English Teacher Weekly for July 10th
The Summer Sizzler (Part 1) and an abundant Hyperlink Garden
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities at large. If you care about these things, you will find a lot to enjoy here at ETW. It’s a real pleasure to put these together for you each week.
This week marks the beginning of our inaugural Summer Sizzler series. We invited ETW readers to contribute a brief reflective piece about the season—a literary moment, a summer memory, maybe a meditation on the season. I am happy to report that ETW readers rose to the challenge. If you enjoy these pieces, make sure to give the writers some love in the comments section.
Next week, we’ll publish part two of the Summer Sizzler series. You’ll find a fruitful hyperlink garden at the end. Enjoy!
THE SUMMER SIZZLER
Opening Day, by Aimee Guest
Owning a bookstore was new for us that summer. I had carefully chosen the titles for our collection, keeping each type of customer in mind. The weight of responsibility felt heavy, as if a tome of Anna Karenina rested on one shoulder and a volume of Les Miserables (English translation) on the other. The burden lifted just a bit when I pictured a smile blooming across a customer’s face the moment they discovered an old favorite or a new one.
On the other side of the door I could hear a low murmur, a nervous giggle, and one customer saying to another: “I wonder what I’ll find today”. I opened the blinds until the sun lit up the displays of fiction and non-fiction. Running my hands along the spines and over the covers, I inhaled. The comforting scent of books filled the room. I exhaled with my own smile blooming.
My husband straightened one last sign. I checked my watch.
“It’s time,” I said.
He walked over and opened the door and three faces looked up at him. The tallest girl, with serious eyebrows, tried to peer around him into the store. Another had pigtails that bounced as she jumped and her Swiss cheese grin proved she’d been keeping the tooth fairy busy. Finally the smallest customer held his oldest sister’s hand, his cherubic face looking up at his sisters, eyes as blue as the sky outside.
“The bookstore is officially open,” my husband announced with a sweeping bow, as if he were Willy Wonka himself opening the doors to the chocolate factory.
The children rushed past him.
They would be our sole customers that summer, using the only currency we accepted: pretend dollar bills and little plastic coins from The Dollar Store. Rich with the money they’d received for every minute spent reading over the past week, they spread out and went slowly from table to table, book to book.
The summer of The Bookworm had begun.
is a maker, mother, wife, kayaker, bike rider, theater teacher, and beauty seeker. She writes , a newsletter about making space in our everyday lives for creativity, courage and curiosity. (https://aimeeguest.substack.com/)
Summer Was Our Best Season, by Corley Humphrey
For me, To Kill a Mockingbird almost solely exists in the summertime. Sure, it technically takes place over a handful of years (decades, if you’re Scout, trying to decide what really led to this), but the summer scenes make the novel enduring. When we think of summer, we think of ease and bliss. Even those with a “9-5” can’t help but expect relaxation. It’s probably because of those school-free summers: swimming when you would be stuck at a desk, running around with friends without looming homework, staying up until the early hours, or just going on vacation. A nostalgic innocence hangs as thick as the air. So, if a story focuses on innocence and its loss, shouldn’t it be set in the summer? Mockingbird has relatively universal childhood memories from every season. Scout and Jem make a “snowman” (that any Southerner would recognize); they constantly snoop and theorize about their odd neighbor, “Boo”; Scout gets into schoolyard fights; and so on. They even have a friend, Dill, who only visits in the summer and joins their childish escapades. However, what sticks is Tom Robinson’s trial, happening in the unforgiving summer heat. When the children try to enjoy their freedom, this trial fills the season with the heaviness of intolerance and racism. Many mock and threaten Atticus and his family–with Scout and Jem infamously attacked by Bob Ewell. Worse, their summer ends with Tom, a helpful and blameless man, dead. The simplicity of the season–and its interwoven childhood–is altered. Gone with it are the assumptions of kindness and justice from the town and world. Yes, this is all rooted in how Jem broke his arm, but the overlap of summer and Tom’s fate emphasize an important lesson: innocence never lasts.
From Corley Humphrey: I am a high school English teacher at Silverdale Baptist Academy with a Masters in English from Liberty University. I help run our Literary Arts Society, the Hawk and Quill, and enjoy creative writing (poetry & nonfiction mostly) in my free time. Also, as a true literature lover, my dog’s name is a reference: Bingley— and it sure does fit him! (You can read her Masters thesis on Harper Lee’s work here)
How to Beat the Heat (or How to Avoid Al Dente), by Tim Bond
Most of my adult life, I worked as a summer camp director. I don’t know if this was a joke from God or blind luck, but my Scotch-Irish body was, and is, not suited to the heat. Growing up in the South, you learn humidity and heat may not be your friend, especially if you are a 6-foot-4 chubby noodle of a man. The key to contentment while broiling under the eyes of Rah is: ignore those sweaty pits, don’t look at your red face in a mirror, and no white t-shirts. White t-shirts are not for you, you will ruin them before the end of the pay period.
