Catcher In The Rye...My Views

Holden Caulfield.  This is one tormented guy who goes through much in a three day period! He’s a rebel. He’s an outcast. He also seems to be the hero of assassins or failed assassins in real life. This part I do not understand, but that will come later.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a very good read. For some strange reason, my high school and subsequent colleges never assigned this book. Aside from liberal use of the word ‘godamm’ and a few ‘fuck’, they are nothing an average American teenaged boy hasn’t uttered a thousand times.

To sum up the story, college screwup Holden Caulfield has failed to achieve at yet another high-level college. Instead of waiting until his last day, he decides to leave four days early after a nasty brawl with his roommate. He ends up in his home town of New York City. After a clumsy attempt to pick up women, he agrees to a short tryst with a hooker. The tryst is a disaster and he has a somewhat violent run-in with her pimp. The next day arranges a date with an old female friend but he messes that up, too. Holden ends up going home and has a talk with his beloved younger sister Phoebe, including a fantasy about being a catcher in the rye, catching all of the children before they go over the edge. He then leaves and is going to spend the night at the home of one of his old teachers. After Holden wakes up to hind the man gently tousling his hair, Holden panics and runs out. Later on, tells Phoebe that he is running out west to become deaf and dumb and live in the woods. She wants to accompany him, but he refuses, then changes his mind about going when he sees Phoebe is upset. At the end, he is happy watching her ride the carousel in the rain.

Overall, the story works quite well as it explores Holden’s angst over three days. There is also much open to interpretation. For example, I can see possible homosexual repression in him. His awkwardness with the few women in the book, the way he runs from the hair-tousling teacher, they are all possible signals. Or, Holden could simply be a disaffected youth who refuses to fall into the categories of acceptable society. 

Actually, I take that back about simply, because that in itself pigeonholes Holden into the larger realm of society’s outcasts. Back in the early 1950s, outcasts of society had a tendency to be institutionalized if they were feared in any way (read “Girl, Interrupted” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for 2 great examples of that time period).

So where does this fit in with murderers of public figures? Mark Chapman, John Hinckley, and Robert Bardo were said to have been carrying or owning copies of “Catcher In The Rye” and that somehow it influenced them to kill John Lennon, ATTEMPT to kill Ronald Reagan, and kill Rebecca Schaeffer, respectively. Am I to understand that Holden Caulfield is a symbol for society’s outcasts and he influences them to kill? Holden kills NOBODY, he just beats up on himself. Is it perhaps his fantasy of being the poetic catcher and rescuer of the children before they go over the edge that inspires them? Whatever it is, those people were sick to begin with, and using a book to inspire them is just plain madness as well. John Lennon had supposedly gone over the edge before he left the Beatles, Reagan was way beyond the edge on many levels (but I love the guy anyway!) and Rebecca Schaffer had supposedly gone over by becoming “another Hollywood whore” in Bardo’s eyes. Well, Hollywood is filled with them, males AND females, so why focus on her? It makes no sense. The way that MIGHT have made sense based of the catcher theory was to kill Lennon in 1968, Reagan in 1966 before he became governor of California, and I won’t even go into Rebecca Schaeffer, her career was still only a few years in the limelight. Do not mistake that into thinking I condone these people, it’s just a take on the catcher fantasy.

Holden is a lost soul in post-war America. He is struggling to find himself and figure out where he belongs in the world. I suspect there was a lot of that in the late 1940s, early 1950s youth who felt out of place, those in a somewhat opulent family life who weren’t badly hit by the Depression. Where do they fit in? Holden is not a jock, not a deep intellectual, apparently 2 categories that one could make a life on. He doesn’t even click with other misfits like fellow dormmate Ackley, who suffers from acne and badmouths Holden’s roommate Stradlater even though one senses Ackley wouldn’t dare fight Stradlater if the opportunity came up. Unlike “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, in Holden’s world even outcasts resent other outcasts.

I think in one way or another I am like Holden. I didn’t really fit into a particular category growing up. There were the jocks, semi-jocks (water polo, bowling, and golf), bandheads, and smart nerds among the guys, and athletes, bandheads, cheerleaders, and “the clique” among the females. I used to clash with the jocks in junior high, but developed a decent acquaintance if not direct friendship with some of them by high school. The clique of girls didn’t have any particular skills except to gossip about others, discuss fashion and music, and rag on my ass for no particular reason. In some ways I hated them more than the jocks, but not all of them, every group has their anomalies. I tried flute in 4^th grade but sucked at it, so bandhead was not a future for me. Some of them were snobbish in their own way as well. I sort of took part in some intramural volleyball in 10^th grade and spent my spare time in the high school TV studio, but apart from that I was a lost soul who completely sucked in my dealings with females. I also tried to avoid conflict and didn’t really fight anyone even when a few of them could have improved from a black eye or bloody nose or both. The reality was, I’d been around what I then considered to be the same assholes for 10 years and I just wanted to graduate and get the hell out… problem was, I felt that early in the 11^th grade. On the homefront, there were problems as well, but that’s a whole can of worms not needed for this article. A question here is, if I had read “Catcher in the Rye” during those dark times, might I have become a homicidal maniac? Thinking of myself back then from a current seasoned age of 42, I don’t believe so. In fact I think I may have been happy to finally read about someone I could identify with, but nothing more than that.

