While April is receiving attention as National Poetry Month, many of us may have missed April is also School Library Month.

I must admit that I am a book person more than a library person, and by that I mean I am compelled to own books instead of borrow them.

But I vividly recall my junior high library, where I found a book with Mark Twain’s signature reproduced and decided at that young age a person’s signature matters—creating then what has endured as my own swirling signature that is a very important icon of my Self (especially as a writer).

As a literacy educator, I also know that access to books at school and home is a foundational part of any child’s literacy—one we have ignored for reading programs and punitive legislation masked as reading policy (see Stephen Krashen).

As a public school teacher, I also witnessed—and resisted—book banning attempts from parents as well as the school’s librarian.

My doctoral work, writing a biography of educator and former NCTE president Lou LaBrant, helped solidify my appreciation for the key role of librarians as scholars and teachers; LaBrant co-authored several scholarly works with a librarian, Frieda M. Heller.

So here for School Library Month 2015, let me repost my presentation from NCTE 2014.

Teaching Reading and Children: Reading Programs as “Costume Parties”*

“It is 1956, and I am thirteen years old,” begins Louise DeSalvo’s memoir Vertigo.  The opening scene reveals DeSalvo’s teenage angst and her desire to flee:

I have begun my adolescence with a vengeance. I am not shaping up to be the young woman I am supposed to be. I am not docile. I am not sweet. I am certainly not quiet. And, as my father tells me dozens of times, I am not agreeable. If he says something is true, I am sure to respond that it is most certainly not true, and that I have the evidence to prove it. I look up at the ceiling and tap my foot when my father and I argue, and this makes him furious.

In the middle of one of our fights, the tears hot on my cheeks, I run out of the house, feeling that I am choking, feeling that if I don’t escape, I will pass out. It is nighttime. It is winter. I have no place to go. But I keep running.

There are welcoming lights a few blocks away. It is the local library. I run up the stairs. I run up to the reading room, sink into one of its comforting, engulfing brown leather chairs, pull an encyclopedia down from the shelf, hold it in front of my face so that no one can see me, so that no one will bother me, and pretend to read so that I won’t be kicked out. It is warm and it is quiet. My shuddering cries stop. My rage subsides. (Prologue, p. xiii)

Libraries, librarians, and teachers return often throughout DeSalvo’s life story that reads as a slightly revised version of Tennessee Williams’s fictional “kindness of strangers”—this a retelling of the kindness of teachers, and of the library as sanctuary.

“There is more than one way to burn a book” (p. 209), Ray Bradbury warns in the “Coda” included in the 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451—a comment that motivated a poem of mine, “The 451 App (22 August 2022),” a speculative poem about how the move to electronic books could lead to the dystopian end to books and reading.

Bradbury’s novel, of course, emphasizes the importance of books, and of reading, but Bradbury’s writing of the novel and life also present powerful messages about libraries.

Jonathan R. Eller explains, “Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries of his time” (p. 168). Further, Bradbury drafted early versions and then Fahrenheit 451 itself in the UCLA Library, working at a dime-per-half-hour typewriter.

Bradbury explains as well in the audio introduction to Fahrenheit 451:

I’m a library-educated person; I’ve never made it to college. When I left high school, I began to go to the library every day of my life for five, ten, fifteen years. So the library was my nesting place, it was my birthing place, it was my growing place. And my books are full of libraries and librarians, and book people, and booksellers. (p. 196)

It makes a great deal of sense and offers some literary symmetry, then, that Neil Gaiman wrote the Introduction to Bradbury’s 60th anniversary edition—Gaiman who is the source of a mostly satiric piece I wrote calling for Gaiman to replace Arne Duncan as the U.S. Secretary of Education.

Gaiman, like, Bradbury is an advocate of books, of reading, of libraries, and then of children choosing what they read:

It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur….

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them….

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant….

Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky….

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

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While writing this, it was late in the year 2014. No dystopia like Bradbury envisioned had happened, and at least potentially, books now are more abundant than ever—both in print and electronically.

But a much more insidious dystopia does exist, one that is little different than decades before us and one that comes in the form of policy and what former NCTE president Lou LaBrant called “adult weariness” (p. 276).

Reading and books—and children—have long been the victims of prescribed reading lists, reading programs, and reading legislation. By mid-twentieth century, LaBrant (1949) had identified the central failure of teaching reading: “Our language programs have been set up as costume parties and not anything more basic than that” (p. 16).

