My Ideal Class: World Literature "Transloosely Literated"

If I could teach absolutely anything, I would love to teach a senior English class in world literature in translation. It would blend together my loves of languages and of literature, as well as my general belief that education should serve to expand the world view of students.

One of the major themes of the class would be the challenges presented by translation--the ways in which perfect translations are impossible and all translators are always making their own choices about the works. I would show the funniest scene from Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray is being instructed by the Japanese director of the commercial he has flown to Tokyo to shoot. The director talks and talks, but when the interpreter translates it into English it comes out as just a few words. The scene is Bill Murray at his best.

I would also pick a page or a paragraph from a famous work--Don Quixote comes to mind--and present multiple translations of the same material, in order to talk about the places where different choices were made.

And now I would have the students read this piece from Sunday's NYT Book Review. A classic!

Guest Post: Five Books I've Loved Teaching

The Five Books theme continues to generate a lot of dialogue. I'm happy today to have the second ever guest post to this blog. Today's guest poster is not only an experienced English teacher, but is also the proud mom of the author of the first guest post ever on this blog.



In September 2008, I will begin my 39th year in education. I’ve been teaching English grades 6 – 12 all this time, and I’m happy to respond to Jeff’s blog.


Five texts I’ve loved teaching:


Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
High schoolers of all ethnicities presented with black lit., often appreciate, but don’t always “relate.” Ralph Ellison’s genius was that his prose style allows students to get inside the protagonist, who begins as a student himself and is desperate to get ahead. He’s thwarted left, right and center, ending, up living in a basement with a recording of “Am I Blue” (you can get a cd of it and play in class), busily screwing hundreds of light bulbs on the floor, ceiling and walls to rip off the electric company. I have had many students who have been shaken by this novel, some of them learning for the first time about black on black betrayal. Discussion leads to lessons in social history.


Julius Caesar William Shakespeare
I love to guide my seventh graders’ first reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Seventh graders – who knows more about stabbing one another in the back than seventh graders during the turning point in middle school where they break into the cruelest of mobs/gangs/packs, feeding on the souls of kids who were their buddies in elementary school with.
Antony’s principles are not as familiar to many of the kids. Close reading draws out the merits of keeping faith and loyality, and we get into talks about ethics, “mean girls” and bullies.


Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
By the tenth grade, most students are excited about having their philosophical discussions. Some of them posture and pose, while others grapple with valid pros and cons and articulating difficult concepts. Crime and Punishmentis perfect for giving students meat to chew, debate and write about.


Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Students learn the painful lesson that, as the famous line from the play goes, attention must be paid. Dramatic tragic hero since the advent of the common man in the U.S.A., Willy Lowman, is a failure in the eyes of almost everyone in the play, and certainly in those wallowing in our neo-gilded age. Students have trouble seeing the nobility in Willy, seeing why his wife knows that attention must be paid even to those who hit the sidewalk and slug it out in the work-a-day world everyday, believing in a personal code of responsibility, dedication and old fashioned ethics that need to be resurrected.


Waiting for Godot -Jean Paul Sartre
Why go on when you can’t? There is no help. There is no reason. Teenagers can connect with this concept, but they can’t so readily relate to Didi and GoGo’s “I can’t go on. I can’t go on. Let’s go on.” Existential as it’s themes are, Waiting for Godot demonstrates that we are not alone, but, in fact we are. Recognize it and, with the knowledge, find a way to deal.

Guest Post: Five Books Every Student Should Read in High School

Of all the previous posts on this blog, Five Books Every Student Should Read has generated the most conversation--if not actual comments--from my friends and acquaintances who make up the majority of the readership at this point. It has now inspired the first guest post on this blog. Besides being one of my wife's oldest and best friends, and a bridesmaid in our wedding, Georgia is an instructor for Academic Approach in Boston. Next fall, she will begin her first year of graduate school in Human Rights Law. She and I have had many conversations about our favorite books, so I am honored to have her include her thoughts on this subject.

