If you know me, this won’t surprise you, but I treasure reading to my kids each night as they go to bed. There’s a connectedness in reading at bedtime I can’t seem to scrape together during the day. It’s also one-on-one time with each of them, something each of them would like to have, but not necessarily like the other one to have.
While, I love reading to them, neither one of them has shown a great interest in reading beyond the mechanical, “I guess I should learn how to do this.”
Then, Friday morning, my daughter made me cry.
“Do you want to know what we’re reading in class?” she asked as we were driving to school.
I told her yes, and words and ideas burst forth from her in ways I’ve never seen in relation to a book. She turned around mid-sentence to tell her brother he’d probably like the book too “because there’s space in it”.
She pulled it from her backpack to show me the cover. Then, started flipped through pages to find something. Once, there, she determinedly read a sentence aloud. This was the sentence she’d used in her writing about the book, she told me, pulling out her school work to show me where she’d written that same sentence.
“And, I said yard was the most important word in the chapter because, well, the whole thing is about the yards, so that’s definitely the most important.”
She talked about this book for nearly 10 minutes. I’m grateful she didn’t stop to ask questions because I was trying to drive and hold together how proud I was for those 10 minutes.
I didn’t hold it together later. Sitting at my desk, I emailed her entire teaching team, tears running down my cheeks, to let them know what happened. These are the people who have made her feel safe, capable, and smart. She knows she’s protected in the school, and that gives her brain the security it needs to start to learn. What a remarkable thing. What remarkable people.
Most of the time, when I ask this question, I get the answer that it is an important text. Students need to read it because of its place in the American canon. If not the canon, the response is the importance of the lessons of the book. After hearing the response, I went back and re-read the text. What I found is much better stated in this piece by Julia Franks writing for the National Council of Teachers of English. Franks points to the central metaphor, the titular mockingbird, and how it applies to people with mental illness and dealing with addiction. Or, Franks points out, it is applied to people of color, most notably Tom Robinson. These groups don’t hurt anyone, readers are told. They simply “make” music to make our lives better. If the argument for TKAM is the lessons it teaches, surely we can do better than a lesson that shows readers people in historically-marginalized groups still in the margins and as passively and flatly as possible.
This is to say nothing of the text’s furthering of the white savior narrative in its positioning of Atticus as so important a figure that his mere passing by requires the African Americans — who have had to function only as bystanders to systemic violence and oppression throughout the story — to stand.
Taken separately or together, these issues build an argument that the lessons of TKAM work against its inclusion. They also start to work against the argument for inclusion based around the idea of its status as an “important text.” To consider this claim, I look to Elizabeth Vallance’s 1974 article “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum.” In her introduction, Vallance writes:
Recently we have witnessed the discovery-or, rather, we have heard the allegation, for the issue is cast most often as criticism-that schools are teaching more than they claim to teach, that they are doing it systematically, and doing it well. A pervasive hidden curriculum has been discovered in operation. The functions of this hidden curriculum have been variously identified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility, the perpetuation of traditional class structure-functions that may be characterized generally as social control. Critics allege that, although this function of social control is not acknowledged openly, it is performed nevertheless, perhaps more effectively than the deliberate teaching of intellectual content and skill, the function in whose name we explicitly justify schooling.
Vallance’s work leads to a questioning of the if-not-hidden-then-implied curriculum at work in the compulsory reading of TKAM in our classrooms. Even if we are calling upon the text for its explicit lessons of choosing to do what is right when it is uncomfortable, or that society is more complex than we may initially understand, these lessons cannot be divested from the text’s implied curriculum. What lessons about expectations of the place of mental illness or addiction are we implicitly teaching through the requirement of TKAM? What systems of hegemony, expected roles for people of color, and implied support of those systems are we passing to our students when we say, “This book must be read?”
Think also, as Franks and others have noted, of the frequency with which our students engage, as readers with characters of color, varying socio-economic statuses, varied genders, or LGBTQIA identities? In a school year, Mayella Ewell may be the only character students see who lives in poverty. Lee’s portrayal of Mayella does nothing to fight against stereotypes of people living in poverty. To the contrary, a shallow reading of the character suggests people in poverty are dishonest. Go deeper, and the dishonesty of poor southern whites is the result of incest. If Calpurnia, Tom Robinson, and the African American audience at Tom’s trial are the only African Americans or people of color with which students interact in a text throughout a year, what are the implied lessons of this essential text? Passivity. Respect for the educated white man. Relegation of people of color to sit and watch while a select group of white people challenge systems of racism on their behalf. The requirement of impossible purity of character to act against injustice.
