Falling in Love with What You Once Hated

It's the well-worn trope of romantic comedy, of course. Boy meets girl, boy and girl hate each other, then boy and girl end up falling in love. One of my middle-grade books from many years ago, Dinah in Love, had this very story line, which netted me the single best line in any review for any book of my long career. Deborah Stevenson wrote, in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, "It's predictable, sure, but so were Tracy and Hepburn."

I'm here to report that this 180-degree change of heart can happen not only in love life, but in work life as well. 

I signed up to teach an online children's literature course this past spring. I hated the course before it even began. At that point I was already hating anything that was online, as the COVID crisis had just erupted. Furthermore, I hadn't realized that for this particular program, all instructors had to teach every course in the exact same way as designed by the course creator. The course, in fact, was in a "container" that couldn't be tampered with by individual instructors. My role was limited to participation in the course's endless discussion boards and grading the course's endless assignments. Worse, I knew that I couldn't have done most of the assignments myself as they required enormous tech expertise that I don't have. The students had to make graphs on the computer and post them on the course website - and attractive, eye-catching posters - and video presentations - and PowerPoints with voice narration. So I was not only a glorified grader, but a grader who couldn't even do the work she was supposed to be grading. 

Here's what I said about the course two weeks in: "I HATE THIS COURSE! WHY OH WHY DID I SAY I'D DO THIS? REMIND ME NEVER EVER TO DO THIS AGAIN!" I said that the one good thing about the whole dismal experience was that I had acquired needed clarity about my career from this point forward because now I knew for SURE that I never wanted to teach ANYWHERE ever AGAIN!

Well, the course ended this past week. I turned in the final grades yesterday. And guess what?

I ended up loving the course.

I learned so much from spending time in that "container" brilliantly constructed by a veteran educator. I managed to add some content of my own by sending out a weekly "Announcement" post to the students (which some of them didn't read but many of them did). The conversations on the discussion boards were amazing, and through them I formed a close relationship with many of the students - all of whom were dazzlingly brilliant. The last week of the course became a total love fest, complete with weepy farewells, which is what I think teaching should be.

Best of all, the course design prioritized the importance of diversity in children's literature. We spent a full week of the ten weeks of the quarter analyzing the sobering statistics on the lack of diversity in children's literature from the Cooperative Center for Children's Books (CCBD) at the University of Wisconsin. We engaged in heart-felt dialogue about why it is so important that books for children be both "mirrors" and "windows," to use the metaphor made famous by Rudine Sims Bishop. The assigned books for the course made up a wonderfully diverse list, from Yasmin the Explorer by Saadia Faruqi to Makoons by Louise Erdrich to the stunning Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. When the students wrote their final posts about their biggest "take-aways" from the course, over and over they wrote, "We need diverse books! Diversity matters! I am going to read more diverse books myself! I am going to give these books as gifts to children I love! I want the world to change so that all children can see themselves in books!  I want the world to change so that readers can see the humanity of all children in books!"

This was the perfect course for me to be teaching, and for the students to be taking, during this time of protest over the never-to-be-forgotten death of George Floyd. We all felt that reading these diverse books, and talking about them together, was work of supreme importance. I felt so grateful that I could be part of  this work. I can't take credit for designing this course - that credit goes to the incomparable Denise Vega - but I can take credit for teaching it - and, I believe, teaching it well.

So: sometimes you can hate something and then come to love it. My blindingly clear certainty that I WILL NEVER EVER TEACH ANYWHERE EVER AGAIN has been replaced with an openness to teach anywhere, any time. Or just . . . openness, more generally: openness to whatever opportunities come my way to make my own small difference in the world, when and where I can.