The only month that a teacher likes better than May is June. I am grading papers and blogs like crazy. For example, my senior English students are turning in papers on four significant Victorian works – Dracula by Bram Stoker, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Salomé by Oscar Wilde, and Origin of Species by Charles Darwin – while blogging on one modern novel of their choice among Therésé Desqueyroux by Mauriac, The Buddha of Suburbia of Haneif Kureishi, Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Grendel by John Gardner, or Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer) by Alain-Fournier, in order to tell me how the work fits into the idea of iconoclasm, postcolonial multiculturalism, or both. I decided to push us really hard from Spring Break until early May, because I knew that pushing seniors in May would be a task that would strike fear even in Sisyphus!

I will be grading papers mostly until mid- to late May. I am also reading Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston right now. More on that novel later . . . when I have time to really write about it. I’m in the middle of chapter three, following the exploits of Wittman Ah Sing.