Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House
1.
On the overcast morning of February 23rd, snow still on the ground, I embarked with the students in my Harvard undergraduate seminar on a walking tour of Cambridge and Boston. We began at Harvard Square, walked northeast to Inman, south along Prospect St. to Central Square, and took the “T” out to the Warren St. station in the Allston/Brighton area. We toured the grounds of the Brighton Marine Health Center, and carried on up the hill to the surroundings of St. Gabriel’s Monastery, closed since 1978. From there we gazed back down at the imposing Brighton High School, and beyond that surveyed a vista of the city, and the territory we had crossed.
The occasion for this outing was the inaugural Infinite Boston tour, a journey orientated by sites and events described in
David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel,
Infinite Jest. I borrow the phrase “Infinite Boston” from
William Beutler’s website of that name, described on its homepage as “a limited-run essay series about the real-life Boston area locations” featured in Wallace’s novel. The site is choc-full of excellent photographs and illuminating descriptions of the various streets and spaces of the book. When confirmation came that I would be teaching “David Foster Wallace and his Generation” in the Spring semester, I contacted Mr. Beutler to see if he would be interested in leading an official tour. It turns out that he does not live in Boston, but in D.C. Instead, he kindly put me in touch with another Bill,
Bill Lattanzi – Cambridge resident, playwright, science documentary maker, and part-time MIT professor – who undertook the pre-planning and did the honors in fine style on the day.
I myself am not a native of Boston, or even of the U.S.: I am Irish-born, and hail from Dublin, a city inextricably bound up with another great twentieth-century novel,
James Joyce’s Ulysses. Many visitors to my hometown are attracted by their reading of this modernist masterpiece – it’s a rare novel that can make a city famous, as a friend recently commented to me – and those cultural tourists are presented on arrival with a variety of tour options based on Joyce and his most famous book. A well-known quip about
Ulysses has it that were Dublin to be destroyed, it could be reconstructed from the meticulous detail that makes up the novel. The same may not quite be true of
Infinite Jest. The “metro Boston area” described in the novel is reconstructed in part as a future fantasia, and with the exception of Don Gately’s jaunty drive crosstown in a pimped-up Ford Aventura, no character comes close to covering the city as thoroughly as Leopold Bloom does in his perambulations. Nonetheless, Wallace’s vision, like Joyce’s, is significantly rooted in the vagaries and possibilities of place. This is something I came gradually to appreciate while living in Cambridge and re-reading
Infinite Jest for our seminar.
I have never thought of myself as having a particularly nuanced or consciously deep relationship to place. I don’t consider this a character flaw, exactly, more a trait that occasionally causes bemusement in me and mild exasperation in some of my friends, the more observant of whom might want to draw my attention to the contours of a street corner or an unusual pattern of plant life. In rural surroundings, I often find myself afflicted by the kind of gentle anxiety I imagine is common to the post-Romantic mind, whereby an abiding connection to nature is more regularly displaced by awareness of the absence of an abiding connection to nature. Even in cities, those hubs of the modernist spirit, I am capable of walking around lost in thought and the realm of ideas, barely recognizing the details small and large that make up urban life. This can be the case even upon visiting a city for the first time, when I should, in theory, be most open to fresh realities. But my natural affinity for theory over reality, for the ideal over the material, is probably what inspires the thing I like most about exploring a new city: studying and internalizing its representation on a map. Like some overly literalist version of the Marxist critic
Fredric Jameson, I need a cognitive map before I can begin to appreciate fully the territory that has inspired its construction.
This want of affinity for the materiality of place is no doubt a contributing factor to the kind of literary criticism I write. The essays on Wallace I have published to date, for instance, have discussed his work mainly in the context of the history of ideas. I have written on the new kind of sincerity embodied in Wallace’s fiction, on his use of dialogue to explore logical, political, and cultural ideas, and on the challenges posed by his fiction to the norms of contemporary criticism. What I lacked before coming to the U.S. was an appreciation of the rootedness of his work in a specific geography. Before living in Cambridge, in other words, I had experienced only how the map could shape the territory. Re-reading
Infinite Jest, and participating in Infinite Boston, allowed me to see how the territory might conversely underpin the literary map.
