My daughter, Rebecca, has an überweird junior high school English teacher. Those are her words, not mine, since I’m stuck in a generation that stuck über in front of mensch and left it at that.
Still, when a daughter complains, a dad is duty-bound to investigate. And that I did, marching headlong into a world I know all too well, the maker and breaker of careers called LinkedIn.
What did I find?
Well, that Rebecca was right — Miss Isaacs, no gender fluidity there — is, well, überweird. Which is to say übernormal, if not Jane Austen old-school.
The weird Miss was born in Fresno, attended Fresno State a few decades back (the antediluvian nineties . . . horrors!) and for 20 years made her living as a librarian in Chicago. Not a geek librarian, but a real one: someone who actually came in contact with hardback books. She even might have indulged a monstrously weird moment or two and bought one. Imagine that.
Becca clearly couldn’t, not when this miss told her class of renegade device disciples to go to the library — we have one in town — and, get this, hold and maybe even read a bound volume of Huck Finn. She just wanted us to feel it, said Becca, as if she’d been asked to swallow an eel.
Since there aren’t that many copies of Huck Finn at the library — the teacher has 16 students — the überweird request was set up by rotation so that by the end of April everyone would have felt a book. The teacher had already called the library and made arrangements.
“So weird,” said my daughter. The teacher could, Becca said, easily download the book online.
I pondered the weirdness for a while before telling Becca the teacher was probably trying to expand her students’ horizons and suggested that until recently — that is to say in the early part of her father’s lifetime — people actually held and turned the pages of books, went to the library, and hung out at small bookshops. I did in the early 1980s and built up a small collection of Raymond Chandler thrillers. They’re still in my study, and Becca knows all this.
So why the fuss?
“Bound books,” said Becca, “are dinosaurs,” so the request by Miss Isaacs was totally überweird, end of story.
My counterarguments didn’t stand a chance.
Becca likes books, but the library demand was a total waste of time. (I get tired of the word total).
We let the matter drop, sort of, but I pursued my interest in the miss, who seemed about my age, late 40s, and had written a paper on teen reading habits, which she said were too varied (blame constant device input and distraction) to offer a kid a chance to get to know and like any one author. I am a widower, and I admit I told myself this was the kind of woman I might ask out on a date, if I can even say that out loud without being sued. But that’s not happening. Crushes on teachers who like books are banned by state law.
As for Becca and überweirdness, I finally opted for something simple. I got out my aged copy of “Farewell, My Lovely,” complete with cover art of Marlowe and a swank dame, and left it on Rebecca’s bed. I heard her let out something like a snort and thought to myself my mission had failed.
Until I saw her with the book the next night. “Cool cover,” she said. “And who was Chandler and why was Marlowe so überironic, especially with women?”
She’d started reading it!
Touchdown.
If only I had Miss Isaacs’ number. Then again, I could go to the library and check out a few Huck Finns.