These are not the lessons we would explicitly teach children. If this is so, then we must be more on guard against implicitly passing these ideas along as truths. What goes unexamined or is understood as condoned through silence shapes how our students understand and interact with one another and the world.
How might we, then, escape these unintended consequences of some of canonical literature’s most pernicious lessons? First, let’s stop teaching books and start teaching children to consider big ideas and essential questions and to use texts of all types as lenses to examine those ideas and questions. Give our students choice of texts. Something along the lines of, “Choose a text with a protagonist with a point of view markedly different from yours,” can be a starting point. If TKAM finds its way into students’ hands via this challenge, all the better, because we will not only be reading the text, but questioning it as well. Rather than deifying a written work, have our classrooms be places of constantly asking, “What does this text get right? What does it get wrong? And, what makes us think that?”
If comedian Hannah Gadsby is correct and “You learn from the part of the story you focus on,” then it is incumbent upon us to be as thoughtful as we can in the stories we choose to tell and have our students read.
The first book I’ve completed this year was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. My only other experience with McCarthy was his Blood Meridian, which I “liked” but which also made me weary going into Horses because Meridian has some pretty intense violence throughout.
Horses is a different sort of western. The tale of John Grady Cole and his decision to set out from his Texas town on horseback for Mexico in 1949. McCarthy’s prose has struck me as powerful and sparse in each of his books I’ve read so far. At one point in Horses I said aloud to myself, “I’m glad he’s read Hemingway.”
My initial description of Horses might be that it’s a coming of age story, but it’s not quite that. At the close of the book, Grady remains who he was at the beginning. Instead, McCarthy adeptly shows us and Grady what it means to be himself across situations and circumstances beyond his small-town upbringing.
Why
I picked up All the Pretty Horses for two reasons. The first is availability. As part of a 40th birthday present, some friends and I gave my friend him all the National Book Award winners in fiction for each of the years she’s been alive. Horses won in 1992. I’d closed out the year with 2017’s winner Sing, Unburied, Sing and had read 2016’s recipient Underground Railroad. Because Sing and Railroad centered around African American protagonists, I was curious to see what through line, if any, I could detect in the Award’s panelists’ tastes across books. Wonderful writing is the answer.
My second reason was one of my best friend’s esteem for the book. He’s one of the best writers I know, and so I trust his tastes. I’ve also had a lifelong curiosity with the writers read by writers I read.
In the End
Several nights last week saw me awake much later than I’d intended because I was wrapped in the voice of this book. Not only is Grady a character I enjoyed following, but McCarthy creates a narrator at once removed and invested in his protagonist. This mix of care and every-possible demise made Horses difficult to put down and satisfying to finish.
What Else I’ve Been Reading
This post from Esther Warkov, Executive Director of Stop Sexual Assault in Schools explaining the #MeTooK12 Campaign kicks off an important evolution of this movement into k12 spaces.
Executive Director of Inquiry Schools Diana Laufenberg’s post on “Crafting Learning Experiences” could be a school’s entire professional learning syllabus.
Just before I started my new job last year, I tried to think about what kind of signature I might want to add to conversations. I was about to meet many more teachers in our district than I’d ever had the chance to interact with before, and I wanted to be conscious of the impression I was making – using it to someone start to shift culture.
The question I settled on, “What are you reading?” As a language arts coordinator, it made sense.
When I would meet with grade-level teams, start a professional development workshop, engage in a coaching conversation it was the same question. From k to 12 I’d ask the room, “What are you reading?”
A few days after a meeting with a team of elementary teachers whom I’d worked with several times across the year, their principal told me one of the teachers had confided he was upset following our time together. I was understandably worried. Not only do I take my job to support teachers seriously, I’m a Midwesterner. “No, no,” the principal said, “He thought the conversation and work were great. He was upset because he made sure he had an answer for when you asked what he was reading and then you didn’t ask.”
I hadn’t.
It was the end of the year, I was working with a team of teachers with whom I’d established a rapport, and I hadn’t felt a need to break the ice. What had initially been meant as a seemingly innocuous question that could start to chip away at culture had been repositioned in my mind as a convenient ice breaker. The thing was, this exchange was evidence the culture was changing. The same teacher who was upset I hadn’t asked was one of the many many many teachers throughout the year who had needed to take a beat on my first asking of the question.
“I’m not really a reader,” many teachers would say before we dove into the work of helping students build identities as lifelong readers. To a person, though, they were able to list several texts when I would push, “So you didn’t read anything yesterday?”
“Well, not a book,” they’d say, and I’d point out that I hadn’t asked what book they were reading. From there, teachers would talk about magazines, news sites, blogs, and any other medium you can think of. By the end of the conversation, I’d usually jotted down a few new places I was interested in reading.
