Texts that changed our lives are not our students’ texts
A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:
“What book changed your life?”
I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.
Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.
We were allowed, however, to read.
I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.
And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.
I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.
Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.
A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:
“What book changed your life?”
I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.
Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.
We were allowed, however, to read.
I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.
And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.
I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.
Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) executive committee has asked its members to think more intently about shifts in literacy.
Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.
In an era when our students are blogging, adding to wikis, accessing podcasts, watching webcasts, and social networking, what are we, as teachers, doing in our classrooms to enrich their full literate lives?
We need to move beyond fear of our own inabilities to access new media. We need to treat literacy as more than a functional skill -- one's ability to read and write --- and, instead, as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces.
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