If I were in charge of the world
There’d be a million million pages of delight,
Instead of thirty-two novels
Somebody else chose.
If I were in charge of the world
I’d cancel facilitators,
Friday spellings,
Pizza bribes, and also
Questions at the end of the story.
If I were in charge of the world
You could read Charlotte’s Web and Flat Stanley
In any grade you wanted.
You could even read them twice.
If I were in charge of the world
There’s be a million million
Pages of delight,
Instead of thirty-two novels
Somebody else chose.
If I were in charge of the world
Nobody under age 40 would be badgered to read Moby Dick.
By then you might appreciate, even like, it.
No books would come by decree,
And a person who said knock-knock riddle books with pop-up pages are a quintessential part of a reading program
Would still be allowed to be
In charge of the world.
A Plea for More Disorderliness
After 12 years teaching 7th and 8th grade Remedial Readers, I found myself in a classroom with twenty-two children who had been identified as the worst readers in third grade. They also suffered from a lot of physical and emotional difficulties. They assured me every day that they “hated reading.”
Jennifer discovered Amelia Bedelia in December. By then, the required period of independent silent reading that started each day had extended from the initial torturous time of five minutes to a fairly willing forty minutes.
Yes, we started each day by reading our separate books for forty minutes. Yes, I read too: no figuring out lunch money or correcting papers. Most children have never seen an adult engaged in a book.
I knew the instant Jennifer discovered something startling in Amelia Bedelia. Her eyes opened wide; she turned back a page and read it again, mouthing each word. Then she giggled and looked up at me. I nodded and winked. She grinned and nudged Sophie, showing her the page. Then David demanded to see what was so funny, and before he realized what was happening, David the boy who whined the loudest every single morning, “I hate reading!” was enjoying a book. Before long, twenty rotten readers were scrambling to get their names on a waiting list for, of all things, a book. And then Jesse discovered that there were more Amelias.
More Amelias! We had an Amelia celebration.
But please note: This was a celebration of reading. We didn’t use the book as an excuse to do something else. I didn’t interrogate them about main idea; they didn’t make puppets. We used each book as inspiration to read another book. I don’t recall ever asking a single question about an Amelia book. I was appalled a few years later, in the course of doing some research on a basal program, to discover Amelia in a basal. The good news is that it is printed pretty much as the author wrote it. the bad news is that the teacher’s manual carefully lists the objectives to be taught with the story, including:
decode words base on the spelling pattern generalization that a vowel letter followed by a consonant and final e represents a glided (or long) vowel sound.
Never mind that research shows that the final e rule is true no more than 53 percent of the time. Even if the rule were 99 and 44/100 percent pure, one has to be fuzzy-headed, any perhaps sadistic, to ruin children’s pleasure this way. And there’s more:
*Spelling Demons from the story: “laughed: the gh has an f sound here.”
*Problem Solving Skills: Pretend you were Mrs. Rogers. What would you have done when you came home and found the towels ruined?
*Higher Order Thinking Skills: Write a new ending for the story.
*Projects: Make puppets and put on a play/
*Eating: Make a cake with a surprise (such as gumdrops) in it.
On and on it goes.
Amazing as it seems, even rotten readers, kids repeating the grade, kids mainstreamed from special class, kids from one-parent, kids on probation, bilingual minimally brain-damaged, deaf, one-eyed kids (this lists summarizes the label of these third graders in my care) will read read willingly and with enthusiasm–when given the chance. School rarely gives them this chance. I tell teachers that by February my third graders were moaning and groaning when I called a halt to sustained silent reading at the end of one hour, and those teachers are amazed, shocked, and mystified. “When did you find time to teach skills?” they ask. Honest. It’s the first question I’m always asked when I emphasize that this silent reading hour was every day, not just on Reading Thursday.
The skills are in the books. After all, the writers use adjectives and apostrophes. But to rigorously plumb the books for these discrete skills is to miss the point of reading. If we are going to invite children to read Charlotte’s Web so we can milk it for every “sequencing activity,” “summarizing main idea,” “understanding vocabulary in context”–then for all the wonder the kids will get from the book, E. B. White might have done better to spend his time feeding the chickens.
A well-meaning teacher sent me a list of sixty-four projects kids can do on Sarah, Plain and Tall. If this doesn’t make one weep, what will?
Leaving a child along to savor a book, to get from it what he will, and then holding one’s tongue when that child closes the book, requires a tremendous act of faith–faith in children and faith in books, School systems have never been designed to easily accommodate acts of faith, and today society’s horrendous divisions and vigilante attacks on libraries just make this fact more telling..
Make no mistake: trusting teachers and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don’t know what might happen. But to the teacher who feels she must be in control–control of the skills, the books, and the children, I commend Arnold Lobel’s lovely little fable, “The Crocodile in the Bedroom,” found in his Fables. There. we find that a crocodile who loved the neat and tidy rows of the flowers on the wallpaper in his bedroom was coaxed outside into the garden by his wife, who invited him to smell the roses and the lilies of the valley.
“Great heavens!” cried the crocodile. “The flowers and leaves in this garden are growing in a terrible tangle! They are all scattered! They are messy and entwined!”
Whereupon he went back to his room, seldom leaving his bed. He stared at the neat and tidy rows of flowers on the wallpaper and “he turned a very pale and sickly of green.
I would ask teachers everywhere to remember that Lobel’s moral, Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order, applies as much to school reading programs as it does to wallpaper.
Note: this is adapted from Who’s In Charge: A Teacher Speaks Her Mind (Heinemann)
Evidenced-Based Practice
In December of 2015, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA) was signed into law and the reauthorized legislation, which replaced the No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB), is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). One of the requirements under
ESSA is that districts and schools use evidence-based practices, which refers to practices,
programs, strategies, activities, and/or interventions that are grounded in research and
have evidence to show that they are effective at producing results and improving outcomes
when implemented.
