Teaching Outside the Literary Canon

by Mike Ziegler Critical Literacy Notes from the Classroom

shutterstock_267444602Years ago, in a jaded moment of teaching frustration, I purchased a book entitled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). I know, the subheading alone should’ve told me to save my money. The argument is pretty self-evident, but the details of the book—at the time—spoke to some of the frustrations I was feeling with my students.

At one point the author, Mark Bauerlein, shares an anecdote wherein some ex-student doesn’t show sufficient love for The Great Gatsby. Bauerlein’s diagnosis, then, goes like this: modern teens are possessed of a “brazen disregard for books and reading.”

“Yes!” I thought to myself then. “Finally, someone has given voice to the frustration of all of us English teachers!”

He is perhaps not wrong in that observation—save for the presumption that such an attitude is somehow unique to modern students. As English teachers, we fancy ourselves to be keepers of the culture, in addition to instructors of reading and writing. We imagine that the empathetic, essentially human part of society will wither and fall from the rose, one heartbreaking petal at a time, if we don’t help teenagers learn to appreciate Gatsby and Hemingway and Fahrenheit and Shakespeare—and Shakespeare and then poetry and then a little more Shakespeare. In other words, we don’t just want them to love reading; we want them to love reading the right things.

And we aren’t wrong. Cultural literacy is an important thing and kids get precious little of it. But pushing the classic canon and teaching kids to become more culturally enriched are not necessarily symbiotic. In fact, I want to propose that they are often antithetical (an argument which is not mine so much as Kelly Gallagher’s, in the indispensable Readicide).

Misguided Values

Students need to learn to love reading and the idea of literature before they can be expected to love literature independently.

shutterstock_182159027In that sense, the focus of English classrooms has been off for a long time. We build our units around a core canonical text, and make everything else more or less in service of that text. Is our concern whether kids learn to love reading, or do we press them to love this book at this moment, because it’s what we believe people who love reading should value?

I can feel some of you dusting off your old “In Defense of the Literary Canon” speeches for me, so I’ll use your ally from earlier. Bauerlein, in Dumbest Generation, offers another “measure” of proof that today’s youth are culturally bankrupt. He cites the fact that almost none of them has ever attended a jazz concert. Almost none! Imagine that!

Maybe some of you attend jazz performances regularly. They aren’t my cup of tea—nor are live stage plays, to be honest—and yet I don’t consider myself culturally bankrupt. But according to Bauerlein, if you don’t go to jazz concerts at least a couple times a year, you’re an agent of the cultural apocalypse.

But any reasonable person would agree that a distaste for jazz does not determine or define cultural literacy. We know this in our hearts, and yet we often refuse to allow the same benefit of the doubt to students.

On the contrary, when we come across something like the infamous TED Talk about Shakespeare and hip-hop, we use it to push kids even harder to appreciate The Canon: “See! If these rappers sound like Shakespeare, how can you not like the famous bard’s rhymed couplets?”

How often do we stop to consider the implicit corollary? If they’re close enough to confuse, then either Shakespeare isn’t so unique, or a few voices in hip hop are.

Next Steps

Some kids will love the classics from the moment they get their hands on them. And many of them will learn to love them in the classroom—because of you! But we do a disservice to our students when we imply that these are the only books that matter.

We don’t generally have the freedom to rewrite our curriculum. But a few minutes of students’-choice reading every day, or an assignment that asks students to select something for the New Canon, can have a huge impact on how your students exit your classroom and enter into the world of popular culture. To deny them the breadth of cultural richness is to send them into the world with their eyes wide shut.

In future posts I’ll share the joys of letting students read whatever they please. In the meantime, go read a good book by an author you’ve never heard of. See if it doesn’t turn out to have its own universal truths.

Michael Ziegler

Michael Ziegler is a Content Area Leader and teacher at Novi High School.  This is his 15th year in the classroom. He teaches 11th Grade English and IB Theory of Knowledge. He also coaches JV Girls Soccer and has spent time as a Creative Writing Club sponsor, Poetry Slam team coach, AdvancEd Chair, and Boys JV Soccer Coach. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, majoring in English, and earned his Masters in Administration from Michigan State University.  