Given I only get five book choices (and lament leaving out 1984and Night), but as I go through the endless list of literary options, I wonder if there is a difference between books I think every kid should read and books I think every kid should be taught. In thinking about "filling holes" in a student's education and thus enabling him/her to participate in the world of academia, these are my five:

1. The Odyssey– I could not agree with you more. As a quintessential part of the Western cannon, a student who misses out on Homer is also missing out on the deeper meanings of and references to some of their favorite stories (The Matrix, O Brother, Where Art Thou? to name a couple). But reading Homer is not only a tool to understanding our favorites, but also a means of arming us against thinking that cinematic atrocities like Warner Brothers' Troyis actually a good action flick...or worse, the actual story of Troy!

2. Harry Potter - I would never have imagined that my belief that we should absolutely be teaching Harry Potter in high school would be controversial, but as several towns in America have banned the series and some communities have even burned it, apparently I am indeed being controversial. Beyond being a great way to get students to admit they enjoy reading (although the movies have not helped my cause - "Why should I read it? I'll just watch the movie."), and besides the multiple lessons that come from exploring the plethora of mythology and folklore J.K. Rowling borrowed from, Harry Potter is about genocide. Voldemort, our half-blood villain, has declared that the wizarding world will be better off once they rid themselves of the "mud-bloods" and establish themselves, the "pure-bloods", as the master race. I would love to see this explored in more classrooms. Lastly, Harry Potter wonderfully lends itself as an introduction to Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey that students almost always find fascinating and want to discuss and apply to their favorite adventure stories. Together Rowling and Campbell offer teachers an attractive and easy platform to do what should be done at least once a year: open the classroom for creative writing.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird- I suppose this one is obvious and can be left to speak for itself.

4. Song of Solomon- In the 21st Century no student should leave high school without a sound dose of Toni Morrison, and Beloved is one of my all-time favorites. However, as a bi-racial student in the New York City public school system during the Giuliani Administration with countless and repetitive African-American curricula and lesson plans behind me, Song of Solomon was the first African-American book to move me and resonate with me. Thus, I mention it here as more of a personal plea. (I would teach this book in conjunction with Jacqueline Woodson's Behind You- the greatest piece of fiction I have read in a long time. I cried for hours and now pray the book, and its author, will become a household name.)

5. Much Ado About Nothing- Shakespeare was funny. Let's prove it and bring Kenneth Brannagh in to help.

Last point: as I was thinking about this question I discovered I was categorizing, or blatantly choosing from pre-established genres, and thus thinking "inside the box." Although the challenge of "filling gaps" in preparation for understanding our Western world demands we focus on our classics, there is something to be said for the old adage: moving beyond the cannon, moving beyond the genre, moving beyond ethno-centricity.

Thanks again to Georgia for putting together this post. If anyone else out there wants to put in their choices, or their ideas on any subject, just send me an email, and I will happily include your post on this blog.

Five Books Every Student Should Read in High School

This week is shaping up to be very book themed here at Build a School. Since I've been mostly focused on English issues recently anyway, I might as well keep it going.

I've already made the case that there is a certain amount of cultural knowledge that students should acquire during their English studies. For me, this includes having first-hand experience with certain works, so that they feel ownership of the knowledge, not just that they have acquired facts about titles and authors. So here they are, five books every student should read before finishing high school.

The Odyssey

For me, The Odyssey is the prime mover of all of Western literature. The story of Odysseus' long and troubled journey home has directly or indirectly inspired so many great authors (Joyce, Frazier, The Cohen Brothers) that it is impossible to imagine the course of Western literature without it. In addition, it is relatively easy and fun to read, full of all kinds of memorable twists and adventures. It presents students with many literary ideas that will help them understand other works: epic poetry, metaphor and simile, etc.. I think if I had to choose just one book, this would be the one.

Hamlet

Shakespeare gets a pretty bad rap in the world of high school. Students tend to take one look at the old fashioned poetic dialogue and decide that it must be boring, and certainly not worth the hard work of trying to understand it. In the hands of a great teacher, though, one who can break through those initial barriers and get students to see the beauty of the language and the universality of the emotions, reading Shakespeare in school can be a life changing experience. I had a hard time deciding which play to choose for this list. In some ways, Romeo and Juliet is the easier choice, with a lot more that the students are likely to identify with. Fundamentally, though, I just think Hamlet is a better play, and there is still plenty there for teenagers to latch onto.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Probably the biggest hole in my own education was that I didn't read Huck Finn until well after graduating from college. By then, I knew a great deal of the story anyway; it's so much a part of our culture. I include it on the list because I can't think of a more American book. So much of our national identity relates to themes of this book--the legacy of slavery, the pioneer spirit--that it's hard to think about being American without including the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the picture. There are also great opportunities for drawing connections, both within English studies (here comes The Odyssey again), and to history class.

