BOOKSHELF English teacher David Chant on the adventure of reading

SHAWNIGAN Bookshelf WITH DAVID CHANT

STORY BY CHRISTINA CHANT PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARDEN GILL

ON THE FACE OF IT, THERE’S LITTLE IN COMMON BETWEEN A FICTIONAL FIVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL FROM ENGLAND WITH TELEKINETIC POWERS AND A 10-YEAR-OLD CANADIAN BOY WITH A PASSION FOR HOCKEY, BUT ROALD DAHL’S MATILDA REMAINS ENGLISH TEACHER DAVID CHANT’S MOST ENDURING CHILDHOOD MEMORY OF THE IMMERSIVE MAGIC OF READING.

“I remember sitting in the den in my childhood home in Ontario,” he recollects. “I was maybe around 10 or 11 years old, and I sat and read Matilda for hours. So much so that, in my memory, I read all night and finished the entire book in one sitting.”

Rereading Matilda recently with his eldest son not only brought that particular memory rushing back, but also awakened a fresh adult perspective on the story itself. “Though I wasn’t aware of this when I read Matilda as a child, it’s really a story about a young person on her own, discovering the joy of learning, largely through reading. As an adult, that really struck a chord with me because that’s what I do now – it’s what I’ve enjoyed doing so much for over 20 years.” Similar meaningful early childhood reading experiences aside, David notes he completed his high school education “dutifully, but not particularly memorably.” Aside from one notable episode, where an eccentric high school English teacher gyrated around on a desk on his back sizzling like bacon in a striking lesson on auditory imagery, his teenage years were more about hockey, music, and navigating the excitement and challenges of high school social life than they were about enlightening literary experiences. The next time that reading truly recaptured his interest was after high school, during a time when he was playing major junior hockey in Brampton, Ontario, and keeping his academic hand in with humanities correspondence courses through York University. He was reading a book on medieval history when a spark, a feeling, came to him, somewhat by surprise. “There was an intellectual appeal that scratched an itch for me I didn’t even know was there,” David explains. “And from that point on, the appeal of learning and thinking, and the discovery that reading brings, have never disappeared.” After a period playing professional hockey in the US, David entered full-time post-secondary education at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, goaltending for the SMU Huskies, and diving into a range of humanities courses. It was during his first university-level English course – a year-long survey course of the ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf’ variety – where he made a profound discovery that shaped the course of his future life, passions, and career. “I was really into the course; it was the same feeling I’d had during my York University correspondence courses of being invigorated intellectually, and this process of learning and discovery through reading,” he shares. “I remember reading down the syllabus and seeing ‘The British Romantics’ and feeling pretty skeptical, but the first piece we studied in that section was William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Reading thoughts and feelings that I had had, expressed so powerfully and elegantly by someone who had lived in a totally different time and place, really got me. I was hooked, and I’ve been engaged with literature on a full-time basis since.”

This passion took him to the University of Glasgow to complete an MLitt in British Romanticism, followed by four years of a PhD at Queen’s University before switching into the BEd program to pursue his interest in teaching. “I get really excited to read, and when I read, it constantly presents other things that I want to read and learn about as well, so it just snowballs,” he explains. “I say that a lot to my students: if you’re hungry to learn, all you have to do is start one place where you find something interesting. Then you’ll instantly think of a bunch of other things that you want to read and learn about, and it branches out from there. I’ve read relatively widely in history, philosophy, and religion, all inspired by my reading of literature. It can become almost an obsessive quest to keep exploring and discovering.” It was this process of discovery ignited by his graduate studies that led him to his favourite book, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – the novel he would take with him to a desert island if given only one choice. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years. “It’s a very strange book,” says David. “Even more so because the novel in English at that point in 1759 was quite a new thing, so to be so creative with it at that point in history is very unique. I suppose the main theme is storytelling and digression – the narrator tries to tell the story of his life, but in the process he ends up saying so many other things. It’s incredibly cheeky, like a big joke, with Sterne testing how far he can go before the reader gives up and throws the book across the room. But if you enjoy it, it’s just fascinating and hilarious.” But Tristram Shandy is not a book David says he would ever ask high school students to read, nor does he tend to teach his second favourite book, Moby-Dick. “There can be real pleasure found in creative forms, but you need to go slow and it’s an acquired taste,” he says. “I’ve found that high school students tend to gravitate more toward linear narratives, told in ways that are clear, accessible, and engaging, and I totally understand and respect that. The content can certainly be mature and thought-provoking – but, in terms of a narrative, straightforward and clear tend to be more successful.” For that reason, one of his favourite books to teach is Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. “It explores almost every big, important theme you could imagine – family, love, race and racism, class, money – but it doesn’t do it in any pretentious, lofty, didactic way. It’s just a wonderful, engaging story that’s written so clearly and effectively, and it’s so accessible. And students just get right into it. I get right into it, and I’ve taught it many times.” Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also go over well in the classroom, he notes. “I think Oryx and Crake

is one of the most important and profound novels of the 21st century. It deals with big issues that we’re grappling with – climate change and its consequences, and the potential tension between science and technology and the liberal arts – but it’s also funny and very human. Jekyll and Hyde is great to teach, and I think it’s actually very contemporary in a sense. I think there are major themes about drugs and alcohol and addiction, but it’s really about identity. One of the main messages I try to convey when teaching it is that it’s okay for your identity to be plural – you can do many different things. It’s appealing to me as someone who grew up as a hockey player, but who also felt this pull towards academic and intellectual culture. That was seen by many as incongruous, but of course it doesn’t have to be.” Recently, his explorations in reading have brought him into the sphere of young adult fiction, with recent notable reads including Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and David Almond’s Skellig. Both are fantastical magic realism books with young male protagonists, which have presented David, now the father of two young boys himself, with a richer, more multifaceted, and more emotional reading experience than they may naturally offer a younger reader. “When I was in my 20s and reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy with gusto, it was simply with the perspective of Frank Osbaldistone as the young adventurer,” he reflects. “Now I’m reading things through the eyes of a father, seeing these themes about nurturing and caring for young people, and ultimately having to let them go.” It’s this natural shift in perspective that has also brought him round full circle to teaching William Blake’s poetry. “At the time when I was doing my grad work, Blake was the one major Romantic writer I tended to stay away from. His writing appeared to me to be a bit too esoteric and out there, even for my tastes. I was more comfortable with and drawn to writers like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, the Shelleys (Percy Bysshe and Mary), Austen, and Scott. Blake was different. But now I find I’m always quoting him, and his poems are the most fun to teach. I think they’re what students think poetry should be: they’re often short, they make great use of rhythm, they rhyme. Some of his poems have an almost childlike quality to them on first listen, but then you dig into them and it turns into those magical hour-long classes where you could hear a pin drop – everyone is just so into it.” These, in essence, are the kinds of positive, memorable experiences with reading he’s trying to create as a teacher. “I feel like it’s just such a gift. It was given to me by some great educators, and my career as an English teacher is trying to share that gift,” he explains. “If after high school, years on, the students grow up to be adults who read, write, speak, listen, and think with a sense of confidence and enjoyment, that’s the greatest measure of success that I could ever hope for.”