The Back of my Garden

The Back of my Garden
Christopher Bogart

I have retired now to the back of my garden
to view my life from its furthest point.

Everything I have ever worked for
is arrayed before my eyes.

The yard, planted in beautiful bowers of
roses, hydrangea and mountain laurel.
Pots of petunias in shades of pink, and purple and white
delight the eye, from their outposts on the corners of the deck.

English ivy creeps up the ancient swamp maple,
as if in a race to trace its bark with green leaves
to wave to the will of gentle breezes.

My house, centenarian in shades of cream and brown,
looms up before me like a sleeping monolith, a
monument to the productivity of labors past, past industry.

I stand on the ground of my achievements.

I have retired now to the back of my garden,
and my life, at its furthest point,
Far beyond the boundaries of the property line
has become to me a challenge
in a world of new dreams,
new fields of future endeavor that trace
new and unknown boundary lines
and new security beyond the place
I once called home.

Where is the pointer?

First picture: The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry by the British artist Ford Madox Brown (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England)
Second picture: The Alfred Jewel (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

In the previous parts of the paper, I analyzed why our children are exhibiting lower reading and writing scores, the methods I feel do not work, the methods I feel will work and why.

The last part of this paper concerns itself with the second part of the metaphor of the Alfred Jewel. Believed by historians to be the beautiful and valuable handle for a pointer to be used to teach King Alfred’s bishops English, and for that knowledge to be passed on to their priests and the faithful, the “jewel” in the metaphor is our language through our literature. The pointer, the utilitarian (and missing) part of this artifact is the teacher. At the end of this paper are the works cited and the sources I used to write this paper.

As I stated in the lead up to the posting of this paper, as I prepared this paper to present it at the session of the Oxford Round Table’s “Reading First” conference in Oxford in the summer of 2005, I realized that I was putting together my philosophy on teaching reading and writing that had been developed over a lifetime of teaching English. I also was forced to take a good look at my beliefs about literature in general, and the use of words in writing in particular, as well as the importance of poetry to this endeavor. As I look at this paper today, I realize how beneficial it was to spend those months thinking about what I believed and articulating it in a paper and a presentation. How beneficial it was to my outlook on teaching in general. How beneficial it was to my belief in the power of words.


Where is the pointer?

Taking the metaphor of the Alfred Jewel to its extended end, what is needed now is the final point of the comparison, the missing pointer itself.

In the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, another transformation occurred in the world of education; and, as with the first, it too was a slow and pervasive change. Simply put, the focus of educating educators shifted from substance to style. It seems today that the emphasis to prepare a teacher for the classroom in many colleges and universities across the United States is more about education courses and training how to teach than it is about content. The result is that most new teachers entering language arts classrooms today are less prepared than their predecessors to teach reading and writing skills using the strong literature base that is so necessary if our students are ever to improve as readers and writers. In many of our school districts throughout the United States, our elementary and middle school children are being taught by teachers that are elementary certified, which means that they are prepared to teach a number of subjects, but none with any depth. To make matters worse, many of their supervisors are not department chairpersons, but administrators who rarely have any background in the subject they are observing and evaluating. Observations and evaluations that were once meant to be “tune-ups” to improve the teaching of the subject material now have become the monitoring of classroom management and control. If we are ever to stop digging down and start digging out, the preparation of college students to become real educators has to change.

The educators who teach our children today must be thoroughly grounded in British and American literature as well as the language that produced it. As with Dylan Thomas, the Anglo-Saxon warriors who sat around the fires of mead halls and the child who sits near the warmth of a parent to listen and learn, they must become “lovers of words.” They must know and understand the poetry of our language as well as its prose. They must be avid readers with a love of the written word, and they must be able to write it.

On May 15, 2005 The New York Times published an editorial entitled “The Fine Art of Getting It Down on Paper, Fast.” In that article, Brent Staples states that in a report released by the National Commission on Writing last year, one third of the companies polled stated that only one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely.30 Commenting on this poll, Mr. Staples writes “The evidence suggests, however, that most teachers have never taken a course in how to teach effective writing and that many don’t know how to produce it themselves. The blame lies not with the teachers, however, but with an American educational system that fails at every level to produce fluent writers.”31 If the educators in today’s classrooms can’t write, how can they teach writing techniques and instill a love of writing in their students?

In order to produce educators of this caliber, colleges and universities must begin to reform the way they teach their students to be educators. Technique must yield to substance in the selection of a course of study. This course of study must be literature rich, both in poetry and in prose. It must emphasize narrative, persuasive as well as expository writing. Our future educators must be able to write, and to teach the techniques of writing with confidence and with experience.


