The Book Talks, Vol. 1
5th Grade Teacher Adrian Neibauer on Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting (1975)
The Book Talks is an interview series featuring teachers and the books they love to teach. First up is my conversation with
, who teaches fifth grade in Aurora, Colorado. Adrian and I had a fantastic conversation about Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting (1975), a classic of children’s literature in which ten-year-old Winnie Foster encounters a hidden spring in the mysterious wood outside her house. She meets the Tuck family, who know a great deal more about this spring and what its water does to people. Winnie has to decide what to do with her newfound knowledge, and the Tucks have to decide what to do with Winnie.Are you a teacher at the K-12 or college level? Is there a book you look forward to teaching year after year, or a new book on your syllabus you’re excited about sharing with students? I hope you’ll consider being an interviewee on The Book Talks! There is a link to an interest form at the bottom of this post.
When did you first teach Tuck Everlasting?
Novel studies used to be a fixture in my classroom. I didn’t have a standardized reading curriculum to follow, and there was no pressure to teach reading as a set of isolated skills from stacks of basal readers. The school library used to have class sets of novels for every grade-level. If I didn’t see a novel that I wanted to read with my students, I would let the librarian know, and they would order me enough copies for at least one small book club group.
That was over ten years ago. Tuck Everlasting was the last novel I taught (and read with) my students. Tuck was a staple novel in our classroom. Every year, either a small group of students would choose it for their literacy circle (book club), or if no one chose it, I would use it as a whole-class novel study. I taught Tuck every year (or read it aloud) for about five years before standardized testing forced me to curtail novel studies and read aloud.
What do you love most about the story? What have your students loved most about it?
At the upper elementary level (grades 4-5), and middle school level (grades 6-8), rarely is the term literature used. This is why I love teaching Tuck Everlasting so much. I believe Tuck is literature for younger students. My favorite part of teaching Tuck is Babbitt’s use of beautify language. There is so much to dissect and discuss on each page. She uses personification, foreshadowing, mystery, metaphors, imagery, etc. in such a tight space (less than 150 pages), and with beautiful prose. Tuck is a novel made for teachers to read and discuss with students! Babbitt’s craft is unparalleled as compared to other novels written for this age group.
I love how slowly the book moves. The first four chapters take place within a single day! Most students are not used to such a slow burn, and I particularly love the pacing Babbitt uses to keep her readers engaged.
Students love the elements of magical realism in the book. They love the idea of immortality! Babbitt’s use of magical realism to address more adult topics, such as civilization versus nature, time, death, loyalty, and family make for great classroom discussions. My favorite memories are of students animatedly discussing numerous contrasts throughout the book (dark versus light, constant change versus changelessness, vagueness versus clarity).
As a teacher, it is always a special moment when I can make connections to other academic content areas. For example, although we don’t study Westward Expansion in 5th grade, I loved connecting the setting of the book to European colonization of the U.S.
Babbitt is a master of suspense. One dreams of writing a prologue as gripping as hers. What compels your students’ attention early in the story? What do they respond to first as readers?
The prologue is incredible! In a page and a half, Babbitt throws us into the natural world with the changing of the seasons. We see the month of August like a giant ferris wheel, “at the very top of summer.” I think the imagery of the wheel is the first thing that grabs students’ attention. Attention spans are even worse today, but ten years ago, I still had to force students to read slowly so they wouldn’t miss any beautiful detail or foreshadowing.
Early in the story, students relate to Winnie because she is their age. As a ten-year-old, Winnie is given such an impossible choice to make. Kids love sharing whether they would choose to live forever and what that might mean.
When you were teaching this book and the kids got to the part where she realizes, “Oh, these people are going to live forever,” but before she has the conversation with Tuck where he explains that this is actually the most tragic thing that could ever happen to anybody—how do kids respond to that? Did you have any kids who were immediately like, “Living forever is a bad idea.”
That’s the best classroom discussion ever. That’s what I love about the book. Before she even has time to consider what she wants to do, he dumps that on her. He says, “This is awful. We are cursed.” And I tell the kids: “Close the book. Let’s have a conversation. What would be the pros and cons of living forever?”
And of course, the kids are like, “I wouldn’t have to worry about getting old or hurting myself.” They love the idea of living forever, but then slowly they’re like, “Oh, would I want to be ten forever? Would I want to be living in my parents’ house forever? Would I want to be in fifth grade forever?” And then they think, “I wouldn’t want to do this again because I’d already have done it, but I couldn’t go on to the next grade because I’m trapped in a ten-year-old body.”
