From the Bookshelf: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod pursued by The Headless Horseman by F.O.C. Darley (1849)

I haven’t taught 11th grade English in about five years, but when I did I remember that I tried my best to follow American literature chronologically, intertwining it with American history (occasionally combining my class with another teacher’s American history class for a few days), because there is something about the literature of our country and our culture that follows along pretty well with our history.

Luckily, doing so meant that by the middle to the end of October, I was usually somewhere in the early 1800s, which meant that if I had wanted to do something seasonal, I had at least a few writers to choose from.  Edgar Allan Poe seemed to be the go-to choice, but I usually avoided him because by the time my students had me for a teacher, they had read so much Poe in middle and the early part of high school that he was a bit over-exposed.  Besides, one of my favorite stories for Halloween has always been Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

This isn’t much of a surprise when you consider that I, along with quite a number of people from my generation grew up watching Disney’s cartoon version of the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horesman on VHS (Disney has always been excellent when it comes to home video–when the first video stores in my town opened up in the early 1980s, the kids’ section was full of Disney tapes and we were constantly taking them out.  I got more exposure to literary classics through Disney as a kid than just about anyone).  I think that when I first attempted to teach “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” I had made the assumption that a number of my students had had a similar experience and might want to read the original material.  After all, Washington Irving is one of those American literary figures that you simply cannot skip over if you’re covering the history of American literature.  I mean, this may sound ignorant or off-base or something, but I’d put him right up there with Poe or even Hawthorne (whose “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” are two of my favorite short stories as well).

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as well as I expected.  I remember struggling to figure out why, after one day of working on the story, my class seemed pretty lost and frustrated.  So I did what I usually do in this situation–asked them why they didn’t seem to like it.

“It’s boring,” was the general response.

As the “Twilight” Fades …

photo credit: osiatynska via photopin cc

A student and I were talking in study hall the other day about some of the books that she reads, and she pointed out that she was reading the latest in a YA series, but followed that up with “because I read the other three, so I have to read this one.”  The conversation then turned to some of the YA books that have come out over the last decade or two that have staying power.  Right away, we both seemed to agree that the Harry Potter books fit well within that category, even though I have never read a single page of any of them (and to her credit, she didn’t recoil in horror as if I just punted her baby 30 yards because I’ve never read them.  I simply haven’t.  They came out at a time when I wasn’t interested in them, so I never read them.); and we tenuously agreed on whether or not The Hunger Games will be on teens’ hit lists in 2022 (we both agreed the first novel has the best shot).

Then we turned our attention to Twilight.

Okay, I brought it up because I knew she’d laugh because she knows my utter disdain for Stephenie Meyer’s sparkle sparkle vampire saga.  But I can’t help it because those novels are such an easy target.  After all, they have been incredibly popular during the past decade, and the quality of writing is suspect at best.  When I wrote for Change.org in 2009 about the “Twilight” of serious teen reading (which I’m pretty sure was their title, not mine, but whatevs), I was writing in regard to a columnist’s whining about how the big-name authors of his day are largely ignored by today’s teens in favor of what’s essentially popcorn.  The gripe is legitimate in a sense, although it’s not exactly a new one since our culture has been debating the merits of pop versus substance since Elvis first appeared on the scene and Annette and Frankie were making movies about going to the beach.

What has struck me as interesting during the time since I wrote that blog post is how many teachers seem to not only love the popcorn, but are buying and feeding their students the popcorn as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I read my fair share of it and am always up for talking about it.  But there seem to be so many teachers out there who are so focused on not having their classes be the derided “boring English class” that they have swung the pendulum completely to the other side and are eschewing most, if not all of the classics for stuff that’s engaging or is going to “work” in their classrooms.

The “Twilight” of Serious Teen Reading

photo credit: visual.dichotomy via photopin cc

[A quick note:  This post originally appeared on Change.org on March 13, 2009.  I'm reposting it here with some minor edits]

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wonders aloud what has become of the radical youth because college students of today, instead of reading seminal counterculture works by Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, and Anais Nin,  are reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Apparently, the idea that the younger generation rebel against the older generation, rise up and challenge the status quo was smothered to death in a cul-de-sac somewhere in the last 30 years (“On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats“):

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?

He goes on to lament that college campuses don’t seem to be what they were 40 years ago when his generation was stirring up trouble in protest for equal rights or against the Vietnam War (in fact, he mentions that a tour guide at Kent State University doesn’t mention the infamously fatal 1970 riot on his tour), and that the average college student has become more conservative in some ways, but simply less active in others.  Even though he does admit that the way today’s youth participates in politics isn’t the same way their parents or grandparents did, he doesn’t seem to approve:

“As young people shift toward the Internet and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters.’ What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool. For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot to offer, it’s time to start chanting, ‘Hell, no! We won’t go!’”

