P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
“After half a century of [progressive reform and expanding public education],” wrote Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, “we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us” (xii-xiii).
This was published in 1961, and the cause of illiteracy Barzun confronts may sound familiar to those of us in the 2020s: “the loss of the proper pedagogy in the lower schools…, the goal of seeing whole words instead of letters” (p. xiii).
Barzun pleads, “the citizen who is interested (and who has managed to learn to read) [may have their] hair [stand] on end at hearing what folly has been condoned as educational theory during the past thirty years” (p. xiv).
Along with Barzuns dismay about how reading was taught and what passed for “reading theory,” he mused at the end of his Introduction: “Shall we need another book like the present one, fifty years hence, about the misdeeds of the new simplifiers?” (p. xvi).
Considering Barzun lived to be 102, dying in 2012, he may have had what little hair remained stand on end to watch the reading crisis return in the 1990s (the national meltdown over whole language) and 2000s (the National Reading Panel era). And if he could have just held on a bit longer, the current “science of reading” (SOR) onslaught that takes its playbook from the very volume that includes Barzun’s hand wringing now some 60-plus years ago.
Despite the authors’ lamentations in this volume (along with others in the 1950s and 1960s that held forth again progressive education and whole word reading instruction), neither the US nor the world collapsed due to misguided reading instruction or theory.
Shouting “reading crisis!” has proven to be more hobby that credible pronouncement, and ironically, if folks would find the time to read a bit (I recommend this book, b the way), it doesn’t take long to see the arguments as mostly nonsense and wild overreactions grounded in ideologies.
Let me show you a few examples beyond Barzun’s smug and sensationalistic Introduction.
Walcutt, editor of the volume and also author of Chapter VII, offers and opening chapter that takes a full swing at announcing a reading crisis as well as casting plenty of blame. Much of the chapter should sound eerie similar to those familiar with Emily Hanford’s journalism and podcast, patterns that pervade the entire volume.
Walcutt starts by showing evidence of claims of a reading crisis (somehow avoiding credible evidence of a reading crisis). This is particularly interesting because of the strong connections made about low literacy, special needs, and what children are suited for higher education and what children should move from high school into the workforce. Of note, Walcutt mentions Samuel Orton (of Orton-Gillingham), but provides no citation, when discussing disability (p. 8)
If nothing else, the certainty exhibited by Walcutt framed against how much of that certainty comes off as deeply misguided, and by today’s standards, offensive and dehumanizing should give all of us pause about our own certainty and blanket claims.
However, note that immediately follow Walcutt’s arguments about low literacy, he immediately shares a single example of a school that excels at teaching reading! Yes, even in the 1960s, there were claims of miracle schools: “In a school of 700 pupils, there are only 20 with reading problems….We cannot stress too positively that fact that in this school every child learns to read independently in the first grade, unless he is mentally retarded [sic] or disabled”—a percentage oddly close to SOR claims that 90, 95, or 96% of students can be proficient readers (pp. 10-11). [Nowhere is terminology such as “independently” defined or linked to how these claims are verified beyond the claims of the school. We also have no demographics on students or how those students compare to a generalized populations of students.]
We should note that these extraordinary claims have no proof, no scientific research—just claims and anecdotes.
Walcutt does launch into a few pages of “facts,” including data mostly grounded in IQ testing. One example is a reference to the 1940s reading crisis based on the draft for WWII; note that this reading crisis was strongly discredited by literacy scholars as a false attack on progressive education.
Walcutt’s facts also criticize popular commercial reading programs (Macmillan) and associate low literacy with delinquency and low IQ.
Then comes the direct blame, which, again, will sound familiar: “One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and —even more—that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers” (p. 18).
And of course: “The assertion that the reading experts do not understand the theory of their system can be demonstrated if we point out the false assumptions, the faulty extrapolations from scientific research, and the absolute contradictions that appear in its central propositions and procedures” (pp. 19-20).
Walcutt then discredits the look-and-say method that he claims dominates reading instruction—although we are left simply to trust that the characterization is both fair and as universally applied as he claims.
Walcutt also traces look-and-say back to Horace Mann, although, again, we must trust this analysis is credible.
Embedded here is a big picture characterization-as-criticism:
This says that reading for meaning has supplanted reading for pronunciation, or even word-recognition, and that some teachers teach only reading for meaning (presumably by whole sentences), ignoring phonics completely on the theory that the child who can read for meaning will pick up his phonics incidentally and without special instruction or effort, but he will read for meaning before he can sound out a word” (p. 31).
In the 1990s, this is the same argument leveled against whole language; today, this is the same argument leveled at balanced literacy.
After Walcutt spends a great deal of time metaphorically discrediting the look-and-say method (an extended bird analogy), he ends melodramatically (but not scientifically): “With this rickety equipment the look-and-say bird has flown for more than thirty years, casting a huge shadow over the lives of our children” (p. 43).
