Trained Immaturity, or, the Problem with Reading

There are scenes in films, on television, on the internet, and in books, which can deeply disturb me. I have actually walked out of theaters, once less than ten minutes into a film, because the soundtrack accompanying killings made it impossible for me to stay. There are books I had to pause in the listening, often, before I could resume reading - one of those comes immediately to mind, Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil in his Different Seasons collection, another was Robert Daley's Prince of the City- because, yes, literature is a powerful thing.

Bailey Loverin, sophomore at the
University of California-Santa Barbara,
committed to "trained immaturity"
[Photo, The New York Times]

So I know, and you know that I know, what Oberlin College dean Meredith Raimondo is trying to say when she tells The New York Times, "I quite object to the argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up. That absolutely misses the reality that we’re dealing with. We have students coming to us with serious issues, and we need to deal with that respectfully and seriously." But I know that dean Raimondo also completely misses the point when she suggests that - thus - all literature read on campus should come with "trigger warnings" about disturbing content.

Authors have a right to surprise and shock. We might even hope that they have a duty to surprise and shock. That's a duty which converts a simple "story" - the completely predictable world of, say, a Tom Clancy, into "literature," something which forces the reader to see the world anew.

"Should students about to read The Great Gatsby be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Things Fall Apart — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

"Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

"The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools." (The New York Times)

A variety of issues collide here. Feminist Theory collides (perhaps) with Queer Theory and Disability Studies. The norms of Social Media collide with the purpose of the university. Individualism (and maybe Reader Response Theory) collides with the purpose and intent of literature and its authors. Attempting to become an adult collides with the contemporary American middle class/upper class norm of the prolonged childhood. Community Rights collide with Individual Preference.

"Trigger warnings, which originally started in online feminist and activist spaces as a way to warn community members that the topic being discussed might “trigger” unpleasant memories of sexual assault, child abuse, domestic violence, etc.," says professor Jade E. Davis on her blog, "have done that culture-jumping thing where they are no longer used in only those spaces. They are now somewhat ingrained in Internet culture as sort of the anti-troll, and they have become a standard that is used at times when the actual thing being discussed is not traumatic, but rather simply an uncomfortable encounter.

"What I find fascinating, and a bit odd, is that rather than entering the realm of popular culture, a place where a trigger warning might make sense, they’ve entered the realm of the university, a space where people are supposed to be challenged, pushed, and learn to think and understand in new, different and more diverse ways."

One of the biggest concerns I see is that certain issues seem to be afforded "Trigger Warnings" while others do not - a politically determined list created by elites. So, sexual assault, yes, the use of the term "Nigger" in Huckleberry Finn, probably not. Certain forms of violence, "Ms. Loverin draws a distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa Barbara are veterans," but probably not the kind of street violence not experienced by "many" on a University of California campus. What about a story of absent mothers? What about, I wonder, a book like mine? What might I need to label... since none of it deals with Ms. Loverin's "many"?

The next biggest concern is the academic/political. I did not work within Feminist Theory, but I did/do work within Queer Theory and Disability Studies, or even a far left version of Disability Studies I have called "Retard Theory." In those there is a commitment to the challenging and the shocking. Those "Trigger Warnings" would compromise 'our' ability to attack the comfort of the status quo.

Man in his underwear. What do we censor?
National Geographic

Then there is what I might call, the "Trained Immaturity," the expectation of the eternal protection of perpetual childhood. This has changed dramatically since I was young, as I realized recently when I saw a librarian censoring National Geographic magazines before offering them to students, something unthinkable in the 1960s or 1970s. This problem comes from many things: the corrosive effects of helicopter parenting, television and film age-warnings, limited open play opportunities, and, yes, of the limited canonical reading list of many American Advanced Placement English teachers on not just their own students but, via the 'prep for AP mindset' which exists in many US high schools, on all the middle class children in those schools.