Please read on for evidence-based practices based on strategies and activities based in my classrooms with students from university to primary grades. It starts when my husband had just been hired to teach physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. The local school district wouldn’t hire me because my license to teach in NY City was an “emergency license,” On a whim I applied to RPI. As it happened, just that week a professor in the small Literature Dept had taken ill. I had an MA in Medieval Lit, so they hired me to take her place.
Male students majoring in engineering with a couple architecture majors.
The Department declared the first semester to be Rhetoric, the second Literature. Rhetoric went fine. I started each class with a couple of lines of poetry on the board, asking students to take a quick read. No discussion: Just notice. The most reluctant/obnoxious kid in the class slouched in the back row. When I said the Chinese lyric poem I’d posted was the most beautiful verse I knew, that kid straightened up, read it, and pronounced, “Not bad.”
A moment I treasure.
In Spring 1968 Harpers published Norman Mailer’s “On the Steps of the Pentagon.” Simultaneously, Mailer’s “‘The Armies of the Night” was published in paperback. Both recounted his participation in the 1967 anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon, setting Christian ethics against an opposition to America’s corporate mentality.
This seemed perfect book for my students so in spring 1969, the department Literature semester, I assigned The Armies of the Night.
My colleagues were aghast at this assignment…lots of grumbling along the lines of “what could you expect from someone with a degree from UC Berkeley.” Their primary claim was “This is NOT literature.” Since the department was buzzing with this outrage, I shared a bit of the buzz with students and explained why I’d made the assignment.
I did little lecturing but asked students to assign themselves topics arising from the book—for a 10-15 minute presentation to the class. Some did this solo; others paired up.
We were deep into Mailer when his book received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. You can imagine the thrill of my students (not to mention my own).
Late in the spring term, Department Fall reading lists were issued: The Armies of the Night, now a certified prize-winner in Literature, was on multiple reading lists in the department.
Knowing the RPI job was just for one year, I’d gotten a truly crazy interview with the Troy Superintendent of Schools. He started with, “You’re the one married to that foreigner.” (My husband’s name is Hans.) Noticing my Berkeley degree, he asked me if I still believed in rioting. Then the assistant superintendent came in with the news that the district had just received state funding for improving education of African-American students and she noted I’d in the worked in neighborhood Youth Corps in Trenton, NJ.
“You like working with colored kiddos?” the superintendent asked.
I was hired to teach remedial reading to small groups of 7th & 8th graders, a job for which I had zero qualifications. But it didn’t take me two weeks to figure out that McCall-Crab readers were not going to work.
I bought “Soul Brothers and Sister Lou” off a grocery store spindle & started reading it to the kids. They liked it so much I got 5 more copies so they could read it. They sat around a table with each kid who wanted to do it, taking a turn. Other kids kept sneaking in to hear the story. Sylvia soon stayed all day, & gradually organized the reading, doing much of it herself. Since she was a major discipline problem, no teacher complained of her absence.
Fortunately, my boss, a longtime social studies teacher just hired to be boss of this special Urban Ed program, was a reader himself. So when I told him we needed to overhaul the contents of the Remedial Reading Room, he went along with it. One girl complained that when she’d take a book home to read, her mother would snatch it to take to work.
Over the years, this man was my boss in 3 different schools and he agreed to some fairly wild things, such as devoting budget to kids choosing a paperback a month at local book store. His only comment was “Let’s pray the board of ed never finds out about this.”
I have remained a loyal subscriber to Harper’s, grateful for the way they shaped my career… and I very much wish I knew what happened to Sylvia. Teachers loved it when she stole donuts and gave them one, but when she raided an ice cream truck and began distributing quarts of ice cream to classrooms, they sent her off to a juvenile hall.
I wrote a lot of articles for Education Week. In a review of William Bennett’s last hurrah as U .S. Secretary of Education where he offered a list of reading materials to accompany English instruction from kindergarten through 8th grade, I paid tribute to Sylvia.
“Mr. Bennett’s list avoids charges of ethnic bias by offering the contemporary poet Nikki Giovanni along with the traditional canon of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shakespeare. That’s his entire poetry list for 7th and 8th grade.
“I doubt that Sylvia ever read “The Raven,” but I remember that foul-mouthed, hostile child sneaking into my room in times of great stress to listen to a tape of John Ciardi reading poems with his son Benn.
“Sylvia gained 18 months in her reading scores during 7th grade, finishing above grade level, but she failed every class except reading. She cursed teachers, threw chairs, and fought with other kids. Finally, the authorities labeled her incorrigible, and at age 14 she was permanently excluded from the city school system.
“During her final week Sylvia gathered up some of the books she had enjoyed: His Eye Is on the Sparrow, I Want To Be Somebody, Nigger, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manchild in the Promised Land, Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. Needless to say, none of these titles made Mr. Bennett’s list. But Sylvia ran her hands over the books and said, “You know, it just proves that people who start out bad can do O.K. for themselves.”
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-how-to-create-a-generation-of-aliterates/1988/10
My relationship with Education Week ended very badly. They invited me to write a list of “recommended books” for teachers, which they published at the beginning of the school year. I think the list holds up as worthy reading.
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-books-worth-remembering/1996/09
But Ed Week destroyed our relationship with a terrible editorial change. In praising James Herndon’s The Way It Spozed To Be, I noted my immediate shock of recognition. ‘How was it that this veteran teacher on the outskirts of San Francisco knew so much about kids in upstate New York? Mr. Herndon’s ability to describe the way it is as well as the way it is “spozed” to be convinced me of two important facts: I wasn’t nuts and neither were my students. From him, I learned to relax a bit, to stand back and look for the natural rhythm of a class, to build on that rhythm and give the kids some time to organize themselves. James Herndon also helped me appreciate a no-nonsense black colleague from my early teaching days named Sylvia. It was Sylvia who ended up organizing the most difficult 7th graders in the school, kids who tested on less than a 4th-grade reading level, into what folks today would call a shared-reading group. Each day, she would permit a few minutes of horsing around, but within five minutes, she usually had her students sitting at a table together reading Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. Mr. Herndon writes of similar efficiency among his tribe of students, observing that not even “an experienced teacher with a machine gun” could organize them to read a book as efficiently as they organized themselves.”