Daniels and Diack start with exploring different definitions for reading, using another analogy (driving a car). Much of the discussion focuses on concerns about reading through whole word methods, leading to the authors noting their own research on reading errors.
Again, they criticisms seem mostly grounded in disagreements with Dewey and Gestalt psychology. This leads to a discussion of new reading primers, which they criticize as lacking and boring because of efforts to identify and use a necessarily limited number of sight words.
As an artifact of the recurring patterns of the Reading War, this chapter highlights the problems with reading programs and primers grounded in narrow theories and philosophies of reading, but it also demonstrates the complexity of the debates in their final paragraph: “But having said this, we must add that, though the unit of accomplished reading is the word, the phrase, or even the sentence, the unit of learning to read is the letter. These are not two contradictory, conflicting aspects of reading; the one agrees with the other. However, present anxieties about the teaching of reading stem from failures to distinguish between, and indeed actually confusing, these two aspects of the reading process” (p. 67).
McCracken explains that the New Castle Reading Experiment was published in the book, The Right to Learn, and thus, “Its most important contribution to reading is its proof that the ‘reading readiness’ program is both meaningless and harmful” (p. 71).
This chapter includes a claim that seems common across decades: “Today reading specialists have a long list of reasons why about one third of the public school children can’t read” (p. 80). [Note that despite claims by SOR advocates, NAEP reading scores have been fairly flat with about 30% of students below basic, which is below grade level approximately.]
McCracken represents as well the “poverty is an excuse” faction in the Reading War, arguing: “It is folly to blame poor reading on distracting home influences….Children will learn to read if they are taught to read….If they don’t learn to read it is the fault of the teaching, not the taught” (p. 82).
If fact, McCracken continues, “The reading readiness fad as we have described it here was invented to excuse poor reading instruction by shifting the entire blame to the child….Almost every five-year-old child is ready to learn to read the day he enters school if the reading program is ready for him” (pp. 82, 83).
But, alas, “Reading instructional method in this country is abysmally poor, and blaming the matter on the child is never going to provide any improvement” (p. 84).
Lowe shares an anecdote about a 28-year-old who holds a high school diploma designated with “Honors”; yet, Arthur cannot read.
Of course, such stories have been highlighted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries; they are tragic but are none the less anecdotes, proving nothing that can be generalized about how children are taught to read.
Lowe, like the other authors in this volume, has an agenda so as is common in all the eras of the Reading War, their are bait-and-switch tactics, never grounded in valid evidence or claims.
Notable, Lowe recognizes that standardized testing of reading can and was gamed to meet the ways students were taught to read; she accuses reading tests focusing on predicting means that “the best predicters are rated the best readers” (p. 103)
The agenda is to attack, you may be surprised, teaching children to guess at words by using pictures: “How can he learn to read words when he is taught to look and think about pictures?” she ponders (p. 104).
Lowe also mentions Orton (in this volume paired with Gallagher, not Gillingham), again without citation.
Rawson’s chapter demonstrates a few key patterns found in today’s Reading War. First is the tension between teaching reading and how to identify students with special needs such as dyslexia.
Rawson argues that “children with reading disorders are not usually referred to us for examination and treatment until they reach the third grade” because of the look-and-say curriculum.
However, “Children…who have been taught for the first grade…to sound out words—that is, by the phonetic method—approach reading differently. They do not need picture clues” (p. 132).
She calls for phonics-first instruction, and no guessing using pictures, to prevent dyslexia, in fact.
[Ch. VI deals with the claimed link between reading “retardation [sic]” and delinquency.]
Walcutt returns and offers the anchor chapter with the stunning opening line: “We have said that no further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary” (p. 141).
The chapter is dedicated to an overview of phonics-based reading programs that, he claims, show that reading research is settled—in 1961.
So here you have essentially the exact same arguments made in 1961 that are being used in the SOR movement.
This is basically a silly book, filled with anecdotes and overstatements. But the SOR movement is no less silly, no less bombastic, and no less futile.
We persist with the same arguments getting us nowhere.
Maybe the problem is the arguments, the silly adult bickering.
In 1961, Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates declared “illiteracy is still with us.” Charles Child Walcutt added: “[N]o further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary.” This session examines reading crisis/reform cycles to reconsider the stories told about reading and offer a new approach for reform that serves the needs of students and supports teacher professionalism.
Voting: All NCTE members are invited to attend the Annual Business Meeting, scheduled this year for November 22, 2024, from 5:30–7:00 p.m. ET, and to take part in discussions and vote on resolutions about issues of concern to the profession! Membership must be verified before the start of the meeting.
Sense-of-the-House Motions: These statements reflect the opinion of the majority of members attending the Annual Business Meeting. They may be offered for discussion and action at the Annual Business Meeting. To be considered for deliberation, sense-of-the-house motions must be prepared in writing, must not exceed fifty words, and must be submitted to NCTECommittees@ncte.org, to the attention of the NCTE President or Parliamentarian, by noon ET on the day of the meeting. Such motions, if passed, are advisory to the Executive Committee or other appropriate Council bodies. They do not constitute official Council policy.
