most jobs that support homes and families are no longer simple, and they’re changing constantly. You’ve got to have very strong technical skills at the very least in order to get a job. Then you must be capable of learning much more on your own in order to maintain your position and advance, meaning, you’ll need to educate yourself, to read and understand difficult material.

“Then I’d rather learn technical skills, and forget about college.”

“Now you’re criticizing the other system.”

“The educational system?”

“The educational system. We could follow the examples of other countries. We could conceivably make powerful tech ed programs available to some high school kids and powerful college prep programs available to others, but we’re not there yet and we’re not moving in that direction. We might eventually.”

“So in the meantime, you have to cram Shakespeare down my throat.”

“I do. You’ll have to contend with passages from Shakespeare and even with more complex literature. In the standardized tests, you’ll - ”

“You already said that. But you can’t like cramming it? You can’t like doing that all the time. You must feel a little, uh –?”

“Compelled, I suppose.”

“But maybe even worse?”

“Intimidated?”

“Yeah! Intimidated! That’s how I feel sometimes! Intimidated! That’s why I fight back!”

“Refusing to collaborate, eh?”

“Yeah! Refusing to collaborate in the, uh, the-”

“Conspiracy against your freedoms?”

“Yeah! Refusing to collaborate in the conspiracy against my freedoms! Yeah!”

“You see? You don’t even have the language skills to express how you feel. Don’t you wish you did?”

“Why should I? You figured out how I feel! You understand me!”

“Look, most people in power don’t mean to intimidate us. Some do, I’m sure. Some feel it’s the best way to govern and get things done. Some respect intimidation as the best way forward, but most are better people than that. If there’s a conspiracy at all, it’s unconscious for the most part. Only the really nasty ones think they’ve got it over on someone else. The point is, most people don’t spend too much time worrying about how others feel about the system, educational or otherwise, and to some extent, yes, it is a conspiracy. They set aside your feelings about it all because they perceive them as immature, maybe erroneous, and maybe even invalid. They see the freedom of getting a first class education as a true freedom, whether you have a liking for it or not.”

“But how do you feel?”

“Well, … I know I could do a much better job of teaching if I had highly motivated, excellent readers and writers in class. We could go farther. We could do more work. Then kids would develop true skills recognizing the subtleties in a piece of literature, and they could transfer those skills to everything they read and hear. I would feel confident about their chances at excelling on an ACT, SAT, or other standardized exam. I could be sure that they’d listen much more closely to campaign speeches and would discern, not only what is said, but also what is left out. They would be able to gather evidence and establish very good explanations for the candidates’ decisions to choose words so. They would be capable of assessing and dismissing the base, unfounded claims being tossed about. I would be much more secure in the knowledge that their votes would be informed by intelligent inferences regarding the strategies of unscrupulous, deceptive politics.”

“I bet you don’t like having kids like me around who don’t care about any of that stuff, do you?”

“You’re wrong. I enjoy kids like you. I enjoy conversations like this. And little though you may like it, I enjoy having the opportunity to teach you the universal truths contained in works by Shakespeare, even if you refuse to read. I enjoy it because the truths are so very applicable to our experiences, and once you see them, maybe you’ll even change your mind about reading the great authors who have arrived at them. Many, many of my students have thoroughly enjoyed Shakespeare’s work in my classes, and even if they decided not to read him, they benefited by watching and understanding his plays.”

“But I slow you down. You want to do more. You want me to read, and I’m not going to.”

“Yes, there is that element of frustration all right. I can’t make you want to get Shakespeare, any more than I can make you want to get a CDL. I’d always like to see you do more, but I understand the limitations, and now you do too. Unless we alter the educational system itself, we can’t compete with the vastly different systems of the world. You can’t raise test scores simply by forcing everyone to try harder. You need to find the most talented kids, group them out of the rest, and let them shoot ahead. Then your average scores will go up, and you’ll find more real talent to fill jobs. Kids who earn certification in carpentry or welding or auto mechanics might just have to go unemployed for a while.

“But I’m not entirely certain we’re doing the wrong thing, either. Our country’s educational systems may never catch up with those of Finland or Japan or China, or even Canada, for that matter, but teaching all our kids the great truths of the greatest philosophers and literary figures that ever lived is definitely not wrong, whether our students learn to read for themselves or not. And who knows? Maybe the system, the broader system, society itself, might eventually revert to the values of a former time, so that people who want to work in the trades, in construction or industry, will be able to find job opportunities that give them wages, benefits, and improved standards of living again. Do you understand?”

“Nope. I mean, I understand that part of it, yeah; but it still don’t make no sense to me. I still don’t see what’s in it for you.”

“Most of us never got in it for ourselves.”

“Oh. … Ya. Whatever …”

“Good way to keep greed out of it. Make teachers work pretty hard; make ‘em struggle just a little to keep up financially. Make ‘em think twice about being teachers. You also have a way to wash out the weak ones in the first few years. Lay on the work. Keep wages down. A teacher’s got to be pretty dedicated to stay in the profession for any time at all.”

“Yeah, or pretty stupid.”

“Maybe. Maybe. So, you want the last word in this little argument?”

“Ya, last word: Getting my CDL I understand. Reading Shakespeare? Getting Shakespeare, whatever? WHAT … EVER!”