Incorporating the Real World into Fiction

the following quote was taken from an article on WashingtonPost.com titled

Wrestling With the Lessons of 9/11: Teachers Take Varying Tacks to Help Students Grasp Historical Significance

found here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/11/AR2006091101171.html?nav=rss_education

Of bin Laden, students called him a fanatic who sought to build hatred toward this country. One said bin Laden disliked the United States because of its wealth and power. "It's like 'A Tale of Two Cities,' " said Goutham Peddi, 15, a junior, "the powerful against the poor."

I read this bit of the article and it made me start to wonder... could lessons or even sections of curriculum be planned around historical events in our history? It might be more work than the results would warrant, but it seems a reasonable endeavor to think about lessonplans in context of real world events like 9/11 and think of how to meld the two together. This example of how "A Tale of Two Cities" can incorporate into discussion about real world events is a good one. I think that doing this might help bring out aspects of a text that reading-unfriendly students may not have seen. For example, a student interested in politics and law might have an aversion to reading fiction... maybe instruction like this would help to bring a new light of understanding and appreciation for classic and YA pieces of literature.

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P.S. note:
Another piece to support this from this article:

Many students marked the fifth anniversary of the attacks this week with various assignments and classroom discussions. Brian Jeffrey, who teaches English at Los Osos, asked his students to write a journal entry on what their lives were like the day before and day after Sept. 11, 2001. "It's something I ask my students to do every year as a way to compare and contrast the significance of this event in their lives," Jeffrey said. According to Jeffrey, his high school students were relatively young at the time and their memory of the terrorist attacks has gotten hazy. [...] One student recently asked Jeffrey what year the attacks took place. Jeffrey, who is preparing to teach George Orwell's "1984," is hoping to incorporate the book's themes in discussions of civil liberties and the war on terrorism. The English teacher said as each year passes, his students' perspectives on world events change and they tend to be more trusting of the government.

Banning Steinbeck

The following article is taken from a website called Critical Mass, an online journal "dedicated to commentary on the state of American academe" and maintained by Erin O'Connor, an English teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. This particular article is about how parents in an Ohio school district trying to ban John Steinbeck's short classic, Of Mice and Men, which we've just recently begun (or finished for some of us) reading.

http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2003/01/banning_steinbe.html


I have mixed emotions about this issue. When I was in highschool I vividly remember reading this book and staying with it in class for at least a week or two. I immensely enjoyed the book... an sentiment which was echoed 7 years later as I finished it last night while the rain came down and pattered against my roof.

I can see a couple reasons why people would want to ban this book:
1. Profanity (108 counted by the Ohio protest group)
2. Racial slurs (12)
3. Use of God's name in vain (45)
4. Sexual content (unabashed references to whore houses and visiting such)
5. Portrayal of women (Curley's wife, prostitutes)
6. Graphic depictions of death including murder (Candy's dog, Lenny's murder)

I wonder if perhaps the reason people wish to ban this book is the reason why this book is so widely read and appreciated. Obscenity and racism exist. People use God's name in vain. Some women are manipulative. Men like sex and there are women who will accept money for it. People are killed for pleasure. People are killed for mercy. And some people are killed for no good reason at all.

There is something "naked" I think, about good writing. There is something unabashed about a good author's ability to take what he sees and put it on the page. We must ask ourselves, why do we read books like this? Are books meant to show us how things should be? Are they meant to change minds? Should they only show us what we're comfortable with, what we wish for, what we think is right?

Again, I feel that the best policy is to know your enemy. If an author wants me to do something about poverty, would the writer give me a nice story about a poor person who is helped by another out of their situation, or does he/she give me a story about one forsaken by all, who eventually dies in a gutter cursing god as they slowly freeze and starve to death. Now I know which story would move me more. I know which character I would be more attached to. I know which story would be "filthier", which one would make me more uncomfortable, which one would move me more.

Why do we include Of Mice and Men in our studies? What do we want to show these growing adults? What do we want them to feel? I think that highschool should be preparation... preparation for college... preparation for life. And in the real world, no amount of flowery, un-obscene, and comfortable language is going to change the fact that people cuss, fuck, and die.

