I've been pondering how to make my criminal justice majors get more revved up over reading To Kill a Mockingbird. My older son, the law-school graduate, said to remind them that if they didn't like the class on the first go-round, they'd dislike it twice as much if they had to repeat it. That's not my style. I don't like to threaten and punish. I want them to see what I see in the novel. It's so honest and sweet in places, and so harsh and brutal in others, without being crass and rough. I was telling my husband recently that American culture has lost the art of subtlety. We go for the broad, bright, obvious stroke, not the delicate, nuanced, nearly unseen one. We are hardened, jaded, roughened. Our emotions are too shredded by the constant violence and blatant loveless sexuality.
One of my students said he thought the book was boring. I told him it might be because modern readers (and tv and movie viewers) expect a murder or a car chase in the first five minutes. Neither occurs in TKAM, at least not by the usual definitions. There are chase scenes (Jem running away from Boo's house), and there is the death of Tom, which is in a subtle way, a murder, since he is not guilty of raping the white girl.
Aside from acting out all the parts for them, like a one-woman play, I don't quite know what to do. But I'll think of something.
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