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-books-worth-remembering/1996/09
All these years later, my outrage still boils. The words are all mine—EXCEPT they changed Sylvia, the indomitable student, into “a no-nonsense black colleague.”
I howled my outraged, insisting that a correction be noted in an upcoming issue. They refused, and that was the end of my career with Education Week for more than a decade. Then I was lured back to speak against “collaborative learning.”
“How many of the people we know, the people who run our schools, the people we elect to Congress and the White House, are much different from the Vladimir Nabokov character who, ‘had he been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, would have been found dead about noon?
“When I taught 3rd grade, we started the day with 15 minutes of sustained silent reading. That’s what it said in my plan book, anyway. I thought I’d have to tie those kids into their chairs to keep them there five minutes. And even when they became convinced I’d have to see blood gushing before I’d let anybody move from the chair to go to the nurse or call his lawyer, they didn’t read: they sat quietly and watched me read. For months. It was a scary time for me, but I kept reading and I buttressed myself with a stubborn faith in kids and good books. Eventually, that faith flowered. By March, those children were complaining that they were “right in the good part” when I called a halt to silent reading at the end of an hour each morning.
“When I tell this story as the miracle of 3rd grade, a lot of people are upset. When did I teach? they ask. How did I make myself accountable for learning, how did I assess the children’s progress during that hour of silence?
“That hour of silence makes a whole lot of people nervous. And I know why. Not many people believe you learn to read by reading. It’s too simple. And if truth be known, not many adults can sit and read on their own for an hour every day. And not many teachers can keep quiet for an hour every day.
“Maybe in recommending to teachers and their students a corporate-committee model of collaboration, we should tell them about General John E. Hull. He was in charge at the American Air Force base at Iwakuni, Japan, on a May morning in 1955 when 25 Japanese women badly crippled and disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima were to begin their trip for medical help in America. They were already aboard the U.S. Air Force plane when an aide dashed up to General Hull with an urgent cable from Washington. Not wishing to risk repercussions should the Hiroshima women encounter medical complications, a committee at the State Department had ordered the flight canceled. For a long moment, General Hull said nothing. Then he handed the cable back to his aide. “unfortunately, I don’t have my reading glasses with me,” he said. “Be sure to remind me to read this later.” And the plane took off.
“I want my students to know such stories, stories of conscience, stories of one person standing up and obfuscating bureaucracy and groupthink, one person refusing to take time for a committee vote.
Janet Emit, noted scholar for whom an annual NCTE writing award is given in her honor, wrote a scathing denunciation of my article and explained why collaboration is vital.
It seems a shame to choose a side, but I remain convinced that a whole lot of learning is solitary.
For some unfathomable reason, I was invited to visit with and give a speech to members of The California Literature Project weekend reunion. This Project had brought teachers together during the summer and subjected them to an intensive, rigorous study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next summer another group studied Proust. At their weekend reunion, I heard lots of groans and laughter, lots of talk about “surviving’’ Joyce and “surviving’’ Proust.
I both admired and was appalled by the notion. I witnessed firsthand the sense of community and joint accomplishment this literary survival engendered. But I questioned if survival–getting through a book–is the literary model we want for our classrooms. I stressed the notion that If our students are to become lifelong readers, parents who read to their children, then student choice must be central to the program.
Participants accused me of anarchism. Student choice, they insisted, is fine and dandy for recreational reading, but for literature study the teacher must choose. Left on their own, they insisted, students wouldn’t move beyond Sweet Valley High books.
The poet-farmer-teacher Wendell Berry gives us a wonderful image of what happens when people insist on unanimity over diversity. He gives us “crazy old Mrs. Gaines who sang of One Lord, One Faith, and One Cornbread.’’ Wendell Berry never even hints that crazy old Mrs. Gaines might have been a high school English teacher, but he points out, they had to lock crazy old Mrs. Gaines up in a room because “For her, to be free was only to be lost.’’
David Hawkins, one of the organizers of the Elementary Science Study, probably influenced my teaching more than anyone else. The Informed Vision (Agathon, 1974) is a collection of essays wherein Mr. Hawkins uses mathematics and science as a starting point for a practical, idealistic inquiry into the way children learn. He points to the “essential lack of predictability about what’s going to happen in a good classroom … because the teacher is basing his decisions on observation of the actual children in their actual situation, their actual problems, their actual interests, and the accidental things that happen along the way that nobody can anticipate.” Mr. Hawkins advises us not to answer questions about, say, objectives, but to question the questions. He insists that one-month test results aren’t of any interest, slyly adding that “[t]he seven-year test hasn’t been made yet.”
Based on Hawkins, I refused to write weekly lesson plans, insisting that on Fridays I would write detailed descriptions of what had happened that week.
Frank Smith’s “Twelve Easy Ways To Make Learning To Read Difficult” (since reprinted in Essays Into Literacy; Heinemann, 1983), which gives me and every other person of strong heart the license to chart our own course–if we dare. Mr. Smith says the teacher must respond to what the child is trying to do. And, he cautions, this is no cinch. He insists it is a very difficult step to take, one requiring “insight, tolerance, sensitivity, and patience; it demands an understanding of the nature of reading, a rejection of formulae, less reliance on tests, and more receptivity to the child.
In The Wilderness and the Laurel Tree, Ned O’Gorman’s advice is similar. “A teacher will learn about children by watching them first of all; not by reading about them or talking to experts about them.” Mr. O’Gorman tells us to “[s]it down now and then watch the children,” writing down what we see. Then, he advises, we should take our notes home and think about what we have seen. Ned O’Gorman, a poet and Harlem principal, is no pie-in-the-sky theorist but a practical idealist. He can say in one breath, “I killed another 500 cockroaches this morning,” and in the next proclaim, “[t]eaching is a joyous, exhilarating task.”