The “science of reading” movement has promoted a misleading story about reading through the media—reading proficiency is in crisis because teachers do not know how to teach reading and were not properly prepared by teacher education. This opening talk with argue that attacks on BL are grounded in efforts to deprofessionalize teachers.
Thomas will examine an authentic definition of BL as a reading philosophy that centers serving the individual needs of all students. He will examine also the caricatures of guessing and three cueing (MSV), providing attendees scholarly evidence for accurate characterizations of BL as well as deeper understanding of reading proficiency.
What Really Matters: I Am Thinking about People Tonight
P.L. Thomas, Furman University
Prelude
This is a prelude. This is not what I had originally written for tonight.
Just over a week ago, I woke to learn that Trump had been elected again as the president of the US. Along my immediate despair, I felt that I would not be able to give this talk, to share What Really Matters when so many people had just chosen that so little matters.
I almost immediately thought about a former student who has a trans daughter. I have watched that family choose love and also watched how that choice of love has been met with anger and hate, making their journey more difficult than necessary. Far less humane.
I love my former student and her wonderful family. A family facing an impending doom that is now darkening their frail but blossoming hope.
We are connected on social media, and watching this all unfold in their daily lives is overwhelming, saddening, and even maddening.
Of course, I cannot give in to despair, and so, next is what I had planned, an early draft written in a rush of inspiration when I was so kindly invited to share this with you tonight.
This then is my …
What Really Matters
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Jim Edwards.
Jim was a much loved and highly respected professor of philosophy for 41 years at Furman, his alma mater.
If you look up anything about Jim, you see he was born in Columbia, SC, but he always went out of his way to say he was a son of Woodruff, my hometown.
Any time I would see Jim he would smile and say, “Who would have ever imagined two boys from Woodruff, professors at Furman University.” You could hear in that voice a kindness, a reverence for both that town and this university.
I wish Jim could be here because I know what he’d be thinking.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about my mom and my dad, Rose and Keith Thomas.
My father and mother both died in 2017. My father in late June. And then my mother in early December, just several days before her birthday.
The end was slow, awful, and premature for my parents. I watched them die while living the reality of the consequences of having little money at the end of your life.
My parents’ death taught me a lesson, in fact: The healthcare system in the US doesn’t care about anyone’s health. It is the bank account that matters.
But I have so much of my parents in my memory, a memory that I am learning is flawed at best.
After tropical storm Helene devastated Western North Carolina and Asheville, I have been trying to recover, trying to recreate as much of my family as I can, specifically my mother’s family who lived for about a decade in Asheville during the 1960s.
After my parents died, my nephews and I cleaned out my parents’ house, the only real capital they left behind and likely the thing they were most proud of. Part of what we held onto was hundreds of pictures that my oldest nephew, Tommy, sifted through and had many scanned.
I have been looking through them all trying to find Asheville pictures. Recently, Tommy dropped by two containers of pictures and other things, most of which have not been scanned.
And there among the pictures, I found letters. A few from my mother to my father in 1960 while they attended Spartanburg Junior College (now Spartanburg Methodist College).
The college was very strict about relationships, including no public displays of affection. However, one day on my mother’s lunch break while working as a cashier at a grocery store, my mom and dad slipped off and were married at the courthouse, although marriage was also not allowed for anyone attending the college.
This led to their coded dialogue. Dad was “Honeybun” and Mom was “Nut,” the only two words on the envelope of one letter. As long as I can remember, my dad would say to my mom, “You tickled me nut,” meaning “I love you.”
My father told stories about that courtship over and over throughout my life. They were happy stories, and they reinforced the happy parents I enjoyed during my childhood and teen years.
I also found a stack of letters my mother wrote from Lumberton, NC just after I turned one year old. My mother, you see, had left my father and moved back in with her parents (who moved constantly, mostly around NC but in SC also).
The letters have the return address at Southern National Bank where Mom was working. We also have her social security card issued while in Lumberton.
These letters are sad and imploring, and often confusing. By spring, my mother began signing letters “Love always, Rosie + Paul + ?” because she was pregnant with my sister.
One letter, as well, is a sweet one from my mother to my father’s dad, Tommy (my namesake since his given name was Paul Lee Thomas).
And then there are letters from my mom to my dad in 1964, three from Asheville and four from Woodruff/Enoree (they lived in a small mill village, Enoree, just south of the slightly larger mill town of Woodruff, SC).
My father was in the National Guard and training in Fort Gordon, GA. Similar to the love letters in college and the letters from Lumberton, these letters are filled with love and missing my father by my mom, my sister, and me.
But in all these letters, the thing missing is my father. No letters back, and several times my mother asking if he has forgotten how to write letters.
