This week my class and I have been talking Vonnegut.

My unit plan had called for lessons about letter writing, but for some reason recently I had mentioned Vonnegut in passing. I waited for some sort of response or sign of recognition. Nothing.

“Have you people heard of Kurt Vonnegut?”

Blank stares. Slow shaking of heads. The sound of my soul jumping out of my body, running to the bathroom, and screaming as loud as it could from inside the farthest stall.

Vonnegut!

“Even though I am having a personal crisis right now,” I said. “I am going to pretend I’m not because I love you. But this is something we have to fix. You have to know who Kurt Vonnegut is.”

Just like that my lesson plans and unit plans went out the window. That night I searched my bookshelf and the Internet for some Vonnegut selections to share. Talk about a pleasure. It was like walking through Paris trying to find your favorite place to sit and enjoy the view.

Re-visiting all that Vonnegut took me back to high school, what feels already like 10 zillion years ago, back when we actually didn’t have cell phones. Rather than text message in class to pass the time we were forced to hold the textbooks up in just such a way as to hide the paperback novels we were reading.

[Sidenote: How Leave it to Beaver does that sound, eh? But it's true!]

Anyway, Vonnegut was a favorite of my buddies and mine. Slaughterhouse. Cat’s Cradle. Time Quake. Breakfast of Champions. That was our Farmville, or whatever the hell my students are doing on their cell phones the moment I turn my back on them.

How reading KV feels. (Photo by www.stuckincustoms.com)

Something magical happened looking back through all that Vonnegut in search of what to give to my class. Something so magical I’m going to put a useless swear in the next sentence for emphasis: I fell back in fucking love with him. He inspired me. He angered me. He made me think. He made me–another useless swear warning–want to teach the shit out of him to my students the next day.

I ended up choosing this essay, having my students read the first few pages of Slaughterhouse, and I had them listen to an interview with the old goat on NPR. If you have a few minutes after reading this blog, check out them all if you need an infusion of literary genius, soul, or good old fashioned IRE.

By the time I had put the lesson together, in some selfish way it didn’t even matter if my students were into it or not. I had inspired the human being whose job it is to inspire those students. Self-inspiration is an entirely underrated and under-discussed necessity of good teaching. Mr. V. had pumped me up. He had given me a reason to teach well.

Honestly, I’m not too sure how good the lesson was. But one thing I know that I did well was another underrated bit of good teaching: I modeled how a real live adult interacts with real live ‘school shit’ in the real world. I was downright gleeful standing there, talking Vonnegut with a bunch of teenagers.

If I was a philosophy/logic teacher, here’s how the equation might look:

KV gives passion to his books–> Books give passion to me–> Me gives passion to students–> World is saved.

Simple enough, right?

One of my favorite sections of the essay I linked to goes like this:

How many of you have had a teacher at any point in your entire education who made you happier to be alive, prouder to be alive than you had previously believed possible? Now please say the name of that teacher out loud to someone sitting or standing near you.

OK? All done? ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

I did that with my class at the end of the period. And you know what? It WAS nice.