Not all the “teacher books” I treasure are written for or by teachers. Take, for example, those by Edward Abbey, who exhorts us all to remember that “[o]ne brave deed is worth a thousand books.” Teachers, by profession and personality often a polite, even passive, lot, would do well to read Mr. Abbey’s outrageous books. Iconoclast and gadfly, as well as by nature a conservative man, Edward Abbey argues for open spaces and individual eccentricity. He works hard at inflaming his readers “with malice aforethought,” as he says, against “armies of government and greed.” Deliberately subversive, complaining that we have yielded too much too easily to machines and money, he points out that measurement and analysis do not equal understanding. He recounts a story of Beethoven that teachers should remember when called upon by some bureaucrat to “demonstrate that learning has taken place.” When asked to explain the meaning of one of his sonatas, Beethoven is said to have simply sat down at the piano and played it through again.
Teachers who feel the pressure to use the advice of corporate America would do better to read Pultizer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam’s The Reckoning than an analysis of the worldwide math scores of all 5th graders or all the national media whines that are proliferating faster than dustballs. In compelling and fascinating detail, Mr. Halberstam uses the story of the rise and decline of the U.S. auto industry as a paradigm for our national attitudes about work, money, power, and ethics. This is a must read for any teacher who is tired of being blamed for the national debt, the balance-of-trade deficit, welfare, or plantar’s warts. And it is as readable.
Teachers can learn more about the wonderful resilience (and stubbornness) of children from reading Max Apple’s “Stranger at the Table” and “Bridging” (collected in Free Agents; Harper 1984) and Roommates (Warner, 1994) than from a score of courses in educational psychology. Mr. Apple draws on his own childhood and his experiences as a single parent for his poignant, hilarious, and ultimately profound stories.
Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life is an autobiographical account of a boy who, by the time he is done writing his own letters of recommendation to prep school on pilfered high school letterhead, has just about convinced himself that he is an Eagle Scout and a champion diver, even though his school doesn’t have a swimming pool. As Mr. Wolff puts it, “We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.” This is the story of a boy who is peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous, and a liar. And every teacher with any heart will be rooting for him all the way–and taking another look at her peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous students.
We teachers could wish for more good books in our faculty rooms and administrative offices. Moreover, we need to remind members of the august commissions on excellence in education and the writers of standards of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy, and Max Apple’s grandfather. We need to exhort them to read more and talk less.
“When I taught 3rd grade, we started the day with 15 minutes of sustained silent reading. That’s what it said in my plan book, anyway. I thought I’d have to tie those kids into their chairs to keep them there five minutes. And even when they became convinced I’d have to see blood gushing before I’d let anybody move from the chair to go to the nurse or call his lawyer, they didn’t read: they sat quietly and watched me read. For months. It was a scary time for me, but I kept reading and I buttressed myself with a stubborn faith in kids and good books. Eventually, that faith flowered. By March, those children were complaining that they were “right in the good part” when I called a halt to silent reading at the end of an hour each morning.
“When I tell this story as the miracle of 3rd grade, a lot of people are upset. When did I teach? they ask. How did I make myself accountable for learning, how did I assess the children’s progress during that hour of silence?
“That hour of silence makes a whole lot of people nervous. And I know why. Not many people believe you learn to read by reading. It’s too simple. And if truth be known, not many adults can sit and read on their own for an hour every day. And not many teachers can keep quiet for an hour every day.
“Maybe in recommending to teachers and their students a corporate-committee model of collaboration, we should tell them about General John E. Hull. He was in charge at the American Air Force base at Iwakuni, Japan, on a May morning in 1955 when 25 Japanese women badly crippled and disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima were to begin their trip for medical help in America. They were already aboard the U.S. Air Force plane when an aide dashed up to General Hull with an urgent cable from Washington. Not wishing to risk repercussions should the Hiroshima women encounter medical complications, a committee at the State Department had ordered the flight canceled. For a long moment, General Hull said nothing. Then he handed the cable back to his aide. “unfortunately, I don’t have my reading glasses with me,” he said. “Be sure to remind me to read this later.” And the plane took off.
“I want my students to know such stories, stories of conscience, stories of one person standing up and obfuscating bureaucracy and groupthink, one person refusing to take time for a committee vote.
Janet Emit, noted scholar, an annual NCTE writing award is given in her honor, wrote a scathing denunciation of my article and explained why collaboration is vital.
For some unfathomable reason, I was invited to visit with and give a speech to members of The California Literature Project weekend reunion. This Project had brought teachers together during the summer and subjected them to an intensive, rigorous study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next summer another group studied Proust. At their weekend reunion, I heard lots of groans and laughter, lots of talk about “surviving’’ Joyce and “surviving’’ Proust.
I both admired and was appalled by the notion. I witnessed firsthand the sense of community and joint accomplishment this literary survival engendered. But I questioned if survival–getting through a book–is the literary model we want for our classrooms. I stressed the notion that If our students are to become lifelong readers, parents who read to their children, then student choice must be central to the program.
Participants accused me of anarchism. Student choice, they insisted, is fine and dandy for recreational reading, but for literature study the teacher must choose. Left on their own, they insisted, students wouldn’t move beyond Sweet Valley High books.
The poet-farmer-teacher Wendell Berry gives us a wonderful image of what happens when people insist on unanimity over diversity. He gives us “crazy old Mrs. Gaines who sang of One Lord, One Faith, and One Cornbread.’’ Wendell Berry never even hints that crazy old Mrs. Gaines might have been a high school English teacher, but he points out, they had to lock crazy old Mrs. Gaines up in a room because “For her, to be free was only to be lost.’’
