The Word You Didn't See Coming

I have been ambushed by the same word twice in my teaching career.

These two events occurred nearly twenty years apart. Both times, while I was reading aloud to students, completely unprepared, the word gobsmacked me.

Here’s how to handle these occurrences so you’re never ambushed by a word in classic literature that derails your teaching.

The first time a problematic word from a classic novel snuck into my purview, I was a brand-new English teacher in a freshman classroom made up mostly of boys, with a smattering of girls who were as rough-and-tumble as their male counterparts.

We’d just finished Romeo and Juliet, and I was standing in the English teacher’s lounge looking over all my next book options.

Mr. “Cool” teacher walked in, and we started chatting.

He pleaded with me not to force another classic novel on my freshman after teaching Shakespeare. As if classic literature was some kind of punishment.

“Don’t do that to them,” he implored me.

My boyfriend at the time had talked me into reading Stephen King’s The Long Walk (yep, the one that’s recently been made into a movie), and something clicked: teenage boys, a walking contest that’s really a metaphor for Vietnam (in other words, a historical reference), contestants wearing each other down until only one is left standing.

It was masculine, gritty, and weird. Everything that Romeo and Juliet wasn’t.

This was three years before The Hunger Games hit theaters.

If you haven’t worked in a high school before, you may not realize how little time new teachers have to read. But if you’ve seen any of my previous posts, you might imagine I had even less time than most.

Yes, I’m loquacious, as my husband likes to say.

As an English teacher, that showed up as detailed curriculum planning and lots of writing feedback. I’d provide each student with so many writing suggestions on their papers they could not only get a higher grade, but also a publishing contract.

So, while I had read quite a bit of The Long Walk before I went through the process of getting the school to buy the copies, I hadn’t read all of it.

Time was just something I couldn’t stretch to fit in my copying, supply buying, grading, organizing, lesson planning, and general life requirements as a single woman who was now a new teacher and still hoped to sleep.

Reading everything ahead just wasn’t always possible.

At first I was proud of myself.

The boys and even the girls dug the novel.

It was gutsy and real, with sci-fi elements.

My students seemed eager for each new chapter. The novel was so different from what they were used to reading in school that it felt like I had really challenged the status quo.

We clicked along through the story, but as the journey intensified, so did some of the language.

Many of the boys were breaking down, getting weaker from lack of food or too much physical exertion. Some were sick. The reality of what would happen if they dropped below a certain speed surrounded them and was becoming too difficult to process.

Tension was high, and it was every man for himself.

So they turned on each other, using mental games that grew from each boy like the angry fangs of wounded animals.

And there it was. Smack in the middle of the chapter.

Knee-deep into the book—the word that shall not be named.

There was no warning label, no parental advisory, on this Stephen King book.

I never saw it coming.

I stopped and explained it on the spot—that the boys were tearing each other down because it was every man for himself on that road. That cruelty was the goal when you’re trying to survive. This was King’s extended metaphor for what happens when young boys are flown away from their families, turned into soldiers, and expected to survive in a jungle they didn’t know while their friends died around them.

But I was building that explanation in real time, on the fly.

I was unprepared.

I didn’t say anything wrong; I just wish I had seen it coming.

The second time this happened was two nights ago, while homeschooling my own daughter. A die-hard unicorn fanatic, she started telling me a made-up story about a unicorn war in which one of the creatures loses its horn.

Where did my mind go?

To Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, of course.

Hmmm… a play.

We could read it in a night or two. As a family.

The Glass Menagerie didn’t have anything shocking that I could recall.

No rape scene like in A Streetcar Named Desire or the attack in Suddenly, Last Summer. As a former theatre major, I thought I knew my way around a Williams play.

*Spoiler alert: I didn’t. Not fully.

I knew the story:

A shy, insecure girl who collects glass animals is chatting with a gentleman caller, or rather a friend of her brother’s, who’s been asked over for dinner. He accidentally knocks her unicorn onto the floor and breaks off its horn.

Sure, I knew that was coming.

We sat down to read The Glass Menagerie aloud as a family from one of my old, old college theatre textbooks.

