A New Year, Some New Stories
It feels good to be a teacher in 2025. It always has, but this year I feel particularly fresh and ready to share beautiful stories with young people. Here are some fun stories from the first week back in 2025:
3rd Grade Literature
We are reading Linda Sue Park’s short and beautiful book, The Kite Fighters, which is about one young boy’s quest to find a path for himself, despite the feeling of always being overshadowed by his older brother. We read a chapter about the boy receiving a special opportunity to fly a kite in honor of his king, and about the quiet pride the boy feels. My students were quite touched by this moment—this group of students is particularly sensitive, and they feel certain emotional tones more keenly. Something about this young boy’s attainment of a special thing only for himself really resonated with them. They wrote about it beautifully:
The king asks Young-sup to fly his dragon kite in the kite fights because Young-sup is a great flyer. This means a lot to Young-sup because he doesn’t usually get to do special things—his brother does. It is a huge honor.
4th Grade Literature
We are reading The Hobbit in 4th grade literature, and I don’t think I have ever shared it with a more appreciative audience. It was a challenge to figure out how to teach The Hobbit when I first started doing it years ago, but I’ve hit upon the right method… And when I describe it, you’ll laugh!
I teach it in the same way I would teach a non-fiction title.
See? I told you!
What a funny thing to say about a work of fantasy. And yet, I promise it works. Here’s why: with something like The Hobbit, which is an exciting adventure, but depends heavily on its setting, there must be a certain attitude of intellectual curiosity in the reader. And, with children, the way to accomplish that is by showing them a glimpse of the whole concept—telling them about the richness of Middle Earth, about Tolkien himself, and about everything that went into making it. By having the glimpse of the whole to aspire towards, they feel that curiosity and enjoy the parts leading up to it so much more. So, I tell them that the world they are about to enter has been crafted lovingly from the ground up, and is meant to feel old, lived-in, and full of its own past and legends. I tell them explicitly that when we read The Hobbit, we should certainly appreciate the heroic narrative, but we would be remiss to neglect the colorful world that serves as its background. This light preparation gives them the prompting to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak, while they read The Hobbit. And so, we spend a whole class period reading the dwarves’ Misty Mountains ballad closely, discussing what it tells us about dwarves as such, and what we can ascertain about the quest they mean to undertake.
On an assignment, the students were asked to take three selections from the Misty Mountains song and translate it into their own words. These are the three selections:
For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.
On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun
The bells were ringing in the dale
And men looked up with faces pale;
The dragon’s ire more fierce than fire
Laid low their towers and houses frail.
The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.
Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day,
To win our harps and gold from him!
By choosing these three sections, I hoped to emphasize the dwarves’ history as the proud makers of opulent treasure (first section), how they tragically lost it (second section), and what they plan to do now (third section). I also played the song from the movie for them. With the lights off, obviously. Dark for dark business. :)
This is what some students wrote about what we can understand about the dwarves from their song:
This ballad teaches us the dwarves had a tragic past and they want to go on an adventure to get back what used to be theirs.
They are going to get revenge and take back their gold!!!!!!!!
They are preparing for a cool adventure. The dwarves want to get back the things they lost to the evil worm.
Their history is dark and sad, but the adventure they are preparing for is for revenge and gold.
5th Grade Literature
We are reading Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler in 5th grade. This is a relatively new title in my curriculum—I taught it for the first time last year. But boy, is it an exciting read! It’s also short, so it only takes us about a week to read the whole thing. I find that it is a nice book to come back from Winter Break on. It is, surprisingly I’m sure, about a boy who gets lost. On a mountain. In Maine. It is harrowing. And it is true. Every word of it actually happened to a little boy named Donn Fendler back in 1939.
The most remarkable thing about twelve year-old Donn is his attitude of calm acceptance. He has an episode of panic when he first realizes he is lost, but once he recovers, he greets every new instance of misfortune with a shrug and a step forward.
Here is what several students had to say about Donn’s admirable ability to remain hopeful in spite of his terrifying circumstances:
When Donn gets lost, his attitude is phenomenal. While Donn has to deal with rainy weather, hunger, and anxiety, instead of screaming and crying he shrugs his shoulders and says “okay.” Then he continues his journey.
