Today in a PD session with Kathy Collins (I don't know how to link her, really? Her Twitter feed sort of ends in August last year... I know that doesn't sound great, but I've been inspired the whole time she's been at our school.), we were asked to do a little "close reading" of Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up.
Kathy shared with us the first chapter:
She said something like, "Talk about it. What do you notice?"
She said something like, "Talk about it. What do you notice?"
So a colleague and I did that - we analyzed, we made inferences, we drew conclusions... based only on those few paragraphs. It was getting intense - we were digging. We were on fire.
But really, none of what we had said had any significance at all, anymore, when another colleague who had left the room in the meantime, came back without a clue and sat down to read it over in thirty seconds, turned to us to say, "She committed suicide. Couldn't the 'thunk' be her having jumped from the roof?" Conversation went cold. Shivers. It got the attention of others at the table. We were all convinced, because it made perfect sense, in the most chilling way - a way we hadn't considered.
And so I had to read it; running out to the bookstore after the PD to buy it. I haven't had this desire, really, to read a book for fun in a long time. I need to know: what is the thunk?!
More to come.
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