Nearly 65 years later, Common Core, the related high-stakes tests, and rebranded concepts such as “close reading” are poised to have the same chilling effect Bradbury dramatized in Fahrenheit 451, and directly warned about, again: “There is more than one way to burn a book.”

From LaBrant to Stephen Krashen, literacy teachers and scholars have called repeatedly for access to books in the home, well-funded public libraries, and children having choice in what they read.

Instead, we close libraries (and public schools), we defund and underfund what libraries (and schools) remain, and we invest in reading programs and reading tests. That is a very real and painful dystopia.

Like DeSalvo, Gaiman recalls the library as a safe haven:

Nobody is giving you a safe space. I used to love libraries at school. Because school libraries had an enforced quiet policy, which meant they tended to be bully-free zones. They were places where you could do your homework, you could do stuff, whether it was reading books, or getting on with things that you wanted to get on with, and know that you were safe there. And people responded to your enthusiasms. If you like a certain writer, or a certain genre, librarians love that. They love pointing you at things that you’ll also like. And that gets magical.

Here, Gaiman answers his question from his Introduction to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “Why do we need the things in books?” (p. xv).

Books as magic, libraries as sanctuaries—we must cast spells, then, to erase the dystopia before us in the form of yet more standards and test, yet more libraries closed, and then yet more children taught to hate the very things and the very places that have made life worth living for so many.

Books and libraries created Gaiman, spawned his belief: “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”

Let’s hope so.

References

LaBrant, L. (1949, May). Analysis of clichés and abstractions. English Journal, 38(5), 275-278.

LaBrant, L. (1949). A genetic approach to language. Unpublished manuscript, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.

LaBrant, L. (1947). Um-brel-la has syllables three. The Packet, 2(1), 20-25.

*Portions adapted from the following blog posts:

Teaching Reading and Children: Reading Programs as “Costume Parties”

Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)

“Fahrenheit 451″ 60 Years Later: “Why do we need the things in books?”

Neil Gaiman Should Be U.S. Secretary of Education: “Things can be different”

See Also

Neil Gaiman: Libraries are cultural ‘seed corn’

It’s a Book, Lane Smith

Magical Murakami Nightmares

The guilty verdict in the Atlanta cheating scandal seems to be a logical conclusion to the “bad” teacher myth confronted nearly five years ago by Adam Bessie.

As a 30-plus-years educator, I have daily witnessed a not-so-subtle disdain for teachers, directly as people and broadly as a profession.

One situation that captures that, I think, is the many times among my cycling group years ago when people would discover I was then an English teacher. Each time, the person would say, “I better watch what I say then”—not so jokingly.

The stereotype of the authoritarian and humorless English teacher—gray hair in a bun, red pen at the ready—is likely the image many people conjure when they think about teachers.

Not all, but many.

School for too many children is something to endure, a place that seems impossible to navigate without getting into trouble, and especially for children of color, the first confrontation with discipline and punishment that are inequitable and inevitable.

So I regret to admit that a significant reason the “bad” teacher myth works politically and there seems a great deal of glee about teachers/educators being busted for cheating is our fault—our fault each time we have created or perpetuated authoritarian schooling.

That said, I must then stress here it isn’t that simple.

I have, then, a few questions.

The first, Why are 11 educators being convicted in Atlanta, but Michelle Rhee continues to skip along scot-free?

Another, Why did professional educators commit these crimes?

And finally, What does the popular glee over these convictions reveal about justice in the U.S. as well as lingering racism and sexism?

I have some ideas about how all of these are connected.

Let me start with Rachel Aviv’s headline about the Atlanta scandal, by focusing on the subhead: Wrong Answer: In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice.

My first idea is that there is nothing “shocking” about the cheating scandal, but that it is entirely predictable, if not reasonable.

I recommend Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale which dramatizes the consequences of “reduced circumstances.”

Adults, children, and animals backed into a corner will behave in ways that are unlike their normal behavior.

Offred/June fantasizes about murder with a knitting needle; she had been a “normal” wife and mother before the events creating the dystopia that reduces her.

Teachers/educators and students who find themselves in high-stakes situations and almost no power, then, have often and will often seek any means necessary to avoid the injustice of punishment over which that have no control.

As a high school teacher, I witnessed time and again that students who faced impossible expectations either quit or cheated, often. The problem was not the student, but the expectations and the burden of the impossible.

But here is the problem: In the U.S., we have a cultural belief that human goodness/badness is almost entirely a consequence of the individual—despite that cultural belief being mostly refuted by what research shows about the power of social forces to shape individual behavior.