I do not know what to do with my parents.
Because I have now begun to recreate a new version of them, a new version captured well I think in many of the pictures that remain.
But I am recreating what I can with what I have, and this new version, I think, will find a new place in my heart that doesn’t have to know everything.
I wish my parents could be here because I do know what this would mean to them.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Pat Lanford. She was my first-grade teacher, and my first surrogate mother.
For those who know me, this will not be a surprise, but I was a momma’s boy. My mom taught me to read and play cards well before school. And instilled in me a love for science fiction. Her favorite movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still, and she introduced me to the sci-fi horror classics like Vincent Price’s The Fly.
So that transition to school was a hard one. I cried, I resisted.
But Mrs. Lanford was always loving and patient.
The story goes I was sitting in the back of class making car revving noises once. Mrs. Lanford said, “Paul, stop it!” So I made a loud tires-screeching-to-a-stop noise.
I think Mrs. Lanford that year adopted a common refrain, “Now, Paul!”
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking of Mrs. Townsend, my second-grade teacher. She was a small woman, and her husband was Mr. Townsend, a highway patrolman. I was terrified of her.
The first day of school, she called the roll, and when she came to my name, she said I was named after my father.
This was Woodruff. Every knew everyone, and everyone knew my father and my grandfather, who ran the Pure Oil and then 76 gas station in the middle of town.
I said, “No, ma’am, I was named after my grandfather.”
First day of second grade I was sent to the hall for talking back.
That gas station I mentioned, it was Tommy’s 76, and everyone in Woodruff knew my grandfather as Tommy. But his name was Paul Lee Thomas, and I was Paul Lee Thomas II.
I had carefully explained that, and that if I were named after my father, Paul Keith Thomas, I would be Jr. and not II.
In the hallway I was terrified of my fate once I got home, but the next day, Mrs. Townsend took me in the hall—not in front of the class—and apologized. That was over 50 years ago, and I remember that as if it were last week.
A couple decades later, I was a teacher at Woodruff High. On the first day of class, I was checking roll, including a student Billy Laughter (spelled L A U G H T E R). Thinking I would be funny, I pronounced his name as “laughter.” Billy was a big guy, redneck in overalls, and I watched as his neck and face began to turn red.
I quickly added, “Billy, I thought I was being funny. I know your family name is Laughter and I also know that wasn’t funny. Sorry.”
The red subsided and Billy stopped contemplating how much trouble he would be in for strangling a teacher.
A lesson Ms. Townsend never knew she taught me. A lesson that both Billy and I appreciate.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about people, you may be starting to recognize, who profoundly shaped me to be the person I am standing before you.
That began with my parents, but this list so far and to come, I must emphasize, has mostly been teachers, the profession I too have chosen—or the profession, like being a writer, that I came to recognize is who I am.
I think that recognition of being a teacher is in part out of a debt I feel to all of those people, all of those teachers, in and out of classrooms.
Sometimes I take a few moments and recall all of their names, and I can name nearly every teacher I had from first grade through my doctoral program.
I don’t want to forget.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Mrs. Parks, my first Black teacher, third grade, who taught me the year Woodruff incorporated the previously Black-only schools into its school system.
Integrating came to Upstate SC slowly, into the late 1960s and even into the 1970s.
My mother took a job in the school office that year because my sister and I would be attending that school in the Black neighborhood of Woodruff, Pine Ridge, that literally sat on the other side of the railroad tracks.
Mrs. Parks delivered the first lesson of my life about racism because a student had uttered the N-word. She made us all get out our dictionaries and proceeded to explain to us that the racial slur had its roots in a word that meant “dirty.”
She was calm, stern, and amazingly practical with a room full of third graders, many of us white students living daily in racist homes where that word was commonly used by our parents and nearly every white person we knew.
It was the first time I started to understand there was something profoundly wrong about the words and anger of white culture while I spent my days at school with friends both Black and white.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Mrs. Simpkins.
Mrs. Simpkins was my 6th-grade math teacher. She had two sons, one a year younger and one a year older than me, Clark and Scott. We went through school and played basketball together. A few after she was my teacher, her husband was my high school principal and would also be my first principal when I became a teacher.
They were from Moncks Corner, SC, and once when I was over playing basketball with Scott and Clark, Mrs. Simpkins warned us, “Now, boys, don’t you get in that rud.”
Like most of her students, I loved but was also terrified of Mrs. Simpkins, and I found myself worried about her warning. When I asked her sons what the “rud” was, they laughed and clarified, “The road, the road!”
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Harold Scipio.
By high school, Mrs. Simpkins and other teachers had instilled in me a belief that I was a math and science student. Mr. Scipio taught me chemistry and physics, and further convinced me that my future lay in the sciences.
Mr. Scipio was a tall, thin, and even-speaking Black man who printed meticulously on the overhead as he taught. He referred to all his students with “Mr.” and “Miss” and our last names—I was Mr. Thomas—explaining that since we had to address him as Mr. Scipio, he felt he should do the same.
