Meditations on Literature and Literacy…Continued

During the summer, I have time to do things that I sometimes don’t get to do during the school year…such as watch tv. So I watched season 4 of Queer Eye recently (shut up, it’s fun). In the first episode, the makeover subject was a teacher that Jonathan had when he was in high school. This teacher appeared to be in charge of all of the arts programs for the district (How is that even possible?) and never seemed to go home.

Now, I know people love this image. The teacher so selfless, she (let’s be real, it’s often a she in this role) never seems to go home, that she lives for and through her students, that her family is really the students and her actual family comes second or is nonexistent.

I find this image problematic because it basically makes people think that the only good teachers are the ones who have no life outside school and that give themselves up in service of their students. And while that admirable to an extent, that shouldn’t be the ideal. You can be passionate about teaching and still maintain some semblance of self outside of work. You can make a difference in your student’s lives and raise biological kids. I don’t think teachers need to only be one thing. We can be teachers and parents and artists and athletes and musicians and photographers. But when society sees these teachers portrayed on tv and in movies as these people who ONLY care about teaching, then we get a misguided idea of what being a teacher looks like. We should definitely share our interests with students and get involved at our schools. It’s only when that comes at the expense of everything else in life that there’s an issue that does not seem to get addressed in these idealized portrayals of teachers.

I recently finished reading On the Come Up by Angie Thomas. Her story about Bri, a 16 year old who is on the cusp of breaking into the rapping world was quite something. This story wasn’t only about rapping though, and that is the beauty of it. The story is multi-layered with commentary about racism, drug addiction, gang affiliation and family dynamics that delivers on all fronts. It may seem like a lot for the writer to take on, but she does it with a deft and witty hand.

I can also see some of my students in Bri. The ambition yet feeling like the world has already failed them. The creativity that has no outlet. The feeling that maybe they deserve any difficult circumstances they are experiencing. The world seeing them one way, when they know it’s not true. Playing into stereotypes to get attention. I have seen all of these situations as a teacher many times yet this was a rare book that managed to encompass all of these things and do it in a way that didn’t make the reader feel like they were being preached at.

As an adult who reads YA, I also pay more attention to how the adults are portrayed in YA books than maybe teens do but I am impressed with Thomas’s ability to make the parents and relatives in her stories feel like fully realized characters. They’re not just cheerleaders or road blocks to what the teen main character wants to do. Bri’s mom, Jayda, had a history and personality and that made her struggles with unemployment and taking care of her kids while remaining clean a struggle I could feel inside of me even if I couldn’t directly relate to her issues.

I would most definitely recommend this book to my students and to other adults who work with teens. I don’t think I’d read this as a class novel, though. I think I would have students read it in literature circles (more on those later) or on their own and then discuss it with them or have them respond in writing.

The most basic philosophy of literacy education is that kids will read what they’re interested in. When they find people who are like them represented in a story, they are often intrigued because maybe they feel like there are no stories about them so why should they read another story about someone they can’t relate to? This is often the underlying reason I find that students (disabilities aside) don’t read. As schools re-vamp their English curricula, this is something that should be at the forefront of the planning.

I have taught with several English teachers who prefer teaching Dead White Writers because that’s what they’ve always done and that’s what they know. However, I can tell you that the students in the classes I’ve taught are not that invested in these stories. We all know what they are: The Crucible. The Old Man and The Sea. Death of a Salesman. These are books we read in English class when we were growing up. These are also books that students find difficult to understand because they have no frame of reference for them.

That doesn’t mean we should throw out all of the classics. What it means is using these texts as a jumping off point for different discussions instead of merely “teaching the book.” When I worked with a class where we read Death of a Salesman, I suggested to my co-teacher that we also read Fences (August Wilson) since I could see clear parallels between the texts and thought the students would as well. And you know what? They could. That strategy worked out much better than just reading Death of a Salesman on its own.

When I taught middle school, I liked to read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes with my classes. This was the story of a girl who contracted cancer as a result of the radiation from the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A Japanese fable stated that of a person folded a thousand origami cranes, they would be granted a wish. So Sadako set out to do just that. Now, I don’t believe any of my students were Japanese but they related to the story of a little girl who wanted to get well so badly she would take unusual measures to get there. And in the course of reading this, my students learned a good deal about Japanese culture and empathy for people with chronic illness.

It is important to create space in the classroom to discuss literature this way, because people read to experience life and gain empathy for others. These skills are as important as or maybe more important than gaining skills to pass exams. So it’s crucial that we don’t lose students along the way because we pick texts that we’ve always “done” instead of considering our students and their interests and ideas.

It’s fitting that we’ve been talking about our country’s independence the past few days as it was July 4, Independence Day. The idea of independence can be at different levels though, and I have been thinking about my students’ independence. Teens are definitely exploring their individualism as they look to gain independence from their parents and teachers but I often wonder if we’re giving them what they need to do so.

As a Special Education teacher, this is something that my colleagues and I wrestle with often. We give our students the tool they need for success in the form of graphic organizers, sentence starters and guided notes (and some a pencil/pen and paper) but what happens when these things go away? In education circles, there is often talk of “scaffolding,” adding these strategies to help students succeed and accommodating some of their learning challenges or differences. However, it is often difficult to take the scaffolding away and have the students reach the same level of success.

On the Regents, there is a section where students have to write an argumentative essay so I created a template to guide them. We used the template in class the first time, but the second time we did this style essay, I told them we were going to use an annotated margin instead. I wrote out the format I wanted them to use and had them copy it in the margin of their paper. These essays suffered accordingly. There were problems with organization and following directions. So I had to wonder if these showed my students’ real ability since it was mush less scaffolding than before.

I don’t necessarily know what the answer is since it has become an innate part of my teaching practice to provide these scaffolds though I do believe my students need to wean off of template use at some point. That, and bring their own pens and paper.

“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything…” – Sam Seaborn, TWW

Welcome to my musings about literacy, education and motherhood.