Confessions of a Literary Dork

I am a dork.  

No, it's okay.  I'm not prompting to you to disagree.  This is not the intellectual equivalent of whining "I'm so fat."   I really am a dork.  
I use whilst and cloying in informal conversation and use SAT vocab with my 6 year old son.  I have quotations from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet tattooed on my wrist and ankle respectively.  I know how to use the word respectively.

Just another Monday night.

My dorkiness is nothing new; I was born into it.  My forestry major father took two semesters of Shakespeare for fun.  My mother quoted Macbeth while cooking soup, and our dinnertime conversation was peppered with "the lady doth protest too much, methinks."  After we had "dined to an adequate sufficiency," we'd adjourn to the living room where we listened to the Les Miserable soundtrack on cassette tape and huddled around the libretto to learn every line.

One summer when I was 13 or 14, my sister and I spent hours paddling our old family canoe around a lake, quizzing each other with quotations from The Belgariad by David Eddings.  You know...for fun.

Yeah, I've been a dork for most of my life.  But it's only been in the past 3 or 4 years that I've really started to own it.    

It's a scary thing, to publicly declare your love for something.  You risk criticism, disagreement, even condemnation.  What you love may not be conventional or acceptable or (gasp) cool.  Oh, it's okay to declare your love for football or Disney or the Republican Party.  But when you love science, or reading, or the original West End production of Martin Guerre, well...let's just say it's harder to put that kind of love on a T shirt.

In retrospect, it is quite the rack.

I remember being 14 and discovering that a boy in my class also read David Eddings.  My joy was boundless.   I'd made a connection.  Here was someone who liked what I liked, someone with whom to share a whole world!  I found out I had read farther in the series than he and practically tripped over myself to loan him the next book.  We were in Social Studies and he was sitting in the back with his buddies.  I handed him the book and stood looking at him, waiting impatiently to begin bonding over King of the Murgos, and he, conscious of all the male eyes on him, gestured to the artwork on the cover and grumbled "Who's the chick with the rack?"  I was disappointed, but part of me understood.  It wasn't cool to like a book, and I shouldn't have exposed him like that in front of his friends. 

Imagine what that must be like.  To have a love - a true burning passion for something - but not be able to share it.  The frustration and embarrassment I felt then is still with me 23 years later, but more than anything else I feel sorry for that boy.  He had an opportunity to connect with someone who loved what he loved, but he had to save face in front of his friends.   

I don't want my classroom to be a place where one feels the need to save face.  I want my classroom to be a safe haven for love.  And here's how I try to do it.  

I call myself a Literary Dork.  I have action figures of Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare and Jane Austen hanging in place of pride at the front of the room.  I recite soliloquies in class every time we hit Vocab Lesson 2 Exercise B.  I sing show tunes and quote Robert Frost and sigh dramatically whilst recounting my unrequited love for Edward Fairfax Rochester.  I confess in hushed tones that I have a crush on Atticus Finch.  

And you know what?  They eat it up.  They encourage me.  They proudly bring me references to literature they've found in pop culture ("Ms. Cotillo!  Last night on iCarly there was  Saint Bernard named Buck!"). Because of my over-the-top behavior, my students know they can be excited about books and music and poetry.  But the love bubble isn't literacy exclusive.  Girls talk about boys; boys talk about cell phone specs.  We talk fantasy football and travel soccer and history day projects.  In my room, it's okay to be excited about the things that make you happy.  It's okay to let that passion connect you to others.  It's good to be a dork. 

See.  It's official. 

Mary
@mzcotillo