Fahrenheit 451

Within the limit of five books, I was trying to get a variety of genres and time periods. I wanted a Sci-Fi book in the group, because I think they are a great way to see how fiction can help us think through real-world questions. I picked Fahrenheit 451 because it's about the importance of books. There's a lot to talk about related to the power of fiction, the influence of TV, the role of government in society, etc.. I had a couple more possibilities for this spot, but I'm sticking to this one.

Beloved

I wanted to finish off the list with a contemporary author. For my money, Toni Morrison is the best American writer working today, and Belovedis her masterpiece. I can't begin to do it justice in a couple sentences, so I will just say that it is one of the finest and most powerful books I have ever read. Again, there are all kinds of tie ins to history and to other literary works, and plenty of things to get students talking.

There it is, five books I think every high school student should read. Obviously in a four year career, they are going to read a lot more than five books, so I'd love to hear from everyone else.

What would your top five list be?

What English Class Should Teach Students About Character

One of my responsibilities during my last couple years working in New Jersey was as one of the teacher representatives to the school's Judiciary Board. The Judiciary Board consisted of three teachers and three students (the student body president and two specifically elected representatives, one junior and one senior). When a major school rule was broken, it was our responsibility to determine as best as possible the facts of the case, and to recommend consequences to the Head of School and the principals. We saw a little bit of everything you might imagine that teenagers do, from the unending accumulation of minor offenses to bigger things like theft and drinking. More than anything else, though, we saw cases of cheating and plagiarism.

I had a conversation recently with my current colleagues here in northern Virginia. I am the only native born American in the Language Department, and we were discussing what they saw as the peculiarly American obsession with plagiarism. In the schools where they grew up, plagiarism was, if not outright encouraged, certainly openly permitted. It was the students' job to go out and find information from people who knew better than they did, and regurgitate that information. The extent to which you rephrased or processed that information was really beside the point, as far as they were concerned.

My background is pretty much the opposite. Where I went to school for 7th-12th grades, academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, lying to a teacher) was grounds for immediate expulsion, a more severe policy than the two strikes given for drug or alcohol offenses. That environment certainly shaped my sense of the severity of plagiarism, and made it difficult for me to sit on the Judiciary Board as student after student came through for the same dumb things and walked away with a minor slap on the wrist. I felt at the time that if we made it more clear to the students that academic dishonesty was impermissible, and that the penalties were severe, the less it would happen.

Whether or not a one strike policy would have been the solution to the problem, the issue itself is one that schools have to deal with more and more, and need to find appropriate solutions for. The Internet gives students access to an increasing number of ways to avoid doing their own work, as well as teachers more and more resources for catching them. At schools like McLean High School, right here in my own backyard, the resulting conflict is starting to boil over.

It is not just about the increased resources available on the Internet. The Information Age is changing the role of information itself, and we should be discussing with our students just what that means for the morals and ethics of using information. On the one hand you have sites like Wikipedia, where information is open, fluid, and without owners. In many other areas, though, information is an increasingly valuable commodity, and we need to think about it as we would think about anything else with financial worth. This is going to be a difficult situation for students to navigate, since the opportunities to break the rules are growing, even as the rules become more and more important.

In that context, teaching students to do their own work, and to give credit where it is due to the work of others, is a hugely important part of education. I include it here as I am working through my ideas about English class because it comes up so often as students resort to CliffsNotes and SparkNotes to do their reading for them, and downloaded essays to save them hours of writing. Severe and immediate consequences for breaking the rules may not be the best solution in all schools or for all students, although I certainly got the message from my school, but it needs to be an explicit part of the curriculum, so that when students go out into the world they are prepared for the moral questions that lie ahead of them.