We screen for the "acceptable," we screen to "not disturb," we screen, all too often, to make the adults comfortable, to let the adults not have to deal with complex conversations. Oh how easy to let the concerns of 18th and 19th century wealthy white male novelists dominate our classrooms than to struggle with issues which challenge today's children.

But we do not have to. I have closely watched a seventh grade language arts class this year as they have read about the Holocaust, about American racism, about cancer and amputation - surely deeply disturbing topics for 12-13-year-olds, but I have seen them all rise to the complexities of the occasion. And I do not think, no matter what their personal issues, that they will need "Trigger Warnings" in their futures. First, they understand literary complexity. Second, they have enough Google skills to enable them to check out a book before they begin reading - at least to understand general themes. Third, they know how to advocate for themselves. Fourth, the are learning how to control their own learning environments - and thus know how to 'step outside' if they need to. These are all skills I wish those students at Oberlin and UC-Santa Barbara and elsewhere had learned in their K-12 school experiences.

As Dr. Davis says, "I would never give my students a “Trigger Warning,” but I do tell them every semester that we will be going over things that they might find disturbing, uncomfortable, angering, or upsetting. If this is the case, they are free to leave the classroom. The rule is they have to engage respectfully and openly, but only in the classroom. They can think whatever they want outside of the space, but inside the space, they are vulnerable, and I work with that. If things are too much, they are free to step out of the classroom as well. I only require that they email me and let me know why so we can make sure that the course will be okay moving forward."

So I guess I don't believe in "Trigger Warnings." Instead, I believe in  students learning the skills of mature adults, and I believe in the process of literature.

- Ira Socol

The Non-Anglo-American Reading and Writing

"The island raises another question: Is it real? Is this whole story real? I refuse to ask that question. "Life of Pi" is all real, second by second and minute by minute, and what it finally amounts to is left for every viewer to decide. I have decided it is one of the best films of the year," Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the new Ang Lee film, Life of Pi.

holding on to the non-Anglo narrative in a way most films refuse to

"I refuse to ask that question," Ebert says... and this is essential. If you approach this tale in traditional, Anglo-American rationalist style, you end up writing the kind of nonsense produced by The New York Times' critic A. O. Scott, who writes...

"No problem! He will go on to embrace Islam and study kabbalah. Thousands of years of sectarian conflict, it seems, can be resolved with a smile and a hushed, reverent tone of voice.

“If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all,” warns Pi’s dad, who is committed to the supremacy of reason and who is, as rationalists often are in the imaginations of the devout, a bit of a grouch about it. But this piece of skeptical paternal wisdom identifies a serious flaw in “Life of Pi,” which embraces religion without quite taking it seriously, and is simultaneously about everything and very little indeed. Instead of awe, it gives us “awww, how sweet."' 

Scott is so sure of his position as an authority on reason that he ends his review by stating,

"The problem, as I have suggested, is that the narrative frame that surrounds these lovely pictures complicates and undermines them. The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle.

"Perhaps they are, but insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that “Life of Pi” does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion. The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes — or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all."

Oh my, the very idea that one might actually, "doubt what you see with your own eyes." This is the startlingly disturbing concept which The New York Times cannot embrace in this film, and which prevents us from allowing a democracy of reading and writing into our classrooms and schools. 

"If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer." (Life of Pi, p. 297)

Six months ago I wrote about young students at Scoil ag An Ghleanna at St. Finan's Bay in County Cork, about how those six and seven-year-olds attributed the sinking of the RMS Titanic to (a) "it wasn't blessed," (b) "if you looked in a mirror, it said 'No Pope'," (c) "it was build by the Protestants in Belfast." And I wrote then that, well, who knows what brought that ship together with that iceberg at that moment in that way? "Wrong," is such an absolute word, because, who really knows the whole story?