At a banquet near the end of my senior year, as we were cleaning up afterward, he smiled and called me Paul. It was after school hours and I was about to graduate. He was telling me we were both just people, we were equals.
I can still see and hear that moment today.
And the other moments I will never forget were when we took tests. Mr. Scipio would casually walk in and out of the room, often staying out of sight in the back of the lab cleaning lab equipment.
The first time that happened, we all looked around making eye contact, realizing that these tests were about more than chemistry or physics.
He never said a word about this behavior, but I knew even as a teenager that Mr. Scipio was showing us you don’t cheat or lie, especially to those people who treated you with dignity and respect.
Many years after I graduated and had taught high school for almost two decades, I was at dinner being interviewed for this job at Furman. Nelly Hecker, Hazel Harris, and I were talking after a day of interviewing when I saw Mr. Scipio sitting at a table nearby.
I walked over, and when I told him what I was doing, he beamed.
I think at that moment I knew I would take the position if offered.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Lynn Harrill.
Strands of the webs of my life keep breaking.
That is an inevitable consequence of living into your 60s, and hopefully beyond.
I received a text message in July that my high school math teacher and later teaching colleague had informed a group of people that my high school English teacher, Lynn Harrill, passed away.
He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s—something I found out about second hand, explaining several months of fruitless phone calls from him when he never spoke—but the end came quite awfully after Covid prompted a stroke.
I sat on the couch with my partner, and there was nothing I could do except a sudden and deep burst of crying.
This reminded me too much of my mother’s death—a sudden stroke and then dying of cancer a few months later—and my father dying sitting beside my mother right after that stroke.
The end is always too, too awful, and humans, we are too, too frail.
Lynn was a wonderful human and a life-changing teacher who willed me to be a teacher and a reader and a writer.
Lynn taught me two years of high school English, and like Mr. Scipio, profoundly shaped me as a person.
I was that student who wandered into Mr. Harrill’s room any time I was free, talking endlessly, likely consuming time he didn’t have to spare.
Once he said I should consider teaching, and I laughed, thinking it was a ridiculous idea.
About 6 years later, I was sitting in the exact chair Mr. Harrill had been sitting in, teaching in the position he had left for the district office.
And that position here at Furman I interviewed for seeing Mr. Scipio at dinner? Lynn Harrill had just left Furman, and my office is the one he picked out and furnished when Hipp Hall was first opened.
Few days pass without me thinking of Lynn.
No one had a greater impact on who I am than Lynn, and as he would attest, that is what teachers do.
I cannot move on from Lynn with sharing a poem from Emily Dickinson, who Lynn loved:
I am thinking about Steve Brannon and Dean Carter.
I now live in a converted textile mill just a couple miles from my first college, Spartanburg Methodist Junior College. It is there that my life transformed, grounded in Mr. Scipio but fulfilling what Mr. Harrill saw well before I did.
Mr. Brannon introduced me to e.e. cummings in his speech class, and I still recall the day I realized I am a poet and a writer while sitting in the dorm I pass when driving from my apartment to downtown Spartanburg, a poem mimicking cummings.
Dean Carter taught me survey literature courses, and when he wasn’t chastising me for wearing my high-top, leather Converse All-Stars unlaced, he convinced me to begin tutoring for the course, and it was during that experience I discovered my love for teaching.
At SMC, Dean Carter and Mr. Brannon gave me the gifts of being a writer and being a teacher, gifts built on all the gifts of teachers before them.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Richard Predmore and Nancy Moore.
Called USC-Spartanburg at the time, my undergraduate experience became a journey in English and education thanks to Mr. Brannon and Dean Carter.
Dr. Predmore, meticulously writing in pencil on my essays, and Dr. Moore—introducing me to Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Alice Walker—completed the transformation of my nerdy math and science self into the person who would spend his life with books, literature, and teaching.
Richard was demanding, and Nancy was encouraging and kind. I find myself always trying to emulate those qualities as I teach my college students.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Ann Shelley, John and Mark.
Dr. Ann Shelley taught me at USC-S during my MEd, and after that, she and I did research together in my classroom at Woodruff High. Ann was gracious to have me co-author my first scholarly works years before my doctoral program.
But I also would become colleagues with her son Mark at WHS, where he started a long and stellar career as an educator. And as many of you here know, I would later be a colleague with Dr. John Shelley a cherished faculty member at Furman for decades in the religion department.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about Lorin Anderson and Craig Kridel, the chair and anchor of my doctoral committee. [Craig is kindly here with us tonight.]
Once again, Ann’s foundation of me as a scholar was finally fully realized in my doctoral program, one recommended by Lynn Harrill.
I cannot stress the great fortune it was for me to have Lorin Anderson as my committee chair. He was practical, patient, and above all else, like many of the people I have mentioned tonight, incredibly supportive of me as a scholar.