Mississippi: The Most Southern Place

by Rick Kreinbring Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project Professional Learning

This blog was written before the recent horrible events at Delta State University. My thoughts are with the community and its many warm and kind people. 

shutterstock_80645992A few years back I recognized that I was getting stale—not bad, just not good—and that I was becoming calcified in my self-assurance. I don’t remember an exact moment when I noticed it. In any case, I didn’t want to become the teacher who boasts 20 years of experience, when he really means two years of experience repeated 10 times. I looked around until I found a seminar given by Columbia University and Theater for a New Audience, on teaching Shakespeare. I applied and was lucky enough to get in.

That first experience took me apart. It changed everything about me and how I teach, and I’ve been addicted to seminars ever since. In the years since then, I’ve been all over the country, attending just about anything that’ll let me in. The results have varied from transformative to “at least I got a free poster.” I like it best when I come away changed, when I feel like the ground has shifted under my feet and I need to rebuild. For me, that’s the marker of effective professional development.

PD’s Broader Purpose

Sometimes, though, a seminar isn’t as much about learning a new approach or finding something to build into my own practice. It’s about the landscape and the people I meet. It’s about changing the way I think about myself, as a teacher, a student, and a human being.

I find that being around really good teachers—smart, inspired, creative, risk-taking teachers—is what changes me. I like being in the “learning chair”: the worst teacher in the room, the least informed person in the seminar. It means I’ll be learning.

IMG_0514This year found me at Delta State University in Mississippi, “the most Southern place on Earth.” There, among outstanding teachers from all over the country, I spent an exhausting week working through everything that the Delta has to offer.

The Delta is a place of conflicted history and rich culture. Teachers and caretakers there are charged with the task of tending a dying region, while parceling out the memory to everyone they meet. And so this seminar fell into the category of ground shaking and attitude changing. It forced us to think about places almost none of us had visited, from an old cemetery for Chinese immigrants, to an aging Jewish synagogue, to Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint, perhaps the last “true” juke joint in the Delta, and a place where people dance with abandon as the night grows late.

Rediscovering Mockingbird, in the Courtroom

One afternoon, my classmates and I were able to participate in a panel discussion on the Emmett Till case. On the panel were the last people, other than his murderers, to see Till alive: his uncle and an FBI agent who reopened that case in 2004. The discussion took place in the actual courtroom where the original miscarriage of justice occurred.

Those of us in the language arts huddled afterward to talk about the connections to To Kill a Mockingbird. Being in the place makes the emotions of the novel more real. The ghosts are real and the voices seem to seep in from the gallery, and I feel closer to the truth of the books I’ve taught for years.

Keeping Traditions Alive in the Classroom

IMG_0649On our last day in the Delta, I made a mojo, a little pouch that contains bits and pieces of the places you visited, people you met, and sites you want to return to someday. You display it somewhere people will see it and ask about it, and every time you talk about it, the magic of the mojo gets stronger.

Like that mojo, Mississippi offered a strange mix for me. I didn’t walk away with a notebook full of new techniques—I did get some, though. But when I see a guest lecturer pick up a diddley bow—a guitar made out of a cigar box, broomstick, and a single string—and pull so much emotion out it while he teaches a class of rapt students about the history of the blues in the Delta, I understand how important passion is to teaching. I see how being able to demonstrate something, and let students try it themselves, makes learning so much richer.

Even though so much of what I saw showed me something that was slipping away, or already gone, I wasn’t sad. It’s another of those weird paradoxes of this place. All of the people I met have a sense of duty, to the past but also to the future. They tell stories to us, teachers from all over the United States, trusting that we will carry them back with us and teach them to our students, so that the sound of the blues, that heartbeat rhythm, won’t disappear.

RICKRick Kreinbring teaches English at Avondale High School in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His current assignments include teaching AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition. He is a member of a statewide research project through the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative partnered with the MSU Writing in Digital Environments Program, which concentrates on improving student writing and peer feedback. Rick has presented at the National Advanced Placement Convention and the National Council of Teachers of English Conference. He is in his twenty-third year of teaching and makes his home in Huntington Woods.