Did I say it was OLD?

When Amanda Wingfield, the mother, strutted in, I should have known she’d be spoiling for a fight. That faded Southern belle routine, a woman built entirely of nostalgia for a world that was never as gracious as she had remembered it, was not placed in this play to do no harm.

Nope.

Her character used the same word that pounced on me in The Long Walk.

This was the same ambush, nearly twenty years later, and I was just as caught off guard as I’d been in the classroom. But this time it was with my own kid, not an assortment of high school freshmen whose trust I was trying to earn.

My daughter saw the word.

She saw me look concerned.

And she saw me hesitate and turn to my husband.

Instead of me managing the moment for her, we just talked.

She said she’d never use a word like that, and she understood, on her own, why it was not only inappropriate but wrong. She also seemed to understand why it felt so aggressive coming out of the character Amanda’s mouth.

The difference wasn’t that I was more prepared the second time.

I wasn’t; not really.

The difference was that I had more room to sit with the discomfort, instead of performing my way out of it in front of an audience.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll avoid reading certain classic novels.

I’m telling you so you’ll stop expecting a warning label, and so you know that even when you are caught off guard, the moment isn’t ruined.

It’s an opportunity.

There’s a real difference between a classroom and a living room.

In a classroom, a teacher is managing thirty kids’ worth of reactions, backgrounds, and liabilities, with no ability to pause and check with every single child. That teacher’s caution isn’t cowardice. She’s performing work that must appeal to lots of different types of students.

A home read-aloud is a different tool for a different kind of education.

You’re sitting next to your child.

You can stop any time.

You can define.

You can watch their face and adjust.

Treating those two settings as if they require the same action plan is where a lot of the “just avoid it” crowd goes wrong.

So I wouldn’t skip the book; I’d make sure to not get caught off guard by it.

What these two books taught me:

The ugly word on the page isn’t always there for the same reason, and figuring out why it’s there is the real lesson.

❦ Amanda in The Glass Menagerie:

Tennessee Williams hands her that word as characterization, full stop.

She’s not a stand-in for the author’s views; she’s an indictment of an outdated place and time. Everything about Amanda is nostalgia for a South that was never as gracious as she insists it was. Williams is showing you exactly how her memory is built and what it costs the people around her. Amanda dreams of a “kinder” time when servants did all the work, as if the servants in her universe had no lives of their own.

The ugliness is pointed.

It’s providing us with characterization, and the play knows it.

❦ The boys in The Long Walk:

The word here is doing something more ambient.

It’s the 1970s, and we’re getting to know draft-age boys, walking themselves to death as a stand-in for Vietnam. They’re doing everything in their power to wear each other down, including using cutting language against each other so they themselves can survive. The cruelty there isn’t indicting one character’s worldview—it’s the entire atmosphere; it’s what boys about to be fed into a war machine do to each other under pressure.

It’s much uglier in some ways, but less surgical.

We have the same word in two books, used for entirely different purposes.

If you ask “why is this here?” every time you see an offensive word instead of assuming you already know, you end up teaching the book rather than just surviving it.

Yes, even the ugly words are worth examining.

If you’re about to read a classic aloud with your children and you’re nervous about what’s buried in it, you might have a good instinct but the wrong fear.

Skimming for content warnings won’t help you.

No, you don’t have to read the entire book ahead of time.

I know that’s the advice everyone gives, but I also know it’s not realistic.

You’re teaching six subjects to a child, maybe to multiple children; you don’t have a couple of spare days to pre-read every classic before assigning it. What you actually need is a targeted pass, not a full read:

• Search “[book title] Common Sense Media” — most people know this site for movies and TV, but they also review books directly, with the same category breakdown (language, violence, messaging) and specific examples instead of a vague age number.

• Pull up the text online (Gutenberg, Google Books preview, whatever’s legal and free) and search for a specific word you’re worried about. Five seconds, and now you know the page number instead of finding out live.

• Read a synopsis. (SparkNotes, LitCharts, a solid Wikipedia plot summary) Specifically look for who says difficult things and why, not just what happens. You’re not looking for spoilers to avoid; you’re looking for landmines to mark.