And Craig Kridel introduced me to Joseph Williams’s book Style, and one of the most important people I have yet to mention tonight—Lou LaBrant.
Craig is a giant in the world of educational biography, a field—what I have tried to do here tonight—that centers people to stress what really matters.
Through Craig, I met in person Maxine Greene, and interviewed Louise Rosenblatt.
But most of all, I was entrusted with the legacy of LaBrant, for which I can never repay Craig, himself a person who has always treasured that people above all else, people are what really matter.
I am too much indebted to Craig to simply thank him, so instead, I want to share a few words from LaBrant, a now constant voice, a sort of sound track for my life who continues to speak into a world too often like hers mid-twentieth century:
LaBrant, L. (1951, April). English at the mid-century. RHO Journal, 28-31.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about the people devastated by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene. Especially in WNC and Asheville.
Asheville was a central part of my life in the 1960s when my mother’s family lived there.
My mother’s parents can be fairly described as “characters.” Even as a small child, I found them fascinating, fun, and a treat to visit. The thing that is most distinct about them—Harold Sowers and Edith Mize—was that most people called them Slick and Deed.
And then there is their Asheville.
It sweeps over me, more than a memory, more like a flashback, every time we drive into Asheville on Hwy 25 and pass through a tunnel.
The rock tunnels of Asheville and the very distinct area of West Asheville are buried in my child’s brain from trips in the 1960s and 1970s.
As an adult, much of my life included the close mountains of Tryon and Saluda, NC as well as frequent trips to Asheville—for MTB trails, gravel riding, and the explosion of breweries that many people now associate with the bohemian city.
Asheville has become gentrified, and the South Slope introduced the town to tourist beer drinkers. I know locals and long-time Asheville folk (my aunts and uncle included) likely regret these changes, but my life has spanned both Ashevilles in almost completely positive ways.
But with the help of my aunt Lynda (second oldest of five children by Slick and Deed, my mom the oldest by several years), I have reassembled some of what my fractured memory holds.
Slick and Deed moved the remaining family (my mother was married and living in Enoree, SC) from Roanoke Rapids, NC to Asheville in 1963. Moving was normal for the Sowers family; my mother attended 4 high schools, including in Pendleton (SC), Concord (NC), Lumberton (NC) and Union (SC), graduating finally from the latter.
Slick had trouble keeping work, although he mostly moved the family from mill town to mill town.
Asheville proved to be some stability for Lynda, Buddy, Mary, and Patsy—my aunts and uncle. However, they lived in four different houses, and Deed eventually secured the managing job at a motel on 690 Merrimon Avenue, Sunset Court Motel.
My aunts and uncle lived through the often violent integration era for schools in Asheville, attending Asheville High (which was named Lee H. Edwards High School from 1935 to 1969).
Uncle Buddy was eventually expelled from there—he had pictures of the bruises from repeated beatings he received as a high school student—and moved in with my parents in Woodruff where he graduated high school before serving in Vietnam.
Two of the most traumatic events for the Sowers family occurred in Asheville.
Slick fell and broke his leg while drunk, but Deed refused to help him.
I recall my mom talking on the phone and finding out he had a compound fracture and had to drag himself inside to call for help while Deed sat on the porch.
Soon after, Slick, drunk again, threatened Deed with a gun.
These extreme events, it seems, prompted Deed to seek the motel managing work to help provide the family some stability.
Another place that likely has the most consistent memories for me with family is Myrtle Beach, SC.
It was about a four-hour drive from Woodruff in the Upstate of SC, and for most people, Myrtle Beach was a somewhat expensive vacation destination (but, to be fair, this was a working class and middle class beach with the beaches for wealthy people further south near Charleston or North Myrtle Beach).
My working-class parents visited Myrtle Beach in off seasons; I mostly recall the beach in December, in fact. We have many pictures of Myrtle Beach covered in snow; I think we were there for the heaviest snowfall recorded for the area.
Slick and Deed loved Myrtle Beach, but as a family with very meager resources (often as a result of Slick’s alcoholism), they were also resourceful.
Usually in the off season as well, Slick and Deed arranged to help manage the Victory Motel in Myrtle Beach.
In many ways, the Sowers’ world was volatile like the 1960s, but my childhood was more than an hour away, allowing me to hold onto idealistic memories of my family.
And finally.
I am thinking about people tonight.
I am thinking about John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Maggie Smith, Eugene V. Debs, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.
I am an old—in more ways than one—English teachers so you’ll have to excuse my ending with literature. Like teachers, authors are the people who made me, the people who saved my life and continue to save my life.
One of my favorite writers is Kurt Vonnegut, who was not only an era defining novelist but also a teacher of writing. And Vonnegut on occasion has noted that one of his best pupils was novelist John Irving, who gained famed for The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, both of which were popular novels and films.