"We," in that "Anglo-American" conceptualization of the world, crave certainties, as A. O. Scott does. One cannot share religions, because some stories are contradictory. One cannot create a tale based in uncertainty, because it makes the endings too difficult, and the "theme" too personal. One cannot be both moral and a Democrat even in much of America. We believe in hard lines of separation, in linear tales with the climax on page 278, in stories with a specific - instructed - point of view which we can all reconstruct in a summary and, of course, can "compare and contrast" with other similar narratives.

"Tigers exist, lifeboats exists, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow, limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank." (Life of Pi, p. 299)

But for most of the world, the certainties that come from being the favored race in either the British or American Empires remain elusive. The universe is unstable. Often our beliefs are unsure. And thus our stories cannot be linear, and can often simply observe and reflect. That "climax," that "turning point," that "transition where the protagonist changes," well, it just may not happen during the segment of life being reported - or the segment of dream being reported - or the mix of the two which it - any of it - may be.

Because the other thing about the uncertainty is our differing conceptualization of "facts." The English and the Americans - at least as those are understood by FoxNews - believe in the existence of the "reliable narrator," that, if we just find that person, be in Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow or whoever, we will "get the truth." But the rest of us, we cannot certain of that either. No one sees without lenses, no one sees without experiences and education, beliefs and fantasies. No one sees without having both needs and wants. So vision, yes, is always personal, and thus "unreliable."

Pi Patel is an "unreliable narrator" to The New York Times. Of course he is an "unreliable narrator" to both Roger Ebertand myself, but the difference is, The New York Times is troubled by this, and Ebert and I, perhaps our life experiences tell us that all narrators are unreliable, which allows us to listen to the story rather than to analyse it.

Akira Kurosawa's Rashoman. Truth? Where does that exist?

When the power is all yours, or you believe that power is all yours, you can, you will, feign certainty. And that certainty will allow you to easily split the world between "fiction" and "non-fiction." That certainty will allow you to easily categorize and label and summarize and simplify. That certainty will lead you to the simplicity of introductions, bodies of content, and conclusions. It will allow you to write five-paragraph essays and believe in hard lines between citation and plagiarism, just as you believe in hard lines on a map of the world.
The "rest" of the world might find all this too simple to be true at all. Memory is memory after all. It is "unreliable." It is always fiction and yet, it is also our only "truth," as Norman Mailer made it clear in that essential explanation of the writing of history, The Armies of the Night.

"She is in my memory her own avatar," John Banville writes in The Sea, which I just finished hearing. "Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations." 

We are uncertain and we are unreliable, and, as Banville adds, we are uncertain. “Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him," Banville's narratorinsists.

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” - James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

So that other "we," that non-"academic," that non-white-protestant-power-owning, non-Anglo-American, non-imperial "we," need that democracy of reading and writing which allows our voices, our world views, and our uncertainty to exist fairly and equally within "your" school's walls. For without our voices being truly welcome, "your" schools have nothing for "us."

"You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see any higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality." (Life of Pi,p. 302) 

- Ira Socol

Why Bloomsday Matters

Unlike Harlem Village Academy's
counting, some books might take
a year to read and embrace.

There aren't many days devoted to celebrating a novel, but the 16th of June - Bloomsday - is one, and though it misses the school year for most of us Northern Hemisphere types, it remains worth celebrating, if for no other reason than it suggests that reading is not done "school credit" or Pizza Hut coupons or anything else except the desire to know, and that it suggests that writing can do so much, and among the things it can do, is to carry us across time.

The 16th of June 1904. Dublin. Ireland, still a part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Edward VII reigning from Buckingham Palace. Charles Stewart Parnell, the great leader of the movement for Irish Self-Rule dead some 13 years before, but the Wright Brothers, across the Atlantic, had flown their first heavier-than-air craft six months before, marking the 20th as a unique Century.

And James Joyce went for a walk through the city of Dublin with Nora Barnacle, the woman who he would marry 27 years later.