2.
This recurrent language of map and territory is drawn, of course, from
Infinite Jest itself, and particularly the famous Eschaton scene that takes place at Enfield Tennis Academy. Our tour took place on a Saturday, and for class two days later we read a long stretch through the middle of the novel, beginning with Eschaton and culminating in Gately’s brutal fight with the Canadian gangsters that occurs outside the novel’s other primary institutional site, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (sic). At nearly 300 pages, this constituted approximately twice the usual reading for a class, the previous week’s meeting having been annexed by Presidents Day. In conjunction with Infinite Boston, however, these sections of the novel provided much food for thought and classroom discussion on the question of place.
Eschaton is “an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game,” but one renowned among the students who play it for its theoretical purity. It takes place on four contiguous tennis courts, which, as one of my own students put it in his mid-term paper, “represent a concrete war territory but are themselves only theoretical in nature.” This fragile distinction between theory and reality – an opposition that, owing to the representational quality of the Eschaton game itself, does not fold neatly onto map vs. territory – comes under pressure when snow begins to fall during the game. In response to the young participant JJ Penn’s suggestion that the snow should alter the calculations that constitute the game’s action, Michael Pemulis, an older student and “sort of eminence grise of Eschaton,” is apoplectic: “It’s snowing on the goddamn
map, not the
territory, you dick!” Pemulis might well be clear in his own mind on the rules, and on the necessary axioms that allow for the rules to apply – “Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game” – but all this “metatheoretical fuss” is both negated and sublated when Evan Ingersoll attacks Ann Kittenplan with a direct hit that he also claims is a strike against the world superpower she represents.
Of course, Wallace is drawing attention here to the unreal idealities of global nuclear conflict during the Cold War, where game theoretic strategies often took precedence over the lives and concerns of real human beings. But the Eschaton scene is also a comment upon the role of fiction itself as a form of representation that takes the world as its object without becoming identical with it, or even being tied to it. The fact that real events such as falling snow and inter-player fights can “threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism” tells us something important about the artifice of realism, but it also tells us something about place, and how it gets transmuted into fiction. In his entertaining new preface to the just re-published
Signifying Rappers – wherein I learned that some of my favorite haunts in Cambridge were also David Wallace’s back in the summer of 1989 – Wallace’s co-author
Mark Costello offers one reading of the way place fed into his friend’s writing in that book: “There’s a bounce in the prose that captures some of the fun, god-damnit fun, to be found around Boston that summer.” This sentiment locates the affective quality of place in the experience of the writer himself: a fun time generates bouncy prose. But the “elegant complexity” of the Eschaton scene teaches us that there are also other, and perhaps more interesting, ways to consider the relationship between writing and place.
In Wallace’s personal library held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, there is a book called
A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest. A collection edited by
Michael Martone, it dates from 1988, and Wallace might have encountered it soon after its publication or later in his career. If his markings are to be our guide, however, it seems clear that Wallace only ever read one essay from the book. This is the contribution by Martone himself, a short meditation entitled “The Flatness.” On the opening page, Wallace underlines some isolated words and phrases, but the only full sentence he marks is the third one: “The geometry of the fields suggests a map as large as the thing it represents.” This sounds, of course, like a Borgesian idea, and Wallace was a committed fan of
Borges: in a review of a biography of the Argentinian author, Wallace called him “one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century.” Nonetheless, the metaphysical conceit Martone invokes is in this case simply the precursor to a more aesthetic conceit, one that clearly attracted Wallace’s attention. Five pages later, in the final paragraph of the essay, he underlines the following sentences: “I grew up in a landscape not often painted or photographed. The place is more like the materials of the art itself – the stretched canvas and paper.” Beside this, Wallace writes in the margin, “Not object but medium.”
