By Mike Lunsford
Special to the Tribune-Star
May 18, 2009 12:17 am
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I posed a question to one of my English classes the other day: “Have you ever read something that touches you? That inspires you? That has changed you in some fundamental way?
Although I could tell that many of my kids were thinking about my queries, and a few had even raised their hands to share responses with me, I also could see that too many of them had no idea what I meant in asking, not because they didn’t understand my words, but because the concept behind them seemed strangely foreign.
Most of what those young men and women read in school now is not for inspiration or even interest. It is for test preparation, for answering multiple-choice reading comprehension questions. It is boring and bland or incomplete, hardly inspirational stuff. Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Emily Dickinson be damned; we have train schedules and endless excerpts to study; letter C and bubble sheets await. After all, that type of reading leads to diplomas and certificates of completion and more qualified entrance into a shrinking job market.
I teach a subject that has been under assault for a long time.
The ages-old stereotype of the English teacher persists. She is often clothed in a conservative skirt and heels, the proverbial bun, reading glasses, and pearls as part of her ensemble. Her male counterpart is dressed in a conservatively dull suit and outdated narrow tie, a pocket protector filled with ballpoint pens among his requisite accessories.
Both versions carry sack lunches and copies of Byron, and among their limited interests are red marking pens, diagramming sentences, and informing weary teens that they have once again misinterpreted their Tennyson. Both prudes silently labor at secretly writing novels that will take them away from the doldrums of their everyday existence.
If students only knew that their harried and harassed instructors desperately want to implode those images, as well as return to a time when they passionately taught literature, a time when they taught a subject simply because they loved words and the ideas that they generate.
In the aftermath of yet another state-mandated performance test — given just this week — I have been thinking about the demise of teaching literature, about why this most fundamental of educational tools has gotten such a bad rap…
I am not so far out of touch with reality not to realize that we are most certainly shifting away from a society of words toward one of video and digital images and special effects; e-mail and text messaging have replaced the hand-written letter; 30-second sound bites are sending the language as it was taught to older generations to the showers. The in-depth reporting of news is yielding to the bloggers; research involves nothing more than an Internet quotation site. We are living more and more in a world of the literal instead of the figurative.
At the same time, I believe the entire focus of education — or rather the lack of one — has moved toward the retention of facts. Reading comprehension, which so many of our students so sadly lack, is a reasonable goal; however, much of what they are now asked to retain seems to have no purpose, and much of it makes no sense to them other than the attainment of another hour or two on the testing treadmill.
The late Ray Recchi wrote a column over a decade ago for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel; I have kept it all these years, and it has become required reading for my seniors. Recchi felt even then that there was a “redefinition of education because it means we no longer would attempt to teach children how to think, only how to find answers to questions.”
We have gotten so concerned with test scores and “annual yearly progress” and target areas and sub-groups that we have forgotten that somewhere in the mix, we should be trying to get kids to read because it is fun, and yes, because they may come to love books, and perhaps, if we are lucky, become more literate, more compassionate people along the way.
Recchi seems to be speaking to us from the grave. Even then, he feared that schools of the future “are no longer institutions where students become educated and ennobled. Instead, they essentially would become job-training grounds.”
As I sat that day on a stool that’s nestled near the corner of my cluttered desk, I picked up the first book I saw on a stack of books I keep amid an expanding mass of ungraded papers and testing manuals; it was an 87-year-old copy of Edgar Guest’s “When Day Is Done,” a gift from my mother a dozen years ago. Its pages fell open to his poem, “The Simple Things,” and the note my mom had left in the book to mark a favorite piece: “I thought this was very good,” she wrote to me.
After I read Guest’s handful of plain but eloquent stanzas to the group, I told my students that his words justified my question. Guest has never failed to touch me with his homespun words and uncomplicated subjects. That poem often has made me stop and reflect and reconsider where I’ve been and where I want to go. I told them that, on that very night, after all my work was done, I was eager to sit down for a while with a good book, a simple pleasure after a hectic day.
We are slowly, but surely, dismissing poetry and art and literature as unessential; they are at recess while our kids and their teachers labor incessantly at test preparation, at completely filling in their spaces with a No. 2 pencil.
George Will has said that Americans have “grown accustomed to the narcotic effect of their own passive reception of today’s sensory blitzkrieg.” He says, “… reading requires two things that are increasingly scarce and to which increasing numbers of Americans seem allergic — solitude and silence.”
At least our kids are getting those two things while they take their tests …
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more about his book, “The Off Season: The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford,” at www.mikelunsford.com.
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