If you’ve looked at my bio, you’ll know that I’m now a language arts teacher at an international school in Thailand. This job has definitely been a learning curve for me, especially as someone with a degree in English literature. I’ve had to rediscover how the high school brain tackles books and trudges through seemingly tedious homework. I’m used to the fast-paced, intensely discussion-based classes I had at Calvin, and not the step-by-step breaking down of basic literary concepts that happens in high school.
Although it’s been difficult to adjust, I think I’ve found a silver lining to my struggle.
At the higher education level, literature becomes a vehicle for intellectual and philosophical contemplation. Even in my “Children’s Literature” class, we broke down plot structures and contemplated the social commentary presented in books written for ten-year-olds. All of this is great and, at least for me, extremely fun. I love taking something that seems so simple and discovering the iceberg beneath the surface.
But I think I skipped a step in the process.
I recently asked my students to choose a book under the dystopian genre to read on their own. In order to keep track of their reading progress, I tasked them with writing a ten-words-or-less summary of the reading they did each day. I wanted this to be a quick and easy way of getting points for their reading without having to subject them to reading quizzes. I didn’t realize that this would be an almost impossible task for some of my students.
I opened the Google Classroom assignment to see a whole paragraph written by one student.
This student takes on the world with a level of enthusiasm I can only imagine possessing. She took that same enthusiasm and essentially wrote her entire thought process while reading The Maze Runner for the first time. I chuckled at her excitement and decided not to take off too many points for this assignment. The next day, she turned in another paragraph. This time, she even ended it with, “Sorry that these are so long. I got carried away.”
Carried away. I stared at that for a second and couldn’t help but smile.
I still remember when I read The Maze Runner for the first time in middle school. I was so engrossed in the story that I spent three hours curled up in my bed just chewing through it. I got carried away.
To my student, The Maze Runner wasn’t an exploration in the dystopian genre. It wasn’t a look into building suspense or an example of how even books for teenagers can say something about the world. It was a story. An entertaining, exhilarating, and enjoyable story.
Behind the devices, the commentaries, the developments, the structures, and the language is simply a story. A story that raises your heart rate, makes you laugh in complete silence, draws tears, inspires rage.
Behind the academic necessity to discover the nuance in every story is a desire to simply consume the story. Behind my scrambling to make this unit as educational as possible was this small silver lining: they enjoyed the story.
I’ve started to look at everything I consume with a new set of eyes. Or, should I say, my old set of eyes; a set I had retired for many years. I had turned my first reads into research ventures, digging through layers of meaning before I had even given the surface enough time to settle.
I now want to enjoy a story first before analyzing it; experience it before I dive into its intricacies and allusions; take off my thinking hat and just let the story guide me through its own path first. There will always be time to specify themes and investigate details.
There will never be another first read.
Priscilla Chang (’25) majored in English literature and minored in linguistics at Calvin. She now works as a missionary teacher in Thailand, teaching language arts at Chiang Rai International Christian School. Apart from her love of reading and writing, she is also obsessed with learning languages, dancing, and watching the latest Korean dramas.
