I’ve Taught Monsters
JESSICA LAHEY is a teacher and the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. Her writing on education and child welfare appears regularly in the Atlantic, Vermont Public Radio, and the New York Times. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches in Vermont.
I’ve taught monsters —ancient, ravenous monsters. Scylla and Charybdis, Grendel and his mother, and Polyphemus hurling rocks at the sea. Their stories are best taught out loud and without irony, lest dramatic interpretation give way to camp. When Beowulf dives into the “heaving depths of the lake” in pursuit of Grendel’s mother, I let my voice slip down as well, into dramatic, low tones to convey the dire threat as “the hero observed that swamp-thing from hell, / the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength,” then pitch my voice up into a frenzied crescendo, volume rising in tandem with the stakes, as Beowulf struggles to clout the fearsome she-monster on the head with his “war-sword.”
For over a decade, I taught monsters to the compliant, privileged, and well-nourished learners of a private school. My duty was clear: to guide them through the rigors of a classical middle school education, thus ensuring acceptance at the vaunted secondary school of their parents’ choice.
No matter how earnestly I threw myself into a no-holds-barred dramatic monologue, the vast distance of Beowulf ’s time, language, and culture from our own would blunt the impact of the “tarn-hag.” Yet, even when I couldn’t deliver fearsome drama, my students would toss me a few points for commitment and effort. They appreciated that I was willing to humiliate myself in service to their education and a thousand-year-old horror story.
Sure, these students knew monsters: a few of the smaller horrors