What’s beyond Reading 1st?

Reading 1st is a blueprint for a reading instruction program that would enable all students to read on or above grade level by the end of the third grade. An appropriate response to this challenge could be “From your mouth to God’s ear.” We are pinning our hopes on this promise to ensure that all students in America will be reading on grade level by the third grade, for we know that all the research points to that goal as indispensable to future academic success. However we must reach beyond that promise by providing not only reinforcement in reading and writing skills for those children that achieve this goal but for those that do not as well. As these children pass through elementary school to middle school and then to high school, we must not only reinforce these skills in our children but excite and inspire them as well. To do that, we need educators who not only are grounded thoroughly in these skills but who are grounded thoroughly in the great literature of our language. We need educators who love to read and to write and can inspire their students to continue the love affair with words that they began when first introduced to reading. The love of words is the key that will open the door not only to the wondrous worlds of imagination of the countless authors that have written in our language, but to the imaginations of every single child as well. This literature can no longer be treated as the private preserve of the few, but must be treated as the birthright of all. The love of that literature must be celebrated in every child in every classroom on every day.

Dylan Thomas was a poet who fell in love with words. He celebrated that love affair every day of his life. It is because of this love affair with words, that he should have the last one.

And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever. There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth; and though what the words meant was, in its own way, often deliciously funny enough, so much funnier seemed to me, at that almost forgotten time, the shape and shade and size and noise of the words as they hummed, strummed, jigged and galloped along. That was the time of innocence; words burst upon me, unencumbered by trivial or portentous association; words were their spring-like selves, fresh with Eden’s dew, as they flew out of the air. They made their own original associations as they sprang and shone.

My first, and greatest, liberty was that of being able to read everything and anything I cared to. I read indiscriminately, and with my eyes hanging out. I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books, such sandstorms and ice-blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-awaking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light. I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather, wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers.

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, ‘Yes this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.’ But you’re back again where you began.

You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words.

The joy and function of poetry was, and is, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.32


Notes


1 Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1952), xv.

2 Ibid.

3 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 42.

4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: The New American Library, 1964), 84-85.

5 Ibid.

6 Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, xv.

7 Keith E. Stanovich (1993-94). “The Romance and Reality” (Distinguished Educator Series). Reading Teacher, 47(4), 280-91. EJ 447 302.

8 Marilyn Jager Adams (1990). “Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print.” Cambridge, MA: Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc. ED 317 950.

9 Ibid.

10 Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, “Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? A 2003 Update.” Educational News.Org. http://www.educationnews.org/phonemic_awareness_what_does_it_. Htm.

11 Hallie Kay Yopp (1992), “Developing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children.” Reading Teacher, 45(9), 696-703, EJ 442 772.

12 Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, “Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? A 2003 Update.”

13 Roger Sensenbaugh, “Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read.” Kid Source Online. http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/phoemic.p.k.12.4.html.

14 Marilyn Jager Adams, “Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print.”

15 Hallie Kay Yopp, “Developing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children.”

16 Roger Sensenbaugh, “Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read.”

17 Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003), 19.

18 Ibid, 29.

19 Robert MacNeil, The Story of English: A Muse of Fire (MacNeil-Lehrer Productions/BBC, 1986).

20 Ibid.

21 FolgerFestivals Handbook, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995, 3.

22 Robert MacNeil, The Story of English: A Muse of Fire

23 FolgerFestivals Handbook, 16.

24 FolgerFestivals Handbook, 17.

25 Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, 56.

26 Wilbur, Richard, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, Keats, New York: Dell Publishing, 1959. 32.

27 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 4.

28 Arthur Kanegis, “New Heroes for a New Age”, Center for Media Literacy, 2002-2003.
http://www.medialit.org/reading room/article460.html.

29 Ibid.

30 Brent Staples, “The Fine Art of Getting It Down on Paper, Fast,” The New York Times, May 15, 2005, Op Ed 13.

31 Ibid, Op Ed, 13.

32 Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, xvi,xvii,xxii.



Bibliography


“Cadmus,” www.arts.uwa.edu., 2005, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/Mots
Pluriels/MP190dpCadmus.html.

“The Alfred Jewel.” Oxford University (Art object of the
Month).http://www.asmol.ox.ac.uk/ash/objectof month/theobject.htm.

Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, New York:
Arcade Publishing, 2003.

Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces, New York: MJF Books, 1949.

Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, New York: Dell Publishing, 1989.

Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, NewYork: Washington Square Press, 1956.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol, London: Octopus Books Limited, 1986.

