Lazyteacher

I’ve always had a hard time teaching short stories. Beyond the most obvious, teacher-proof ones (The Lottery, Harrison Bergeron), I’ve struggled with how to approach them. Should I have them read them in class to make sure it gets done and the discussion is decent? Should I frontload a lot of “Elements of the Short Story?” Should I get into author biography and historical context? Should I dwell on issues of exposition, conflict, and resolution? Of course, all of those issues show up when we teach novels or plays, but I usually have one day to do a short story and then it’s gone, released to the already-taught ether and whatever decisions I make have to be good enough. See this long document by Dewey Hensely for Kentucky for ideas (.pdf).

Usually, I have the students teach the short stories to each other.

I recently finished Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (from a tip on Bookslut) and I want to try again. She has a difficult style for kids and offputting to some: whimsical with a hint of disaster, winding plots, evocative if strange descriptions, and a taste for the surreal. Her first short story “The Faery Handbag” starts with a description of the Garment District in Boston and tells the story of her Grandmother Zofia who has an immense handbag which contains an entire village, a slavering dog, and the Zofia’s husband. Obviously, there are elements of magic realism there where you’re never sure if the rules of the story are different than the “real” world or if the characters are just coo-coo.

Link has a breezy, quirky style which is fun to read.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and T-shirts and shoes and handbags involves The Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they are bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they start to reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

It’s verbal in its rhythms and eschews SAT words but for kids, and I’ll want to test this out on a few willing victims. I’m worried that the way she plays with reality and fantasy might irritate kids who want to know what’s going on at all times. Later stories have zombies and stone rabbits that come to life, but they’re always literary zombies who are reflective of the consumerist society or literary rabbits who symbolize modern ennui. They never just haul off and munch on brains. Still…zombies are zombies. Here are a couple of other review to get a second and third opinion.

Magic would be a good book to have on hand for the quirky, misunderstood kid who has a bit emo radiating from his/her general direction. I’d love for this to work with a larger class and it might in the aforementioned short story student to student teaching. It would definitely stand out next to Hills like White Elephants or By the Waters of Babylon.

Any others have success in teaching short stories.