Reading Response: Wilhelm Ch. 6

In the section titled, "Toward A Critical Literacy," Wilhelm brings up a couple issues that I find worth reflection. First, he asks, "Why do we teach the language arts? What do we hope to achieve for our students and for ourselves through this enterprise?" (151) For me, these questions also tie back into a question he posed earlier in the chapter, regarding "what our purposes are as teachers: to teach texts, or to develop readers who can and will want to engage with and know texts in personally powerful ways throughout their lives?" (145) In my special methods class this semester, I reacted to the idea of teachers having a responsibility to the text. At the pre-college level, I don't believe that teachers are responsible to anyone or anything but their students. Their success, in and beyond our classrooms, is our job (success being measured by actual learning and performance, not grades). The text is a tool to be used in whatever way it is most effective towards getting the job done.

But I digress. Regarding the initial question, I wrote earlier this semester that my goal as an English teacher is to create "effective and fluent communicators." Wilhelm, like me, sees the skills nurtured in English classes as reaching beyond the classroom, and beyond reading and writing. He writes, "Literacy is both the willingness and the ability to evoke, conceive of, express, receive, reflect on, share, evaluate, and negotiate meanings, in the various forms that meanings may take." (151) All of those things, in my mind, fell under my umbrella of "communication." As I read this section, I actually thought again about Frankenstein (the book this time). When I first read Frankenstein in the seventh grade, I was struck at how eloquently the monster was able to describe the experiences of his life before he learned (or re-learned) to speak and write. I wondered if, without knowing the words for what he was seeing and feeling, he would really have been able to commit those experiences to his memory with such detail, to be recounted later when the proper words were there.

Whatever the answer to that query, I do still believe that our communication skills, our comfort with language and its use, can enrich our experiences and enhance our engagement with the world around us on many levels. Working with figurative language teaches us to think abstractly and make comparisons and connections, to think if not in metaphors then perhaps in analogies that help us make sense of the new and unfamiliar. English classes, ideally, teach students to ask questions and think critically to answer them, to consider motivations and character, to interpret what isn't said as well as what is. In this way, students learn not only to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others or to receive and interpret communication from others, but also to communicate to themselves the full significance of their experiences with richer detail and deeper meaning.

Why do we teach language arts? To allow our students access to the world around them, to help them break down the mysteries, build understanding, engage their environments, and improve themselves.

Reading Response: Wilhelm, Ch. 5: Reading is Seeing

Towards the end of the chapter, Wilhelm writes something that I found potentially more interesting than all of his experiments and findings throughout the chapter. "In an art class," he tells us, "divergent views are 'interesting' rather than incorrect," and "students are prodded to explore and express their visions and understanding, not to simply justify them." Wilhelm argues that the use of (visual) art in our reading classes can "open the doors to these same possibilities with literary response" (140).

I watched "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" yesterday, and there's a professor in Victor Frankenstein's first medical school lecture who begins by warning students--and I'm paraphrasing here--not to fool themselves that they might ever have a new or original thought, or that there is any hope or virtue in creativity or imagination. I'm sure no teacher in schools today tells students such a thing that explicitly, but to what extent are students being taught that same lesson? Why should art class be the only place where divergent views are encouraged? For that matter, why should it take the addition of visual arts to our classrooms to make students welcome to "explore and express their visions and understanding?"

Watching "Frankenstein" in 2008, it's easy to see what a fool that professor is, acting as though everything had been done and discovered and there was not a single advancement to be made in the field of medicine, but would we not be just as foolish to act as though we have all the answers to any text we might be reading with our classes? Easy as it is for us to see that we would, many of our students come to class expecting us to act just that way, and they don't know what to do when we don't. I of course love the way Wilhelm used drawing to draw reluctant readers in and will borrow his methods, but if the only time we are "prodding" out students to "explore and express" their "divergent views" is when they're doing it through visual arts, we're falling short.

Feelin' a Funk

Today is the last day of my 5-day weekend. Friday was a pretty good day. Julie was working, I had a list of things to get done and errands to run, and since I had my momentum from the week behind me, I managed to have a good and productive day and then to relax a little. I even made my first gumbo! For a guy claiming to be a Cajun, it's pretty sad that it took me 26 years, but it came out awesome.

