“I’m not reading a girl book.”

He said it to me looking me dead in the face, holding the book up with his hand, and nodding his head in the direction of the offending novel.

“Give me something else. I’m not reading this.”

My student’s don’t defy me. Ever. I try hard to make sure they like what we are doing, and in return they do it. The end. I take pride in the fact that my students enjoy my class.  The best card I ever received was from a 15 year old boy. “Dear Ms. Norman, You make English not suck.” A higher compliment I could not imagine. By the time the last book of the semester rolls around the kids expect to like whatever it is I give them. They almost always do. But not that day.

I handed out one of the best selling novels of all time, and the response I immediately got from this normally compliant boy was simple.

“I’m not reading a girl book.”

Notice he didn’t say another girl book. We hadn’t read any all semester. In fact, we had read what are traditionally considered “boy books.” Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, Tuesdays with Morrie, all have no major female characters, all are written by men. I had taught nearly an entire semester of books by and about people this boy could identify with.

Some of the other boys in my class joined the protest. When they saw my jaw set they changed their tactic. “Come on, Ms. Norman, Don’t you want to give us a book we enjoy? Make an exception, let us read something else.”

They did not succeed in persuading me. We are currently 140 pages into Rebecca. Mostly, the kids like it. The book is a little creepy, and you can’t quite figure out whether it is about murder or ghosts, what isn’t to like? But there are about three boys who are simply refusing to read it, failing all their response writings. They have a point to prove.

I want to tell you all the things I told them. I want to give you my feminist rant, perfected by seven years in the classroom, but that isn’t the deeper story here. That isn’t why this story shakes me, two weeks later. It shakes me because I am sure,  in the hardest parts of my heart, I am the belligerent student.

I don’t do that. I’m not reading that. I will not consider that opinion. No. I do not have to hear that out,because it is not for me.

There are entire blogs, twitter accounts, groups of people, whole swaths of the world that I just shrug off. Those people have nothing for me. I could not possibly gain anything by reading their story.

That, is a girl book.

I don’t want to live my life with my head on my desk. I don’t want to miss out on a brilliant mystery, simply because I have a point to prove. It seems I still have a lot to learn.