I started teaching middle school language arts at the tender age of 22. A few years later, I started teaching high school English. I went straight from being a student in one classroom to being a teacher in another one.
The only real-life experiences I had were my summer jobs: washing dishes and working in two foundries. To be sure, these were enlightening experiences, especially working in the foundries, but I worked for only a few months at a time and then returned to the shelter of school life. Nothing else had happened in my life—serious illnesses, sudden hardships, family breakups—that would have forced me to grow up. I would guess that some of my students were significantly more life-hardened than I was.
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In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill presents the case that while barbarians were despoiling Europe during the Dark Ages, Irish monks were preserving the fruits of Roman civilization in meticulously copied texts. As the continent began recovering from the barbarian incursions, these monks were poised to spread that knowledge, allowing civilization to recover more quickly. It’s a good argument, one my Irish friends like to cite frequently (along with the jest that God put the Irish on an island so they wouldn’t take over the world).
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Dave Kemper recently asked me to explain more fully my objections to response-to-literature essay assignments. As I’ve mentioned before, I love literature and will read nearly anything—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Bruce Sterling to Fritz Leiber to Harlequin romances (listed in no particular order)—and I love to discuss books with other people. Lately, I’ve even begun posting recommendations of recently read books on my personal blog. So why this distaste for forcing third-graders to read and report on How to Eat Fried Worms or high-schoolers to read and write about To Kill a Mockingbird?
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In previous posts, I’ve argued that clear, straightforward language in writing is best. When you have something to say, presenting it in transparent language puts the focus on the content itself, allowing it to achieve its best effect. Contrariwise (if you’ll forgive my ironic vernacular) a person who employs elevated diction to articulate his or her reflections is quite often endeavoring to camouflage a poverty of substance. Or, as Charles Bukowski put it, “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”
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We’re all so familiar with clusters as prewriting tools that we’ve forgotten how they were originally intended to be used. In Dr. Gabriele Lusser Rico’s classic book, Writing the Natural Way, she says…
Writers need some magic key for getting in touch with these secret reserves of imaginative power. What we lack is not ideas but a direct means of getting in touch with them.
Clustering is that magic key. In fact, it is the master key to natural writing. It is the crucial first step for bypassing our logical, orderly Sign-mind consciousness to touch the mental life of daydream, random thought, remembered incident, image, or sensation.
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At a recent family get-together, a cousin and I were talking about her oldest daughter, Katlin, a high school sophomore-to-be. My cousin mentioned that Katlin had a required reading list for the summer as preparation for an honors English class. Frankenstein and Brave New World were two of the titles she mentioned. She then asked me what I thought about the choices.
I said that Katlin might be in for a rough go of it. And I left it at that.
Here’s what I really thought: Trying to slog through these novels by herself, in summer no less, will completely frustrate Katlin. Novels such as Frankenstein and Brave New World are best appreciated in a discussion group, headed by someone who knows his or her literature. By summer’s end, Katlin will have had it up to here with Literature (with a capital L) and, worse yet, the turnoff may affect her feelings about any type of reading, including pleasure reading.
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