Place not as the object of art, but as its medium. If we take this complicated idea seriously, then the “bounce in the prose” inspired by the writer’s subjective experience of place becomes supplemented, and even transcended, by a stronger claim to the centrality of place as the objective medium for art. And a medium is not only the canvas or paper on which art gets created; it can also be, as Marshall McLuhan informed us, the message itself. Moreover, for an advanced artist like Wallace, the medium is what provides the norms and characteristics whose exploration and expansion become part of his project, become part of what his art is attempting to articulate and express. Here the Boston of
Infinite Jest (and its Midwestern counterpart, the flat Peoria of
The Pale King) becomes the medium without which there would be no message, becomes the real boundary that limits but also enables the acts of the artist’s transformative imagination.
3.
As we traveled from stop to stop on the tour, Bill alternated his commentary among relevant anecdotes from Wallace’s biography, his own reminiscences from 1980s Cambridge, and passages from
Infinite Jest. Outside the Cambridge Hospital, he read aloud the scene of Poor Tony Krause’s post-seizure release back into the world. On the green line from Park St. to Warren St., I read the passage about Mike Pemulis’s drug run to obtain samples of “the incredibly potent DMZ” (the reactions of the train’s non-affiliated passengers remain unrecorded). Standing in the grounds of Brighton Marine Health Center, the students took turns reading the novel’s descriptions of the “seven exterior Units on the grounds of Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital.” Here we could remark on Wallace’s imaginative fervor in inventing the grim activities of the various Units – #1 treats “Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders,” #4 houses “Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions,” #5 is a home for catatonics – and simultaneously test the accuracy of his descriptions of the “seven moons orbiting a dead planet” against the realities of the place that inspired those descriptions. All of these buildings we could see for ourselves, in other words, so that characters’ movements could be imagined, and their sightlines reconstructed, with a new awareness of the possibilities the place provided.
Bill and I had agreed in advance that we should end the morning by each choosing a favorite passage from the novel to read. Bill selected the scene of Mario Incandenza’s nighttime walk down the Enfield Hill to the grounds of Ennet House. When I sat down the following evening to finish the reading for class, I found myself entranced as never before by this scene, which directly precedes Gately’s fight. In keeping, perhaps, with my relative obliviousness to place, I don’t consider myself to have much of a creative visual imagination as a reader (something my fiancée likes to poke fun at me for), and so having a clear picture of Ennet House from the day prior enriched my experience in unanticipated ways. With the “real” Ennet House in my mind’s eye, I could better appreciate Mario’s warm feelings for the “crowded and noisy” authenticity of the halfway house, a place “where people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say
God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.” I could see the darkness surrounding the buildings, the lights illuminating the residents of the house, the ramp on which they go outside to smoke, Mario smiling grotesquely but tenderly as he and his police lock stand tilted forward on the cusp of the hill.
For my own concluding contribution to the tour, I chose a more ostensibly abstract passage, which I read aloud as we stood on the hill by the old monastery, overlooking the high school and the city:
Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word
excuse or
occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
I don’t necessarily think that Wallace agreed with Gerhardt Schtitt’s analysis of tennis or of the self. The German coach’s “Old World patriarchal” values retain a whiff of fascism, something the capitalization of State alludes to here. Schtitt’s neo-Hegelian understanding of the relationship between self and other also denies the true existence of another who is not simply the occasion for meeting the self; this position is uncomfortably close to what Wallace will elsewhere say he most fears, the trap of solipsism. Nevertheless, when it comes to emotionally affecting passages of philosophically inspired prose, Wallace has few equals in literary history. It is difficult for me to read, even silently, those closing sentiments – “It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same...” – without being moved both intellectually and emotionally, without having my head throb heartlike, as Wallace suggested to his editor
Michael Pietsch he wanted to achieve with
Infinite Jest.
What finally interests me most about this passage, however, is the discussion of boundaries and limits it contains. One of Wallace’s most profound historical projects involved trying to convince his generation of Americans that they needed to revalue and reestablish boundaries; rather than individual freedom inhering in a lack of restrictions, limits could be understood as animating and enabling. The boundaries of a game, and the boundaries of a self, were clearly two kinds of limits that fascinated Wallace. But there are also the boundaries set by the tennis court itself, the medium through which this particular confrontation with the truth of limits occurs. It might be, then, that the most enabling boundaries for any writer are the boundaries of the places he or she inhabits and knows well, real territories transmuted in the writer’s mind into maps of new territories that are then opened for exploration by readers. It is a well-established fact about Wallace that forging a connection between writer and reader was for him a central aim. I have found, as a reader of Wallace, that this connection can be deepened and extended by a trip around the Boston of Infinite Jest, the writer’s canvas, his territory, his map and his medium, all at once.
