By The Numbers by Marcy Nicholas

While my AP English students always read an excerpt from A Room’s of One Own, they must experience one of Woolf’s novels. Since this is the first summer I don’t have to get re-certified in “Gamification Punctuation” or “Twenty-one Research Hacks for the AP English Student” or “Speed Reading for Professional Success,” I can use this time to prepare to teach a Woolf novel by immersing myself in everything about and by Virginia Woolf. Or at least, everything by Woolf. Her novels anyhow—not her essays and her letters. That would be too much for twelve weeks. After all, to learn more about Woolf, I can scan her Wikipedia page before I start reading The Voyage Out. On second thought, maybe I should skip her early novels and go straight to the famous ones: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years. That’s about, what, nine hundred pages of text? I can read three novels in twelve weeks. It’s not as if they are long like Ulysses.

If I really want to understand Woolf and choose the right novel of hers for my AP class, I guess I should read some Eliot. Twenty, twenty-five years ago, I took a graduate course on Eliot, but in that six-week summer session, I felt too rushed to read closely four, 500-page novels. I’ll start Eliot at the beginning of May before school gets out for the summer and re-engage with her major works: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch. If I read fifty pages a day, I can finish Eliot by the end of the month. Sure, I’ll have the end-of-year final student projects to grade, thirty-eight in AP English alone, but fifty pages a day for an English teacher should be as easy as ABC. Along with each novel, I could skim through a few chapters of Barbara Hardy’s critical study of Eliot’s work. What’s three to five more pages a day? Then in June, I’ll be ready to start Woolf.

All this thinking about Eliot reminds me that my grad school prof said nobody could understand her without first reading Austen. So I better look at old Jane too. At least her major novels. If I squeezed in twenty-five pages each day, I could finish Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma in May, shift Eliot to June, and start Woolf in July. Eliot in June could be tough. I rented a spot in a community yard sale, so I’m committed to sit at my table for three days. I probably won’t be that busy. I can’t imagine many buyers for depression glass will show up at a yard sale, so in between customers, I’ll have time to read some of my fifty-per-day pages. If I get behind, I can watch the Masterpiece Theatre versions of Austen’s novels.

If I stick with this schedule, I’ll still have two months—sixty-two days—to read Woolf. If each novel is about three hundred pages, I only have to read fifteen pages of Woolf per day, July through August.

Of course, I don’t have exactly two months. During the third week of July, I promised my parents I would help them move to a retirement community. I’m sure it will only take one week to move them out of the three-story Victorian house they’ve lived in for fifty-two years. Even though we’ll be busy all day every day, I will have my evenings free. After spending the day packing, moving, and unpacking, I can think of nothing better than to crawl into bed and start reading To the Lighthouse.  

Then I shouldn’t have any other commitments. Except for that stupid court date at the end of July. What day is that? The last Wednesday of the month? My soon-to-be ex-husband is contesting the alimony he must pay me monthly for five years. He also wants to settle the visitation issue for our four dogs. He thinks he should have them on weekends, but he wants me to drive them to his place and pick them up. Every weekend. For the rest of their lives. He lives an hour away. Thinking about my dogs, I forgot I entered two of them in AKC obedience trials on a few weekends in July and early August. I better get in some obedience reps with them daily for about an hour each day. I can do that as soon as I get home from school.

True, I may not have exactly sixty-two days from July 1 to read Woolf. School starts the third week of August. And just today, the English faculty received an email from our department head that in the fall, several of us, including me, are scheduled to teach one section of ninth grade English. Mrs. Wineburg retired, and no one will be hired for her position, so some English faculty must give up one of their upper-class courses. He also reminded us that the week before classes start, we must attend a three-day, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in-service training on “Accommodating the Needs of the Reading-Averse Twenty-first Century Learner.”  

Anyway, none of this matters now. It’s only April, and I have thirty more days to figure out the best way to approach reading Woolf. Although I might have to recalculate the number of pages per day, I’m sure it will add up.