I recommend in that context the research-based Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir and the literary (as well as beautiful) The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, written by George Saunders and wonderfully illustrated by Lane Smith (I have examined how these two works complement each other).

Let me end this by stressing that I am not calling for excusing any and all behavior because of social forces; nor am I necessarily saying that the educators convicted in the Atlanta scandal are somehow above punishment.

I do argue what the punishment should be for those educators needs careful deliberation.

I also think the greater issue is that we must confront the reasons these cheating scandals are occurring under the high-stakes accountability mandates, which is the lesson from the Atlanta cheating scandal:

I think a great illustration of what must be done is how the tide is turning about the legalization of marijuana.

For those who think right/wrong is simple, consider that one day possessing marijuana was illegal in Colorado, for example, but the next day it wasn’t.

The solution to ending cheating among educators under the impossible weight of high-stakes accountability (just as the solution to stop student cheating in school) is to end the conditions creating it.

The Atlanta cheating scandal is not a major lesson about “bad” teachers, but it is yet another lesson about the bankrupt education reform movement, the one that made Michelle Rhee rich and famous and thus above the law (a situation that oddly seems to draw little fire from those dancing about teachers getting busted).

Particularly in high-poverty, majority-minority schools, students and teachers are living a dystopia not of fiction, but a daily experience.

“No excuses,” zero tolerance, high-stakes testing—these are the conditions that reduce good children and adults to behaviors that are unlike who they are.

High-stakes accountability must be put on trial, convicted, and sent away for life without parole.

See Also

Taking the Fall in Atlanta, Richard Rothstein

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, by P. L Thomas: A Review

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Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance by P.L. Thomas

Spring semester 1980, I was a first-year student at Spartanburg Methodist College and the class was Public Speaking 101, taught by Steve Brannon.

At that point in my redneck life, I was mostly focused on golf (I was on the college golf team), playing pick up basketball (I carried a basketball to class often), and recreational drinking (buying shopping carts filled with beer on sale to smuggle back onto our dry campus).

But one class session changed a great deal of that, or at least pointed me in a different direction—the day Mr. Brannon introduced me and the class to e.e. cummings with “[in Just-].”

I suppose that moment and the days to follow are what many people call a religious experience, but for me, it was an awakening to the glory that is language, that is poetry.

Soon after the cummings epiphany, I was sitting in my third-floor dorm room, looking out the window. It must have been an early spring day, warm and sunny. Then, I wrote what I consider my first “real” poem—since no one had assigned it, and the poem had—as would be the case since that day until this moment—demanded I write it:

The years to follow, my life as a poet, would include many, many efforts to become other poets—always, always cummings, James Dickey, Emily Dickinson.

Poetry for me is the inextricable blurring of reading and writing poetry. Poetry is the verbal gymnastics of standing on the shoulders of giants.

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It is no small thing, I think, to be a reader (a lover of books), a teacher, and a writer. I make no claim that this combination is better than other combinations, but I do argue the combination matters (in the same way being a teacher and a parent inform each other).

My teacher-who-is-a-writer/poet Self, then, existed in a constant state of anxiety over the formal schooling demand to dissect literature (at the bidding of the New Criticism gods) as that contradicted my love of literature and my poet-Self who wanted readers simply to enjoy having read a poem.

One of my soul cleansing moments was to share with students Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” to linger at those last lines: “A poem should not mean/But be.”

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It is National Poetry Month 2015, may I invite you to read?

Tarame Chronicles

Yen To Dollar (notes on a gifted child as an adult)

wonderland (Yen To Dollar pt. 2)

remnant 3: it started with a cup of coffee

remnant 8: what makes poetry, poetry?

remnant 9: Thoreau on poetry

remnant 11: poetry of social consciousness, personal experience

remnant 12: “my fingers touch your blood,” Frida Kahlo

remnant 20: “your absence will sadden other afternoons”

remnant 56: “thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness”

remnant 73: “It’s not a place of measurement”

In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”

Writing versus Being a Writer

“There’s time to teach”: Entering the world of literature through the music of R.E.M.

There’s Time to Teach: Making Poetry Sing with R.E.M.

Poems published in English Journal

Adrienne Rich: Artist of the Possible and Life among the Ruins

REVIEW: Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, James Baldwin

Teaching Essay Writing through Poetry

National Poetry Month: “What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?”

Made in America: Segregation by Design

“He knows, or thinks he knows”: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World