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in London on the day of their wedding in 1931.
Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

"Nora worked in Finn's Hotel," Colm Tóibín writes (brilliantly) in today's Guardian, "and the walk between there and Merrion Square, where they originally arranged to meet, passed by 6 Clare Street, from where Samuel Beckett's father ran his business, and where Beckett would write some of his novel Murphy. Joyce, who would begin the stories in his book Dublinersin that year, 1904, and Nora planned to meet outside the house where Sir William Wilde had lived and where Oscar Wilde had been brought up, the site of many parties. Bram Stoker, who had known Wilde at Trinity College Dublin, had been a visitor to this house. His wife was a former girlfriend of Oscar Wilde. Thus the run-down city of Dublin could become sacred space if you cared and knew about those names. If you did not, or were in a hurry somewhere, as characters in Ulysses often are, as many people today still are, then it could be ordinary, like a street in any city. "

And thus James Joyce began, in 1904, about his city, and his people. "to write "a chapter of the moral history of his country" was grandiose; the stories themselves evaded such easy description. In them, Joyce's Dublin is a village filled with dreamers and chancers whom he placed in a kind of cage." (Tóibín). He wrote the stories of Dubliners, and then, a decade later, he began assembling Ulysses, his magnum opus, his remarkable tour of a day in Dublin with his "hero," Leopold Bloom. "Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros the bottleworks. Dodder bridge."

Ulysses can be read in many ways... this is from the amazing Ulysses Seen project

Ulysses is many things, including much easier to listen to than to read (but Joyce is an Irish writer, and Irish Literature is meant to be heard), among them a survey of the forms of literature, a paean to Homer, and a description of the city so clear that you can breathe it.

All around Dublin, the book's
events are commemorated.

It is rich, and complex, and difficult, and long, and it is the ultimate kind of triumph of human communication, a book which bonds its readers to its author, and its readers to its place.

"A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed pale as they might all mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as cowed he crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the braggart's side spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon."

The act of writing - not handwriting, not keyboarding, but communicating asynchronously with an audience - is a wondrous thing. Most authors struggle to tell their stories, struggle to find time and place to write, struggle to be heard. And for that courage, for the gift writers give us, we celebrate them only rarely. There are days for Presidents and days for Soldiers... but only this event to recall the wonder of those who enable us to know, to understand, to feel, to sense far beyond our personal experience.

So raise a pint (or four) to James Joyce this 16th of June, and to Leopold Bloom, a human created from the mind of another human. And add a whiskey too, for all the other authors, and all the characters they have created, and for all of us as well, the readers who keep the tales alive.

Happy Bloomsday to all...

"Penelope" the final chapter of Ulysses, contains the longest known sentence
in English-language literature

- Ira Socol

Changing Gears 2012: reconsidering what "literature" means

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream again     (6) learning to be a society (again)     (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic     (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

What's in your Canon? What works of "literature" represent our society, its history, its values, its breadth, its ways of communicating? And, how do you define "literature" anyway?

Not many more classic bits of dialogue in the English language,On the Waterfront, 1954, Budd Shulberg (Elia Kazan, director), Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando

For me, and I think most of us who have grown up since the Second World War ended (which is almost 70 years ago now), our "literature" includes many things, and our "canon" is composed of many types of things. There is music which might, "define a generation," or "speak to great ideas," or express "ultimate frustrations," or "great hopes." There are films which have re-set a society's vision of itself, or which might make clear an essential moment in time, or perhaps would encompass all of our doubts, or, again, all of our hopes.

There are television shows which have helped us define ourselves, or understand ourselves, or doubt ourselves, or re-think our history, or speculate on gains and losses as times have gone on.

Challenging our sense of reality, our sense of time, and our reverential sense of literature,
Life on Mars, the BBC television show written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan,
Ashley Pharoah, Chris Chibnall and starring John Simm.

Not, of course, to discount novels and poetry and theatre, which have re-defined our world, our language, even our way of getting news. Taken us on incredible journeys, and brought us into incredible bodies. Or has turned our darkest moments into reflection.

