I'm always surprised by what my students find interesting, for even though there is only little over a a decade between the youngest of them and me, things that I find fascinating (classic films, graphic novels, Etsy, indie music, etc.) are met with a yawn, or, worse yet, an eye-roll. But this week has me particularly scratching my head.
When I was in high school, I distinctively remember feeling like I was a person lost in time. I didn't feel like a child of the millennium -- I didn't want to get jiggy with it, or have anything to do with whatever "it" was. If I had to articulate what I wanted -- I would have given some heartfelt but entirely convoluted explanation of how I felt like I belonged in a quiet small town, somewhere in rural California, hearkening back to a world where things were hand-made and small wonders were still a way of life. I have no idea what time period I was precisely longing for (I was, after all, a raging feminist / tomboy who wasn't afraid to announce that Rochester should have died in Jane Eyre so she could be free) but I just felt that the past was far more interesting than anything this generation was going to come up with.
And I wasn't alone. One of my friends in high school had a family ranch that had been passed down for generations, a place so authentically OLD that you'd have thought Anthropologie adapted their kitschy throw-back style from their white-washed walls and rusted, once-brightly painted, useful tools strewn about. She loved that place and was proud of her family's ties to rural California, and, by God, our whole group jealously fantasized about the sort of life that ranch represented -- especially after it had graced the pages of Martha Stewart Living as an homage to a better time, a better style.
So what I don't get is -- why don't my students feel that same sense of disconnectedness and longing for a different, quieter, gentler life?
This week as my students work on descriptive pieces, I assigned them to write about a house. (Now, keep in mind, I've had many of these students before and have heard their expressions of dissatisfaction about the way technology consumes their lives.) Out of all the thrilling, creative, and opportunity-laden options they had to write about, the most popular choice was an office.
Yes, you read that right -- an office.
While I'm praying that commenting on homogeneous furniture and cubicles is the hipster thing to do now, I was even more surprised by their least favorite choices -- a tie between a rural farmhouse and an English estate.
"But Ms. Melville, I don't know HOW to describe those places...I wanna switch" was the story I heard all class, no matter how many different ways I tried to make those places sound interesting. For the farmhouse, I can understand their confusion -- it's not something they would be familiar with in their suburban environment. Few, if any of them, have ever been on a working farm and if they have, I'm sure their main memory would be the smell of the manure or too-close encounters with animals, but not the homey details.
But that still leaves me with the estate conundrum. Besides my bucolic California fantasies, the other world I was utterly obsessed with was Europe. I went through several reading phases as a teen -- one year I read every single Agatha Christie mystery the library system had, another was spent lost in the world of Russian novels, but finally, the one that still lingers in my imagination is that of the English estate.
Frankly, if you take them at face value (trying to ignore the class, women, environmental, etc. concerns), there is something about these estate stories that appeals to every generation. I've read them all -- from the classy Austen to the incredibly dramatic (and citified) Foresyte novels by Galsworthy. My students at my school have been subjected to many of them as well. So why aren't they interested? Who wouldn't want to live in one of these worlds, where you can spend your days wandering through the gardens, playing the piano, writing reflective letters, and falling in love with dashing young Byronic heroes? And according to the new PBS show, Downton Abbey, that world also involves a lot of sexual situations, intrigue, and gossip -- which is pretty much any teens' three favorite topics. So that leaves me wondering -- is it just not cool anymore to admit you like what you read? Have they not noticed every delicious morsel of Colin Firth when he was Mr. Darcy? Have they lost their ability to transport themselves into the world of fantasies?
I don't have a simple answer to these questions, but I may start asking in class about their reading habits and encouraging a healthy dose of BBC miniseries as an antidote.
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