How serious an infraction do you think plagiarism is, and what would you do to discourage it?

What Can You Do With English?

In an earlier post I talked about my former student, Adam, who liked to make the argument that English was a useless class. When we really got to the heart of it, what Adam believed was that reading fiction did not belong in school. He often equated it to having a class about watching movies (not remembering in the moment that he was sitting in a Spanish Culture Through Film class). Books and movies were for entertainment, if you liked that sort of thing (Adam didn't--at least not in the case of books), and didn't belong in an academic classroom. Adam was a pragmatic guy. He wanted to grow up, get a good paying job, and settle down to the task of making lots of money. Reading books just didn't fit into that scheme, although he was willing to admit that the writing skills aspect of English class was probably worth his time.

I had this discussion with Adam more times than I care to admit, hoping in vain that someday I would find just the right argument to convince him of the validity of reading fiction in school, but I never made the breakthrough. As is often the case when we get into a discussion like this, my failure was due to the fact that I didn't have a great answer to the question. I had never questioned the value of reading books. I loved reading in school. English and Spanish were always my favorite classes, and I studied Spanish in college mostly to keep reading all of the wonderful books there were to discover in my second language. Reading the great works of literature was a part of education that I always took for granted.

The goal behind this blog, though, is to not take anything for granted. Everything in our someday school should have a reason, and we should know exactly what it is. I've already argued that there is value to knowing about literature. Today's topic relates to the skills we get from English class.

I'll leave writing aside for the moment. If Adam was willing to admit the usefulness of learning to write well, I will assume for now that most of the readers of this blog are on the same page. What I want to present is an argument to convince my friend Adam, if he ever stumbles across this blog, that all those books he was forced to read were worth the time he may or may not have spent reading them.

Adam and I ended up leaving that school the same year, he to graduate, and me to join my future wife on Long Island, where she was starting graduate school the following fall. My new school on Long Island had a summer reading list for teachers. We were supposed to pick one book from the list and be prepared to discuss it during the before-school faculty meetings. I chose to read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and in its pages found the argument I had been looking for. I haven't seen Adam since then, so I haven't had a chance to test it out, but I like to think it would have at least made him think for a second that reading books was good for him.

For those of you who are not familiar with the book, it is a memoir of Nafisi's experiences leading a clandestine course in Western literature for women during the early days of the Islamic Republic. In addition to Lolita, they read a wide variety of books including The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice , and Daisy Miller . The book is both a fascinating view of what it was like to be a woman in Iran during that huge cultural transition, as well as a love letter to great literature. Here is what she says about what we learn from these books:

Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that
others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous
individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity
of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a
voice; in this way a novel is called democratic--not that it advocates democracy
but that by nature it is so. (p. 132)

By reading about the experiences of other people, even (or maybe especially) fictional people, we learn to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. We learn empathy.

Empathy can be a rare skill during our school-age years. Teenagers have enough of their own stuff going on that it is often hard to step outside themselves and think about what it is like to be someone else. Reading fiction gives them a comparatively safe environment to explore that process. When the class discusses why a character behaved in a certain way at a critical moment in the story, or what might have motivated the antagonist to commit a heinous act, they are learning to empathize, to use their imaginations to connect with other people. That is a skill worth developing.

So, Adam, if you're out there, are you convinced?

As always, the names of any students mentioned in this blog are changed to protect their privacy.

What Do You Know About English?

Can you identify the authors and works for the following quotes?

THERE lived not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman of their calling that use to pile up in their halls old lances, halberds, morions, and such other armours and weapons.

ON an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house, and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady, who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own;
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confin'd by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

How did you do? (Answers below.) The real question is, is this what we want from our high school graduates, that they be able to identify famous passages from famous works of poetry, prose and drama? It's certainly kind of fun to get them right, and the 40+ year run of Jeopardy indicates an American fascination with trivia. But is this our great aspiration for our students?

The answer ultimately depends on the very basic question: what is school supposed to do for us? It's a question that my whole approach to this blog mostly tiptoes around, hoping that in the process of writing I can form a coherent answer. As I mentioned in my first post on knowledge, though, I do believe that one of the things we should get from school is a shared cultural vocabulary. Included in that vocabulary should be a basic knowledge of major literary figures and works. When a high schooler goes to the movies and sees She's the Man , her teacher should point out that, while soccer wasn't around yet in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare wrote about the whole dressing up as your brother thing first, and even he probably got the idea from someone else.

