Maybe it’s time to pause a
moment to talk about Washington Irving and me.[1] I cannot really remember
when I’d not heard of him. One of my earliest memories—going to see the
thirty-four-minute Disney cartoon of “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at the Trail Drive-In, Enid, Oklahoma. The film was
released in 1949; I would turn five in November that year.
The cartoon scared the hell out
of me.
Although a lot of it was funny,
there was a terrifying scene when Ichabod rides home from the party and meets
the Horseman, alone in the woods, a Horseman armed with a huge sword, a
Horseman mounted on a bulky black steed that looked as if it had ridden out of
Hell to scare little boys sitting in Oklahoma cars. Mission accomplished.
Later on in my boyhood (when was
it? can’t remember) I learned about Rip Van Winkle, which wasn’t all that frightening—even the notion of
going to sleep and waking up twenty years later was actually kind of exciting
to a boy (I’d be done with school!).
Not so exciting now, when, twenty
years hence, it’s very likely I’d wake up dead.
Early in my public school
teaching career (which, recall, commenced in the fall of 1966), I discovered in
a little reader I had to use (Doorways to
Discovery) a radio-play version of “Legend.” I had my seventh graders read
it aloud—and, in some years, we actually performed it over the school’s PA
system. A couple of times the faculty did it for the kids around Halloween. The
students seemed to like it (hey, beats homework!), and I learned a vocabulary
word—salubrious—which Ichabod utters
when he enters the party near the end: Ah,
Mynheer Van Tassel, (Nasally) this is
indeed a salubrious occasion![2]
(For those of you too cowardly to admit that you don’t know salubrious, it means “promoting health;
healthful.”)
Still later, I taught the full
story to my eighth graders (as well as “Rip Van Winkle”)—though it took a bit
of help. Those stories, originally published in 1820 in Irving’s collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,
are full of words my students didn’t know—and allusions to unfamiliar things,
as well.
Still later, when I taught
college-prep juniors at Western Reserve Academy, I gave them a little “reading
guide” to the stories, a guide on which I defined for them words like inveterate, cognomen, supernumerary,
ferule, chopfallen, and numerous others. And, of course, I showed them the
Disney film that had terrified me.
No comments:
Post a Comment