We don't want our kids going out and having unprotected and/or promiscuous sex with each other. But we know that it happens. So what do we do? We teach sex ed. We tell kids "abstinence is the 100% foolproof way to not contract a genital STD" and we tell them what an STD is. We show them disgusting and grotesque pictures of what can happen. We tell them disturbing tales of viruses and bacteria and disease. Why? Because it's necessary to educate. To show how things are in order to stress how things should be.

Without the ugly, the beautiful does not exist. I think Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is both painfully ugly and at the same time elegantly beautiful because it seems to true and real. It stands before us, naked, blatant, and unashamed. And I feel that touch with something so real and beautiful and ugly is worth having, and worth giving to others.

Banned Books

Banned books shrinking
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.strausnews.com/articles/2006/09/08/the_chronicle/news/20.txt

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I've always found it amusing if not interesting when I see people react in such extreme measures, such as banning books. If there's something that I have learned from my experience with my parents, it's that which is off limits that becomes immediately what is most alluring and desirable.

Though, maybe that's just the kind of incentive that these kids need. Or perhaps, the incentive that the parents need as well. For if Robbie Jr. learns that his mother has petitioned in a puritanical rage for Salinger "The Catcher in the Rye" to be removed not only from the school but from the local library's shelves, hopefully he'll wonder why. Perhaps this will be just the push he needs to find the great book for himself and keep it secretly in his back pocket and read it only when nobody's looking... engaged with the text in such a way that only a banned book could ever do. The text becomes his partner in crime.

I remember back a long time ago, I wasn't allowed to read comic books. My mother told me that they were too violent and devoid of substance as literature. I remember asking to go off on my own in the toystores and as soon as her back was turned, I launched myself towards the rippling pectorals of Batman, and voluptuous beauty of Storm and Rogue of the X-Men. And when I read them... I found out that she was right. There wasn't really that much depth to the stories. And it was incredibly violent. But it was just as she had said it was going to be. And I'm no worse off today. And I have more respect for my mother for telling me the truth about how she really felt, rather than just telling me "comics will rot your mind."

Banning books is, perhaps, inevitable. As long as this country will give its citizens the freedom to say whatever it is that they want to say, there will be people saying things that other people will wish to silence. But every opinion, and I mean every opinion matters. The opinion of the Nazis and pedophiles matter. The racist conversations taking place right now in bars across America, that matters. It all matters because it's real and it's there and it's going to be there whether you agree with it or not. It is the discussion of such matters that brings about progress.

It is always good policy to know your enemy. Having a banned books list is a great thing I think. It shows us what we as a society are afraid of. It shows us exactly what we do need to talk to our children about. If you want to ban "The Catcher in the Rye" it is your American right to say so and to try and do it. But don't stop there. Don't place something far away and say, never touch that because I said so. Bring it up bring it close.

As a matter of fact, if you hate it so much, you should probably let your children read it and show them exactly why it's wrong. Show them exactly why it's filth. And if they happen to agree with you, then perhaps we've just moved forward to a consensus between us all. And if not, the discussion you have about your differences may simultaneously as beautiful and ugly as the book itself. And that's what life really is.

Banned Books & Censorship

Here, at the beginning of everything, I must make a confession: I am no longer going to be an educator.

The choice to go into English education was never a choice made in the throes of passion for me. Everyone had always told me since as long as I've been in school: "You would be a good teacher. You're a great public speaker. You should go into education."

But as the years and education classes went on... I sensed a kind of hollowness to everything I did, an emptiness that echoed through my classes and work.

I realized (far too late as it were) that deep down inside, I didn't really want to be an educator. It was just something that I was good at... not something that I wanted to do.

So I changed the emphasis on my English major to literature instead of secondary education. I found that I then had two classes I needed to drop that had no benefit to fulfilling my major. One was teaching ESL, and the other was teaching lit to adolescents. Since I did have an interest in literature and I enjoyed the lit discussions in class, I decided to keep the teaching lit. and drop the other.

That being said, the class (and this blogg) have been an exercise in will-power. It almost feels a bit like living a lie... sitting in class pretending to be a future educator... joining discussion as if I was interested, as if I were making mental notes about future lesson plans when really I wasn't. It was almost the same empty feeling I had when I was going into teaching, only this time, I knew I was living the lie.

