I teach college students who range
in age from 17 years old on upwards. 
Many of them are fresh out of high school, and so in teaching them I
occasionally get some sense of what it might be like to teach in high schools. In talking with them out of class, I get
some idea of how they see the world. My
own personal experience of being a teenager is probably not much of a guide – I
went to a very different kind of school in a different country, and graduated
in 1979. Some of the people I knew then
probably have teenaged children of their own now. Most of my knowledge of high school life comes from TV dramas,
documentaries, and some novels. From
what I see, I get the impression that being a high school student is, for most,
a profoundly unpleasant and even disturbing experience, although the students I
see have survived it, and some even say they enjoyed it. I’m sure that I would not.

Poet Ron
Koertge has given a portrait of a small group of high school students in this
collection of poems. The Brimstone
Journals aims to show the inner voices of each of the students, each poem
being written from the point of view of one of the students. A story unfolds – a small group of angry
students plan to go to their high school and shoot the people on their list,
the ones who they do not like. There’s
a selection of the different groups one might expect to find in a school: the
jock, the promiscuous girl, the studious Asian, the street-talking African-American
girl, the racist burning with hatred, and so on.

The book is
a quick read, and it succeeds well in setting out what it aims to do, if one is
willing to enter into the fiction that each of these characters would express
themselves in poetry. The book could
certainly be used as a talking point for high school students. Its great failure, however, is in its
one-dimensional approach to each type. 
Each character is sketched, but the characterization is so shallow that
it fails to provide any insight beyond the most obvious. Of course there are sex, violence, drugs,
bullying, anxiety, and self-harming behavior in high school; I can’t believe
that this would be surprising news to any teacher, parent or student. So The Brimstone Journals is less
informative and no less sensationalistic than any episode of Fox TV’s Boston Public,
and it pales in comparison to any episode of Freaks and Geeks or American High.

© 2002 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review.
His main research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry.
He is especially interested in exploring how philosophers can
play a greater role in public life, and he is keen to help foster
communication between philosophers, mental health professionals,
and the general public.

Categories: Fiction