David Hawkins, one of the organizers of the Elementary Science Study, probably influenced my teaching more than anyone else. The Informed Vision (Agathon, 1974) is a collection of essays wherein Mr. Hawkins uses mathematics and science as a starting point for a practical, idealistic inquiry into the way children learn. He points to the “essential lack of predictability about what’s going to happen in a good classroom … because the teacher is basing his decisions on observation of the actual children in their actual situation, their actual problems, their actual interests, and the accidental things that happen along the way that nobody can anticipate.” Mr. Hawkins advises us not to answer questions about, say, objectives, but to question the questions. He insists that one-month test results aren’t of any interest, slyly adding that “[t]he seven-year test hasn’t been made yet.”
Frank Smith’s “Twelve Easy Ways To Make Learning To Read Difficult” (since reprinted in Essays Into Literacy; Heinemann, 1983), which gives me and every other person of strong heart the license to chart our own course–if we dare. Mr. Smith says the teacher must respond to what the child is trying to do. And, he cautions, this is no cinch. He insists it is a very difficult step to take, one requiring “insight, tolerance, sensitivity, and patience; it demands an understanding of the nature of reading, a rejection of formulae, less reliance on tests, and more receptivity to the child.”
In The Wilderness and the Laurel Tree (Harper, 1972), Ned O’Gorman’s advice is similar. “A teacher will learn about children by watching them first of all; not by reading about them or talking to experts about them.” Mr. O’Gorman tells us to “[s]it down now and then watch the children,” writing down what we see. Then, he advises, we should take our notes home and think about what we have seen. Ned O’Gorman, a poet and Harlem principal, is no pie-in-the-sky theorist but a practical idealist. He can say in one breath, “I killed another 500 cockroaches this morning,” and in the next proclaim, “[t]eaching is a joyous, exhilarating task.”
Not all the “teacher books” I treasure are written for or by teachers. Take, for example, those by Edward Abbey, who exhorts us all to remember that “[o]ne brave deed is worth a thousand books.” Teachers, by profession and personality often a polite, even passive, lot, would do well to read Mr. Abbey’s outrageous books. Iconoclast and gadfly, as well as by nature a conservative man, Edward Abbey argues for open spaces and individual eccentricity. He works hard at inflaming his readers “with malice aforethought,” as he says, against “armies of government and greed.” Deliberately subversive, complaining that we have yielded too much too easily to machines and money, he points out that measurement and analysis do not equal understanding. He recounts a story of Beethoven that teachers should remember when called upon by some bureaucrat to “demonstrate that learning has taken place.” When asked to explain the meaning of one of his sonatas, Beethoven is said to have simply sat down at the piano and played it through again.
Teachers who feel the pressure to use the advice of corporate America would do better to read Pultizer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam’s The Reckoning than an analysis of the worldwide math scores of all 5th graders or all the national media whines that are proliferating faster than dustballs. In compelling and fascinating detail, Mr. Halberstam uses the story of the rise and decline of the U.S. auto industry as a paradigm for our national attitudes about work, money, power, and ethics. This is a must read for any teacher who is tired of being blamed for the national debt, the balance-of-trade deficit, welfare, or plantar’s warts. And it is as readable a Teachers can learn more about the wonderful resilience (and stubbornness) of children from reading Max Apple’s “Stranger at the Table” and “Bridging” (collected in Free Agents; Harper 1984) and Roommates (Warner, 1994) than from a score of courses in educational psychology. Mr. Apple draws on his own childhood and his experiences as a single parent for his poignant, hilarious, and ultimately profound stories.
Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life is an autobiographical account of a boy who, by the time he is done writing his own letters of recommendation to prep school on pilfered high school letterhead, has just about convinced himself that he is an Eagle Scout and a champion diver, even though his school doesn’t have a swimming pool. As Mr. Wolff puts it, “We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.” This is the story of a boy who is peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous, and a liar. And every teacher with any heart will be rooting for him all the way–and taking another look at her peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous students.
We teachers could wish for more good books in our faculty rooms and administrative offices. Moreover, we need to remind members of the august commissions on excellence in education and the writers of standards of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy, and Max Apple’s grandfather. We need to exhort them to read more and talk less.
People who think that, say, the Standardistos, the Collaborationists, or even the Whole-Language evangelists have given us startling new insights would do well to read Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (Vintage, 1960). Utopians such as Mr. Goodman are long out of fashion, but his decades-old examination of how the spiritual emptiness of our technological society wastes human resources, particularly the young, remains a milestone. Mr. Goodman points out, for example, that people objected to progressive education on the grounds that it “flouted the Western traditions, the three R’s, Moral Decency, Patriotism, and the Respect for Authority.” His letter to the New York commissioner of education, included in the book, nails the absurdity of lesson plans on the nose.
Today’s teachers would do well to search in libraries for copies of Josephck Featherstone’s Schools Where Children Learn (Liveright, 1971) and What Schools Can Do (Liveright, 1976). As well as offering a fine analysis of what schools can do, these books remind us that the big issues in education don’t change much from one decade to the next. For starters, Mr. Featherstone predicted both the coming of the teacher-effectiveness mania and its shoddy content. “Teaching practice is so complex, and our modes of knowing about it so limited,” he writes, “that it is difficult to believe that any emerging paradigms of technical knowledge will be anything but scientific mumbo jumbo, concealing their essential inadequacy under a veneer of statistical precision.” Reading Jay Featherstone is a poignant reminder that today we teachers talk only to each other. Nobody else is listening. The fact that Mr. Featherstone, an education professor, was once a regular contributor to The New Republic reminds us that today there is no general-interest publication in America that takes education seriously.
I must admit that I did encounter one significant book in an education course. At 9:30 p.m., while sitting in the back row of an English methods course at Hunter College, after a long day’s work, I’d just finished a paperback thriller and wondered how I’d stay awake for another half hour. A classmate and I traded books. I definitely got the better part of the deal, because the classmate handed me Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Teacher (Simon & Schuster, 1963; 1986), in its own way a thrilling book.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner insists in this classic work that when words have no emotional significance for the beginning reader, they may do him more harm than not teaching him at all. Such words, she writes, will “teach him that words mean nothing and that reading is undesirable.” Ms. Ashton-Warner helped me see why my teaching the required Silas Marner turned out so badly, and why I must promise myself never to do such a thing again.