• If it’s a well-known classic, someone has almost certainly already written about this exact problem. A quick search for “[book title] problematic language” will usually turn up an essay or teaching guide that’s done the homework for you.

None of this requires reading the whole book ahead of time.

It requires knowing enough not to be surprised.

But what if you look, find nothing, and a word shows up anyway?

I trained in performance, and the rule we were taught was: you read the dialogue as it’s written.

Not because the word is fine, but because softening a playwright’s language changes the character, and the character’s ugliness is often the entire point the author is making.

If you’re doing an actual production of The Glass Menagerie or watching a film adaptation, that’s a text meant for performance. Williams put that word in Amanda’s mouth on purpose, and an actor cutting it would be editing Tennessee Williams, which isn’t really anyone’s job.

But your living room isn’t a stage, and I think that distinction matters. In a classroom or at home, your kid can see the page. They can see the word sitting right there in black and white, whether you say it or not.

So if saying it out loud feels like too much, for you or for them, you don’t have to. You can read around it—“and then Amanda says something that I’m not going to repeat out loud, but here’s what it tells us about her”—and the lesson survives completely intact, because it was never about you voicing the word.

It was about noticing the word on the page and asking what it’s doing there.

Performance has different rules than parenting a nine-year-old through a play at the kitchen table or on the sofa. I’d rather you feel free to choose than feel bound by a theatre convention built for actors on a stage.

After:

Have a real conversation; don’t give a lecture.

Ask your children:

• Why do you think the author put that word in this character’s mouth?

• What is it telling us about who they are, or what world they came from?

Let your kid sit with the discomfort instead of you narrating it away for them.

This is the part that actually worked with Amanda’s line.

I didn’t tell my daughter what to think. I just let her sit there with it, and she landed on “I’d never say that” and “I understand why it’s wrong” on her own.

That’s a better outcome than anything I could’ve lectured about.

Here’s the wrinkle that might throw you: not every landmine is a word you can search for.

Some parent friends of ours read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to their children and admitted that Roald Dahl’s sequel reads like a fever dream from a bygone era’s assumptions. I haven’t read it, but my husband did—aloud to our daughter, completely unprompted by any of this, and both he and our friends discovered they had the same reaction to the story. It was just strange. Off-putting in a way neither of them expected. Nothing that would show up if you searched “problematic language,” so nothing a keyword check would catch.

Just an entire book’s worth of a different century’s idea of what was “normal” to put in front of a child.

That’s worth considering because there was a real stretch of literary history where children were written for, like, small adults, dropped into weirder material with none of the protective softening we build in by default now.

All you Gen X and Millennials who’ve seen the original Willy Wonka movie just think bout the boat scene—you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This weirdness is not necessarily a flaw to sand off.

It’s a genuinely interesting thing to notice with your kid.

That the very idea of childhood as a protected, cushioned category is a fairly modern invention.

Every piece of advice up to this point assumes you have five minutes to prep.

But what if you don’t?

After I read the version of The Glass Menagerie in my very old textbook, I looked up the use of the problematic word on Google, and Gemini swore up and down that that word wasn’t in the play.

Okay, buddy.

The absolute wars I’ve had with Gemini over reality amaze me!

Sometimes a word is just there, mid-sentence, with your kid staring at you. Here’s what actually works in that moment, no prep required:

• Don’t perform a recovery—just narrate it plainly.

  “Huh, that’s a strange way to describe that” or “That’s pretty rough, isn’t it?” is enough. You’re not delivering a lecture; you’re telling your kid, “I noticed this too,” so they wonder whether you missed it or think it’s fine.

• Ask before you explain.

  “What did you think of that?” gets you further than jumping straight into context. Half the time, your kid gets to the realization on their own, the way my daughter did with Amanda’s line, and your explaining just gets in the way of that.

• You’re allowed to stop.

  You can decide to not finish the chapter to avoid making it weird. A five-minute detour to actually talk about it isn’t a derailed lesson. It is the lesson, and probably the most important one of that day.