I’ve read this article three times now, plus what people have written in the Post’s comments sections (well, except for those beating the “liberals are destroying learning … all college is radical … teachers are communists … and what do we do with witches?  BURN THEM!” drum, which … *yawn*.  Wake me up when you come off it) and I’m still vacillating between two thoughts:  yes, we’re all doomed, because sometimes I’m amazed that my students read at all; and no, you’re just another whining boomer that I had to hear from when I was in high school in the ’90s and you people were calling everyone between 15-30 a “slacker.”  While I honestly admit that I didn’t really like On the Road, I took enough writing classes in college to be around people who had read and workshipped Jack Kerouac – and discontent coming from a kid at a private Catholic college whose biggest problem is telling mom and dad that he ran up the Visa buying clothes from J. Crew doesn’t exactly come off as genuine (I won’t go into the Sylvia Plath desciples, who I’m sure had already preheated the ovens in their dorms.)

Hating Nora Helmer

Sir Anthony Hopkins as Torvald and Claire Bloom as Nora in “A Doll’s House.”

In the great struggle for English class to remain relevant, I am sure that there are plenty of teachers who are looking to have their students read what interests them instead of required texts that we tend to refer to as “the classics”. I see the point in that; however, I have to say that I am pretty old school, meaning that I don’t want the classics to die just because they were written centuries ago and don’t feature vampires or post-apocalyptic murder contests (unless, yunno, they do). So the struggle therefore turns to not just teaching “the classics” (and yes, we can have an argument over what defines “the classics” but that’s a whole other post entirely so just go with me here), but making them relevant as well. Like I said about Shakespeare, there has to be a reason we’re reading him 400 years after the fact or still working through The Odyssey and Beowulf even though we have a good millennium on each of those, right?

Enter Henrik Ibsen and A Doll’s House.

Half the audience just groaned. In fact, when I told my assistant principal that’s what we were studying when he popped into my room he said, “Yeah, that’s one I never liked.”

It’s okay. Before I started teaching it a few years ago, I hadn’t really liked it and I had read it twice. Why did I start teaching it, then? Well, it was my first year of teaching sophomores, I was in a bind as to fill up a month’s worth of classes, and the entire play happened to be in the textbook.

Hold on a sec, the doorbell just rang and I think it’s an angry crowd of innovative educators carrying iPhones and iPads that are displaying pitchforks and torches.

Pithy comments aside, I can understand the groaning. I mean, Henrik Ibsen isn’t exactly the type of writer who gets your blood pumping. He’s Norwegian, sure, but he lived about 800 years after the days of the vikings; his characters tend to be the uptight middle-class sorts we’ve come to expect from boring-assed 19th Century literature; and his stage directions remind us that anal-retentive does, indeed, have a hyphen.

Plus the story, which was revolutionary for its time, seems pretty run-of-the-mill for modern audiences. The realism in the portrayal of the Helmers and their marriage is taken for granted by generations of people who have watched television dramas that are designed to reflect real life and real people. But as I point out, there has to be a reason that we keep reading it … and with the case of A Doll’s House, it’s two things: the main character, and the ending.

Watch your f—in’ language

It’s banned books week!  I love banned books week!

No, seriously, I do, and I think it’s because when I look at the ALA’s list of “Banned and Challenged Classics,” I see a number of books that I either read for English class or that are taught by me or a colleague.  And just because I love pumping my own ego here, I’ll run off a quick list:

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (was taught in honors 11 in my h.s.; I read it a few years ago)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (read it in high school; taught in 9th grade)
• The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• 1984, by George Orwell (read it in college; taught in 12th grade)
• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck  (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (taught in the AP course of the first school where I taught)
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (on 11th grade curriculum of school where I first taught)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey (read it in high school)
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (read it in 7th grade)
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (while not on the curriculum, popular among my students)
• The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (on AP curriculum of school where I first taught; however, the department was forced to put a sticker over the cover of the Penguin edition because it featured an impressionist’s painting of a half-naked woman)
• The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (not taught, but a copy was in my high school library)
•  A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (read in 11th grade)

That’s quite a bit (there were 97 books total on the list), and that doesn’t count a few others that I read in college or that may be on other school districts’ reading lists.  A quick search of the “Why they were challenged/banned” page shows that the word “violence” shows up 11 times, “language” shows up 43 times, and “sex” shows up 62 times.  I’d say I find this surprising or not even interesting, but it’s not–our culture has this weird, almost puritanical objecting to sex and language yet allows violence that makes the Tom & Jerry cartoons I watched as a kid look tame.

I tell my students three things about literature that we often call “classic.”  First, that there is a reason it’s called “classic” and is still taught even though it may be hundreds (even thousands) of years old and that’s because the insights those writers had into human nature are still applicable today.  Second, literature does not happen in a vacuum–it affects the world and the world has an effect on it.  Third, all great literature usually contains one or both of two things:  sex and death.