Seamus Heaney

This is the power of "literature," it is the power of the story, the power of human-to-human transmission. As Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel Prize "Lecture"  "I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot." ... "Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Or, as I said to a group of seventh graders last week, troubled - and maybe even troubling seventh graders, "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

We, as a community, grow smarter the more voices we hear, the more voices we embrace. It could be the students of a Middle School...

...or it could be a "badly" danced interaction with the globe...

...but whatever it is, it expands us, it improves us, it opens us.

The Window, 1952, an amazing short story by,  Frank De Felitta (teleplay), Enid Maud Dinnis (story),
now even more interesting because of its view of early television. Series, Tales of Tomorrow

So my seventh step in Changing Gears 2012 is to look as widely as you can for the literature which will touch your students, for the canon which will help them know themselves and our world. This matters. When we prescribe a Common Core we proscribe all that lies beyond that, and what lies beyond is truly the 99 percent.

Literature, that transmission of culture, of who we are, is a huge thing, and it involves every one of us. I was lucky enough, as a young kid, to watch one of my friend's mothers - Jean Fagan Yellin - unearth the story of Harriet Jacobs, and bring truth to light. This taught me something important about who an "author" might be. At the same age I was also lucky to be near enough to Manhattan to sneak away and watch Alvin Ailey tell stories, and near enough to Brooklyn to see the Assyrians describe their lives almost 3,000 years ago. I got to see Pablo Picasso describe war, which was different than John Wayne describing war. I even had the chance to see Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux describe calm, and Philippe Petit describe tension. It was an education in the art of communication for which I will always be grateful.

But it it is also an education in the art of communication which I think we owe all of our students. "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

- Ira Socol
next: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

Mad Men, Life on Mars, and Dickens for this Century

What is literature?

I have struggled with this idea many times, and we, as a society, are constantly struggling with it. We do, after all, divide even the writing category "fiction" into two parts - "fiction" and "literary fiction" - suggesting that we are constantly trying to limit what "literature" means.

In the 1830s the way "literature" was presented began to change. Rotary printing presses, which would be powered by steam in the next decade, combined with machine-made paper, created a "popular press" for the first time, the cheap dissemination of print media to the masses. Into this new technology stepped a writer named Charles Dickens, who leveraged the new technology through the serialization of his writings.  "Serial publication had several advantages. For the reader, it substantially reduced the cash outlay required to pay for fiction: for a novel in monthly installments like [The Pickwick Papers], one had to pay only one shilling a month, instead of a guinea (21 shillings) or more for an entire novel. For the publisher, it expanded the market for fiction, as more people could afford to buy on the installment plan; it also allowed the opportunity to advertise, as ads could easily be incorporated into the little booklets in which a typical Dickens novel was issued. And for the author, it created a greater intimacy with the audience, something Dickens always relished."

If you read Dickens today, you will still see how this embrace of the technology of the time altered the style of writing. Chapters became something different when presented this way. "Blogging" (see American Notes) became possible.

Socol Literacy as Tyranny

I thought of all this as I watched the last installment of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. Television, certainly, has always been the "modern" equivalent of the serialized novel, but at its best, when it emulates "literary fiction" in complexity of construction and in intent (feel free to challenge that statement!) it takes on the role in today's world that Dickens' fiction held a century and a half ago.

So as I think back on my favourite serializations in television: Mad Men, Life on Mars, China Beach, Homicide: Life on the Street, I see deeply rendered portraits of contemporary or near historical times, which are written and allowed to unfold for the "reader" over a long period of time. These stories are hard to rush through, unless you wait and back out of the mainstream conversation about them. But if you do wait, you lose the cultural impact of participating with a vast group in a common literary experience.

This is literature. Complex characters and themes, sophisticated writing, powerful photography are joined in a truly effective way of getting people to see things they have not seen before. And as we investigate them together, through the contemporaneous reading which serialization provides, we get to analyse the texts together, in a way we rarely do with any other media. Just Google the "News" or "Blogs" re: Mad Men to see both the quality and quantity of conversation which explodes every Monday.

