In 2003, as the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health case promised to legalize same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, Upper School English Teacher Connor Larsen, who was a high schooler at the time, joined protesters outside the state’s courthouse each day. The demonstrations captivated him: there was something “so exciting and interesting” in having “some kind of effect in the way that I would be living my life,” said Larsen in an interview.
These events “definitely pulled [Larsen’s] attention away from sitting in Biology, or any classes,” and his grades plummeted. Although demonstrating was “not a bad thing to be doing,” Larsen and his family decided it was better for him to attend boarding school.
At the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Larsen studied creative writing. He described his time there as a “defining experience.”
“I went from being someone who didn’t care very much about academics…to having teachers who could actually show me that all the things I was feeling in the world were reflected in literature, often in more interesting, nuanced, complex ways,” Larsen said.
“Having incredible teachers…was really life-changing for me,” he continued. “Maybe [there is] a trope of teachers who had great teachers who went on to be teachers, but it’s true, I think. You meet somebody who opens so many doors that you’re so grateful were opened, so you want to turn around and open doors for other people in the world.”
As an English teacher, Larsen still wonders at the “really interesting, beautiful things that happen in these texts” while teaching his students texts such as “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck and “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger.
While Larsen appreciates the English department’s effort to include “new authors [and] new voices,” he thinks that there are elements in the classics that are “worth having students read and think about.”
“Literature is finding language to describe and explore the human experience,” Larsen explained. “[In the world of “Of Mice and Men”], there’s…so much external pressure [and] so few opportunities to live a meaningful, dignified life…[And yet] in that world, you have these two characters who depend on each other, who love each other. There’s something so special and moving about what very different humans can learn about each other from their relationships. ‘Of Mice and Men’ is about loneliness and alienation, but it’s also about companionship and striving for a better future, however tragic the outcome is.”
He’s particularly amazed by Salinger’s use of narrative voice in “The Catcher and the Rye,” saying, “To me, there’s something so incredible about a grown man being able to recreate the voice of a disaffected, grieving sixteen-year-old in ways that to me seem so authentic…It’s not easy to do. A lot of authors try and reproduce adolescence or teenagers, and they just butcher it. But for all of his flaws, of which there are many, I buy Holden Caulfield as a character in this world. Holden’s voice is here, on the page, with us.”
Larsen explained that he is still learning through teaching. “I’ve gone through many stages of my life where I thought that the world should be black or white, that I desired to think of things as black and white, when I wanted there to be clear demarcation between morality and immorality,” he said. “The longer that I live and write and think, the more the nuance matters, and the more I want complex, messy characters.”
“I think that we all are messy characters, and I think that there’s beauty in that,” Larsen concluded.