The stories we tell help us understand who we are. Students will find the modern stories that register with them on their own, whether they are in books, on TV, in movies, or on the Internet. As a teacher, I feel it is my job to help them see where their stories come from; and doing that involves providing them with a background knowledge in the stories that have been important in the world in the past.

So, my answer is yes, students should complete their high school education with some books and authors that they know something about. The next question, then, is what books and authors should they be.

Coming soon: Five Books Every Student Should Read Before Finishing High School

Answers for the quotes:

1. Cervantes, Don Quixote
2. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
3. Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
4. T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland
5. Shakespeare, The Tempest

A couple comments on the choices:

As a Spanish teacher, I had to put Cervantes in, and I've already established that the knight errant and his squire are the heroic guides for this blog.

I didn't read Crime and Punishment until I was in my thirties, but was amazed when I finally did how modern the novel felt to me. As I often do when I'm reading a great book, I wished I was an English teacher and could sit down with a group of students to work through the novel.

I included Bartleby as a tribute to the great website where I got all the quotes. www.bartleby.com has dozens, if not hundreds, of complete works online. It's a fantastic resource.

Just past a mostly pleasant April here in DC, Elliot's masterpiece was mostly a free association based on the the calendar.

In the summer of 2006, my wife, my sister and I had the opportunity to see Patrick Stewart play Prospero in Stratford upon Avon as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works Celebration. His delivery of the epilogue is the single most powerful theater experience I have ever had in my life. Just reading the text still gives me chills, so I had to include it.

Language Evolution

As a Spanish teacher and general word nerd, I love stories about language; so I particularly enjoyed the coming together of a handful of stories related to changing language habits last week. First there was the coverage on both NPR and The New York Times of a new study from The Pew Internet & American Life Project on how the informal habits of writing used for IMing and text messaging are bleeding into students' school work. No one who has received a paper written by a teenager in the last five years or so can be very surprised to hear this news. I spend more time then I care to admit adding capital letters to the beginning of my students' sentences in large, angry, green pen.

As Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, points out in the NYT article, my efforts at teaching this important aspect of correct writing may be doomed in the long run. Since the capital letter at the beginning of the sentence holds no intrinsic meaning of its own, it could very well fade into extinction. We can imagine it becoming as quaint as words like 'hath' and 'quoth'; or, for that matter, the custom of capitalizing all nouns, proper or otherwise, long since faded from common usage.

My boy Steven Pinker covers the ever changing landscape of language usage, this time in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.), another fascinating read which I recommend highly:

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any
level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons
several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For
as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical
plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.
(The Language Instinct, p 373)

Needless to say, Pinker uses the expression "language maven" pejoratively.

Teachers on the whole are pretty conservative folks when it comes to language. We place high value on established writing conventions as indications of a quality education. My personal pet peeve is the use of 'myself' in non-reflexive contexts such as, "Please hand in your form to Mrs. Calvert or myself." It makes me cringe. But it's also very much a part of the common usage, and I've even seen it used in this way by some very able and reputable writers, so I try to let it go.

When I'm having trouble letting it go, I try to remember the French and their eternal quest to save and protect the French language. The French have the Académie Française to regulate the language, laws on the books to forbid the use of anglicisms, and a pretty healthy national pride in their language and culture. Which is why it's sort of funny when I turn on NPR and hear stories like this one. If, after all that effort, the French can't hold back the English invasion, what hope do we have against IM English?

For me, the answer to this is not to give up on teaching correct usage or good writing. No one denies that there is still such a thing as good writing and bad writing, or at least effective writing and ineffective writing. But the discussion of what makes good writing is so much richer when we talk about the ways that language evolves and grows, and allow the students to work through the problem of whether those changes are for the better or not. It also opens up the possibility that we might learn something from our students as well. I love it when that happens.

A chance for all the language mavens out there to vent: what are your pet peeves in your students' writing? I know you've got some.