Saving Laura

My copy of Little House

Lately I'm preoccupied with time management in my classroom. I want to slow down when everything around me says, "Go faster!" This afternoon as I sat at my paper strewn reading table after school, I gazed out my classroom window and indulged in stepping out onto the playground of my own mind. It's nice out here today. This is what I thought about:
      
When I was in third grade my teacher led a discussion of genres in literature. "So, Charlotte's Web would be fiction," she said, writing it on the chalkboard under the appropriate descriptor.  And a biography of Marie Curie would be. . ."

            "Non-fiction," the class chorused. 

            This went on for a few titles and finally she said, "Little House on the Prairie. Fiction or Non-fiction?"

            I raised my hand. "Non-fiction."

            My teacher looked over her reading glasses at me from the front of the room.  "No. Actually, Laura Ingalls Wilder's books are fiction."

            I was known as a good student, a kind girl you could sit next to the outcast in the class because I would be a friend to them.  Well-mannered.  Flexible.

            So I don't remember deciding this was my mountain to die on. It was instinctual, like protecting your Twix candy bar at lunch. I was pretty sure the teacher had only misspoken.  I took a breath and said, "You mean they are non-fiction."

            "Class?"  She turned to my peers. "When a story is made up it is called. . . .?"

            "Fiction!!" They replied enthusiastically.

            My heart jumped into my throat and I leaped up in a panic to save my precious pioneer stories from this woman's slanderous accusation.  "Those books are TRUE!!!" I said perhaps a little too loudly to be considered respectful, my voice breaking a little. I sat down quickly and covered my face.

            "The Little House on the Prairie books are fiction," she said with calm authority.  Math was more her passion and she had absolutely no idea what she had just done.   I sat, bewildered and betrayed.  I went home that night and asked my mother who responded by scolding my teacher for not better explaining the ambiguity of those books, genre-wise, and the intention with which they had been written. I went to bed staring at my ceiling and wondered why no one else seemed as bothered as they should be.

            I became the books I read, swallowed them whole and digested them into my consciousness. To question that book put my whole inner world into a tilt. It was the first time I felt let down by literature, and utterly misled by the spirit in which I had read something. Why did it matter so much to find out those books might not be one hundred percent factual?  Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were living on borrowed time. My baby sister was two and I was moving into a role of keeping certain things alive for her.  There was a bittersweet feeling about it all, but even at nine I suspected this was the way of the world and growing up.  Part of how I knew this was from reading about what I thought was Laura's real childhood. 

_______________

One of my favorite lines is from Richard Peck's Newbery Honor award winning, A Long Way From Chicago.  Grandma Dowdell is a rough around the edges, tall tale telling woman of sometimes questionable ethics. She also fiercely loves her family. Peck gets readers to buy into her sense of justice because her heart is pure gold. This character is more real than some living people I know. The book takes place in a small Illinois town where there  is "time to ponder all the different kinds of truth."  That line closes the first chapter and makes me put the book down every time. It is moving and disappointing and exquisite all at once. It reminds me that what is "real" is up to each of us. The world is full of velveteen rabbits. 

As a third grader I had yet to ponder "all the different kinds of truth," but my writing became a way to examine life through different lenses. Eventually, I understood that my teacher wasn't wrong about the  Little House books, and neither was I.  As a teacher, I take a lesson from her now.  The discussion with my mother about Wilder's books and the subsequent thinking I did that night about it all taught me so much more than knowing where to place a title in an appropriate column.  In the age of Common Core and high stakes testing it is easy to leave the teaching of thought behind. Making "time to ponder" in the classroom is important, either on paper or out aloud.  I've decided it's my mountain to die on. It is, after all, necessary to becoming a whole, real human.

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