I posed a question to one of my English classes the other day: “Have you ever read something that touches you? That inspires you? That has changed you in some fundamental way?
Although I could tell that many of my kids were thinking about my queries, and a few had even raised their hands to share responses with me, I also could see that too many of them had no idea what I meant in asking, not because they didn’t understand my words, but because the concept behind them seemed strangely foreign.
Most of what those young men and women read in school now is not for inspiration or even interest. It is for test preparation, for answering multiple-choice reading comprehension questions. It is boring and bland or incomplete, hardly inspirational stuff. Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Emily Dickinson be damned; we have train schedules and endless excerpts to study; letter C and bubble sheets await. After all, that type of reading leads to diplomas and certificates of completion and more qualified entrance into a shrinking job market.
I teach a subject that has been under assault for a long time.
The ages-old stereotype of the English teacher persists. She is often clothed in a conservative skirt and heels, the proverbial bun, reading glasses, and pearls as part of her ensemble. Her male counterpart is dressed in a conservatively dull suit and outdated narrow tie, a pocket protector filled with ballpoint pens among his requisite accessories.
Both versions carry sack lunches and copies of Byron, and among their limited interests are red marking pens, diagramming sentences, and informing weary teens that they have once again misinterpreted their Tennyson. Both prudes silently labor at secretly writing novels that will take them away from the doldrums of their everyday existence.
If students only knew that their harried and harassed instructors desperately want to implode those images, as well as return to a time when they passionately taught literature, a time when they taught a subject simply because they loved words and the ideas that they generate.
In the aftermath of yet another state-mandated performance test — given just this week — I have been thinking about the demise of teaching literature, about why this most fundamental of educational tools has gotten such a bad rap…
I am not so far out of touch with reality not to realize that we are most certainly shifting away from a society of words toward one of video and digital images and special effects; e-mail and text messaging have replaced the hand-written letter; 30-second sound bites are sending the language as it was taught to older generations to the showers. The in-depth reporting of news is yielding to the bloggers; research involves nothing more than an Internet quotation site. We are living more and more in a world of the literal instead of the figurative.
At the same time, I believe the entire focus of education — or rather the lack of one — has moved toward the retention of facts. Reading comprehension, which so many of our students so sadly lack, is a reasonable goal; however, much of what they are now asked to retain seems to have no purpose, and much of it makes no sense to them other than the attainment of another hour or two on the testing treadmill.
The late Ray Recchi wrote a column over a decade ago for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel; I have kept it all these years, and it has become required reading for my seniors. Recchi felt even then that there was a “redefinition of education because it means we no longer would attempt to teach children how to think, only how to find answers to questions.”
We have gotten so concerned with test scores and “annual yearly progress” and target areas and sub-groups that we have forgotten that somewhere in the mix, we should be trying to get kids to read because it is fun, and yes, because they may come to love books, and perhaps, if we are lucky, become more literate, more compassionate people along the way.
Recchi seems to be speaking to us from the grave. Even then, he feared that schools of the future “are no longer institutions where students become educated and ennobled. Instead, they essentially would become job-training grounds.”
As I sat that day on a stool that’s nestled near the corner of my cluttered desk, I picked up the first book I saw on a stack of books I keep amid an expanding mass of ungraded papers and testing manuals; it was an 87-year-old copy of Edgar Guest’s “When Day Is Done,” a gift from my mother a dozen years ago. Its pages fell open to his poem, “The Simple Things,” and the note my mom had left in the book to mark a favorite piece: “I thought this was very good,” she wrote to me.
After I read Guest’s handful of plain but eloquent stanzas to the group, I told my students that his words justified my question. Guest has never failed to touch me with his homespun words and uncomplicated subjects. That poem often has made me stop and reflect and reconsider where I’ve been and where I want to go. I told them that, on that very night, after all my work was done, I was eager to sit down for a while with a good book, a simple pleasure after a hectic day.
We are slowly, but surely, dismissing poetry and art and literature as unessential; they are at recess while our kids and their teachers labor incessantly at test preparation, at completely filling in their spaces with a No. 2 pencil.
George Will has said that Americans have “grown accustomed to the narcotic effect of their own passive reception of today’s sensory blitzkrieg.” He says, “… reading requires two things that are increasingly scarce and to which increasing numbers of Americans seem allergic — solitude and silence.”
At least our kids are getting those two things while they take their tests …
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more about his book, “The Off Season: The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford,” at www.mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: Are literature and poetry headed out for recess?
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
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Greece Passes New Austerity Deal Amid Rioting
'Rumor Has It' Adele's Rolling in the Grammys
Coroner: Houston Autopsy Results Weeks Away
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Grohl, Grammy Nominees Cut Up on the Red Carpet
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Police: Houston Found Dead in Her Hotel Room
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Today in History for Tuesday, February 12th
And the Winner for Best Super Bowl Ad Is...
Stocks Fall Sharply As Greek Deal Is Held Up
Arab League Wants U.N. Help in Syria
Sandusky Can See Grandkids, Have Local Jury
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Apple of their eye at $500 a share
Adele's revealing "60 Minutes" interview
Rosenthal: A's sign Cespedes
Bobby Brown on Houston's Death
Turkey's first face transplant
Exclusive Video: Bobbi Kristina Leaving Hospital
Obama Unveils $3.8 Trillion Budget
Kelly Ripa's Fashion Faux Pas
Lusetich: AT&T Recap
Raw Video: Aurora Borealis As Seen From Space
Grammys 2012: Highlights
2.12: Pebble Beach Pro-Am -- Phil Mickelson
2012 Grammys: Rihanna
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Exclusive Video - Whitney's Bodybag
FUEL TV: Punk Payback Gym tips