So, I find it odd that those who most embrace the common reading experience, whether via classroom assignments or "one book, one community" events, are often the least likely to bring this contemporary literature into the educational mainstream.

Now the National Endowment for the Arts, which has worked hard to limit the definition of reading, has one idea. But I wish high schools and universities would more often embrace the literature of today alongside "the canon." Not only would it ask our students to "read" and comprehend the full range of literature they will be exposed to, but it would allow "the world" into these often very limited conversations. After all, is considering the Peggy/Joan elevator scene in Mad Men's Sunday "Summer" episode (season 4, episode 8), really any different than analysing any moment in Great Expectations?

We would also expand our education to include the most "read" bits of literature today, and to include the visual component of literature (often so left out of school that some English teachers have students read Shakespeare and other plays).

RETRO: The Camera & 'Mad Men'
Uploaded by Jefferson_Robbins. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Too often in teaching literature we allow ourselves to be trapped in the past. And while there is nothing wrong with the past, and - in fact - I am a fan of "the canon," the past becomes much more relevant if we understand how literature continues to evolve, yet often dwells in the same themes.

So this week, consider sending your students home to watch television, and let the world join you. It took half centuries for Dickens or Fitzgerald to find their way into American education. Don't repeat that mistake.

- Ira Socol

Multimedia Literature: Rethinking English Class

In my eighth grade science class, Mr. Rotandaro used the classroom film the "old way," as a time waster for a group of students he wasn't interested in teaching. Day after day we watched double features of anti-drug and "VD" movies, so many that we were digging deeply into the bottom of the city's health department film vault.



There was no science education going on, but we did laugh a lot. And in eighth grade, well, that ain't bad.



But the same year I experienced the worst of film in the classroom, I also experienced the best.

Lisa watching films, filmstrips, and experiencing "magazine time" (in Russian)

In my English class, regarded as "Dumb English" by the school, with kids mostly expected to hit the "Voc" programs in high school, our teacher, Alan Shapiro, had other ideas. We read the great dystopian novels in that class: Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, perhaps a typical middle school syllabus, but... It is important to remember that a number of us in the class really could not read. And many could surely not read well enough to get through any of these books on our own, but it was Mr. Shapiro's belief that we could all still be part of the conversations.

So he, and some students (volunteer only) read parts of the books in class. He used props too, lining the walls with huge posters of Stalin when we read 1984. Sometimes he'd play audiobooks. And for each book, we trooped across the corridor and sat on the floor of the huge old castle-dining-hall looking auditorium, and watch the films made from these books.

 

Because of the limitations of class periods, and access to the auditorium, these "film watchings" usually spread across a week, which gave us plenty of time to discuss what was going on, both in terms of literature and in terms of audio and visual manipulation - Shapiro being a huge believer in the need to develop "crap detecting" skills in students.

<--- for more on life in this school, you can read the book, now available for Kindle.

And as we watched the films, silence was neither expected nor even encouraged, and conversations did break out, sometimes requiring that we stop the film to talk about something of interest.

In simple terms, Mr. Shapiro had designed a Universal Design classroom, long before the term would be invented, long before the technologies of today would make this type of media switching easy. And in doing so, he created an English class in which everyone, yes everyone, succeeded.

Making it work...

I decided to write this post after a quick Twitter conversation: We were discussing Little Big Man which was running on Turner Classic Movies. And I asked if anyone used this film in class. @tkraz said his students read it, but, "The only film version we watch of something they have read is The Simpsons The Raven (and Whacking Day paired with The Lottery)" and, "Would be cool - I have to struggle against them turning it into nap time. Could watch 3:10 to Yuma and Old Man and the Sea. Maybe..."

