One of my favorite novels is The Cannibal Galaxy, by one of the writers I most envy, Cynthia Ozick. I always thoroughly enjoy everything Ozick writes. I usually expand my vocabulary reading her, as “narthex,” “diremption,” “crenellation,” and other uncommon words pop up naturally in her narrative. I enjoy the vigor and complexity of her sentences.
But I usually don’t “understand” in the sense of an overall interpretation, what her fictions are “about.” Novelist Edmund White likens her to Flannery O’Connor, which makes it a little clearer why I can’t come up with easy overall interpretations (though I can actually with O’Connor). O’Connor famously told off her publisher, who was demanding advanced outlines, by telling him she didn’t know what her story was going to be until she finished writing it.
The plot of The Cannibal Galaxy involves a Hannah Arendt like figure, Hester Lilt, who takes some appointment in the midwest, and so enrolls her daughter Beulah in a local Jewish school, whose headmaster and founder, Joseph Brill, has begun to despair of the mediocrity of his students and their parents. Brill was orphaned by the Nazi occupation of France, where he alone of his family was rescued and hidden by Catholics in an eccentric but intellectual priest’s basement, where he had nothing to do but read the priest’s stored library. Emerging from this cocoon of European literature, philosophy and theology, Brill founds a K-12 school in America devoted to marrying French and Hebrew literature and culture. (Whether this is Ozick’s commentary on schools like St. John’s College of Annapolis and Santa Fe, or of the undergraduate common core programs like Human Being and Citizen at the University of Chicago was something I was not able to decide.)
Brill idolizes the non-mediocre Lilt and plans to propose to her. (Beulah’s father is unknown and absent.) But he also despairs that Beulah seems ordinary, like his other students, and shares this opinion with her mother.
Skipping years later Beulah, and Brill’s own son he has fathered in a late marriage to one of the school’s secretaries, are adults. His own son, a grind and rule-following A student, does not make much of himself. Beulah becomes a world renowned visual artist, using a kind of intelligence and imagination that was simply not a big part of the curriculum.
Exactly who in all this is a “cannibal galaxy,” a larger galaxy that “collides” with and submerges a smaller galaxy, so that the result has a new shape and direction, I am not sure.
But I’ve been teaching for the past 3 months where I mainly work with kindergarten through 2nd grade, mainly bright children who have some “special” need: autism, lack of self-control, inability to focus, etc. I “push into” rooms for my little charges or pull them out to another room to give them “small group” instruction. Some of the instruction is in things like blowing your nose, or not talking while someone else is, or not walking down stairs while your face is glued to an Ipad, talking at a reasonable volume, or sitting in a chair normally. More of it is on trying to finish the same piece of work everyone else just finished, or in covering the same topics (planets and orbits, Greek mythology, life cycles of plants and animals) that their general ed classmates are receiving, but in a separate room where the “special” kids disruptive behaviors will only annoy each other, not the general population.
I have this one kid, we’ll call him “Burt.” I thought at first English might not have been his first language; he has an eastern European last name. Burt is clearly intelligent (after teaching him for 3 months and even meeting his dad I googled his parents - Ivy PhD dad, Ivy PhD and JD mom), but he can’t finish his kindergarten work, which often consists of activities like coloring areas in a “paint by number” type page according to not with which numeral but instead which “sight word” they are labelled. Burt stares off into space, occasionally twists his arms or body as if he is having a seizure, gets up and paces and skips about. And doesn’t finish the work, which seemingly less intelligent kids finish.
Recently Burt asked the main teacher in this class if Mr. Majors could take him outside so he could finish his work at a desk in the hallway, which has less noise. He then finished faster, and even finished some projects faster after returning to the class. (Noise cancelling headphones are fairly ubiquitous in a modern public school in a wealthy county. They may not have the same effect as just exiting the whole sight and sound cacophony of the classroom.)
I think like Ozick’s Beulah, Burt may turn out to have hidden talents that simply aren’t being addressed by the school and the curriculum. Burt likes math, patterns, sequences. (Though he doesn’t finish math work on time either.) I don’t think he enjoys coloring and cutting and pasting every day, even if “sight words” or other content are involved. My reaction to these situations makes me recall the argument of Ivan Ilich’s Deschooling Society.
In the case of some of these students being “forced” into very structured classes and schools where almost everyone does the exact same thing the exact same way, I think I can say which galaxy is attempting to cannibalize which, submerging it and changing its direction, perhaps forever.
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An update: Interesting coincidences. Today I took this child into the hall to color in “10 frames” with the appropriate nuber of squares (actually shamrocks in squares), for 19, 13 etc. He then spontaneously started telling me what 4x4, etc. was up through 12x12. Then he started going into very large number multiplication, 400 x 400. 160,000 x 160,000 etc. Then he mentioned some number to the such and such power. This is a kindergarten student. Then the math tutor for the school walked by and I pointed him out and asked him what the square root of 25 was and he answered (correctly). So I asked if there was a gifted and talented small group in the school. (There is not.) Coincidentally I was in a teacher meeting with his parents the next day at 4 pm. It turns out they have done multiplication with him at home, but where he got square roots and exponents no one has explained.
The next day the country coincidentally sent a form where you could nominate children to recieve gifted and talented “services,” though this is just going to mean someone county-wide administrator will provide the student’s regular teacher with “enrichment materials.”
Subsequently I realize there was another student in the class, a very mercurial Latin kid, who does, on the rare occasion when the class does something crafty beyond just coloring things, show unusual artistic talent (original designs or fabrications that would be impressive for a child many years older). So I was able to nominate them both.
A version of this was published in SpliceToday last week.