Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a story collection centered around Beatrice Hempel, a middle-school English teacher. I'm an English teacher, so I was excited to get someone else's perspective on what I do every day. What I really liked about Ms. Hempel Chronicles is that she isn't like Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland (you know, with the opus). Too often, books about teachers make them into these mythical inspirational figures. And while they can be--we all have memories of teachers who have made an impact on us--most of us just aren't having these earth-shattering moments every day in the classroom. (Maybe that's a good thing--look at what happened to Mr. Keating.) Ms. Hempel is an ordinary teacher: she loves her kids and her subject; she tries hard, but not always hard enough. She says things that any teacher can relate to, like this bit from the first story, "Talent":
"Ms. Hempel was actively developing her sensitivity to the appropriate and the inappropriate. She still had difficulty distinguishing between the two: was it appropriate for her to laugh when a kid farted in class? Was it appropriate for her to wear stretchy fabrics? Ms. Hempel was not, she knew, a very good teacher...She bribed them with miniature chocolate bars. She extracted compliments from them. She promised herself that she would decorate her classroom with photographs of great women writers, but she never did" (Bynum 5).
She sells herself short, though; in the last story, after she has left the profession (that's not a spoiler, as the book really has no plot to speak of), she encounters a former student and learns that she actually did teach the kids something. They remember her fondly, and while this gratifies her, she has no desire to go back.
As I mentioned, this book really has no plot, but that isn't a bad thing. It just chronicles the thoughts of an everyday teacher who seems to feel that she is both better than and not good enough for her chosen profession. Bynum's writing is gorgeous. My favorite part is at the end, when Ms. Hempel (who is no longer known as Ms. Hempel, but we never get her new name) recounts a dream she has had of her soon-to-be-born baby's first day of school:
"Together they were walking down the hallway, headed toward some bright, severe place where they didn't really want to go. It was her role to take the child there and then return....But for now she was alone with the child she loved, walking farther down the hall, deeper into the silence, the strange glow ahead of them, the child slipping his hand into hers and holding it lightly, the whole dream filling with her wish that their steps would grow slower, and the passage grow longer, so that they might never have to reach the place where they were supposed to arrive" (Bynum 193).
Coming next: The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell.
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