Then, I would point out, “If this is the longest conversation you’ve ever had in this building about yourself as a reader, then we’re missing an amazing opportunity to connect with our students.” If the kids in our care only see us as people who make them read the things you’re “supposed” to read in school, and not actual daily readers ourselves, then we’re missing myriad opportunities to be powerful role models of literacy.
After this conversation at one of our middle schools, the school’s librarian polled the faculty on their favorite books and then took pictures of each person holding the book. She pulled the titles from the library shelves and displayed them alongside the pictures at the top of the stacks. Within days, each of the teacher-preferred titles was checked out.
Another teacher of elementary students took to posting a printed photo of the cover of whatever book she was currently reading outside her door. Alongside it was a paragraph explaining what the text was about and another recounting how she had come to choose the book.
One principal posted photos of what she was reading on her office door – a teacher book and a juvenile title. When students found themselves in the office as a result of a poor choice, situations were diffused when conversations started with questions of whether they’d ever heard of either of the titles.
In my own office, where only adults ever come to visit me, I have two printed pictures hanging, the book I’m reading as part of professional learning and the book I’m staying up too late each night reading (Chris Emdin’s For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, respectively).
The folks I meet with know me pretty well now or know what I do in the district before we sit down. As a result, I’ve shirked asking the question. I plan to bring it back. I miss the expectation of it. I miss the positive assumption that the people with whom I work, people charged with fostering learning daily, are readers. I also missed the sometimes overwhelming lists of recommendations the question elicited like when I asked the question in a meeting of librarians and we ran dangerously close of scrapping the whole meeting agenda while we shared our newest favorites. You know what, though, we captured every title and everyone in the room asked if we would share the list in the meeting notes. Building an expectation of reading means building a culture of reading. And that means giving people space to talk about their reading.
I don’t take as much time as I’d like to read. When I do, it is helpful for me to know someone I know thinks the book I’m about to open was worth their time. This summer, I’ll be posting each Tuesday about a book I’ve read recently that is #WorthReading over your summer.
I do not remember where I first read about Claudia Rankine’s prose/poetry, National Book Award finalist Citizen. What I remember is that the online article said, “Read this book now. That is all you need to know. It is worth your reading. I don’t need to tell you about the book because it is that good.”
Dutifully, I ordered my copy and dropped it on the pile of to-read books. In January, as I was on my way out the door for the train ride to Philly for EduCon, I picked up the book, figuring, “It’s not that big. Perfect for a train.”
I was wrong in two ways.
1. Rankine’s book is big. The blend of poetry and prose packs more subtext about racial identity, race, perspective and resilience in the face of the marginalization of institutional racism. I read as I always do, with a pen in my hand. By the end of the train ride, I’d made only two marks in the margins. There was too much I wanted to capture. Rankine, in the stories she tells, has done the underlining for her reader by deciding those stories were worth including in the book.
2. It is perfect/imperfect for a train. Riding alone, I was constantly looking up, toward strangers and evaluating whether I could break the divide between us with, “I need you to read this because it is my responsibility now to pass it on.”
And that’s a large piece of why Citizen is #WorthReading. It is an American Lyric as advertised, and it is a lyric worth repeating, worth spreading, worth returning to as a reminder of stories too often muted and voices too often left out.
Dana Boyd’s It’s Complicated has been on my Kindle for longer than a book of its quality should have to wait in digital limbo before a person gets around to reading it.
Complicated is Boyd’s distilling and examination of years of exploration of the online lives of the American teen. Making the title apt, the text shows that teens’ relationship to online spaces is complicated and best summed up for me in the closing pages:
As teens work through the various issues that emerge around networked publics, they must struggle with what it means both to be public and to be in public.
I tried, as I made my way through the book, to figure out where I was agreeing with Boyd because she was making points I’ve made in public before and where I was agreeing with her because she’d masterfully unveiled a new line of thinking. In the end, I tipped my hat to Boyd because she’d made points that had never occurred to me and woven them together with what I realized were my own simple ways of thinking.
Explaining Complicated to a friend the other day, I explained, were I designing a syllabus that included the book, I’d follow it quickly with Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American City.
Because that’s what Boyd does here, she pounds the digital concrete of modern American cities and attempts to understand how teens are hanging out there the way they used to do on stoops and in malls across the country.
Additionally, she works to understand adults’ fears that have driven teens to these spaces and adults’ fears now that they’re there. Boyd writes, “[S]ocial media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults.”
I read the book with a constant refrain in my mind, “What kind of adults are we forcing these teens to become?”