Hence, picking a topic for the blogg was difficult. I eventually settled on Banned Books & Censorship frankly because I counted on the media to give my RSS feed ample material to write on... but more so, I felt that censorship was an issue that could be taken out of the educator position and replayed in the parent situation. I think about these articles, then, not as a potential educator, but as a potential parent with a child in the education system. What books would I allow my child to read? What educational practices do I agree with? How can I use this class, blogg, and experience to gain the perspective of teachers to use when someday I may be a parent?

I set up my Google Reader to browse the New York Times and the Washington Post with respect to educational topics, counting on the fact that censorship, protest, and book banning were topics that the reporting community would cover... and I was not too far off the mark. Though not abounding with stories, the two feeds did give me a good number to select from... if nothing else, a good number to fulfill the required quota of the Blogg.

I also subscribed to a couple of Google's specific groups as "About Literature: Classic" and "Powell's Banned Books" for material. Although these haven't been as fruitful as the others, they occasionally come through with a good article or two.

Finally, I set up the feed to search the news database with specific terms in mind, like "of mice and men" "banned book school*" and other searches for controversial authors such as Angelou and Orwell.

By keeping my searches very general as I do, I find a wide variety of things to comment on, (hopefully) keeping the blogg interesting.


Censorship is important to me because I believe very strongly in experience being the best teacher. You can tell a young child as many times as you like not to touch a hot stove because it will burn them... but until that child touches the stove and gets burned, he/she will not truly know or understand why not to touch it.

Thus, we all learn vicariously. Survival necessitates it. The reason I don't snort cocaine is because I've heard the stories of the people who's lives it has ruined. Do I need to snort cocaine to be able to tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing? No. Most everyone would agree that snorting cocaine isn't a good thing. But experience offers a variety of perceptions. Sigmund Freud himself was an avid user and supporter of cocaine. Was he wrong? Or did his experience offer him a different perspective. To be speculative, perhaps there really is a third-eye which psychedelic drugs can unlock for all of us, and we're really just missing out. Timothy Leary would have us think so... and who are you to refute his point having never taken such drugs yourself (presumably)?

What I'm getting at here is that no matter how much science would like us to believe that the world is now empirically defined and ordered... every individual operates on a faith. Faith in the trustworthiness of doctors and researchers... faith in the accuracy of historians... faith in the scribes of religious texts... faith in the stories of ancestors... When all the events of the entire world are taken into consideration, your life may actually empirically touch only 20% of what you believe you actually experience.

Therefore, the experience, perspective, and opinions of others are all incredibly important. We see only 20% of the world with our actual eyes. The rest we read, we hear, we come to know vicariously. Do you know what the holocaust was? Did it actually happen? How do you know it actually happened? Have you personally talked to a survivor? Have you gone and visited a death camp? No, you read about it, you heard about it.

Perceptions, most importantly through words, are our doorways into experience, our windows into knowledge. And when someone says that some doorways should be nailed shut, that some windows must be boarded up and sealed away, it is a VERY serious matter... Especially when the same doors and windows offer to some people the experience of beauty.

When a book or piece of artwork is banned we loose a part of our perspective... we loose a part of the collective human experience. True, it may be ugly, or disgusting, or vile, and we would love to deny it ever existed... but it's still there whether we want it or not. People lie and kill... they murder and they rape and curse and are violent... they have sex they take drugs. And no matter how adamantly you tell your children or your friends that such things don't happen... a thousand things even worse than that will happen during the course of your conversation.

Books as a form of art show us what we love and what we hate and we need them BOTH... because of one single thing:

Understanding.

We need to understand why we love what we love and why we hate what we hate. If a mother finds "How to Kill a Mockingbird" offensive, she needs to understand WHY it's offensive and then TEACH THAT TO HER CHILDREN. Pass on values.

Man has always been terrified of what he does not know, what he does not UNDERSTAND. We destroy what we don't understand, and oftentimes (and sadly only much after the fact) do we see that what we destroyed in the name of ignorance is what we should have examined in the name of understanding.

Censorship is dangerous because it can create and perpetuate the destructive power of ignorance. Before we remove a perspective from our society, we must first concretely understand WHY we demand such removal... why one thing is horrible and another is useful... why we destroy pedophilic material and teach chapter 12 of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".

Censorship is important to me because it can advance us, not only as a society, but as a race and species... while simultaneously having the power to make us slide further down the ladder of social evolution we try so desperately to climb. And that is why I address it here.