Not all the “teacher books” I treasure are written for or by teachers. Take, for example, those by Edward Abbey, who exhorts us all to remember that “[o]ne brave deed is worth a thousand books.” Teachers, by profession and personality often a polite, even passive, lot, would do well to read Mr. Abbey’s outrageous books. Iconoclast and gadfly, as well as by nature a conservative man, Edward Abbey argues for open spaces and individual eccentricity. He works hard at inflaming his readers “with malice aforethought,” as he says, against “armies of government and greed.” Deliberately subversive, complaining that we have yielded too much too easily to machines and money, he points out that measurement and analysis do not equal understanding. He recounts a story of Beethoven that teachers should remember when called upon by some bureaucrat to “demonstrate that learning has taken place.” When asked to explain the meaning of one of his sonatas, Beethoven is said to have simply sat down at the piano and played it through again.
In Spring 1968, Harpers published Norman Mailer’s “On the Steps of the Pentagon.” Simultaneously, Mailer’s ‘The Armies of the Night was published in paperback. Both recounted his participation in the 1967 anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon, setting Christian ethics against an opposition to America’s corporate mentality.
It seemed perfect book for my students so in spring 1969, the department Literature semester, I assigned The Armies of the Night.
My colleagues were aghast…lots of grumbling along the lines of “what could you expect from someone with a degree from UC Berkeley.” Their primary claim was this was NOT lia
We were deep into Mailer and these student projects when his book received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Can you imagine the thrill of my students? (not to mention my own).
Late in the spring term, Fall reading lists were issued: The Armies of the Night, now a prize-winner in Literature, was on multiple reading lists in the department.
Knowing the RPI job was just for one year, I’d gotten involved in a truly crazy interview with the Troy Superintendent of Schools. He started with, “You’re the one married to that foreigner.” (My husband’s name is Hans; our last name is Armenian.) Noticing my Berkeley degree, he asked me if I still believed in rioting. Then the assistant superintendent came in with the news that the district had just received state funding for improving the education of African-American students and she noted I’d in the worked in the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Trenton, NJ.
“You’re willing to work with colored kiddos?” the supt. asked.
I was hired to teach remedial reading to small groups of 7th & 8th graders, for which I had zero qualifications. But it didn’t take me two weeks to figure out that a huge supply of McCall-Crab readers was not going to work.
I bought “Soul Brothers and Sister Lou” off a grocery store spindle & started reading it to the kids. They liked it so much I got 5 more copies so they could read it. They sat around a table with each kid who wanted to taking a turn. Other kids kept sneaking in to hear the story. Sylvia soon stayed all day, & gradually organized the reading, doing much of it herself. Since she was a major discipline problem, no teacher complained of her absence.
Fortunately, my boss, a longtime social studies teacher just hired to be boss of this special Urban Ed program, was a reader himself. So when I told him we needed to overhaul the contents of the Remedial Reading Room, he went along with it. Over the years, he was my boss in 3 different schools and he agreed to some fairly wild things, such as devoting the budget to kids choosing a paperback a month at local book store. His only comment was “Let’s pray the board of ed never finds out about this.”
As a result of that early Mailer, I have remained a loyal subscriber to Harper’s, grateful for the way they shaped my career…. and I very much wish I knew what happened to Sylvia. Teachers loved it when she stole donuts and gave them one but when she raided an ice cream truck parked in front of the school and began distributing quarts of ice cream to classrooms, they sent her off to a juvenile hall.
In an Education Week review of William Bennett’s last hurrah as U .S. Secretary of Education where he offered a list of reading materials to accompany English instruction from kindergarten through 8th grade, I paid tribute to Sylvia.
“Dubbed the Zulu chief by many teachers, Sylvia was probably the toughest, most belligerent 7th grader in our urban school. But she read–with pleasure–Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christina Rossetti, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Basho.
“Mr. Bennett’s list avoids charges of ethnic bias by offering the contemporary poet Nikki Giovanni along with the traditional canon of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shakespeare. That’s his entire poetry list for 7th and 8th grade.
I doubt that Sylvia ever read “The Raven,” but I remember that foul-mouthed, hostile child sneaking into my room in times of great stress to listen to a tape of John Ciardi reading poems with his son Benn.
“Sylvia gained 18 months in her reading scores during 7th grade, finishing above grade level, but she failed every class except reading. Occasionally, she cursed teachers, threw chairs, and fought with other kids. Finally, the authorities labeled her incorrigible, and at age 14 she was permanently excluded from the city school system.
“During her final week Sylvia gathered up some of the books she had enjoyed: His Eye Is on the Sparrow, I Want To Be Somebody, Nigger, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manchild in the Promised Land, Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. Needless to say, none of these titles made Mr. Bennett’s list. But Sylvia ran her hands over the books and said, “You know, it just proves that people who start out bad can do O.K. for themselves.”
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-how-to-create-a-generation-of-aliterates/1988/10
I wrote a lot of articles for Education Week, and it ended badly. They invited me to write a list of “recommended books” for teachers, which they published at the beginning of the school year. I think the list holds up as worthy reading.
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-books-worth-remembering/1996/09
But they destroyed our relationship with a terrible editorial change. In praising James Herndon’s The Way It Spozed To Be (Simon & Schuster, 1970) with an immediate shock of recognition. How was it that this veteran teacher on the outskirts of San Francisco knew so much about kids in upstate New York? Mr. Herndon’s ability to describe the way it is as well as the way it is “spozed” to be convinced me of two important facts: I wasn’t nuts and neither were my students. From him, I learned to relax a bit, to stand back and look for the natural rhythm of a class, to build on that rhythm and give the kids some time to organize themselves. James Herndon also helped me appreciate a no-nonsense black colleague from my early teaching days named Sylvia. It was Sylvia who ended up organizing the most difficult 7th graders in the school, kids who tested on less than a 4th-grade reading level, into what folks today would call a shared-reading group. Each day, she would permit a few minutes of horsing around, but within five minutes, she usually had her students sitting at a table together reading Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. Mr. Herndon writes of similar efficiency among his tribe of students, observing that not even “an experienced teacher with a machine gun” could organize them to read a book as efficiently as they organized themselves
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-books-worth-remembering/1996/09
All these years later, my outrage still boils. The words are all mine—EXCEPT they changed Sylvia, the indomitable student into “a no-nonsense black colleague.”