Many points in the article are well put. At the elementary level many or most schools in our nation participate in a motivational reading program called Accelerated Reader. The volume of reading at these schools is fairly high with high library circulation rates. However, the knowledge base of children’s literature within the teaching profession has declined to the point of non-existence. Teachers do not read children’s literature. Teacher preparation programs do not address this. NCLB and Reading First put the basal text with its focus on excerpted literature and sub skills at the center of instruction. Without guidance our students read fun, humorous books with little substance such as Wimpy Kids, Dork Diaries, and the most popular Captain Underpants. Elementary school librarians (not library clerks) are rare. What is needed are teachers that can recommend the right book to a child because they have read it. When a child reads Harry Potter, the teacher should be able guide him/her to Lloyd Alexander or Susan Cooper for the next book to read. The teacher should be able to talk to children about great books they have read and pass on a sense of passion. This dialogue is absent. Let’s all go to the library and read Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry and get a few students to read it.
The most difficult aspect of instilling children with a love of books is that many
of them simply do not live in socioeconomic conditions that will enable them to secure quality books. In America, we’ve collectively decided that it’s more important to use our vast resources to murder people overseas and promote militarism than it is to learn and develop critical thinking skills.
Giving kids a list of books that are “good” and having them “journal” about them sounds like lazy teaching to this high school English teacher. It also sounds like a way to make good kids who like to read read more, and kids who hate to read hate it even more by turning it into an exercise of pushing papers.
The article should be amended: the problems detailed are not found in “all” public schools. They are specific to public schools that are located in places where administrators and school board members are easily terrified by scores that have no connection to the actual “education” of their students. I teach in a public high school where independent reading of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is encouraged from 9th-12th grade. We’re going to be a part of the Common Core testing system. We have no plans to change the way we teach our kids. In fact, the state of Illinois has been using the ACT to measure student achievement for the last 10 years. No standardized test in history has changed more local school curricula across our state more insidiously than that test. No standardized test values creativity less than the ACT. And yet, and yet.
These new tests will not dominate my life as a teacher. I know this because people said the same thing 10 years ago with NCLB. And 10 years before that. And 10 years before that. And 10 years before that. Part of the problem with reforming education in this country is that teachers act like the sky is falling with every reform. Every new movement is worse than the last. It’s just not the case.
Want students to love reading? Read lots of books. Be ready to recommend some of those books to each student on an individual basis. Teach books that have the qualities of great literature but also tell meaningful stories (three of the best, in my opinion: Cuckoo’s Nest, The Great Gatsby, The Things They Carried) instead of books that meet canonical or diversity checklists. Stop making everything about “theme.” Talk about actions, psychology, relationships. Let kids speak their minds. You’ll get kids to love reading.
While I agree that the focus on testing is lamentable, and detrimental to students, readers, authors, and our general culture, I can’t blame the Common Core. The Common Core only instructs teachers on what to teach, it doesn’t address how. Teachers are still free to give lists of amazing books to children, to read aloud everyday, and to choose books to share with care. The subtle shift of focus away from solely fiction to a balance between fiction and non-fiction is a reasonable response to our high tech, STEM focused world. The issue is with testing. The issue is with the idea that teachers and schools and students can only be evaluated using a test. If we could all agree to evaluate using portfolios, journals, authentic responses, and other metrics, the tests would die. Additionally, if parents embraced a more difficult curriculum while rejecting the tests, the tests would wither and fade. Embrace a better curriculum, but reject the tests!
This article’s logic, particularly the position implied by the title, is absurd, and I’m forced to wonder if Mr. Kalamaroff genuinely understands the Common Core or if he is being intentionally misleading. More accurately, Mr. Kalamaroff might argue against high stakes testing and purely objective tests are detrimental to teaching students to enjoy reading. That at least would have some merit, but that’s not quite what he’s done, instead opting to conflate high-stakes testing with CC reading standards, which ensure students can read informational texts as well as fiction (also a CC standard).