Short, But Sweet: These Poems, She Said

Ever sigh and say, “I wish I could teach poetry but I … a) can’t find anything good, or b) don’t have the time.”? This occasional series of posts will focus on specific poems that I like and have even used that I find to be both engaging and amazing.

These Poems, She Said
By Robert Bringhurst

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man

who would leave his wife and child because

they made noise in his study. These are the poems

of a man who would murder his mother to claim

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant

as elm leaves, which if they love love only

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.

These poems, she said….

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

My lazy students problem

photo by rofltosh (used under cc license)

Last Friday, in Deseret News, a paper out in Utah, teacher Teresa Talbot wrote:

The main problem with education today is students who refuse to work. It is the students in a Seventh grade English class who were given three days in class to write an essay. At the end of the three days only 12 of 27 students had completed the assignment and turned it in.

It is the students in a science class where the teacher finally stopped giving students work to complete at home because very few of them bothered to do it. Instead, she began giving students time in class to complete all assignments. Over a third of her students failed because they refused to work in class.

These are just a few sentences from an op-ed entitled “Better teachers, equipment won’t improve schools as long as students avoid work.”  Knowing how many bloggers out there love to point out the ills of the education system in order to prove how “forward” they are, I was quite surprised I didn’t see more about this than a post on Good (“Are Lazy Students the Real Problem in Education?”).  I mean, last year’s Ron Clark post in which he gave parents a piece of his mind got people’s blood boiling; maybe this hasn’t gone viral enough or people are too focused on the upcoming year to care.

How much exposure this particular op-ed gets isn’t the point of my writing this post anyway.  Nor is it to sit back and unload on my students.  I read that article yesterday and certainly nodded along and actually thought that Talbot showed some serious guts there because the tendency is lately that teachers “speaking out of class” (no pun intended) get shouted down or seriously reprimanded to the point of being fired because we’re not supposed to speak ill of those in our care.  But when I read it again with a more objective eye (rather than wanting to scream “Awwww yeah!” every other sentence), I honed in on the sentences I quoted above because that’s where I agree with Talbot the most and that’s where I think that my students do tend to impede their own education.

Despite advances in technology and newer standards, the core of what’s taught in high school English hasn’t changed that much in the 20 years since I first set foot in my sophomore English class.  We still strive to read, understand, and analyze works of literature and we continue to work on improving written expression. I am sure that this will continue to be so long after I have left the classroom.  But when it comes to reading, there is a real problem developing.  It has become harder and harder for me to teach reading when my students don’t read.

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: Cross-Country

When I decided that I was going to do a “reading project” where I read books related to travel, it was because I had just started reading Blue Highways and that had whetted my appetite for more travelogues.  I’m pretty sure that I made a list somewhere–I have a tendency to make lists–but if I made one, I promptly lost it.  I do know for a fact that on the “list” of books I wanted to make sure I read for this reading project were Kerouac’s On the Road (which I’ll be picking up at the library today), Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley In Search of America (which I read years ago), and Robert Sullivan’s Cross-Country.

The subtitle to this story of the author–Sullivan–taking his family across the country is “Fifteen years and 90000 miles on the roads and interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving fan, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, my wife, my mother-in-law, two kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant,” and what I loved about it both times I read it was how it’s almost a foil to that very first book I read by William Least Heat-Moon.  Blue Highways was about a guy who had lost just about everything–his job, his marriage–and as a result he set out on a journey of self-discovery.  Cross-Country is about a writer taking a cross-country journey with his family and reflecting throughout how many times he’s done this.  Not only that, Sullivan is not eschewing the interstates and thruways for “blue highways,” but is rather embracing them.  He and his family mainly travel I-90 and I-94 throughout the northern part of the country, making their way from Portland, Oregon to New York City over the course of about a week.  Along the way, he does what he can to follow the trail of Lewis and Clark and gives quite a good historical overview of that legendary expedition, including a description of what happened on a bicentennial version of the expedition wherein one of the reenactors actually rebelled and decided to set out on his own, but more importantly really works to show his audience what a trip like this is like.  There are what seem like endless searches for better accommodations (specifically, Holiday Inn Express), the best and worst of hotel breakfasts, a surprisingly detailed history of plastic coffee cup covers, and a thorough examination of the history of the very interstate system upon which he is traveling.

