wednesday books teach school

[landofnowhere]

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. For years I have been complaining about the lack of SFF written from the point of view of a teacher, and Emily Tesh probably wasn't listening but she wrote this book anyway! Tesh taught classics at a boarding school for two years, and the worldbuilding of her boarding school in a world very much like ours only with magic is very much informed by that experience -- this is the sort of book that has a lot to say about education in our world, while also having creative and thought-provoking worldbuilding. It's not quite the type of story about a teacher that I wanted, but I hope it will lead to more of these.

(Also, I do still need to read Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic, which is the only other example I know of a fantasy novel from the point of view of a teacher.)

Comments

[cahn]

Ahhhh, you read The Incandescent! I would love to know the story about a teacher that you want :D Although mostly I just loved it for existing as SFF written with teacher-ish concerns, and agree that I would love to have lots of books like this covering all kinds of different types, the way I feel like there are rather more school/boarding-school books of all types from the perspective of the students.

[landofnowhere]

I'm not sure I know myself! But 20-year-old me wanted a book about a new teacher figuring out how to teach. I'm older now, and might like something like a sequel to this book, with an older teacher returning to teaching in a new context. (I mean, I myself decided that teaching wasn't the thing I was best suited for, and my one AO3 fic (Year of the Griffin years-later sequel where Claudia is a professor) is about burnout. But at book length I want a different arc.)

I see you have a review of the book, I should go read it and maybe put my spoilery thoughts there :-)

[oursin]

It's short stories rather than in her novels about 'The People' but Zenna Henderson was a teacher and some of them are from that viewpoint

[landofnowhere]

Thank you! Any collections you'd recommend?

[oursin]

It's a long time since I looked at them, but I think The Anything Box and Holding Wonder - there's also a Zenna Henderson Collection which may be her non-People stories - it's not exactly clear.

[cahn]

Ah, how did I not think of Zenna Henderson! I have Holding Wonder, which I just flipped through to refresh my memory, and it does have quite a few stories that are told from the point of view of a teacher -- maybe a third of them?

landofnowhere, her teacher stories are generally teachers dealing with kids of younger ages -- young elementary, usually. I personally really love her work but not sure if that's what you're going for.

[carbonel]

There are two NESFA Press collections of Zenna Henderson's stories. Ingathering is all the People stories (including one I'd never read) and Believing is all the non-People stories, plus a few poems. They're both available in ebook format for $10 or so each.

[sartorias]

I was going to point out the same thing. There are only two or maybe three collections; she didn't publish a lot.

[lunabee34]

Several people on my flist have been posting about this book; it sounds really interesting.

I'm always down for books with teacher protagonists who aren't white, middle-aged men having midlife crises and sleeping with their female students. LOL

[landofnowhere]

Arguably this book is about a midlife crisis, but it's a very diffreent sort of midlife crisis!

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

[crystalpyramid]

Thank you for the rec! Adding it to my list of books to maybe buy over the summer.

[landofnowhere]

I'd be really interested to hear your perspective.

[cahn]

I think this book would be very relevant to your interests!

[ursula]

I really loved it!

[landofnowhere]

Yay! Have you written a review? I am trying to find all my friends' reviews of the book but it's a bit tricky because I can't remember who all has read it and some of them read it a while back as an ARC.

[ursula]

Hmmm, I think I mostly yelled about it on Bluesky and in individual conversations.

It *was* the book about being a magic school teacher that I wanted, but I think my experience of being a teacher involves more burnout and more collision with class divisions than yours does.

Also, we should play the "what's your school of magic?" game! I think I'd be an instantiation theorist, in rebellion against a family tradition of invocation.

[landofnowhere]

I'm glad it was the one you wanted! I've experienced burnout, but I think because I burn out more easily it ends up being less completely.

I'm not sure I have a good enough sense of the other magical disciplines to tell! Based on Saffy's POV I think I'd like to be an invoker and draw commutative diagrams arrays to summon demons, and just generally try to understand what's going on with demons. But also I'm trying to figure out what my story would be in this world to get on the magical practitioner career path. Math had the advantage that I could mess around with it on my own as a kid/teenager without any real risks, and 13-year-old me was very much against the idea of fancy private schools. I attended a day camp at a local boarding school a couple summers when I was a middle schooler, and generally felt like a total misfit there. And then I went to an open house at that same school, and came back deciding I was never going back to a school ever, including college (at that point I'd been homeschooling for 4 years). OK, actually, probably in this alternate world I got into magic because I attended a magical summer camp that didn't suck, though what sort of summer camp would be appealing to a smart but dyspraxic teenager, I'd still have to figure out.

[ursula]

Huh, I realize I'd been assuming you were a CTY kid! Maybe this universe would also have magic camps similar to Mathcamp?

[landofnowhere]

I did one year of CTY (after 7th grade; the local camp was after 5th and 6th grade), but I took "Introduction to Lab Science" because my mom didn't want me to have the experience she had of taking chemistry for the first time in college and having no lab skills as well as being very clumsy. It turned out to be intellectually unstimulating and also not teaching much in the the way of lab skills, and my lab partners for the big project were The Worst, but CTY at large was a good environment! (And the kid from the game theory class who was really into Star Wars is now a number theorist, though I didn't run into her again until many years later.) I was going to go back after 8th grade to take chemistry, but then I qualified for MOP and went there instead, and that was my only camp through high school.

The question of how one would balance the Mathcamp spirit of "creative anarchy" with reasonable magical safety protocols is one I'm sort of actively curious about! I think you could have a good camp of some sort, maybe along the lines of the Chemistry Olympiad camp?

[hidden_variable]

I just started reading The Incandescent! As I commented to cahn, it definitely seems laser-targeted to my interests.

Also very intrigued by Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic, based on the title alone.

[carbonel]

I read Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic a couple of years ago, and I found it interesting but annoying. There were way too many loose threads that didn't get addressed, and I really didn't like where the story ended. It read as if it were setting up for a sequel, but there hasn't been one yet that I know of.

I guess I wanted to like it better than I actually did.