Alternate Reading of Call of the Wild

I had been planning to write about my next vacation (NYC probably, then The Game in the Have, then Lanc Lanc), but instead I decided at the last minute to write about something that made me happy.
It happened yesterday during my 6th period class, which is normally my best class of the day. Every student is polite and actually pretends to be interested in "Call of the Wild." Yesterday however, they really engaged with the text on a more nuanced level. We'd reached the chapter where Buck lives with John Thornton and falls madly in love with him. No students so far had questioned this turn of events, but one student in 6th period, after reading the one of the many passages that described Buck's "passion", and "adoration" stopped and said "How did this go from being the toughest book ever to a book about some fruity Dog?"
I paused for a moment and answered "Well, [Alan] you're right that the tone of the novel shifts a lot in this passage. It went from being a story about how hard life was and how mean Buck was becoming to one about how much he loves John Thornton. However, Buck is not homosexual. Besides, he's not even a human."
"But he loves John Thornton?"
"People can love people of the same gender and not be homosexual - don't you love your male relatives?"
"But I don't go around saying 'I Love [name of big football-playing friend who's also in the period].'"
Awkward pause. "Anyways, let's keep reading."
They did get back on task, but made sure to emphasize with inflection passages mentioning how they "grappled" with each other, how John Thornton was the "the only one who could hold Buck" or put a pack on his back, and the "naked bedrock."
Now, a perfect teacher would have not found this funny, but if you're me, and you've been teaching all day, anything is funny, and I lost it, hiding my face behind the Everbind edition of Jack London's classic.
On a related note, another period spontaneously decided they would read it like scripture at Church, complete with preacher-like inflections and shouts and exclamations from the class/congregation. Once again, a better teacher would have shut this down with a look, but all of a sudden everyone wanted a turn to read aloud, even the ones who had never read aloud in class before.
I write this all to say that anyone who says are kids are "dumb" is missing the point. They are incredibly clever. The biggest mistake you can make is underestimating their intelligence with regards to classroom management/cheating prevention etc. They can also be very funny when they want to be, and just not with fake farts.

First Baptist Church - Como MS

I went to church with Anda, Dan and Scott, so there might be some overlap between our posts (I purposely didn’t read theirs yet to avoid being influenced).

The church we went to was in a small building. When we arrived, there were probably only ten people there, but eventually it was filled to capacity. Part of this was because it was there 90th anniversary, and there were visitors from another church. Even in the crowd we obviously stuck out, being the only white people there. It was similar to other small churches I’ve been to, in that the minister greeted us before the service started noticing we were new. He referred to the presence of teachers from our district several times, and even called up Dan, as a math teacher, to help him calculate what 10% of ten dollars was. I didn’t see any of my students, but there were some from the high school. The next day a young man came up to me while I was on hall duty and asked how I’d liked it. The atmosphere was definitely welcoming - what you’d hope for in a Christian establishment of course.

The format of the service did not follow what I am used to, (PCUSA usually, sometimes Anglican or generic ecumenical college type services) in a lot of ways. The sociologist in me would say that the line between the ritual and the ordinary was blurred considerably, and that the service was pretty informal. The Calvinist in me was troubled by some big theological differences, most notably the Prosperity Gospel during the collection.

The microphone was passed around to several people prior to the actual sermon. There was an “MC” and any new speaker had to have someone introduce them. At one point a woman went on for a good while about how she was uncomfortable with public speaking but when the minister asked her to introduce another speaker, she had to say yes - it was God’s way of getting her out of her comfort zone. Mind you, this was just the introduction to the next speaker.

The sermon was not performed by the usual minister because they had a visiting preacher from another church. He was incredibly dynamic and entertaining. He conformed pretty closely to the stereotype of a southern black baptist lay preacher - loud in volume, and with the stereotypical delivery. His topic was on how you can only count on Jesus, and everyone else will let you down when times get rough. Pretty depressing stuff actually, but definitely something that got to me spiritually. It’s also the kind of topic uber-liberal Yale divinity school types (the ministers I’ve been primarily hanging out out with for the past couple of years) would probably avoid. There was a good amount of “audience participation” in the form of affirmations from worshipers when the preacher made a good point.

The music was enjoyable. There was a house band of sorts (drums, guitar, keyboard bass) and we got to hear the home church’s choir as well as the visiting church’s choir. The home church had a very young choir. The members looked like they were mostly teens and young adults. It’s nice to see young people people being orderly and smiling after watching the students at my school bound up and down the halls hollering between every class period. Both choirs had very talented soloists, and the second choir was very good. I wish there had been more songs where everyone sang - I was surprised that most were just choir songs. There were also no hymnals so I wouldn’t have known the words anyways I guess.

The mean age in the pews was surprisingly young. There were lots of children and young adults.They called up one of their longest running members to speak since it was the 90th anniversary and she was in her sixties. To give that a bit of perspective, the mean age in my home church in PA is somewhere around 65. While church membership is declining across the country in many denominations because of a lack of interest in the newer generations, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The attire varied somewhat - some people were dressed up, a few were in jeans, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The ministers were in suits and ties instead of robes.

The most memorable thing about the service was that is was long. At around 2.5 hours, it was hard to not lose focus. I’m not sure if Mr. Hebert was in deep contemplation of the divine or sleeping at one point. The minister made some comments about how visitors should know it isn’t usually that long and kept trying to move things along. He might have been worried we wouldn’t come back on account of the length. Afterwards, the four of us hit up The Windy City Grill in Como, which was nice.