I think it was that last aspect of the book that drew me to it when I first read a review in the New York Times upon release of the hardcover (I personally own the paperback because … well, I’m cheap) because as much as I can appreciate a tour of the backroads of our vast country, I am from a generation that grew up on all the things that writers seem to disdain, a child of the suburbs whose nostalgia involves malls and multiplexes and whose memories of lengthy road trips involves the ubiquitous interstate sign.  When my parents and I did vacation and drive to said vacation spot, that usually meant that we were traveling via interstate; when I want to go back to Long Island to see my parents, I have to take what, in a post I wrote on Pop Culture Affidavit, I referred to as not the “mother road” but a “motherfucker of a road”: Interstate 95.  So to read about types of roads that I have traveled (Sullivan doesn’t really travel I-95, although he does give a mention to the New Jersey Turnpike at one point) and to see someone write about them and their history with the same amount of reverence that other writers have used for other roads.

Plus, Sullivan also presents traveling a long distance with family in tow in a way that’s pretty on point.  If you’ve ever had the pleasure of driving eight or nine hours on an interstate, you know what I mean when I use words like “haul” or “schlep.”  Yes, Sullivan has long passages of reflection and takes plenty of time to consider any history that may apply or insights that might be gained, but he also fully acknowledges that road trips can take their toll on any of the travelers.  There’s complaining, there’s missed exits, there’s bad weather, there’s car trouble, and there’s desperately trying to stay awake.  In fact, at times he seems like a more competent and capable Clark Griswold and he definitely makes even the haul enjoyable, especially when so many travelogues these days can be so pretentious.

The Return of the Summer Reading Project

Photo by Daniel A. D’Auria. Used under creative commons license.

Last year, when I was writing my old blog, I had this idea to read several books that were within the same genre and post about them as I read them. I think I figured that it would give me a decent amount of blog fodder for the summer, which is generally a period when nothing is really happening in education (unless there’s a law about to be passed) and when there’s a dearth of material.

I chose travel books as my genre, inspired by my pickup of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways at a Borders a few months prior. So I put that on top of a list I created in my head and got started. I read a few books last summer, but summer turned into fall and I was still reading travel books, or books somehow “travel-esque.” So it became not just a summer reading project, but a reading project.

Last week, I began re-reading my copy of Robert Sullivan’s Cross-Country, which was on my original list, and seeing that summer is once again approaching, I thought I’d go ahead and try to finish this project (by my estimation, I have five things left to read) and do the requisite blogging about the books I’m reading.

I have already finished one book for this project but don’t have an entry ready, and Cross-Country won’t be finished for at least another week or so, so instead of talking about that particular book I thought I would recap what I had already read since my old blog has since been deleted. So, here’s what I’ve read so far (and just to be extra lazy in this post, I’ve copied/pasted from the old blog archives)…

Dead men do tell tales

In this 1992 file photo, Frank Edward Ray stands in Chowchilla, Calif., by the bus from which he and 26 students were kidnapped. Ray, the school bus driver hailed as a hero for helping 26 students escape after three men kidnapped the group and buried the entire bus underground in 1976 has died. He was 91. (AP Photo/Merced Sun Star, File)

I started reading obituaries on a fairly regular basis back when I was in college.  One of my professors had the class subscribing to the New York Times on a daily basis (this was in the days before the NYT had a digital presence) and another one of my professors shared what he thought were captivating obituaries with my senior writing seminar class on a regular basis.  I believe it was under the auspices of “Somebody interesting dies every day.”

Every Sunday, I get the Washington Post delivered to my house.  It’s a hold-over from an earlier time for me, in a way–plus, I clip coupons–because when I get the chance, I do like sitting down with a cup of coffee and a newspaper (and there’s something satisfying about washing newsprint off your hands.  Call me old-fashioned, a luddite, or non-innovative, but that’s just me).  Anyway, Sundays are when I leaf through the Metro section and read the obituaries.  Usually most of the pieces (the obits themselves, not the death notices, btw) are mildly interesting and barely keep my attention beyond the first couple of paragraphs.  But today had a great one, that of Ed Ray, a bus driver who once saved a group of students after they’d been kidnapped and buried (“Calif. bus driver who helped 26 students escape kidnappers in 1976 dies at age 91″):

“I remember him making me feel safe,” said Jodi Medrano, who was 10 when three men hijacked the school bus and stashed the group in a hot, stuffy storage van in a rock quarry.

Medrano held a flashlight as the bus driver worked with older students to stack mattresses, force an opening and remove the dirt covering the van so they could escape after 16 hours underground. She never left Ray’s side during the ordeal.

The entire story itself–recapped in the article–is so incredible you’d swear it was fiction.  And it reminded me that obituaries can make for great reading in English class.  It’s been a while since I did anything with obits–not since I was teaching journalism, to be honest–but seeing what a fascinating story exists in Ed Ray, I wonder if this could be a gateway to a really cool research project or something on how “ordinary” or “everyday” people are as extraordinary and important to our society as celebrities and other figures.

It’s food for thought at this point as I gather up what’s left of my year and think about what I’d like to do in class next year.  But I highly recommend reading the obituaries every once in a while, especially since you don’t know what you’re going to find out.