So I suggested that he try TodaysMeet as a way to get kids engaged in 'active viewing,' that he break the films up into 'chapters,' that he investigate what the director was doing. A system like TodaysMeet can do amazing things in a classroom, quoting one observer: "The students were engaged in 50 minutes of this video, They were collaborating in real time with one another in a mode that did not overtly bother any other student (or teacher), The "playing field was leveled" because each student was sitting at a single computer (mixture of desktops and laptops - old and new), and finally, The teacher was able to produce a "transcript" (of 20 pages in length!), which accurately shows what each student was thinking during the experience, Oh yeah, and when asked later, the students DO want to do this activity again!"

And from another: "TodaysMeet.com is a service allowing us as teachers to enter the teen psyche and surreptitiously discover what they are talking about “behind our back” during a lecture, a discussion, a guest speaker, a viewing of a film, and so many other school activities requiring them to be a passive audience member.  TodaysMeet.com EMPOWERS you as the teacher because students are held accountable for listening; they are no longer spectators, but participants in an interactive audience requiring them to hold their own by providing comments, questions, speculations, arguments, answers, solutions, evidence, opinions, explanations, reflection, analysis, application…the list of possibilities is endless and dependent on the criteria YOU set for the “backchannel” conversations students undeniably have behind our backs."

So, start the film, enable the backchannel, pose your questions, and let your students learn that literature is not only on paper. Let them, as you advance, discuss why storytelling changes when the medium changes, or why storytelling changes when different people try to tell the same story, or the same story is told in different times and/or places.

This is vital education on so many levels, including the absolute need for our students to be able to work with audio and video literary forms via the same kind of critical thinking process we try to apply to books. Why - an example - did the film (and TV show) of the novel M*A*S*H seem more about Vietnam than Korea? Or, why do film versions of books change when they are re-made in a different decade? Or, what kinds of books translate best into movies? (Consider Stand By Me or A River Runs Through It, films made from novellas - Different Seasons and A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.)

Combine this with allowing your students to respond to literature "their way," writing, dictating, creating a podcast or a video, putting on a play, re-making a scene, and you've got a Universally Designed literature experience, and you have rebuilt your English classroom in a way the enables and empowers all of your students.

Seems worth a try, doesn't it?

- Ira Socol

Bloomsday and the value of alternative paths

Is it the greatest novel written in English? That's open to debate, of course, but there is no doubt that James Joyce's Ulysses is an essential book. It's deep exploration of narrative forms alone makes it crucial to the study of literature. It's invention on top of ancient narrative makes it vital reading for writers. And rarely has a piece of literature been so wholly 'of a place' as Ulysses is 'of Dublin.'

But Ulysses is a very difficult read. "YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to bring it into him for a month yes"

from the tower, where "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air."

Ulysses challenges "great readers," adult readers, the way the texts you hand out in school challenge struggling readers.

Today is Bloomsday - the 16th of June, and Bloomsday is when the literary world and the Irish celebrate this book. The novel is set in Dublin on the 16th of June, 1904. The novel follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and his friend Stephen Dedalus on that day, in a modern recreation of Ulysses' journey in Homer's Odyssey.

Now, on Twitter, CESNational asks "am curious: why should we read Ulysses?" And I can say, it is an essential part of our literary canon. It is a basic guide to narrative techniques in the English language. It teaches - quite effectively - the differences between the oral and written traditions. Few books have ever mastered the art of recreating a text so well. It will liberate you from the confines school writing courses often encourage.

Plus, it, perhaps combined with Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, will explain how modern writing broke away from artificial writing norms and embraced a new paradigm for working with human communication. Joyce begets Dos Passos. Dos Passos and Joyce beget Kerouacet al, Kerouac, et al, beget the kinds of fiction and narrative we find online today. Those who bitch about the loss of what they perceive as language skills - if they were well read - would know that blaming technology is ridiculous - Joyce started it.

But, as I said, it is very difficult to read. So, what do you do to access this difficult text? You do what you should have your students do. You should find the right path.