Dickens, Charles. Nickolas Nickleby, New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

FolgerFestivals Handbook, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology, New York: New American Library, 1969.

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Hempenstall, Dr. Kerry. “Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? A 2003 Update.”
Educational News.Org.
http://www.educationnews.org/phonemic_awareness_what_does_it_. Htm.

Jager Adams, Marilyn (1990). “Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print.”
Cambridge, MA: Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc. ED 317 950.

Kanegis, Arthur.“New Heroes for a New Age”, Center for Media Literacy, 2002-2003.
http://www.medialit.org/reading room/article460.html.

MacNeil, Robert. The Story of English: A Muse of Fire (MacNeil-Lehrer
Productions/BBC, 1986).

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media. New York: The New American Library,
1964.

Rosenblum, Joseph. A Reader’s Guide to Shakespeare, New York: Barnes and Noble
Books, 1999.

Sensenbaugh, Roger. “Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To
Read.” Kid SourceOnline.
http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/phoemic.p.k.12.4.html.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, New York: Penguin, 1987.

Stanovich, Keith E. 1993-94. “The Romance and Reality” (Distinguished Educator
Series). Reading Teacher, 47(4), 280-91. EJ 447 302.

Staples, Brent “The Fine Art of Getting It Down on Paper, Fast,” The New York Times,
May 15, 2005, Op Ed 13.

Thomas, Dylan, The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1952.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader, New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Torgesen, Joseph K. Preventing Early Reading Failure – and Its Devastating Downward
Spiral. American Educator, Fall, 2004.

Wilbur, Richard, Keats, New York: Dell Publishing, 1959.

Wood, Michael. Shakespeare, New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Yopp, Hailey Kay (1992), “Developing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children.”
Reading Teacher, 45(9), 696-703, EJ 442 772.

A Word is a Window

In this post, I present the part of the paper that deals with the importance of using literature of reading level appropriate to academic level, and the benefits of this literature to the development of vocabulary and comprehension as well as to the possible solutions to life's challenges.


“A word, at its simplest, is a window.”25

In the end, it’s all about the words: the sound of words read and spoken, the meaning of each of these words as they spring up, like full-blown soldiers, from the page to the fertile soil of a child’s imagination, the visual pictures that they create, and the concepts that these words unlock. Reading and writing are language arts, and the stimuli for proficiency in these arts are not just found in poetry or in Shakespeare, but in great prose literature, much of which we have also relegated to the status of artifact.

Recently, Bruce Coville, in an address given at Rutger’s University in New Brunswick, NJ, expressed frustration over the unwritten policy of many publishers of young people’s literature not to publish books over 150 pages. Their major reason seems to stem from their belief that our students will not read longer books and therefore these longer books will not sell. This unwritten policy seems to reveal an unspoken philosophy that short chapter books with low reading levels will sell better than complex plots in longer books. Many curricula writers seem to have adopted that same philosophy. Many of these books have made their way into the curricula of a significant number of schools as literature for the upper grades and are used to teach and encourage reading in our classrooms.

There are three general levels that divide reading material in education: Independent, Instructional and Frustration. A book on an Independent level is a book that readers are able to read on their own. A book on an Instructional level is a book that requires a teacher as guide as it introduces more sophisticated structure and new vocabulary. And a book on a Frustration level is a book that is too difficult for readers even with a teacher as guide. The Outsiders, Hatchet as well as many other Newberry Award books written on a fourth grade level are great books for independent reading, but become boring when used as instructional reading, because their grade level is inappropriately low and they lack challenging vocabulary for seventh and eighth grade readers. Yet, how many middle schools are using these grade level books for their reading classes? How many high schools are using them? How many of these schools avoid teaching J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written on a sixth to seventh grade reading level, even to their high school students? Why are we lowering our expectations of our students by selecting books that are below their grade level? How many high schools teach the unabridged versions of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities, both with ninth grade reading levels or do they use the abridged versions that have fifth to sixth grade reading levels? Abridged versions of books are easier to read because the vocabulary is simpler and so is the sentence structure. Why would we take away from our students the very elements that will increase their vocabulary and improve their writing? Are we afraid “they won’t sell?”