Looking back, I don’t know why I got a degree in English because the literature instruction I got in middle and high school was mostly terrible. I think it comes down to one teacher, 9th grade. I think it’s more about finding teachers who reach you than it is about any particular “method.”
Other than 9th grade, here’s what I remember: books and stories and poems were drudgery. They weren’t fun, they weren’t amazing, they didn’t help me make sense of my life. Their key moments were to be memorized, their symbols and motifs understood. Everything was presented as hard, awful work. Reading Ethan Frome or Beowulf seemed like punishment, it really did.
Granted we needed to be weaned off the light fare we had grown up reading. But there was no effort to cajole us to actually like the material. I’ve talked to a number of people who feel the same way. (All public schools of course.) I’ve asked them, why don’t you read? And they cite red hunting caps and green dock lights that never seemed to actually mean anything to them. They felt like they didn’t get it, and they never would.
Reading, even great literature, even difficult literature, is supposed to be a pleasure. It’s not worth doing if it isn’t. I agree that it’s down to teachers to find ways to reach their kids, no matter what the obstacles. But the first thing I would do is stop treating books like puzzles, stop focusing so much on symbols and motifs. Symbolism is just one of many many aspects of literature, but in my experience and the experience of many I’ve talked to, it’s like the only thing that seems to matter in scholastic lit study.
I teach high school science and have been adapting primary source, classic maritime books into Google Earth chapter tours. I have found it is a fun way to engage students as they virtually travel to oints of interest mentioned in the text. This multidisciplinary approach introduces science, history and geography in my marine science class. Feel free to read the books at: http://Sailthebook.net
@ Kristen: I’m afraid that’s not the case. Take it from a product of the East Asian high-stakes test-taking culture: Regardless of tests, as long as grading and assessments have standardized rubrics (and they will, if high school diplomas are to mean an equivalent mastery of subjects), there will always be drudgery and forced learning. Changing tests to portfolios, journals, etc. simply means that students will learn to write the “correct” essays and journal entries. It also means that the sphere in which they have to “get it right” will no longer be limited to test-taking, but will start to permeate more and more of school life. This is the main criticism of the educational reforms currently being pushed through in my own country (Taiwan).
There is an even more insidious danger here as well. When essays, journals, etc. start to have “correct” answers, it also means that the system is engaging in thought-censorship. Think of the the scene discussing Hitler in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: Would you, as a grader of essays, give as high a grade to an essay discussing the attractions of Nazism (before attempting to refute them) as one that discusses the merits of democracy? Freedom of speech and thought is easy to pay lip service to, but when actual speech acts (including written ones) conflict with the grader’s personal beliefs (or those held by most of society), then it’s not just an abstract question. A kid’s grades (and, if the system is widely implemented, the kid’s future) are on the line.
That being said, I don’t agree with this article, either. The truth is that, even in the midst of high-stakes testing, those who love reading (or any other extracurricular activity) will still love it, be it due to an inspirational teacher or what they do with their free time. On the other hand, for those who don’t love reading, rigidly standardized tests can better ensure that they retain (to a certain degree) knowledge that is deemed essential to the information society of the 21st century. In Taiwan, we may not use school knowledge in daily life, but that knowledge often serves as a common cultural base, or even a surprising source of tangential inspiration.
Should life revolve around testing and only testing? No. And is ten hours too long a time to sit a multiple-choice exam? Most likely (unless it’s split among different days). But to say the the Common Core will kill the cultural future of the United States is not contributing to the discussion.
This makes sense. Growing up in Brazil, I was educated at a private school that focused on getting its students through the entrance examinations for the best colleges in the country. This meant millions of hours of multiple choice mock tests and teaching how to do well on them. Literature was reduced to memorizing a few facts about each mandatory book (short lists of ten brazilian classics for each college you were to apply). Suffice to say that my appreciation of literature was blocked until the moment I finally left school (and yes, I got into the college I wanted, but at what cost?) and managed to find time to actually pay attention to what I was reading, in levels other than mere fact recollection. Most of my high-school friends didn’t have that luck and even though they also managed to get into good colleges, they never found their way into the joys of reading. Don’t go that way, America.