Saturday was another great day. Julie & I went pumpkin picking, and we drove out to Lexington to do it just to get out and see a bit more of Kentucky. On the way home, we strayed from highways for a while and drove through some really pretty country and cute small towns. We both love Louisville, but we came to Kentucky for something a little different than the way we're living now. It was good to get out and see it, to remind ourselves of the ultimate goal.

For the last three days, though, I've been totally in a funk. With as little free time as I usually get, a 5-day weekend seems like having an eternity stretched out in front of me. After 2 days, I completely failed to make or stick to plans to continue getting everything done that I wanted to. The attempts I did make to put up a gate in the backyard so we can finally let the dog out without a leash or get ahead on my homework were frustrating flops. I tried to have band practice Sunday and to make plans to hang out with friends last night, but nothing came of it.

In a normal week, I get about zero time to stretch out or relax. The only downside of having 3 days off should be missing 3 days' pay, but somehow--poor as I am--that feels like the least of my frustrations right now. If only I could pinpoint what the most of them are, instead of just floating around here like a potato in a funky stew.

Reading Response: The Book Thief

For anyone reading this blog who is not in EDAP 540, read this book.

The Book Thief was easily the best novel I've read in several years. It's a positively gut-wrenching story of a young German girl during WWII, and it was probably the first thing I've read since college that truly impressed me with the sheer artistry of the writing. Zusak writes with a special kind of awareness, playing with and confusing the senses just enough to make you have to stop and think over his vivid descriptions without making them too obscure to be understood and felt. He could have written about a perfectly idyllic summer in the relatively uneventful life of a completely average child and still created a compelling narrative so rich in detail as to be nearly heart-breaking.

Instead, he wrote about a few sorrow and triumph-filled years in a poor, war-torn community, following a young girl who seems to attract grief as surely as honey attracts flies. The voice through which he tells this story is that of Death, whom he makes surprisingly believable as an overworked and sympathetic character who himself--against his better judgment--becomes fascinated and falls in love with the story's heroine.

As I mentioned in our class discussion about the book, one of the things I really liked was the new perspective it offers on Germany during World War II. This is not a Holocaust book, despite having a Jew-in-hiding as a primary character. It's a life-during-wartime story and a reminder that not every German in the 1930s and '40s was a Nazi, and that there were consequences for those who were not. It was, without question, an evil time and--in that time--an evil place (or at least a place filled with evil), but for many that evil was just something to be lived through on the hope of a better future. And many, including some of the most lovable characters in The Book Thief, would not live through it, would not see that hope confirmed.

One last thing: For me, the book's protagonist, Liesel Meminger, is a beautifully crafted symbol of childrens' ability to remain children through the hardest and darkest of times, as well as their paradoxical ability to become adults when they must. She is the human spirit, which is both most vulnerable and most resilient in childhood, and for those of us who work with children, she is a reminder of what kids can be, and what they will be--both of which we should bear in mind and do our best never to stifle.

Reading Response: The Warrior Heir

A few weeks ago, I was charged to visit the teen lit. section of a bookstore and pick out a book that appealed to me. I bounced around a bit and eventually walked out with The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima. To summarize, Jack is a pretty average 16 year-old in a small Ohio town who finds out that he's descended from a race of magical people--wizards and such. He's a warrior, his mom doesn't know, his caretaker's a wizard, his aunt's an enchantress, and he has as much trouble following it all as I'm having explaining it. With this revelation, Jack not only has to deal with new knowledge about himself and many people he knows, but also with new characters in his life who may or may not be trustworthy. He's being hunted by wizards from both of the two warring houses (White Rose and Red Rose), who either want him to fight under their flag in "The Game," a battle to the death between two warriors that determines which house will retain power until the next game, or who want to kill him so he can't fight. Meanwhile, his friends and family are trying to keep him out of the game, the new assistant principle is training him to fight, and he's trying to keep his secret from his mother and best friends.