Anybody who has watched the Harry Potter phenomenon over the last eight years has observed children, sometimes as young as six years old, waiting on line for the latest J.K. Rawling book of the adventures of a 12 year old wizard in training. Bookstores begin six months in advance, compiling “advanced order” lists for copies of the latest installment, lest they sell out before every child who wants a copy is able to get one. So great is the excitement among children across the United States for the latest Harry Potter book that the night before these books are available for sale, these stores run what can only be described as “book fairs,” consisting of costume contests, wand making workshops, makeup workshops, and readings of the previous books with children sitting in large circles on soft carpeting, listening to the words Rawling uses to create her characters and set the scenes in a world that literally defies description. These “fairs” begin at 4:00 PM and often go until midnight, when the book officially becomes available to the public. What accounts for the success of these books? Are they all under 150 pages? The first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone was 309 pages and one of the last books released, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was 870 pages. Are they easy to read? These books are written on a sixth to seventh grade reading level and are filled with Dickensean names, Latin spells and regional expressions, like Professor Snape, Draco Malfoy, Slytherin, “Occulus Reparum”, or my personal favorite, the Boggart in the Wardrobe, that our children seem never to tire of hearing and memorizing. Are they relevant to life today? They don’t appear to be on the surface. These stories take place primarily in a fantasy world that appears more medieval than modern. Their relevance is that they fascinate children with vivid descriptions of that fantasy world, and through these descriptions, draw them into plots inhabited by children like themselves, burdened with the same doubts and fears that we all have. So children, and many times adults, rush out to get the latest Harry Potter book to continue to enjoy the language and live in the adventure. What are our children telling us? Are we listening?


What are our children telling us?

In the social turmoil of the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, a slow but pervasive transformation occurred in the curricula of American school systems across the country. The great literature, which had sustained and inspired us in the past, was slowly replaced with literature that was thought to be relevant to the children of this new era of social change. Underlying this decision was a desperate fear that if our educational system stayed the course with the literature it had always valued, that it too would become increasingly irrelevant. Education has always been defined as the passing on from generation to generation of that knowledge that society has found to be of enduring value. However, instead of integrating new literature of quality into an already impressive body of work, our education system cut adrift most of the literature that they had previously valued to keep in step with the times. It is the results of this philosophy of current relevance that we are living with now. For in throwing out the bath water, we threw out the baby as well. Gone were many of those works of literature that had inspired past generations with the beauty of their words and the relevance of their themes. The literature that took their place was, in many cases, “relevant” only because it was current. The conflicts that characters from the great literature of the past faced seemed irrelevant to many in the present because the settings, the customs, and the patterns of speech seemed antiquated in our brave new world. It seemed that we had become blind to the similarities between the world of muggles and the world of wizards. The magic that had always inhabited the worlds of our great literature seemed suddenly to disappear in a puff of smoke.

The minds of our children today are bombarded with electronic images of what passes itself off as “reality.” TV has become flooded with shows like Fear Factor, Survivor, The Apprentice and American Idol that present irrelevant challenges and proffer dubious solutions to deal with them, offering fame and money as the reward for winning, and abject failure and humiliation as the punishment for losing. Stories that once defined the difference between right and wrong, the role of real heroes, the cost of heroic effort and the rewards when right triumphs over might are many times absent in the lives of our children today. What replaces those heroic themes in “the intuitive mosaic of instantaneous communication” are muddled messages offering wealth and power as a reward rather than as a warning. Is it any wonder then that many of our children gravitate to the stories of a twelve year old boy whose keen sense of fairness and right guide him through an alien world of wizards to challenge one, in particular, who has been seduced by the “dark side” of power? For outside of these popular books, where are our children to look for heroes to model what is right and good?

In the short period of time between the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, influential educators looked at the artistry of language that these authors mastered to tell stories, stories that were truly worth reading and learning from, and made the decision that they were no longer relevant to our children. These stories were relegated to the world of artifact. Like the handle of Alfred’s pointer, the literature that carried forth the values of our culture was placed under glass and out of reach.


Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.26

In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell comments, of the strength of myth, that “The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale – as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea.”27 If such can be said of “the smallest nursery fairy tales” that we read to our youngest children, those same nursery rhymes and fairy tales that inspired Dylan Thomas to read and write poetry, what would be the impact on our children of continuous exposure to truly great literature as they grow up?

Since we no longer have the luxury of blaming parents or mass media for our declining reading and writing scores, it is time to look to what we are doing, or not doing, to improve those scores. It is time to set our feet on a path that will instill in our children a true love of language that will manifest itself in an increased love of reading and writing, a love that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

In order to accomplish this, we must change what we are doing. To instill in them a true love of language from the first day that they enter school, we must teach them to listen as well as to read using the phonemically rich poetry at our disposal. We must continue to use this poetry to reinforce their reading and listening skills throughout their school careers, beginning with nursery rhymes and continuing through the best poetry we have to offer, encouraging them through instruction not just to read it but to write it as well. Can Shakespeare be taught to young children? The FolgerFestivals Handbook has a section of materials and activities specifically for the early grades of elementary school. They suggest that children be taught rhythm and meter at a very early age, using as its first suggested activity a reading piece that is written in the same iambic meter Shakespeare used in his sonnets and his plays, Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Later exercises include choral readings and individual speeches from Shakespeare’s plays meant to reinforce the recognition of the rhythm, rhyme and alliteration in the language.