• “I don’t fully know why this is in here; let’s find out” is perfectly fine. You don’t have to be an instant authority. Looking it up together models the exact research habit you’re trying to teach in the first place.

• You get a second pass.

  If the in-the-moment version felt like it didn’t land—mine with The Long Walk in the classroom sure felt uncomfortable—you can circle back the next day, in the car, or the next morning. The moment isn’t one shot with no do-overs.

And if you’re mid-scramble right now because none of this crossed your mind in advance, you’re not the only one. This isn’t a sign you’re underprepared or incompetent.

It’s a sign that older literature was written under a different set of assumptions than the ones we’re operating under now, and no amount of googling can catch it all.

Being caught off guard doesn’t mean you did it wrong.

It means you’re reading real books.

Here’s the question that actually complicates all of this.

A few years back, Puffin quietly went through Roald Dahl’s books with sensitivity readers and started removing words. Lots of words.

Augustus Gloop stopped being “enormously fat” and became “enormous.” Words like “ugly,” “crazy,” and “mad” got cut across the board. The Oompa-Loompas went from “small men” to “small people.” In Matilda, the line “I was her slave” disappeared entirely, and the girl who used to read Kipling now reads Austen instead.

The backlash was fast and loud, including Camilla, then-Queen Consort, defending writers’ freedom of expression.

Penguin Random House folded within the week and announced it would republish the unedited originals as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,” sold right alongside the revised versions.

They didn’t retract the changes; they gave readers a choice.

So if I’m telling you not to skip Amanda’s line, don’t I also have to answer for Augustus Gloop’s waistline? I think the honest answer is that these aren’t actually the same problem, even though they get lumped together.

A slur is doing targeted, historical harm—it’s a word with a body count behind it, aimed at a specific group, and when an author puts it in a character’s mouth on purpose, it’s usually doing real work: indicting the character, setting a time and place, telling you something true and ugly about how people actually talked.

Ask what the word is doing, not just how it lands:

• Amanda’s words are producing an indictment.

• The Long Walk’s cruelty creates an intense atmosphere and serves as a metaphor.

• Augustus Gloop’s waistline is a cruel punchline in a book that’s mean to everyone.

Editing for historical harm and editing for reader discomfort are two different jobs.

There’s a version of this that isn’t hypocrisy at all, because writers really do go back and change their own work.

Chekhov trimmed the ending off “The Bet” when he anthologized it.

Whitman spent his whole life revising Leaves of Grass.

This isn’t author erasure; it’s a creative mind still in conversation with its own text.

What happened to Dahl is a different thing entirely: he’d been dead for over thirty years, and he’d told his publishers directly not to change so much as a comma. Somebody else’s judgment got substituted in for his after he’d lost the ability to object.

So maybe the honest rule isn’t “never change a word of a classic.”

It’s that the only person with the authority to change a novel is the person who created it in the first place.

Here’s my favorite proof of this because it happened in my own living room.

A friend on Substack mentioned her daughter was frightened by the scene in James and the Giant Peach where the rhino kills James’s parents. My daughter wasn’t scared by this scene in the book, but she was scared by it in the movie. And then last month, she performed in a stage production of James and the Giant Peach and got to play James’s mother.

The one who gets killed by the rhino.

She died on stage, on cue, and thought it was hilarious.

She got less afraid of it by getting closer—by understanding it, performing it, and having agency over it instead of just receiving it.

You don’t protect a kid from a scary rhino by editing the rhino out.

You protect her by handing her the rhino and letting her play the part.

I’d still rather my daughter meet these words—and these rhinos—on the page, in my house, with me sitting next to her, rather than her meet them when I’m not around. With a teacher who’s not sure how to manage the words, or who wants to clean everything up because it’s too much work not to.

And that, my friends, is the beauty of homeschool.

Not everything gets sanitized to meet some status quo.

What do you do all day?

Ever have a childless friend or family member ask you that question?

Well, next week we’re going to talk about it.

The homeschool year is heating up; you are completely overloaded, and a comment like that could set off fireworks if it catches you at the right moment.