Lesson Overview 

 Quiz

Would it be my class without a reading quiz?  Seriously, towards the end of the year the students have gotten so good about doing their reading (and wanting to get credit) that I will sometimes omit the actual quiz if we are pressed for time.  However, I also feel that these end-of-the-year lessons are SO important - I want to make sure that they are a part of them.  And, towards the end of the year - students are absent from class more and more (college visits, AP Tests, senior cut day, etc.) - so far from skipping the quiz, I will make it worth an inordinate number of points.  By doing that it eliminates unneccesary absences AND it makes sure that those students who are legitimately absent will be sure to make it up (by listening to the recording.)

The Discussion

You can find my Lesson Notes both in a transcribed, easy to follow version, and my original handwritten notes below.  Here is what we tried to do in the lesson:

Ring Lardner's "Haircut" was one of the last stories I taught my seniors each spring. The 1925 story is told by Whitey, a small-town barber who chats to a customer about Jim Kendall, the town's favorite practical joker, now dead. The discussion opens with a simple question, "What kind of narrator is this?", and that question runs through the whole lesson. Whitey keeps insisting Jim was "a card," and students slowly realize that the story's meaning lies in everything the narrator fails to see. Early on, the lesson also links the story to Hemingway's "My Old Man," to Eight Men Out, and to Littleton and the bullying cases that students knew all too well.

The center of the lesson is Jim's jokes, and the questions turn quickly from the story to the students themselves. Did anyone laugh? Why? What does that say about us? Students compare the story's humor to the soldiers' gallows humor in All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried and ask how it differs. They look at how and why Jim's jokes are cruel, and what it means that he often never saw the punchline. From there the discussion asks whether Jim is a monster and why a town would live through him. Seniors were weeks from their own ceremony, so one question asks why, at graduation, the biggest bullies often get the biggest applause. Further questions look at Whitey's attitude toward Jim and his repeated "He's a card," which seems to protest too much.

The second half follows Julie, Doc Stair, and Paul, the three people Jim targets or underestimates, through the cruel trick on Julie and Jim's death in the duck blind. Students ask why it matters that Doc becomes the coroner and whether Doc had anything to do with Jim's death. A short glimpse of Jim's own wanting raises a harder question: does knowing why he is the way he is excuse him? The lesson ends on deeds and deserving. We are the sum of our deeds, and the questions ask what Jim deserved and what any of us deserve, without letting students simply rationalize. Here the story links back to the whole year: Milkman in Song of Solomon, Leo's fear of being forgotten in The History of Love, Esperanza and the book she writes in The House on Mango Street, and Candide's advice to tend your garden. The final question returns to the last page. How does the barber mean what he says, and is the story really about what the barber doesn't know?

Because this was among the last things my seniors read, I wanted it to do two things at once. I wanted it to pull together the books we had shared, and to send students off thinking about how they would treat people, without my preaching to them. The story makes that possible, because Lardner never states the lesson. The reader has to see past Whitey and the laughing town on their own, and then decide what kind of audience they want to be.