That song from The Lion King

I have always (read: for the past year or so) said that teaching is one of those things that goes largely unnoticed for several years.  Meaning that students don't really know the impact you had or the importance of what they learned for many years after school ends.  The same, I think, can be said for the reverse.  This is the story of an occasion in which a student caused my life to come full circle -- and in this example, in only took a few months.

There was this one high school Math class that I subbed in quite a few times last year.  The teacher was also a firsty, like me (only she had a real job for herself), and her kids were mostly fun.  At the very least nothing caught on fire, nobody beat anybody's face in, and the kids usually did (or pretended to do) their work.  Most of the time.  Most of the kids.

There was this one kid that I really enjoyed having.  He always did his work, didn't cheat with the other guys (Even though he was friends with them - somehow he seemed to be able to rise above them without seeming "above" them.  It was cool).  He was in band, and he seemed the kind of guy I would have been friends with in school.  Us artsy fartsy types tend to flock to each other, as if we had some kind of radar.  I was reading a Percy Jackson book one of the days I was in his class, and when he asked why, I told him I liked to read what my students were reading.  This applied more to middle school, as Percy is not quite as popular among high schoolers, but the point is that I read a lot of young adult literature.

"You should read Will Grayson, Will Grayson," he said.  "It's amazing."

"Sure, maybe sometime I'll check it out."  I wrote the name down, but didn't ask him how to spell it or who the author was.  I figured I could get the rest when it was needed, or that the clerk at Borders could help me (Borders was still a thing the day I was in his class).

At about that same time, I got really ridiculously in to Pinterest.  My friend Sarah and I would have frequent Pinterest binges, which involved pasting long URLs into Skype, so many links that mine blended with hers and I forgot which ones I'd been to already.  It was a mix of recipes, wedding dresses, quotes, and cute kittens and puppies.  Somewhere in the mix of Sarah-posts was this:

"YES!" I probably said out loud, or if not out loud then definitely really, really loudly in my head.  "This is so perfect!  Whoever that John Green guy is, he's got it goin' on!"  I probably didn't say "He's got it goin' on."  I'm fairly certain nobody says that anymore.  The point is that this quote was awesome (at the risk of sounding like a vapid girl listening to a song in a bar), so me, and I didn't know who the author was.  I don't think Sarah did either, although Sarah if you're reading this, feel free to correct me on that.

Now, a smart person would have looked him up.  Now that I know who he is, I know that a google search would have been really successful.  But that's not what I did.  I just forgot about him and kept the quote in the front of my mind, referencing it every now and then, in that way I have of referencing inside jokes with myself and totally isolating everyone else involved in the conversation.  I should stop doing that.

If I had researched John Green, I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the random full-circle story that was being written around me.  The next chapter in the story was written at a local coffee shop, where I met to tutor a student for the SAT and occasionally share substituting war stories with Mallory, a fellow sub and former college roommate. 

I'd just told what was no doubt a hilarious and terrible story about the middle schoolers I shared space with on a daily basis.  I say "shared space," because as a long-term sub they pretty much view anything you teach them and any work they do for you as meaningless.  So I guess I "taught" them, and I'm sure there were some who listened.  But for most, I was just that young-looking girl who shared space with them for a few weeks.  Anyway, Mallory said this: "You know what your students need?  I think they need some Brothers 2.0.  I think they'd like some of the videos."  

My first thought was of a robot.  "Hel-lo.  I am Broth-er 2.0 and this is my broth-er 2.0 as well.  We are Broth-ers from the fu-ture."  But they are not robots.  Mallory told me a little about John and Hank, how John is a writer but Hank writes songs, and she was team John but Patricia from college was team Hank, and that maybe my students would find some of their posts interesting.  She said they do videos on anything from the economy to literature to how to load a dishwasher and that I should definitely watch their videos.  I think she might have shown me a video there in the coffee house.  At any rate, it wasn't long before I'd spent hours in front of youtube, thumbing through their videos and subscribing to their channels.  

A few weeks ago I was preparing a lesson plan for an interview.  I wanted to do Catcher in the Rye, which is one of my very favorites ever, but I was afraid that some parents might object to Holden's language, drinking, and renting of a hooker for a little while -- even if it was just because he was lonely and wanted to talk for a minute.  I posted on facebook to see if any of my bookish friends had an alternative to Catcher that I could use -- not to fully plan a new lesson, just to show that I was aware of the potential issues and had prepared a backup.  The responses cam in droves -- The Bell Jar, The Graveyard Book, Look Me in the Eye, and many, many more.  Two suggestions from friends were Looking for Alaska and Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  I did an amazon check on the books that were suggested.  Most of them seemed a little too inappropriate to be an appropriate alternative to Catcher, but at the very least my already huge amazon wish list grew tenfold.  And those two books, they were so familiar.  So.  Familiar.....

And then I got it.  Looking for Alaska was by John Green.  And so were Paper Towns and An Abundance of Katherines, two books I'd heard of and had mentally added to my "Judging a book by its title and these sound cool" list.  And The Fault in our Stars, which he talked about in recent videos, and which I had also mentally added to my to-read list.  And Will Grayson, Will Grayson (Which he co-wrote with David Levithan, who also deserves credit and praise and happy thoughts, because his half was really good too).  That book that one kid had told me about that one time.

So thank you, to that kid.  Thank you for being awesome and for introducing me to what is so far a really cool book written by a really cool guy, who said something really cool that Sarah pinned on Pinterest and pasted into Skype.  And thanks, Mallory for telling me about Brothers 2.0 who aren't robots, but who help me pass a lot of time while I'm doing my sitting-around thing while Michael is at work.  And thanks to life for being not quite as random as it seems.

(That song from The Lion King is "Circle of Life."  And it moves us all.)

Edit. I forgot to mention the time in between the brilliant quote and the coffee shop visit.  Someone posted a video of this guy delivering what I felt to be really valid points on a political issue about which I get really fired up.  I reposted the video, having no idea who the guy was, and wondering who this "Hank" was that he kept addressing.