Finding Light in the Heart of Darkness

The stories collected by Pearl Rock Kane in The First Year of Teaching: Real World Stories from America's Teachers began as submissions to a contest supported in part by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. When asked for autobiographical accounts of their first days in the classroom, nearly 400 teachers nationwide were eager to comply. The 25 selected give an uplifting, thoughtful, often poignant, and sometimes humorous overview of the many unplanned-for experiences that make up the first year on the job. In the chapter excerpted below, Z. Vance Wilson, now a published author of fiction and non-fiction who teaches in Wisconsin, describes the lessons he learned as a novice English teacher in Atlanta:

Near the end of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the infamous ivory trader Kurtz, on his deathbed in the Congo, whispers the phrase, "The horror! The horror!" But the truly climactic episode follows Kurtz's death when the narrator, Marlow, visits Kurtz's fiancee in Brussels. Throughout the story, Marlow has said that he despises lies, but when asked by Kurtz's "intended" what his last words were, Marlow lies and says that with his last breath "the great man" spoke her name.

In the spring we had closed the semicircle of our desks to a closer-knit circle with the teacher's desk outside. "Why does Marlow lie to her?" I asked. As usual, I felt a physical urge to answer my own question quickly, to point them to the passage early in the book where Marlow reminds his listeners that London, the capital of civilization, was once itself dark and horrific place. I could hear my own sweet voice within my head. "Don't you understand? We build our culture...