Thomas Kilbourn. Joel Barlow High School. Redding, CT. The man is a legend.
I’m a new English teacher in NYC and keeping the CC in mind while preparing lessons has been a big part of my training. This article, like many others, focuses on testing and how this will change the direction of the curriculum. I think many are missing the point: testing helps us focus on what IS working, on what the students are not grasping, allowing us to revise and review areas of learning to make them more effective. By examining test results and making the appropriate adjustments, we can become more effective teachers.
Of course, there are some imbalances in the current approach; expected at the start of any “revolution.” Allowing this transition to be co-opted by politicians and voters who are attracted to this topic because they see it as a liberal/conservative “plot,” designed to further their own agenda has only illuminated the differences each and every state education system has when it comes to spending the taxpayer’s money.
The people who are enthusiastic about these tests (and I just had to listen to one of them for an interminable hour) and the people who are left absolutely cold by them….are just residents of two different planets.
There is no bridge. Teachers, be subversive.
This, like many articles, is a vast over statement of the CC approach to teaching English texts. My freshmen have been exposed to works from all sorts of writers of different styles and who write for different purposes. They are learning why people write, how to interpret what people write, and they are writing themselves in response to those texts—in terms of style and substance.
The core is not designed to limit teacher freedom or student access to literature. Rather, the goal is to remove the teacher-as-interpreter model that has been pervasive in our culture for far too long.
What does it matter if students read eight novels a year if they are only able to understand those novels in the presence of a teacher who forces the information in front of them? The CC goal is to develop the skills so that a student can independently approach texts that they find interesting or need to interpret in their own lives. These skills are more important than notches in the literary belt. They are also of use across content areas, allowing students to own the skills and see the purpose (something that cramming books does not allow them to grasp). Additionally, I have not sacrificed any compelling literature in my classroom. My freshmen (mark that–freshmen), have read full works and selections ranging from Donald Barthelme, Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Steinbeck, Barbara Kingsolver, Shakespeare, Petrarch, John McPhee, Jonathan Safran Foer, Cisneros, through Harper Lee and James Baldwin. They journal and write constantly.
If anything, the CC opens up room for a wider range of text that are more compelling, and more complex. We’re educating citizens, not English majors. To teachers who feel there is not as much room for the classics I say this: read farther and wider. Literature comes in many lengths, shapes, and colors. I would love to introduce students to the books that made me fall in love with literature in high school, but that is not necessarily going to prepare them when they meet texts that require them to rely on their own abilities without a teacher at the helm to support them.
Many teachers decrying the loss of literature seem to be frustrated over the challenge of incorporating a wider range of texts into their classrooms, as well as having to restructure the models with which they have grown accustom to in the teaching of texts that they have grown reliant upon. This is a poor reason to stand in opposition to a curriculum that aims to prepare students for thinking independently and critically without the teacher as authority.
The key factor in children becoming avid readers I is the influence of a teacher passionate about reading. The solution is more teachers who are passionate about teaching. Too many teachers hanging around the profession because they are making six figure salaries ( for those who would argue that teachers don’t make six figure salaries check out teacher salaries in IL which are publicly available) Children may have actually better off when more of the teachers were motivated by love of teaching than the relatively good salary retirement they could earn.
Yes, it’s the teachers making above the national median income who are dragging the nation’s love of reading into the toilet. I work in a district in Illinois. Lots of people here make more than $100,000 per year. They’ve also been teaching for 25 years or more and have one or two Master’s degrees. (Granted, many graduate programs are worthless. But that’s not our fault.) My desire to teach good literature is the same as it was 10 years ago when I started. Paying me more isn’t going to change that.
To say motivation is replaced by complacency the moment a person starts making money is foolish.
12 years of school in Louisiana and i never had one English teacher try to get me to read any books. It was all “nouns and adverbs, and spelling words”. There were times they would offer book reports for extra credit but reading was never a part of the curriculum. There was a library close to my house that i could walk to and my parents would visit book stores where i could browse. Reading for me began and ended at home. I don’t see how Common Core affects reading books. We didnt’ have Common Core in the past and teachers never pushed anyone to read. or is Louisiana just that terrible in Education? I attended both Catholic private and Public schools.
