Niall places the beer in front of me. “Yeah. It was probably not great to burden a ten-year-old with my emotions but he keptasking what was wrong. It just seemed better than lying to him. And let’s not kid ourselves. He’s been through enough that my emotions probably didn’t even phase him.”
I look over and he’s waving his hands up and down, making Lily laugh. “You’re right. I just hope it hasn’t been too much for him. Like, in total.”
Niall slides half of his cookie, a snickerdoodle, over to me. “It’s my one job going forward, to make sure things get better for him.”
“I’ll help in any way I can.”
Literature for Young Adults - Michaelmas Term Session
Lecturer - Daniel Pierce
T TH 3:30-4:45
REVISEDSyllabus
Block One - Jennifer Niven
All the Bright Places
Breathless
Holding Up the Universe
Block Two - Jeff Zentner
Goodbye Days
In the Wild Light
The Serpent King
Sunrise Nights(co-written with Brittany Cavallaro)
Block Three -Irene McAllisterNic Stone
The Light of the HourDear Martin
Silence in the NightDear Justyce
The Others Before YouDear Manny
Block Four - Alice Oseman
Heartstopper: Volume One
Heartstopper: Volume Two
Heartstopper: Volume Three
Heartstopper: Volume Four
Heartstopper: Volume Five
29
The next few weeks seem to fly, with most of October over. My classes are going well, but the YA Lit class is the gem of the bunch. It seems, ever since the firstGoodbye Daysdiscussion, the class has become a unit. I’ll walk campus and see groups of kids from class hanging out, even on days class isn’t in session. Almost all of them randomly drop in once a week to my office hours, even if it’s just to talk about what else they’re reading. Sometimes it’s just to bullshit about random happenings, or to ask about the most recent atrocity coming from the broken American political system. Niall mentions seeing many of them on a regular basis in Books and Brews.
It’s something I’ve never experienced in my many years of teaching, but I love it.