If I were a teenager, I would have liked this book a lot more--except that this is not at all the kind of book I liked to read when I was a teenager. Unlike the Harry Potter series (which I have not read), Chima's "Heir" books (there are three: The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, and The Dragon Heir) don't so much transport readers to a new universe existing alongside their own reality as they pull at the possibility of an unknown, magical undercurrent to our reality. That being the case, this book deals with a teenager's struggle to accept a new dimension of self-knowledge and to somehow balance his two lives--to study for school and learn wizard magic, to practice for soccer and for battle, to keep his friends from asking too many questions even after they see him dig up a sword in a graveyard and shoot fire from it. The writing is not overly florid or hard to swallow--teen readers should have no problem with it--and the story has plenty of suspense, plot twists, and adventure. When I came into the last few chapters of the book, after a certain plot revelation that I'll not disclose, I found myself eager for the end, both because I was kind of tired of reading the book and because I wanted to see how Jack would solve this latest challenge.

Perhaps for teenagers who'd like to imagine an extra layer of excitement in their own lives, this kind of fantasy works. For myself, I think I prefer wizards and warriors in their own places and times, without the distractions of modern teenage life--or soccer, which is far from my favorite sport and got plenty of spotlight in this book. My "sword and sorcery" archetype is Robert E. Howard's Conan, of course, who is the opposite of Jack: a savage barbarian and natural to combat who navigates through civilization by wit and instinct while having little use for social conventions. I doubt that I'll be reading the other books in the series, but that definitely would not stop me from recommending this one to a teen reader as an accessible, imaginative adventure story.

Also, it could have used a few dragons.

EDTP 540: Reading Response: Wilhelm, Chapter 2

Although I felt this chapter served mostly as a bridge into what's to come, it does wrestle a bit with an important issue for English teachers, the question of why we teach literature. In light of the first part of the chapter, which basically tells us that (for Wilhelm's middle schoolers, at least) school, not reading, is the reason kids don't like to read--and kids know it--the question takes on a sort of pessimistic tone. "If all we're doing is killing reading for these kids, why don't we just teach technical texts and let kids hold onto some faith that reading literaure might be different?

Since Wilhelm got this book published, and we're reading it, I'm assuming he found some way to have kids read in school without ruining their reading experiences. I'm eager to hear about it. In the meantime, I actually began working on the "why teach literature" question in another class, and I have my own answer: My purpose as an English teacher is to teach kids how to use the language, how to be effective and fluent communicators. In order to be enthused about that, they need to see examples of what the English language is capable of doing. Writers of literature are experts of language who test its potential. On a sticky note left in one of my books, I jotted a vague analogy about a boxer-in-training watching videos of Muhammad Ali. Sure, any bozo who's had a few sessions and a few fights can teach you the basics of the sport, but to see the art of it and to see what you could be reaching for (even if you have no intention of reaching all the way), you need to visit with the experts.

This isn't an argument for "the classics" or "the canon" in high schools. Just for real, good literature that kids can enjoy for its artful and clever use of language, not just its subject.

EDTP 540: Reading Response: Wilhelm Intro & Ch. 1

At the close of the introduction, Wilhelm briefly introduces a girl he calls Joanne. I liked Joanne, and I'd like to get to know her better. I like that she was forthright enough with her teacher to tell him, "You're not interested in how I read." I like that she's savvy enough to separate what is right or true for her from "what you all (teachers) think is right." And I like that after she "does what she has to" in school, she goes home and spends time on "real reading." (Wilhelm, 10) That is, of course, pleasure reading, apart from quizzes, questions, and assigned page quotas.

Yeah, I like Joanne, but how many kids are like her? I always thought I was pretty smart, and I always thought I loved to read, but even now as a grad student I have trouble bringing myself to do much pleasure reading after all my school reading. As teachers, can we make all reading "real reading?" Can we let kids who have sports, TV, video games, hi-tech toys, and the internet only read pleasurable material? Is it possible to make everything they read a pleasure? Of course not, so where do we start, and where do we stop?

Wilhelm notes that his students "didn't seem to converse with or critique characters, authors, or other readers." (23) Maybe Joanne did, but she knew well enough not to do it in school. I bring this point up, though, because the trutt is that we can't make all reading a pleasure, but we can teach kids that it's ok for them to dislike a book. We can let them know that even English teachers sometimes read books that we don't like, or even stop reading books that we don't like. We can stop cramming the institution down their throats and admit that we didn't get Shakespeare the first time either, Bronte is a bore, and every time I sat down to read Heart of Darkness in high school, I literally fell asleep. I did get through it, but it took a while.

I suppose you'll always have the "Marvins" who just think that reading is stupid, but you'll also have the Joannes, and if kids who like to read don't like to read for your class, you're doing it wrong.