You don’t get stuff like that when you’re just dissecting text. That comes from a rich conversation. I miss those conversations, where everyone is excited.
The environmental imagery in Tuck Everlasting is gorgeous. I’m a millennial, and I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older and as more of my life has become a competition with devices that these are the kinds of scenes and images where my attention wavers first when I’m reading. What kind of work do you do in the classroom to focus on the imagery and the environmental metaphors? How do you get kids to think about the beauty of still images in text, scenes where presumably “nothing is happening”?
This is a tough question. Many students struggle to appreciate imagery in books, and it has only gotten worse in these last ten years. One way I teach students about imagery is through emotions and pictures. I will display a particularly beautiful image and have students write their emotional reactions. Students write down their Noticings and Wonderings and I zoom in on various aspects of each image. Google Arts and Culture works well.
One way that helps students pay attention to a novel’s imagery is to watch a film adaptation. Unfortunately, I don’t like Disney’s interpretation of Tuck, so I show students scenes from the Broadway musical adaptation instead. We analyze the set design. I want to draw my students’ attention to the passage of time and the cycle of life in the natural world, and how that relates to the passage of time in Tuck.
At the end of a novel study, I would usually offer some sort of final project. One option that was always popular among students is the classic diorama or model of the book. Especially when we’ve discussed imagery and setting, many students find that they can show their understanding of environmental metaphors through some sort of visual representation of the book.
I have to ask how the kids respond to Jesse’s “seduction”—though this is likely not the word you use around fifth graders ;) What do they think about him encouraging Winnie to drink the water?
Ha! The truth is that I’ve never had any student notice it as more than just a crush. A few astute students will notice that Jesse is 17 and Winnie is only 10, which can make for some cringe moments.
The consensus is usually that Jesse urges Winnie to drink from the spring out of loneliness rather than romance. Living forever is ultimately a cruel form of extreme isolation, and I think most students recognize this pang in Jesse.
The book isn’t a tragedy, but it’s hard to get to the end and not have your heart break a little. How do your kids respond to the ending?
That is a really interesting observation. I’ve never explicitly discussed tragic elements of literature in relation to Tuck Everlasting. I do agree that there are some bittersweet moments, though I don’t remember students ever feeling real sorrow over the epilogue. Most react to Winnie’s choice; some are confused about the toad, and why she pours the spring water over him. Some wish for her to choose to live forever. However, I remember most students seeing Winnie’s choice as a selfless act to protect the Tuck family, while choosing to grow old and live a “normal” life. I love asking at the end of the novel, “What is a normal life? Can one live a normal life if they are immortal?”
I realize that many view Winnie’s and Jesse’s relationship as a budding romance, so it would make sense that she would drink the spring water and be with her love. However, since most of my students don’t see the relationship that way, I don’t remember anyone feeling sad that she made her choice; it’s more of a confusion as to why she poured the spring water on the toad. “Why give the toad immortality?” I think most students walk away from Tuck with an understanding that a life lived is more than just the number of years you age. There are unintended consequences to living forever.
The book does a brilliant job foreshadowing parts of its own narrative, but as an adult reader you also realize the foreshadowing works on another level—it introduces adult concepts and asks implicit questions that fifth graders may not have thought about yet, but that they will think about as they get older. I’m thinking of the aside on page 7:
The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?
How do you work with passages like this one with fifth graders?
I’m so glad you pointed that out! I actually teach this concept when we discuss the effects of European colonization on Indigenous peoples. When we learn about the American colonies, especially Jamestown, we discuss different perspectives of land ownership: how the Indigenous Powhatans viewed living on the land as a great responsibility to care for it, instead of portioning it out for private ownership, like the Europeans. I wish I spent more time reading and teaching this book with my students because there are so many passages like that one.
What’s a favorite activity you do while you’re teaching the book? How does it help the kids engage more deeply with the narrative?
One of my favorite activities to do with Tuck Everlasting is to create a map of Treegap, adding details from the book as we read. Students pretend to be tour guides leading a group through Treegap, noting specific stops mentioned in the novel. I’ve had students create a brochure advertising their Treegap tour or a collage photo album, labeling the images with references and quotations from the book.
Tuck Everlasting always makes for great book club discussions, for which I provide a number of discussion guides and activities (e.g. character journals, perspective, internal world of main character, etc.). I also love having students rewrite the ending, choose-your-own-adventure style! Many students are incensed by Winnie’s choice at the end.