In conclusion, “Catcher in the Rye” is a must-read for anyone who’s felt disaffected by the world and expectations of them. It could also be an assigned read that high-schoolers and/or college freshmen groan over because they want to go party instead of write a literary response. Either way, it deserves its place as a classic.

A letter of frustration

To Whom It May Concern in the District Where I Work,

   I am a teacher in your district, and have been for over a decade now. In that time I have seen some pretty interesting things happen and the vast majority of them have served to lower teacher morale and hurt student achievement. Now, all of what is to follow in this friendly tsk-tsk letter is merely the point of view from a humble teacher in the trenches.

  

    Imagine putting a rat in a maze. The object, of course, is to get the cheese at the end. To spice things up, the master of the maze puts in several obstacles for the rat to conquer, such as objects to eat, jump over, maybe push through. Or, the rat is injected with a substance to see if the rat is faster, slower, or dead. An even more extreme experiment is to remove the cheese so that when the rat makes it to the end, there is no prize. The master of the maze, be it a curious or perhaps cruel scientist or a kid toying with his pet for idle amusement, HAS NO IDEA WHAT WILL HAPPEN. Dear higher administration officials in charge of our professional lives, you monitor us rats daily and continuously put these obstacles in our way and you HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WILL HAPPEN. At least I hope you don’t, it would be an ego-shattering disaster for us if we knew you had planned our failure as educators.

  

    Let me move immediately to this year’s obstacle: Infinite Campus. I do understand that SASI was an old, defunct attendance system that needed replacing. What you did instead was purchase a whole new system encompassing attendance, grading, progress reports, and report cards. Our training on this has been as-needed and there have been many glitches impeding our responsibilities. What amused some of us further was a mid-May introduction to IC last spring, a time when we are all exhausted and incapable of accepting input from anyone. What used to take a few simple steps in attendance and entering grades has turned into a mega-step procedure for each of those tasks, not to mention printing progress reports and report cards. I often feel like I am assembling a new computer desk in my home, constantly checking the instructions to make sure I was not getting ahead of myself.

     

   Oh yes, that brings me to the next matter of computers. I look enviously at Title I schools, who are able to afford through Federal money high tech devices like iPads and new laptops. My school is not Title I and the computers are barely tolerant of Windows 7. The machine I use in the classroom still works on XP and some days it is slow to put it nicely. In this day and age simple PCs to perform basic tasks (meaning below the gamers’ standards) are quite reasonable in price. With assessments requiring good video and sound being hurled at us, newer machines, or at least newer motherboards and processors inside the old cases, are necessary.

 

    On that note, let us look at the people in charge of maintaining the computers and servers. The district administration has stripped schools of full-time tech gurus and made these hard-working people split time between schools. I hear that it will be even less than that next year. If the system crashes, who will pick up the pieces? There are too many schools in the district for a small elite squad to handle. No, at this stage in the technology-dependent game, full-time techs are needed everywhere.

 

    Next up is the Common Core, or whatever new label is being stamped on it to unsuccessfully convince us think it changed. In this area, I will lean back and relax a bit, because the reading and language arts standards for my grade level make good sense. The math goes a bit overboard, and the science is a bit too detailed. The students in the grade level I teach is in need of lots and lots of practice in their mathematical operations. Neither Envisions nor Engage New York provide the necessary practice. Some teachers say that Engage New York is wonderful in the area of reading. I may try it next year. My point here is that a reasonable curriculum in all areas, spelled out in good plain common-sense fashion, is needed, along with a similar pacing schedule for all subject areas. A team of teachers should get paid to take a year to hammer this out, not a group who has long since stopped knowing what happens in a classroom.

 

    My dear administrators, teaching young minds requires mindful lesson planning, endless copying, a knowledge of each student’s strengths and weaknesses, and constant classroom management, not to mention grading in the off hours, and dealing with irate/inept parents who often are the reason their kids come to school with low achievement and bad attitude. All of these factors require support, not more requirements, programs, and watchdogs. At the current rate, the rat will limp to the end of the maze and see no cheese. What is the cheese? To me, the cheese is student achievement and a sense of accomplishment for the teachers.

  

    I attended public school on the other side of the nation in the 1970s-80s. My teachers were good educators, and all had personality quirks. I did not like all of my teachers, but I came from each of them with lifelong knowledge. None of them were observed frequently by their supervisors, the classrooms had bright sunshine filling us with good energy and vitamin D, we ate a decent lunch cooked fresh, and we all had time to exercise twice daily, at least until the end of the sixth grade. The result? Most of us got a good education from mostly genuinely happy teachers, graduated and went on to college or trade school and are living good lives today. The kids we are teaching get little sunshine and exercise, are subjected to low quality food that for some reason costs money, and they are likely to live with their parents after high school, if they even finish. The world is not ready for them and they are not ready for the world.

   To conclude, I hope you take my words with an open mind. Our district is not alone, it is just the district I work for. Other schools in the nation face similar problems. If the rats feel encouraged with minimal obstacles, the cheese will be taken happily and the rat will look forward to another maze.

Sincerely,

A frustrated and bemused teacher