"Think of the Things He Calls Himself!": On Teaching Welty in High School

Powerhouse is confusing!This opening line is obviously cribbed from Welty's masterful short story "Powerhouse," a work of fiction that on its own can be quite confounding to twenty-first-century readers, particularly teenagers.I find myself in a unique position to discuss Welty and teenagers since I am lucky enough to have been an undergraduate student of Suzanne Marrs and now a Mississippi high school English teacher in the middle of my twenty-fourth year of teaching.I was vaguely aware of Welty when I began my studies at Millsaps College in the late 1990s, but Dr. Marrs's class on Faulkner and Welty helped me see the genius of her work.It is horribly clich to restate the idea that today's teenagers thrive on speed and immediacy-but have not adults been saying that about adolescents since the first teenager sighed a disgruntled, angsty sigh before possibly doodling on the cave wall in Lascaux?Yet, Welty's short fiction provides a wonderful opportunity for just that.In particular, her first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, is a wonderful teaching tool for introducing a new generation of readers to Welty's range and scope.When doing my Welty unit, I typically assign three to four stories to be read outside of class, followed by a quiz, discussion, and then the cycle repeats until the collection is completed.Since A Curtain of Green has such a wide variety of styles, structures, and tones, it is easily customized for a particular group.I can skip stories I know will fall flat or group stories based on themes or elements.Contrasting the use of dialogue in "A Worn Path" with the titular story is always fun: the former uses dialogue to fill in backstory without any heavy-handed narration while the latter eschews dialogue almost entirely by filtering the thoughts and actions of the characters through the third person, disembodied storyteller.This pairing allows