It’s funny—in the early 2000s, when we were really standardizing what elementary schools do, like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, all that stuff—before then, it was all projects. The dioramas and the character journals and all the fun things you do with a book. Almost to a detriment, to be honest with you. There wasn’t enough analysis of books as literature. Kids would do a book report. And really what teachers were looking for was just, ‘Can kids summarize a book?’ That’s really what those book reports were for.
I remember doing those.
Right, or if you wanted to glow it up, you could do a trifold with pictures. But there really wasn’t much literature analysis. But then standardization hit and now it’s like, “Kids to have know all analysis!” And so the pendulum has swung completely the other way. You’ve got these two opposite ends of the spectrum and neither one of them is good. Now it’s analysis on steroids, and kids aren’t even talking about the book, which is so crazy to me. They’re learning about literary elements—metaphors, similes, imagery, onomatopoeia—but not really any of the sophisticated ones like foreshadowing or allusion, just the basic stuff that’s on the test. And that analysis is stripped away from the actual text. Kids don’t have as many experiences with beautiful literature and well-written sentences.
They’re only given excerpts in which to analyze these pieces. They get these sections of text that are sometimes from a book, but often they’re not. Kids have to locate and identify the metaphor and say what it means. That’s it!
They have to treat these books like little surgeons and pick it all apart. You just have this dead thing on the table that doesn’t even have any life anymore.
Absolutely. And people will argue, “Oh, well, there are excerpts from famous books.” And there will be an excerpt from The Secret Garden. A lovely novel, but it’s not really as relevant. Kids have a hard time relating to The Secret Garden, published in 1911. And Tuck Everlasting is pushing it, honestly. If there wasn’t magical realism in this—a little white girl and a white family in the 1800s—it’s not as relevant to ten-year-olds today, but because of the magical realism and the idea of living forever and the Fountain of Youth, that stuff still hooks kids. And the language hooks kids. When you take an excerpt from The Secret Garden out of context, it doesn’t really have the same magic to it as when you read it cover to cover.
What I’ve always tried to do is come back to the book first—I want to talk about literature first—but then teach kids how to analyze it without going crazy. And Tuck Everlasting is a book you really have to slow down. I use this book to teach kids how to annotate because I want kids to be able to slow down their reading. Especially now, because if their reading is happening on a screen, it’s like “Skim, scan, find the main idea, find the answer to the question, and move on.” It’s almost a different skill set, reading with intention.
I don’t expect kids to annotate every book we read. I don’t expect them during Silent Reading to annotate the book they’re reading, because it takes effort to go through and underline passages and consider points of view and subtext. Kids need to know how to do that, but they can’t do it all the time.
I try and teach novels still, but it’s very, very limited. We try and squeeze in one novel a year, which pains me to say. We teach a historical fiction novel, Blood on the River by Elisa Carbone. It’s good for how accurate it is. It’s very well-researched. But it’s not Tuck.
I think it would be so cool if a fifth-grade class and a high school class paired up and read the book together.
Oh my god. That would be amazing.
Wouldn’t that be fun? It would be a quick read for high schoolers, but you could prep them on how to talk about the Tuck with fifth graders.
What do you think kids lose with fewer opportunities to read books like Tuck Everlasting in school?
Since the Common Core standards were introduced in 2010, students’ stamina for reading an entire novel has atrophied. They may be able to comprehend a short paragraph and answer accompanying multiple-choice questions, but good test takers don’t always make for good readers.
When students’ literacy experiences involve preparation for standardized testing, they lose the chance to connect with well-written novels. It is inevitable that an emphasis on tests, boring basal readers, and standardized reading curricula are all having deleterious effects on students. Many of them do not include reader as a part of their academic or personal identities. Reading is seen as a chore, especially for students impacted with learning disabilities. Technology only exacerbates this problem.
I can’t resist—say more about your thoughts and feelings on the 2002 film adaptation.
Early in my teaching career, it was quite fashionable to watch the movie adaptation of any novel read in class. However, I’ve never shown students the entire Disney adaptation of Tuck Everlasting. I’ve shown students a few key scenes in order for them to put a face to a character’s name. However, I don’t like the liberties the director took and how the movie strays from the novel. I particularly don’t like that the movie seems to have a focus on Winnie’s and Jesse’s “romance” instead of on the major themes in the book. It’s a shame because I do love William Hurt and Sissy Spacek and think they did a remarkable job as Angus and Mae Tuck. Ben Kingsley as the Man in the Yellow Suit is properly creepy, but not overly scary. Still, I don’t like the movie as much as I like the novel.
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