When [Donn] could scream and cry because of the horrible weather and the blackflies all over his body, he doesn’t. Donn doesn’t scream and cry because he knows he will find a way to get home and deal with his problems using his resilient attitude.
At first, Donn screams, cries, and kicks, but he soon realizes that will not help anything. So he calms down, and even though there are jagged rocks that cut his feet, he still keeps going. His attitude carries him throughout the entire journey.
Instead of screaming, crying, and yelling for help (which is what I would do), Donn keeps walking until he escapes. He walks on sharp rocks that make his feet numb, cold, and bloody, but he doesn’t stop. He just shrugs and keeps going.
6th Grade Literature
If you have been following Tending Roses for a while, then you know how much I adore White Fang. We are reading it now in 6th grade literature, and I never tire of it, no matter how many times I teach it.
White Fang is a domesticated wolf who becomes far more ferocious than his nature ever intended. Through the intervention of humans, and their ability to mold White Fang’s nature by manipulating his environment, White Fang gradually becomes more and more solitary and ferocious. White Fang never understands “the heaven of a man’s hand,” because the hand of man has only ever been used to hurt him. He is forced to toil, he is beaten, and he is thrown into the ring to fight other dogs and even wild animals. And then… he is rescued. He is saved by a man who sees it as his duty to “redeem mankind” for the wrong it has done to White Fang.
“White Fang is not a puppy anymore,” I said to my class. “He is very much set in his ways. What could possibly be strong enough to change him?”
“Love,” said my students.
Such is the beauty of White Fang.
7th Grade Poetry
I introduced my unit on imagery in poetry class, so I had to bring in two works by the master of imagery: Robert Browning. He has two separate poems which, just by making a list of sensory images, convey such depth. The first, ‘Meeting at Night,’ tells an entire story. The second, ‘Youth,’ imparts the spirit of being in love with life. (I’ve written about both pieces in The Poetry Periodical)
While we were discussing ‘Meeting at Night,’ one student had to emote openly about it:
”The speaker feels so excited that I feel excited. The line about the lovers’ heartbeats makes my heart beat!”
Here is the poem:
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
8th Grade Poetry
I’ve taught our 8th grade students in some capacity since they were in 2nd grade, so I know most of them quite well. I agonize a little when I choose poems for their class because I’d like to find the ones that resonate with them most, especially given my long history with them. I felt like I chose right for our last lesson. We studied Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush.’
In the poem, the speaker gazes out on a desolate landscape and feels hopeless about the world and his life. Then, suddenly, amidst such bleak surroundings, a thrush sings, “[flinging] his soul upon the growing gloom,” seemingly heedless of the sadness around him. The speaker wonders how it is possible, and assumes that the bird knows some source for hope of which the speaker is unaware.
What is fun and interesting about teaching this poem, beyond the beauty of the piece itself, is that you could make an argument for several different reasons that the bird might be hopeful. There isn’t just one right answer, since there are several different possibilities that could be supported by the text. The idea that resonated most with the class was that the bird is wiser than the speaker, being described as “aged,” and also being a part of nature. So, even amidst a barren, inhospitable landscape, it might have reason to be hopeful at the end of winter (“winter’s dregs”) because it knows spring will arrive soon.
Here is the poem, followed by a transcript of the writing assignment one of my students submitted. I asked them to create a landscape painting in their imagination based on the description in the first few stanzas, describe it, and then explain the bird’s cause for “carolings of such ecstatic sound.”
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
The speaker is standing in a bare woodland where the sky is grey and dark. It is sunset, and the dead bushes with gnarled stems partially block out the sky. The wind is harshly blowing, rustling the stiff branches. There is nobody around and the speaker is leaning against a rusted, old, rundown gate. This landscape reflects a passionless and dull theme. But, there is a frail, old, grey, sickly-looking bird singing joyful light-hearted songs in this dark and desolate place. The bird singing joyful tunes has reason to be happy because it is the end of the cold and dead winter and spring is coming. The bleakness and feelings of loneliness are going to be over soon.