High School summer books:
I Heard the Owl Call My Name (Craven)
A Separate Peace (Knowles)
The Bean Trees (Kingsolver)
Our Town (Wilder)
House on Mango Street (Cisneros)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner)
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Penguin)
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (Little, Brown and Co.)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (B & N Classic)
The Crucible, Arthur Miller (Penguin)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Idylls of the King, A. Tennyson
Jane Eyre, C. Bronte
Rebecca, D. DuMaurier
Hamlet, Shakespeare
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
A fun side note: This year, a few of the books I used in my senior year book club and several of the books from my personal 'to be read next' list have appeared on my high school's required reading lists. I'm fascinated by such things. How do teachers and schools pick which books to teach?
SUMMER BOOK ONE
Derrick Jensen’s Walking on Water
This book came to me on loan from a friend. She mentioned as she handed it to me that he’s a tad more radical than I typically am but that he has some very valid points and good writing. She was right. Jensen writes about his experiences teaching writing classes at a college and a prison. He mixes tangents on the social politics he feels are messing up education with anecdotes about his experiences as both teacher and student. Sometimes the writing made me swoon. Sometimes the ideas made me pause. These are some quotes from the book (in italics) and my thoughts on them:
Opens with a Jules Henry quote: “School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.”
I personally wonder sometimes if schools would do well to teach more absurdity. After Catholic school for 13 years, I feel as if absolute structure (at least in a school setting) is something I know a bit about. I could maybe even do an anthropology study about the kind of culture in which wearing mismatched shoelaces is a sign of rebellion.
Seriously, though, structure provides security and predictability for a student. This is good sometimes, but allowing (encouraging) students to engage absurdity would condition their minds for the resourcefulness, innovation, creativity and patience that will serve them well in the absurd world. Do I agree with Jensen that acculturation takes place in schools? Yes. Do I agree that some classrooms stress submission more than curiosity? Yes (though they aren’t all like that). Do I think absurdity should be grouped with fear of failure and envy of success? Absolutely not. I rather like absurdity. It kept me sane in moments of suffocating structure.
“Chapter 1: A Nation of Slaves”
…So we’ve established that he isn’t shy about telling you where he stands… This is a bit extreme for my tastes, but you have to acknowledge that he’s honest.
“…We presume the primary purpose of school is to help children learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic…The process of schooling gives children the tools they can—and often must—use to survive after graduating into ‘the real world,’ and teaches them to be a member of our culture. Not often enough asked are the questions: What sorts of tools are these? and, What is it to be a member of this culture? In other words, we might be well served to ask what sorts of beings we are creating by the process of schooling” (3).
Fair enough. These questions should certainly be asked. That said, ‘creating’ strikes me as the wrong word to use here. Tabula rasa has long been disproven; experiences influence people, but saying that a system ‘creates’ people gives the system too much credit.
“I snuck books into classrooms and read them in my lap. I taught myself American Sign Language in an attempt to communicate silently with a friend in another row…I learned not to ask difficult questions of overburdened or impatient teachers, and certainly not to expect thoughtful answers” (4).
Glad to know I’m not alone.
“Never are we asked, of course, whether it’s a good thing to standardize children (sorry, I mean students), knowledge, or the larger world. But none of this…is really the point at all, and to believe so is to fall into the fallacy that school is about learning information, not behaviors.
“We hear, more or less constantly, that schools are failing in their mandate. Nothing could be more wrong. Schools are succeeding all too well, accomplishing precisely their purpose. And what is their primary purpose? To answer this, ask yourself first what society values most. We don’t talk about it much, but the truth is that our society values money above all else, in part because it represents power, and in part because, as is also true of power, it gives us the illusion that we can get what we want. But one of the costs of following money is that in order to acquire it, we so often have to give ourselves away to whomever has money to give in return. Bosses, corporation, men with nice cars, women with power suits. Teachers. Not that teachers have money, but in the classroom they have what money elsewhere represents: power. We live in a culture that is based on the illusion—and schooling is central to the creation and perpetuation of this illusion—that happiness lies outside of us, and specifically in the hands of those who have power” (5-6).
There are many things right in this quote. There are many things wrong in this quote. It all sounds rather Hobbes-ian, but I personally can’t help fixating on the claim that men with power get cars while women with power get suits. What if I want to be a powerful woman in a skirt? Or jeans? Or whatever I feel like wearing?
“Pretend you wish to make a nation of slaves. Or, to put it another way, you wish to procure for your nation’s commercial interests a steady supply of workers, and a population pacified enough to not resist the expropriation of their resources. The crudest and probably most common means of facilitating such production is through direct force. Simply capture the workers and haul them to your factories and fields in chains. A slightly more sophisticated approach is to dispossess them, once again usually at gunpoint, then give them the choice of starvation or wage slavery. Alternatively, you can force them to pay taxes or purchase your products, thereby guaranteeing they’ll enter the cash economy, meaning, ultimately, that they’ve got to work in your factories or fields to gain the cash.
"The primary drawback of each of these approaches is that the slaves still know they’re enslaved, and the last thing you want is to have to put down a rebellion. Far better for them to believe they’re free, because then if they’re unhappy the fault lies not with you but with themselves.
“It all starts with the children. If you don’t start young enough, you’ll never be able to acculturate them sufficiently so that they disbelieve in alternatives. And if they honestly believe in alternatives—those not delineated by you—they may attempt to actualize them. And then where would you be?” ([the entirety of page]9).