As an elementary school teacher who taught for 40 years ( 1964-2003) in the bowels of the NYC public school system, I can testify to the change of focus,slow but definite, from teaching kids the necessary skills to function well in society to teaching them to be good little test takers. Now living in upscale New Hope Solebury, Pa, all I hear from the supt. is that we ( the administrative staff and teachers) MUST align our curriculum with the new state standards. The result of all of this is a proclamation put on the district’s Home Page (nhsd.org) is a declaration that we are # 2 in Bucks County and #37 in the state.
I found it interesting that the article never mentioned the influence and impact that having a credentialed Teacher-Librarian running a dynamic school library program can have. The trend, at the local, county, state and national level, has been to gradually eliminate strong school library programs, and with that the elimination of access to qualified Teacher-Librarians. Through direct contact with students, and working with teachers to develop quality curriculum and instruction based on a strong foundation of reading and writing, the Teacher-Librarian, along with Public Librarians, have likely had a stronger influence on the reading habits and development of our youth than any other group of individuals. Even with the explosive growth of digital delivery of information, the Teacher-Librarian has a central role in providing students direction and clarity in exploring multiple areas of interest and discovery.
I have some deep concerns with the article you posted in January.
Three things I see as concerns with this article: #1 You did not mention public or school libraries even ONCE in the article… while I lament, as you do, over stories lost, how can California foster an appreciation of literature when they routinely CLOSE school libraries and lay off Teacher Librarians as non-essential… I’ll take a sentence here to stand on my soap box: CA ranks 53rd of 53rd (dead last) in the ratio of qualified teacher librarians to students. (national average is 800 to 1, CA is 7000 to 1) – http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/lb/schoollibrstats08.asp) #2 – Teacher librarians take up the slack in resources that English and other teachers simply do not have in a single classroom. One person can’t do it all, testing or not!! The Whole Child Blog (http://www.wholechildeducation.org/blog/it-takes-a-whole-school-school-librarians-roles-in-the-whole-child) states: “… often school librarians teach the crosscutting topics that don’t fit neatly into English language arts, science, mathematics, or social studies.” So qualified Teacher librarians are the ones that fill holes and often make learning relevant because the atmosphere is conducive to learning at a student’s own pace. Lastly #3 – You state, “If we want our schools to be transformative places, if we want students to develop a deep love for reading, then we must understand that the most fundamental parts of an education are those that cannot be easily quantified through standardized tests.” This is an agreement that most teachers would also make: it should NOT be all about the testing. But you also state, “ We should all advocate for a public education that engenders a love for reading in students.” Because of “ … impact on the number of active readers in America, a number that is already in noticeable decline.” And I agree. But if you truly want an education in California schools to make a difference or any other state, and NOT be all about the testing, then I challenge you to stand up and fight at least for California’s public and school libraries and Teacher Librarians, because without their help, I fear the war on literacy will truly be lost.
Yours in fighting the war,
So sad to read of another federal fiasco being imposed on the schools. The fact is we were doing O.K. with the basic 1950s system before the first federal assault began with the 1960s “reforms”. They got rid of the Dr. Suess readers (which can still be bought off Amazon for like 99 cents, that’s why there are so many copies still around). Then they trashed the phonics-based system with the “whole language” which is why I started to see high schoolers in the 70s who could not read unless they said is out loud (slowly).
There is no substitute for good books. I read “The Island of the Blue Dolpins” in 4th grade, happily there are still teachers using it but I fear this will change under the latest assault.
In 5th grade in the 60s we all got pocket sized copies of the Constituion courtesy of the John Hancock insurance company, I still have mine.Can’t beat the Bill of Rights for economy of language. But then the new mafia probably thinks it’s too white.
“Animal Farm” by Orwell in 9th grade. “!984” in 12th. There are solutions. Plenty of good historical biography suitable for Jr. High will prepare them for these.
This is a silly parody of a common core ELA classroom. Take it from a high school ELA teacher–none of what is described here is a necessary consequence of CC standards.