In John Irving’sA Prayer for Owen Meany, which builds to being something of a Vietnam War novel, John Wheelwright, narrator and friend of the titular character Owen Meany, offers a key scene in Chapter 1:
We were in Rye, passing the First Church, and the breeze from the ocean was already strong. A man with a great stack of roofing shingles in a wheelbarrow was having difficulty keeping the shingles from blowing away; the ladder, leaning against the vestry roof, was also in danger of being blown over. The man seemed in need of a co-worker—or, at least, of another pair of hands.
“WE SHOULD STOP AND HELP THAT MAN,” Owen observed, but my mother was pursuing a theme, and therefore, she’d noticed nothing unusual out the window….
“WE MISSED DOING A GOOD DEED,” Owen said morosely. “THAT MAN SHINGLING THE CHURCH—HE NEEDED HELP.” (pp. 33-34, 35)
“Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkles some water on the babies, say, ‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:
My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn’t think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn’t think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
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Vonnegut also made a name for himself giving graduation speeches.
This is a long-delayed puberty ceremony. You are at last officially full-grown women—what you were biologically by the age of 15 or so. I am as sorry as I can be that it took so much time and money before you could at last be licensed as grown-ups.
If graduation speeches are meant to punctuate ceremony, then Vonnegut was going to throw cold water on ceremony.
If graduation speeches offer one last moment for sage advice from elders to the young, Vonnegut was going to say something to displease adults and disorient the young.
But always wrapped inside his curmudgeon paper was a recurring gift, one that tied all of his work together: Vonnegut was tragically optimistic and even gleeful about this world.
On cue, then, at Agnes Scott, Vonnegut rejected the Code of Hammurabi, revenge, and admitted he was a humanist, not a Christian, adding:
If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.
I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.
Finally, to those young women, Vonnegut concluded:
I’ll want a show of hands after I ask this question.
How many of you have had a teacher at any level of your education who made you more excited to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible?
Hold up your hands, please.
Now take down your hands and say the name of that teacher to someone else and tell them what that teacher did for you.
All done?
If this isn’t nice, what is?
I can’t end without more poetry because while my refrain here tonight is designed to argue that people really matter, I also believe that one of the most human of human behaviors is our urge to create and enjoy poetry, the very human urge to produce song with only words, to utter the unutterable.
One of the very best written in recent years, one that resonated when Trump was first elected and has, regretfully, gained renewed power, is “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith.
Because of Vonnegut, as well, I am indebted to Eugene V. Debs, a prominent Socialist candidate for president and activist.
I return to his words often:
[Y]ears ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
In my teaching and writing, I also return often to Ralph Ellison, celebrated author of Invisible Man.
But the work that resonates is his talk to teachers, “What These Children Are Like,” from 1963. Ellison challenges the conventional wisdom about drop-outs and the deficit beliefs about language among rural and Black people. He ends with a wonderful recognition about the place of honoring who people are:
I don’t know what intelligence is. But this I do know, both from life and from literature: whenever you reduce human life to two plus two equals four, the human element within the human animal says, “I don’t give a damn.” You can work on that basis, but the kids cannot. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Jame Baldwin also gave a talk to teachers in 1963. Now 60-plus years ago, Baldwin could as easily be speaking to us today:
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
In the Prelude, I admitted my despair, and my momentary hesitation about trying to share tonight What Really Matters, but again, I must stand on the shoulders of giants, again Baldwin who argued, “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”
I am thinking about people tonight.
What really matters? It may seem simple, but what really matters is people.
Love them while you have them here. Speak their names when they are gone to keep them in this moment.
We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, the people who were our teachers whether in classrooms of not.
“Considerably more than half, probably 75 per cent, of our young people do not read as they could. At least 35 per cent of them are very seriously [behind].”
Why?
“A national failure in reading instruction which we the authors see as the single major cause of the deterioration of our education system.”
Joyen heard his father say as he walked up behind him sitting on a bench beside the rail trail he walked every late morning before having an early lunch.
Chicken salad sandwich and fruit. Or twice baked potato soup. When it was colder he’d order decaf and off the brunch menu. Minus any bacon with a soft grunt.
“Race?” The officer was a short, very round Black woman leaning forward and trying to determine if his father was, in fact, okay.
“No race. He was normal.”
Joyen thought the officer’s vest and gun were a bit much for the type of policing she did. He couldn’t stop staring at the gun.
The three of them were still and silent for several moments.
“No. Race.” The officer was tapping her stylus on her tablet when Joyen realized what his father said.
“Dad. Was he white?”
“He was white,” his father said as if Joyen had been there the entire time.
Joyen’s eyes drifted back to the gun as his father gave more description and the officer’s stylus tapped across the screen.
Dark orange hoodie. Black sweat pants. Dirty canvas shoes. The bicycle was way too small for the person who knocked his father down.
His father said that as he was falling he heard the person yell, laughing, “Fuck you, old man!”
