Professionalizing Percy: Teaching a Childhood Favorite

 

Professionalizing Percy: Teaching a Childhood Favorite

 

Cover of The Lighting Thief by Rick Riordan

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I had the opportunity to teach Introduction to Literature for the first time this semester. One of the most challenging aspects of this opportunity was creating a course reading list. As I settled on a course theme, “The Hero(ine)’s Journey,” I immediately included a classic 21^st century children’s literature text: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, which details the journey of a modern-day Greek demigod living in New York. This book was placed in juxtaposition to the previous unit of canonical male and female heroes, comparing the intersections of youth, weakness, learning disability, and gender with traditional definitions of heroism. I was aware of, yet consciously brushed aside, my concerns of including a text that I had such a nostalgic pull towards. It was relevant to my course theme, but what if this middle-grade wasn’t challenging enough for university-level education? Though I claim to specialize in children’s literature, I fell prey to the fear that analyzing a middle grade that I liked would stray from the professionalism that this teaching position would require. Even so, I kept it on the reading list, which was approved.

As the course progressed, I relished the chance to reread The Lightning Thief and invite critical discussion of its successes and failures. I had never revisited this novel in a scholarly context and was excited to do so with students who never read it before, as well as with those who had the same cultural nostalgia for it as I do. However, I also felt a lingering desire for approval, more for this text than for others. Would the students like it? Is it too childish, or is Percy’s voice still likeable in 2020? These concerns led to careful lesson plans that drew attention to Riordan’s specific details in characterization and the definition he posits of “hero.” Student engagement seemed to be strong in these classes, with students participating in a variety of formats such as polls, group discussion, and class conversation. The result was that several students chose to write on The Lightning Thief for their literary analysis essays: some chose to analyze one or two of the female characters for the feminine strength prompt, while another chose to use Percy as an example of how the Hero’s Journey template fails to account for some significant heroic traits.

The discussion and critical work that arose from The Lightning Thief was all successful, and yet, what lingers as I reflect on this course is my sense of relief that students liked the book. Not that the book was challenging, or that it offered a complex and nuanced representation of heroism in middle grade novel, but did they like it? I had already known that this novel would provide excellent content for challenging the definition of heroism without eschewing tradition entirely. Yet putting this on the syllabus, I wanted students to appreciate the novel for the affective response it provokes, whether on a first read or a fifth. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer write on this topic extensively in The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, which I encourage you to read at your convenience.  

I rely on my own fledging experience as an instructor-scholar to conclude that it isn’t  wrong to be attached to certain books. I don’t think that the impulse to share a book that I find valuable needs to be justified. And yet it’s healthy to recognize flaws in books that are pristine in my memories. After a year and a half of graduate study, and after having taught it to students who love it and to students who never read it before this class, I still think of The Lightning Thief fondly. A treasured book will still be treasured whether or not others feel the same. In the midst of a pandemic, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that people who are grieving can change the world for the better. We don’t have to use books to escape into another world and find heroes. Maybe like Percy, even with all of our flaws, we already are heroes in the world we live in currently. We just need the reminder.

-       (AN)

Works Cited

Nodelman, Perry and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. Pearson, 2003. 

Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief. Scholastic Inc., 2006.