I howled my outraged, insisting that a correction be noted. They refused, and that was the end of my career with Education Week for more than a decade. Then I was lured back to speak against “collaborative learning.
“How many of the people we know, the people who run our schools, the people we elect to Congress and the White House, are much different from the Vladimir Nabokov character who, “had he been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, would have been found dead about noon”?
“When I taught 3rd grade, we started the day with 15 minutes of sustained silent reading. That’s what it said in my plan book, anyway. I thought I’d have to tie those kids into their chairs to keep them there five minutes. And even when they became convinced I’d have to see blood gushing before I’d let anybody move from the chair to go to the nurse or call his lawyer, they didn’t read: they sat quietly and watched me read. For months. It was a scary time for me, but I kept reading and I buttressed myself with a stubborn faith in kids and good books. Eventually, that faith flowered. By March, those children were complaining that they were “right in the good part” when I called a halt to silent reading at the end of an hour each morning.
“When I tell this story as the miracle of 3rd grade, a lot of people are upset. When did I teach? they ask. How did I make myself accountable for learning, how did I assess the children’s progress during that hour of silence?
“That hour of silence makes a whole lot of people nervous. And I know why. Not many people believe you learn to read by reading. It’s too simple. And if truth be known, not many adults can sit and read on their own for an hour every day. And not many teachers can keep quiet for an hour every day.
“Maybe in recommending to teachers and their students a corporate-committee model of collaboration, we should tell them about General John E. Hull. He was in charge at the American Air Force base at Iwakuni, Japan, on a May morning in 1955 when 25 Japanese women badly crippled and disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima were to begin their trip for medical help in America. They were already aboard the U.S. Air Force plane when an aide dashed up to General Hull with an urgent cable from Washington. Not wishing to risk repercussions should the Hiroshima women encounter medical complications, a committee at the State Department had ordered the flight canceled. For a long moment, General Hull said nothing. Then he handed the cable back to his aide. “unfortunately, I don’t have my reading glasses with me,” he said. “Be sure to remind me to read this later.” And the plane took off.
“I want my students to know such stories, stories of conscience, stories of one person standing up and obfuscating bureaucracy and groupthink, one person refusing to take time for a committee vote.
Janet Emit, noted scholar with an annual NCTE writing award given in her honor, wrote a scathing denunciation of my article, explaining why collaboration is vital.
It’s a shame that choice is so uncomfortable for so many.
For some unfathomable reason, I was invited to visit with and give a speech to members of The California Literature Project at their weekend reunion. This Project had brought teachers together during the summer and subjected them to an intensive, rigorous study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next summer another group studied Proust. At their weekend reunion, I heard lots of groans and laughter, lots of talk about “surviving’’ Joyce and “surviving’’ Proust.
I both admired and was appalled by the notion. I witnessed firsthand the sense of community and joint accomplishment this literary survival engendered. But I questioned if survival–getting through a book–is the literary model we want for our classrooms. I stressed the notion that If our students are to become lifelong readers, parents who read to their children, then student choice must be central to the program.
Participants accused me of anarchism. Student choice, they insisted, is fine and dandy for recreational reading, but for literature study the teacher must choose. Left on their own, they insisted, students wouldn’t move beyond Sweet Valley High books.
The poet-farmer-teacher Wendell Berry gives us a wonderful image of what happens when people insist on unanimity over diversity. He gives us “crazy old Mrs. Gaines who sang of One Lord, One Faith, and One Cornbread.’’ Wendell Berry never even hints that crazy old Mrs. Gaines might have been a high school English teacher, but he points out, they had to lock crazy old Mrs. Gaines up in a room because “For her, to be free was only to be lost.’’
David Hawkins, one of the organizers of the Elementary Science Study, probably influenced my teaching more than anyone else. The Informed Vision (Agathon, 1974) is a collection of essays wherein Mr. Hawkins uses mathematics and science as a starting point for a practical, idealistic inquiry into the way children learn. He points to the “essential lack of predictability about what’s going to happen in a good classroom … because the teacher is basing his decisions on observation of the actual children in their actual situation, their actual problems, their actual interests, and the accidental things that happen along the way that nobody can anticipate.” Mr. Hawkins advises us not to answer questions about, say, objectives, but to question the questions. He insists that one-month test results aren’t of any interest, slyly adding that “[t]he seven-year test hasn’t been made yet.”
Frank Smith’s “Twelve Easy Ways To Make Learning To Read Difficult” (since reprinted in Essays Into Literacy; Heinemann, 1983), which gives me and every other person of strong heart the license to chart our own course–if we dare. Mr. Smith says the teacher must respond to what the child is trying to do. And, he cautions, this is no cinch. He insists it is a very difficult step to take, one requiring “insight, tolerance, sensitivity, and patience; it demands an understanding of the nature of reading, a rejection of formulae, less reliance on tests, and more receptivity to the child.”
In The Wilderness and the Laurel Tree (Harper, 1972), Ned O’Gorman’s advice is similar. “A teacher will learn about children by watching them first of all; not by reading about them or talking to experts about them.” Mr. O’Gorman tells us to “[s]it down now and then watch the children,” writing down what we see. Then, he advises, we should take our notes home and think about what we have seen. Ned O’Gorman, a poet and Harlem principal, is no pie-in-the-sky theorist but a practical idealist. He can say in one breath, “I killed another 500 cockroaches this morning,” and in the next proclaim, “[t]eaching is a joyous, exhilarating task.”