“Well, I think I know this person, Mr.—” The officer tapped the tablet screen to scroll up on her form. “King. Mr. King. I’m afraid that’s everything she owns. It was a woman. She has problems.”
Joyen forced himself to look away from the gun. He stepped more to his father’s side and noticed the small knot forming on his father’s temple. Turning purple.
The scrape was glistening. Bloody. A red trickle zigzagged down the wrinkles around his father’s eye.
Joyen turned back to the officer still tapping on her tablet. Over her shoulder, he saw his father’s red ball cap in the grass by the trail.
Neither the officer nor his father had mentioned it.
A crow was pecking through the grass just past the hat.
“Dad.” Joyen rested two fingers on the bone joint of his father’s slumped shoulder. “I don’t think you are okay.”
In the wake of Helene a few weeks ago, Western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina continue to recover and rebuild.
Entire businesses and even towns in WNC were washed away in the flooding. My home in the Upstate of SC experienced a great deal of loss as well, but often many magnitudes less than nearby WNC.
My own experience was mostly inconvenience and throwing everything from our refrigerator in the apartment dumpster. But the greatest loss for me has been emotional, my family connections to Asheville NC as well as the loss of cherished businesses and places around Asheville and Chimney Rock, one of the towns essentially swept away in the historic flooding near Lake Lure.
I am compelled again to attempt recreation, a way to remember as well as a way to preserve things that are both gone and precious.
Chimney Rock
When I was a child, my parents loved to simply drive into the mountains, sometimes to Asheville to see my mother’s family but often up the Saluda Grade or to the tourist town Chimney Rock.
In January 2022, we went with friends to hike near Lake Lure. Afterward we drove into Chimney Rock to eat and have a few beers at Chimney Rock Brewing Company, a small, quaint facility right on the Broad River and in the shadow of Chimney Rock.
We sat outside on the deck by the river, freezing and huddled near the fire pit with the locally famous mountain and US flag just above us.
Where we were sitting, laughing and shivering, has all been washed away with most everything along the Broad River—a name now eerily horrifying in the wake of its power.
Zillicoah Beer Company
In late January 2021, I invited friends to one of our favorite places and breweries, Zillicoah, right beside the French Broad River.
For people who hadn’t been there, I would always add that the facility was rustic, but beautiful, and the beer was wonderful.
That day was a celebration of my turning 60, although we often found ourselves at this brewery close to West Asheville because we could sit in the chairs or at picnic tables near the river with our dog, Ren, and simply enjoy the sunshine and soft sounds of that flowing water.
January 2021 was bitterly cold, however, so we huddled for a while under the awning and close to the gas heaters that did little to ease the frigid wind.
None the less, we laughed and we had a few proper pints and we had no idea that almost the entire place would eventually be swept away by the very river we have found calming and beautiful.
Once the devastation of Helene was revealed, I wasn’t sure if Zillicoah would survive, could survive. But within days, the owners were accepting donation—one of my first gestures for helping—and now are themselves attempting to recreate their business, their livelihood.
Pleb Urban Winery
Also near West Asheville at one end of the River Art District (RAD) in Asheville, Pleb Urban Winery lives very warmly in my heart. Our last stop on my 60th birthday in 2021 was at their beautiful facility where it began to snow.
I am not a wine person, but we have always loved the place. And that day was childlike and magical. A birthday, mull wine, and snow.
When we brought home our poodle, Ren (short for Karen, named for The National’s “Karen”), she was dark red and only 3 pounds. One of our first places we took Ren was our local brewery, Rockers.
Since she was tiny, I would hold her in my lap. She gradually developed a habit of resting the front half of her body on tables as visiting breweries and taphouses was a regular outing.
She is two now and almost 50 pounds so this is something we have lost as well.
River Arts District
One of the most wonderful and recently revitalized areas of Asheville was the River Arts District (RAD). Helene’s impact there is very hard to comprehend since it is not just huge loses of buildings but of peoples’ businesses and art.
Weaving through the artists’ workshops was calming and peaceful. We often simply walked around as part of our days in Asheville, a perfect counterbalance to the tourists crowding the South Slope or downtown.
Since I have done a great deal of work on James Baldwin, the mural outside one building was always a moment to pause.
As artists do, despite the tragic losses, they have begun to salvage and resurrect artwork feared gone.
White Duck Taco
Many years ago, when I started going to Asheville as a cyclist, one of the first places I went was the original White Duck Taco that was a house you could see across from where eventually New Belgium built their Asheville location on the French Broad River.
Since our visits to Asheville often included mostly West Asheville and RAD, we would occasionally swing by the location in RAD, also impacted by Helene.
We, of course, still love Asheville, but we are heavy with the losses.
Recreation is a way to express how much we love the things that make us feel fully human, more human.
Recreation is how we salvage and resurrect and move forward.
Nothing will ever be the same in Asheville, but nothing was ever going to be the same.
This is our living and we’d better be sure to look hard enough each time.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 