Something I was reading with an eighth grade class mentioned the Iliad. "What's the Iliad?" I asked. Nobody knew (they're not the best class), but one boy made some valiant attempts: "It's about the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks & the Persians!" "No." "It's about that blind old man and his daughter." "No." "Oh! I know! The war between Athens and its rival, that other Greek city..."

The other day I asked my seventh grade, "Who's a good author if you want to read about Greek mythology?" I hoped someone would mention Edith Hamilton, and was astonished when Kevin called out, "Robert Graves!" I like Kevin; he slouches and looks half asleep, but he's actually alert and curious and hard-working, and good-natured too. The other day Mrs. K, passing by, moved my seventh graders around (quite unnecessarily — they're very well-behaved), and Kevin, who had been moved to the center of a row, wailed, "The wall! I can't concentrate without the wall!" (He leans against it.)

I was impressed when Kevin mentioned Robert Graves, & was reminded of another moment with another student (whom I taught, coincidentally, in the same room). This student, a high school junior, told me that within the space of a few months he had gone from being a "hard-line anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist" to being a skinhead. Naturally I was speechless. We talked, and I mentioned Rosa Luxemburg, and the movie of her life. Joon: "I haven't seen the movie, but I've read some of Rosa Luxemburg's writings." !!! I hadn't read anything by Rosa Luxemburg!!! (Still haven't!) We ended up reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; he seemed to like it. (He later told me that he was a non-racist skinhead; in an essay he tried to explain his trajectory: he became a Marxist-Leninist when he saw how terrible working conditions were in the factories of his grandfather's friends; he didn't have much of an explanation for his subsequent transformation.)