Again, at least he’s up front about his views. This sounds to me like an echo of John Berger’s theory on how advertising works (from Ways of Seeing).
Chapter 2 begins with a Carl Rogers quote: “…I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning…[Successful teaching] seems to cause the individual [student] to distrust his (or her) own experience, and to stifle significant learning…[The best way to learn for me] seems to mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience” (11-12).
Cheers for interdisciplinary and engaged learning!
“The word education comes from the latin root e-ducere, meaning ‘to lead forth’ or ‘to draw out.’ Originally it was a midwife’s term meaning ‘to be present at the birth of.’ I would contrast that with the root of the word seduce, which is closely related, but with a striking difference. To educe is to lead forth; to seduce is to lead astray” (15).
Confession: I’m a sucker for etymology. So cool!
“’So, it’s wonderfully acceptable,’ I say, ‘to disagree with me. It’s wonderfully acceptable to disagree with anyone. Just be agreeable, at all times respectful, in the way you disagree. Be full of thought and thoughtful in your disagreement’” (21).
Very peaceable and very true. I really like this.
“At one point I used the wrong word to describe something—I called a trowel a spade—and when she corrected me I said…‘It’s just a word.’
“‘Just a word,’ she replied. ‘No. You mugged me, as surely as if you had taken my wallet. You mugged me with words, stole a moment of my life. Every time you’re on stage, or every time you write something for someone else to read, all the people in the audience, all the people who read your writing, are giving you the honor of time they could be spending elsewhere. You are responsible for every second they give you. You need to give them gifts—including the truth as you understand it to be—commensurate with that every moment’” (27-28).
Dear reader, You should stop reading this and go play in the sun. Thank you kindly for your time. Sincerely, me.
“…The most revolutionary thing we can do is follow our hearts, to manifest who we really are” (41).
Hmmm.
“Our current system divorces us from our hearts and bodies and neighbors, from humanity and animality and embeddedness in the world we inhabit, from decency and even the most rudimentary intelligence”
(42).
Hmmm, hmmm.
“Beneath the trappings and traumas that clutter and characterize our lives, who are you, and what do you want to do with the so-short life you’ve been given?” (42).
I just liked the alliteration here.
“‘Normally the only reason kids go to college or graduate school—and, in Wes Jackson’s words, the only real major offered—is upward mobility. But we fail to teach our children that service to something greater than themselves is far more likely to lead to a joyful and satisfying life, and one that is environmentally rich’”(45).
This is where we look at for-profit schools and wonder how they fit into the equation.
“This made me think of what some of the ancient Greek philosophers called the point of life: eudaimonia. It’s commonly translated as happiness, but I believe a more accurate translation would be fittingness: how well your actions match your gifts, match who you are. My understanding of it is that after we die, we spend a hundred lifetimes being treated how we treated others here on earth, after which we go back into the pool of those to be reborn. When our turn comes we decide who will be our parents and what will be our gifts, our purpose. Just before hopping back to this side we drink something that causes us to forget. And here we are. It becomes our task in this world to remember our gifts, our task, and to realize them, with the help of guiding spirits…” (46).
“…I regret my mistakes of timidity more than those of recklessness; actions undone more than actions done. Regrets have never come from following my heart into or out of intimacy, no matter the pain involved, but when, because of fear, I didn’t enter or leave when I should have. Regrets have come when fear kept me from my heart. I wish I had told [my students] that this has been true not just with women, but with everything” (49).
“But the hard parts will be your hard parts, they won’t be hard parts other people have imposed on you for their own reasons, or maybe for no reason at all. And your ownership of them—your responsibility to and for them—makes all the difference in the world” (51).
This may sound crazy, but I can attest that it’s true.
“There’s a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication…I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way” (166).
Godel, Escher, Bach anyone?
“Reform versus revolution is a false dichotomy. The first answer is that we need both: Without a revolution the planet is dead, but if we simply wait for the revolution the planet will still be dead before the revolution comes” (193).
So he was focusing on environmental issues but I feel like this idea is relevant in the context of any significant struggle.
“If the first quarter is about liberation, the second would be about responsibility. Every person needs to learn and experience—incorporate, take into the body—both. And they’re inseparable. Either without the other becomes a parody, and leads to inappropriate, destructive, and self-destructive behaviors generally characteristic of unconscious or unintentional parodies. Responsibility without freedom is slavery. As we see. Freedom without responsibility is immaturity. As we also see. Put them together and you’ve got an entire culture consisting of immature slaves” (194).
He is talking here about what he would teach next if he had the same students two quarters instead of just one. Maybe he doesn’t need a second quarter. Maybe he just needs to write a book. Oh wait…
SUMMER BOOK TWO (Why does my font keep changing?)
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge
A very enjoyable read. Lightly written, without being brainless in content, and really a very human account of a woman’s later years. The book is composed of many small chapters told from different points of view. Some are from or about Olive’s family members. Others focus on her neighbors and her past students (she’s a retired school teacher in a small town in Maine). Many of the stories aren’t even about Olive, but she always features in them—if only for a moment—and the glimpses into her relationships come together to give the reader a full picture of this woman. Who remains an enigma…but that’s what makes her a strong character. Following Olive through moments of ambivalence, joy, disappointment, and loss allows the reader to build a connection with a character who isn’t particularly likable but whose suffering makes her irresistibly human.
(Sorry. No quotes from this one...)
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