Shade is your friend, but leaning into the heat is your most trusted ally. Plan your sartorial day out. Short shorts, wicking button down short sleeve shirts, and sunglasses to draw attention away from your balding and probably sunburnt head. Location, location, location. Convince your friends to do a float down a lazy river, have drinks on covered patios, and pray that no one plans an outdoor summer wedding.
At the end of the day, it feels a bit like sitting in a slowly boiling pot on a stove, but this will pass. The air will chill, you will get to pull out those dungarees and sweaters. Campfires, cold plunges, and fall hikes will return. But, for now, the goal is to avoid arriving at al dente.
Tim Bond is from Chattanooga, TN—a Christian hedonist, summer enthusiast, lover of all things good.
Summer Flowers, by Joyce McPherson
Every summer my husband plants wild flowers among the more conventional garden plants, like my grandmother’s roses. He gets the seeds from friends and often forgets what they are, so every summer we search for their names. In the English-speaking world, a single flower may have many names like the common wild pansy, which in Great Britain becomes heart’s ease. The trail of flower names enhances my novel-reading—another necessary element of summer time. I savor lyrical descriptions of flowers like this one from the novel, Robert Falconer:
He … went out into the garden, now in the height of its summer. Great cabbage roses hung heavy-headed splendours towards purple-black heart’s-ease, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend …. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God.
This was written by George MacDonald, whom C.S. Lewis considered one of the best authors for communicating a sense of “holiness.” His flower names evoke deeper ideas—what are pods of honesty? Do I need to tuck some heart’s ease into my pocket? The lily symbolizes purity, and the choice of the word narcissus (instead of daffodil), reminds us of mythology and the youth who turned into a flower when he fell in love with his own image. Traditional roses, wild heart’s ease, pods of honesty, pure lilies, and vainglorious narcissus—a surprising assortment, but isn’t it just like the kingdom of God?
Joyce McPherson teaches English at Covenant College and writes biographies for children. Her newest book is Spiritual Sight: The Story of George MacDonald.
Home, by Dan Frost
Tonight, I miss home. Given the chance to cross oceans and slide back into life there, with friends and family to surround myself with, I wouldn’t contact anyone. I’d go and shove my hands in the dirt, break the grass, lie in it, let it get under my fingernails and fill the cracks in my hands. Cracks I didn’t have when I left. Cracks I didn’t have when she told me she loved me. When we walked up the dune and the sand burned our feet, but we didn’t care because we had the superpower of young love. She held my hand. Fingers interlocked because we weren’t amateurs anymore. We stopped at the top and faced each other, still in the heat, the ocean waves the only movement in my periphery. I said it first, and she replied in kind after the customary pause. Autumn, spring and winter have been fine friends, but it was summer who taught me to smile.
Dan was born and raised in New Zealand but now lives in Michigan with his wife and two kids. He’s on full-time Dad duty while he works on his writing and studies Italian.
Three Ocean Poems, by Chase Waller
“Decay”
Hush,
Let me rest on the far reaches of the beach,
Where the ghost crabs stealthily grab the trash
In the heat.
Oh my god, what a mess! Like the foam on the crest
Of the wave, crashing to earth on the surf then the sand.
Everything that rises must float.
And when anything floats, bobbing around like a boat,
Tossed on the waves of the sea, never resting, never free,
Everything that floats never sinks,
Until it breaks and it takes everything down with a gush
To the ocean floor where it wobbles and totters no more.
Everything that sinks stays very still.
Please.
Let me rest in the deep reaches of the sea;
Let the ghost crabs pick at my pale flesh because
Everything dies.
“Marsh”
The putrid smell
of the empty oyster shell
Lies in the fog of the marsh
like a tick in the hair of a dog
in the early morning tide
as the sun
decides
not to hide,
and the water
recedes back to its ocean home.
And now the boat
slowly makes
its final approach
to the port where the sailors
sleep in Boston Whalers,
and others empty crabs
into metal containers.
Drops of gasoline leak
into the steady sea
making poison rainbows
with peacock coloring.
“Emerald Isle”
When the trap surfaced with a
Puffer fish nested in the wire
Frame, surrounded by sunburnt little
Faces, skin stretched tight in awe;
And when Matt dropped the
Stone crab into the yellow
Bucket, the largest stone crab
I’ve ever seen, after his
Joyful call for the net in the
Knee deep shallows by the
Dock; And when, having crafted
An oceanic landscape in the
Storage box, complete with
Clams, and rocks, and razor-sharp
Oyster shells, we filled our
Menagerie with pinfish and crabs;
And when, with the playful
Shouts of panic, a flurry of limbs
Floundered to stop the
Blue crab, armored and poised
Like an Arthurian knight, from
Escaping the deck and vanishing
Into the clear brown lapping of the
North Carolina intercoastal waters,
I fell in love with the ocean again.
Chase Waller teaches at the Logos Tutorial Program in Rising Fawn, GA. He is married to Sammie Waller.
Summertime Thoughts, by Haley Pringle
Some may argue that January is the time of beginnings, but they might reconsider. To June, I owe my love of sewing, thrift flips, vibrant tangerine linen pants, and a healthy fascination of watermelon with salt. Summer slows time’s pace and brings a bubbling of appreciation.