The first three times I read Ulysses I listened to a remarkable reading of it on cassette. I think there were 48 or 60 cassettes. Oh, but it was beautiful. The next few times I have listened to it on CD, via LibriVox download, or, for more detailed study and interaction, via Text-To-Speech, either a WYNN version I've created, or a Microsoft Reader version, to using Click-Speak with on-line text versions.

I've supported that through period recordings, through online tours, through online criticism.

In other words, I have found my supported text which has enabled me to read and work through one of the 20th Century's essential books, even though I could never read it on paper. And you can too, and so can your students.

Joyce is the perfect author to use to describe why digital text is superior for most learners, for even most teachers have trouble accessing the ink-on-paper version. And so, even if you doubt it's ranking among English-language novels, if you are in education, please give it a try, if only because you might engage a bit of empathy with your students, and you might discover the true value of the flexible text delivery which technology offers.

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Happy Bloomsday to one and all... - Ira Socol

The Reading List

What if everyone in a literature class didn't read the same book? What would happen if, say, during Great Gatsby month, a third of the class read that, a third read Dos Passo's 1919, and a third read Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth?

What might the class discover? What kinds of discussions would develop?

It's not that I have anything against The Great Gatsby. In fact, I think it might be the best written American novel ever. And there is surely no clearer refutation of the myth of 'The American Dream' ever put on paper.

And this isn't just about fixing terrible teaching. Sure, I read in shocked horror as supposedly "top" high school students misread the novel so badly that a whole New York Times article could be devoted to their complete missing of Fitzgerald's point, '"My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”' (say goodbye to Harvard, Jinzhao). Bad teaching is bad teaching no matter what you read.

But it is about suggesting an alternative to our basic pedagogy. It is about creating student choice. It is about empowering peer teaching. And it is about exposing students to far more literature.

Two of the basic components of Universal Design are student choice, and the empowering a wide range of expertise among students, so that a classroom becomes a community of learners rather than one leader and a roomful of passive receptors.

We can start doing this by allowing alternate learning tools - this students reads the book on paper, that student listens to the audiobook, this other student uses text-to-speech. We can continue by allowing one student to sit in a chair, another to sit on the floor, and a third to stand. And we can even allow one to express their knowledge through writing, another through creating a painting, a third to create a video. And all those things are good, but I do not think we are quite there yet.

Getting there requires distributed knowledge and community cognition. And distributed knowledge and community cognition means we offer truly different paths to the knowledge we hope to share.

So when we teach Gatsby, what are we teaching? We should be teaching language, yes, and the structuring of thought and image. We should also be teaching the role of literature, how fiction shapes what we know. And we should be teaching a social history - what did Fitzgerald capture in Gatsby? What did he challenge? Why did he challenge those things? or my favorite... Would an American high school English teacher have assigned Gatsby to his/her class in 1928? Why or why not?

If we mix a room of students reading the other two books, how might these lessons change? The three writers are all inventive - all rule breakers - but they all break the rules in radically different ways. They are all angry, but they are angry in different ways. They all doubt the basic myths of America, but they attack them in different ways.

Imagine the conversation as students compare the end of Gatsby to the "Body of an American" end of 1919? Where does the Gatsby character come from? Surely not just Princetonian frustration.

Given all these options, I would imagine that students might compare, debate, challenge, doubt, and, in every way be less prone to seeking the "right for school" answer. They might even want to read one of the books they hadn't read - maybe outside of school.

This isn't just an idea for lit classes. Spreading out the research, spreading out the work, letting peers teach peers, seems a way to expand both the knowledge base in the classroom, but also the number of experts in the room, and I think that's always a good idea. The best classes I have been in are those where students carried in significant, relevant outside knowledge, and the "not completely common curriculum" approach might just help you get to that in every class.

Just a thought as you start your summer, and start dreaming about what your classroom will look like next year.

- Ira Socol