Not all the “teacher books” I treasure are written for or by teachers. Take, for example, those by Edward Abbey, who exhorts us all to remember that “[o]ne brave deed is worth a thousand books.” Teachers, by profession and personality often a polite, even passive, lot, would do well to read Mr. Abbey’s outrageous books. Iconoclast and gadfly, as well as by nature a conservative man, Edward Abbey argues for open spaces and individual eccentricity. He works hard at inflaming his readers “with malice aforethought,” as he says, against “armies of government and greed.” Deliberately subversive, complaining that we have yielded too much too easily to machines and money, he points out that measurement and analysis do not equal understanding. He recounts a story of Beethoven that teachers should remember when called upon by some bureaucrat to “demonstrate that learning has taken place.” When asked to explain the meaning of one of his sonatas, Beethoven is said to have simply sat down at the piano and played it through again.
Teachers who feel the pressure to use the advice of corporate America would do better to read Pultizer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam’s The Reckoning than an analysis of the worldwide math scores of all 5th graders or all the national media whines that are proliferating faster than dustballs. In compelling and fascinating detail, Mr. Halberstam uses the story of the rise and decline of the U.S. auto industry as a paradigm for our national attitudes about work, money, power, and ethics. This is a must read for any teacher who is tired of being blamed for the national debt, the balance-of-trade deficit, welfare, or plantar’s warts. And it is very readable.
Teachers can learn more about the wonderful resilience (and stubbornness) of children from reading Max Apple’s “Stranger at the Table” and “Bridging” (collected in Free Agents; Harper 1984) and Roommates (Warner, 1994) than from a score of courses in educational psychology. Mr. Apple draws on his own childhood and his experiences as a single parent for his poignant, hilarious, and ultimately profound stories.
Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life is an autobiographical account of a boy who, by the time he is done writing his own letters of recommendation to prep school on pilfered high school letterhead, has just about convinced himself that he is an Eagle Scout and a champion diver, even though his school doesn’t have a swimming pool. As Mr. Wolff puts it, “We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.” This is the story of a boy who is peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous, and a liar. And every teacher with any heart will be rooting for him all the way–and taking another look at her peculiar, sneaky, obstreperous students.
We teachers need to remind members of the august commissions on excellence in education and the writers of standards and all those people yelling in the national media of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy, and Max Apple’s grandfather. We need to exhort everybody to read more and talk less.
People who think that, say, that the commissioners and the New York Times opinionists, or even the the whole-language evangelists have given us startling new insights about teaching and learning would do well to read Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (Vintage, 1960). Of course, Utopians such as Mr. Goodman are out of fashion these days, but his decades-old examination of how the spiritual emptiness of our technological society wastes human resources, particularly the young, remains a milestone. Mr. Goodman points out, for example, that eons ago people objected to progressive education on the grounds that it “flouted the Western traditions, the three R’s, Moral Decency, Patriotism, and the Respect for Authority.” His letter to the New York commissioner of education, included in the book, nails the absurdity of lesson plans on the nose.
Today’s teachers would do well to search for copies of Joseph Featherstone’s Schools Where Children Learn (Liveright, 1971) and What Schools Can Do (Liveright, 1976). As well as offering a fine analysis of what schools can do, these books remind us that the big issues in education don’t change much from one decade to the next. For starters, Mr. Featherstone predicted both the coming of the teacher-effectiveness mania and its shoddy content. “Teaching practice is so complex, and our modes of knowing about it so limited,” he writes, “that it is difficult to believe that any emerging paradigms of technical knowledge will be anything but scientific mumbo jumbo, concealing their essential inadequacy under a veneer of statistical precision.” Reading Jay Featherstone is a poignant reminder that today we teachers talk only to each other. Nobody else is listening. The fact that Mr. Featherstone, an education professor, was once a regular contributor to The New Republic reminds us that today there is no general-interest publication in America that takes education seriously.
Over the years of acquiring 60+ units in education courses, I must admit that one time I did encounter a book that “informed” my career. It happened while trying to secure an emergency credential in New York City; At 9:30 p.m., while sitting in the back row of an English methods course at Hunter College, I’d just finished a paperback thriller and wondered how I’d stay awake for another half hour. A classmate and I traded books. I definitely got the better part of the deal, because the classmate handed me Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Teacher, a thrilling book.
In this classic work, Sylvia Ashton-Warner insists that when words have no emotional significance for the beginning reader, they may do him more harm than not teaching him at all. Such words, she writes, will “teach him that words mean nothing and that reading is undesirable.” Ms. Ashton-Warner helped me see why my teaching the required Silas Marner turned out so badly, and why I must promise myself never to do such a thing again.
I’ve decided to let Education Week, whose front cover motto is “To Inspire and empower,” have the last word. Here’s a review of my book that coined the word “Standardisto.”
ONE SIZE FITS FEW: The Folly Of Educational Standards, by Susan Ohanian. (Heinemann, $16.95.) In this diatribe, longtime teacher and fervent progressive Ohanian comes across like a hectoring right-wing radio host. In a mere 150 pages, she lambastes–and this is a partial list–USA Today, Education Week, corporate greed, the California Department of Education, and everything and anything having to do with the movement to set curriculum standards.
In earlier books such as Who’s in Charge?, Ohanian emerged as an astute critic of educational folly. But One Size, with its self-righteous, sarcastic tone–particularly grating is her insistence on calling standards advocates “Standardistos”–is less analysis than an ad hominem riff, portraying standards as the dark machinations of Fortune 500 executives and conservative think tanks….
At the heart of Ohanian’s anti-standards progressivism is a belief that “teachers are the curriculum,” and she argues here that teachers can only be effective when they control what goes on in their classrooms, free from onerous outside directives. Though this view has been embraced by certain private schools, it’s fantasy to think it will ever hold sway in taxpayer-supported schools.
https://www.edweek.org/education/out-of-order/1999/11
YOU decide. That’s what teachers must do: Decide for themselves. . . and for the children in their care.
Susan Ohanian 