My summer muses are found in art museums. On a beige wall, a perfect summer day rests within an oil painting. Blue skies peer over green grasslands and unpaved roads. Cottony white clouds perch peacefully above.
At home, colors and crafts become more adventurous during the sweltering months. My eyes are drawn towards bright yellow shirts in nearly ANY style; and they linger on small moments of appreciation when I see lush grass growing wild in pockets of shade in the yard.
Summertime allows for a pause—a breath. And with this break, comes a new appreciation for this world that God has beautifully and vibrantly crafted.
A Floridian living in Tennessee, Haley Pringle is an English teacher and thrifting aficionado.
Losing Summer, by Daniel Dassow
The child’s name is Justice. I realize calling him a “child” ages me, since he’s already 12 years old, but at less than twice his age, I have no idea how to talk to him.
He’s my bosses’ son. I use the plural possessive because my bosses are married to each other and they have this one boy, who was sitting in the lobby of our building one June morning as I came to work. I am a reporter at the local paper, and they are editors. I send them stories about this and that, and they clean up the sentences.
Their boy is a mess. His laughter echoes around the newsroom. He plays Pacman on the arcade machine tucked in the corner and bothers his dad — the executive editor who’s always on his phone — with strange memes and bad knock-knock jokes. I feel bad for the kid; his parents are perpetually distracted. I wonder what kind of childhood he is having. I know it can’t be as good as mine was, even if we’re plausibly (horrifically) in the same generation.
That late June morning I came into the lobby, he was eating a McDonald’s pancake and watching videos on a phone. I wondered why he wasn’t in school. I almost asked him later when he banged on the newsroom door and I got up to let him in. I didn’t like his presence here, his lack of anywhere to be. He seemed lost.
Later that night, I tell my wife about the sad image. The truant boy eating fast food while his parents ignore him. She tells me, “It’s summer.”
I say, “What?”
She says, “It’s summer. He’s not supposed to be anywhere.”
Daniel Dassow is a newspaper reporter from East Tennessee who majored in English.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
For The Rabbit Room, Cindy Anderson collects an excellent assortment of “Summer Books for Children”—stories that highlight the best of the season: “hikes through meandering trails, trips to the lake or pond, walks through our neighborhoods, and simple times spent in nature with family and friends.”
Also from The Rabbit Room,
on what modernity has done to us: “…modernity isn’t making things better, per se. Instead, it is making everything more powerful.”From
: Lessons from a Jewish day school on how to go phone-freeFrom The Jerusalem Post: a 4,000-year-old structure was recently discovered in Crete with a unique “labyrinthine layout.”
For The Paris Review, Jacob Rubin makes the case for the enneagram as a way to understand the complexity of human desires and fears: “When I was a boy, the most obvious thing, in almost any situation, seemed to be something that wasn’t named. This unspoken thing usually had to do with desires or strong emotions that appeared to run under people’s words. In a stained glass window, the least striking element is often the very scene being depicted. People could have that quality when I was little, resembling stencils marbled with glowing hues. Where did their hidden longings end? Where did mine begin?”
From the NYT: “Los Angeles schools hired a start-up to build an A.I. chatbot for parents and students. A few months later, the company collapsed.” I’m absolutely stunned.
Matteo Wong for The Atlantic: Generative AI can’t cite its sources: “Even if a chatbot retrieves good information, today’s generative-AI programs are prone to twisting, ignoring, or misrepresenting data. Large language models are designed to write lucid, fluent prose by predicting words in a sequence, not to cross-reference information or create footnotes. A chatbot can tell you that the sky is blue, but it doesn’t “understand” what the sky or the color blue are.”
From Atlas Obscura: How to Tell a Great Campfire Story—“I’m going to tell you a story that I learned from the very birds that are sitting in the trees with us right now. In fact, birds all over the world tell this story, whenever one of their young wants to know where she came from…”
America’s Declaration of Independence was followed less than a decade later by a similar declaration from a group of Native Americans in the Northeast: “On November 7, 1785, a group of Native American families gathered in a farmhouse near present-day Deansboro, New York—about 15 miles southwest of Utica—and established a new nation, the first American republic to be founded in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.”—For The Atlantic, Ryan O. Carr investigates the history and significance of this new nation called Brothertown.
For Words Without Borders, Tahitian poet Flora Aurima Devatine on the symbolic relationship between water and language:
Water is the language space, the space of languages And poetry, writing, literature, Are the canoe advancing over the water, over the sea, with its society, its culture, in the canoe, in the partly submerged hull of the canoe. And it’s the canoe that needs the language, the water element, seawater, the fluid marine space, In order to move forward.
What a lovely and diverse collection!
Today I was in and out of a lot of stores and the signs of school supplies and Fall clothes are already closing in. It's soothing the way words can invite us to linger in summer a little longer.
Thanks for including my piece and looking forward to next week!
I love these entries- fabulous writing!