For adults to make their way through that fear, Boyd later adds, “For adults to hear the voices of youth, they must let go of their nostalgia and suspend their fears.”
Perhaps this idea is where Complicated hits its highest note. In helping readers to pull apart the fear from the fact, Boyd sets the stage for a measured, informed conversation of how we create and monitor online and physical spaces for our teens.
I read the book with a constant refrain in my mind, “What kind of adults are we forcing these teens to become?”
If you’re looking for something more informed to say than, “Kids these days!” then it’s time to pick up Dana Boyd’s It’s Complicated.
You can find a full list of Kindle notes and highlights from the book here.
Do devices arriving in the Fall have you feeling a little unprepared? Do you find yourself excited about the prospects of teaching in a connected classroom, and yet also unsure where to start? Have you dabbled with connected learning in the past and are looking for a group of like-minded folks to push your thinking?
If you answered, “Yes,” or even, “Maybe,” to the questions above, you’re going to want to join the SVVSD ITC’s book study of Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom.
The book offers an introduction to the principles of Connected Learning as well as real-world classroom examples from classroom teachers across the country who share their stories of leveraging connected classrooms to increase their students’ abilities to create and connect in the world at large.
Who: Anyone who is interested is welcome to join the book study which will be facilitated by SVVSD Instructional Technology Coordinators Bud Hunt and Zac Chase.
What: An informal study of Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom.
When: The group will hold meetings twice each week on Tuesday at 3:30 PM and Thursday at 8:30:30 PM beginning June 3, taking a recess throughout July and then continuing in August with a concluding meeting the week of August 18:30. Participants are welcome to join either or both weekly calls. (All times MST.)
Why: As our classrooms become places of greater and greater connectivity, it is incumbent upon us as teachers to consider the best ways to leverage that connectivity to help students learn and impact the world in which they live.
José, Larissa, Scott, and I got together Thursday night in an on-air google hangout to discuss Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children for the second week running. While the schedule said we’d be talking about “Part 1” of the book, our conversation focused only on “The Silenced Dialogue.”
It was a thought-provoking hour of conversation that I’m still mulling over, and likely will be until next week’s conversation. You can read about the catalyst for the reading group here, and join the group here.
As for my part, I’m enjoying having a space to look forward to each week where race, ethnicity, culture, privilege, equity, power, and other critical issues that are easily overlooked in education is the set focus.
Last week, I switched from the print to Kindle version of the book. You can track highlights and comments here.
More importantly, consider joining in the reading. The book is a collection of essays, so you can easily jump in mid-book. Next week, we’ll be talking about pgs. 48-69. Join the hangout or the twitter chat. Maybe just post to the discussion board. Either way, let’s elevate the conversation and critical thinking around these important issues of practice.
Early February, I announced that Jose Vilson and I were starting a book group through GoodReads for folks whose lives are entangled with education. We saw a general lack of conversation around the tough issues we face in districts, schools, and classrooms, and thought maybe there was something we could do about that.
A little over a month later, and we’ve got about 50 members of the #wellrED group, and are about to start our conversations around Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children. Just looking at the group members, I know this is going to include some great dialogue. Folks from all over the US have signed on to think deeply and listen to understand other people’s thoughts around the book.
You should too.
Pick up a copy of Children today. You’ve got plenty of time to read the introduction and forward by the time we post this week’s questions Wednesday. Then, join us Thursday from 7:30-8:30 EST for an on-air Google hangout discussion of what we’ve read and/or join us for a twitter chat at the same time with the hashtag #wellrED.
Being connected gives us a chance to create the type of professional learning we’ve been looking for. Hopefully, this discussion is something you’ve been hoping for.
If you have any questions about any of the above information, leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to help you get connected.
You and anyone you care to invite are invited to join the new book group on GoodReads – #wellrED.
Jose Vilson and I have started the group, and our first book study will start March 19 when we dive into Lisa Delpit’s inaugural work Other People’s Children. The book is scheduled to last 5 weeks, with a second book starting not long after that.
I anticipate online discussion forums, hangouts, and twitter chats will be on the schedule as we move forward.
More than all that, though, is my excitement over the conversations we’ll be having. For me, it’s been a jarring experience heading to Colorado after being on the East Coast for 5 years. Here, there is little-to-no practical conversation about race, class, privilege, and all of the other difficult conversations that should come up when we consider what it means for people of all backgrounds to come together for a joint educational enterprise.
I don’t expect the conversations to be easy. I expect some folks will be uncomfortable. That’s how growth and change usually work. I also expect that it’s an important conversation we’re not having enough of in our schools, in our district’s, and in our country.