We must expand upon that innate love of language that our youngest children have by introducing and nurturing in them a love of literature, not by using books at an Independent reading level, but by setting the bar higher through exposure to books on an Instructional level, books that are rich in vocabulary, figurative language and increasingly more sophisticated sentence structure. These books will become models for an increasing sophistication in their own writing as they are called upon to react to what they are reading by explanation, explication and writing narratives of their own on shared themes.

As they increase proficiency in reading, we must select literature that will excite their imaginations and teach them about the world and about themselves. From the adventures of Mole and Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the rich fantasy world of C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narna to Richard Adams’ Watership Down, we must select high interest books that are well written and engage the reader’s attention. Whether their attentions are kidnapped by Captain Hook in James Barrie’s Peter Pan or by Captain Hoseason in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, we must set out before them the rich array of our great literature. By reading this literature, they can plumb the depths of the sea in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or circumnavigate the globe in his Around the World in Eighty Days, or leave the planet altogether in a ride From the Earth to the Moon while keeping a diary of their continued adventures. They will be able to ride with Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott’s novel as he encounters Robin Hood and protects the lady Rebecca, with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as they protect the weak from the strong, with Sir Galahad in his quest for the Holy Grail or join with Mark Twain as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or they can join the French Foreign Legion in the deserts of Africa in Beau Geste with Percival Christopher Wren. It is the vocabulary of these books and the worlds that they open to the imaginations of our students that is worthy competition to video games and the vast electronic media that presently distracts them. The words and the themes of these books will encourage them to read more and write with increasing sophistication.

Joseph Campbell observed that “since the beginning of civilization, the behavior of every society has been largely molded by its storytellers and myth-makers.”28 In his article “New Heroes for a New Age,” Arthur Kanegis speaks of the unfortunate choices our culture sometimes selects as its heroes today. “’Turning off’ the violence in media is not enough” Kanegis states. “We must also ‘turn on’ stories that will provide role models for children and adults.”29 Where will these role models come from? To find the answer to this question, we only have to look at the wide variety of characters that populate great literature.

As our children mature, they will be forced to face ever more challenging moral questions and will need to explore and grapple with more complex social issues and themes to make sense of their own lives. Through the novels of authors like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Charlotte and Emily Bronte and, of course, the plays of William Shakespeare as well as the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, they will be able to develop the critical thinking skills through reading as well as through response in writing, skills that will carry them into their adult lives.

Great literature, rather than young adult fiction, contains a gold mine of themes that have always been “relevant” to life’s problems, and are just as relevant to us now as they were when they were written. Like the handle of Alfred’s pointer, the wealth of our literature is a valuable jewel, one that must be taken from under the glass, where it has been relegated to role of artifact, and placed in the hands of educators to do what it was always meant to do, to help point the way in the instruction of our language as well as our values.

The Case for Poetry and Shakespeare

With the last two posts, I have presented the problem of our approach to reading and writing today, and have explored the excuses education has used for lack of progress.

With this post, I present my preferred approach and my reasons for it.


What do Anglo-Saxon warriors, a Welsh poet and our children have in common?

Remember the Anglo-Saxon warriors who sat around the fire in the mead hall? Remember Dylan Thomas who had loved poetry since he was a child and had been introduced to nursery rhymes? Remember our child who sits close to the warmth of the parent hearing the sound of words for the first time? They had all fallen in love with words. What would Beowulf, nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss, the sources of these words, have in common? One of the answers is alliteration and rhyme, two of the pillars of phonemic awareness.

Phonemic Awareness, an important early step on the road to learning to read, is defined as “the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable.”7 The first of Marilyn Jager Adams’ five levels of phonemic awareness in terms of abilities is “to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes.”8 The second level, according to Adams, is “comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration.”9 Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, in a paper entitled Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? cites P. Bryant (1990), explaining:

He (Bryant) argues that sensitivity to rhyme makes both a direct and indirect contribution to reading. Directly, it helps students appreciate that words that share common sounds usually also share common letter sequences. The child’s subsequent sensitivity to common letter sequences then makes a significant contribution to reading strategy development. Indirectly, the recognition of rhyme promotes the refining of word analysis from larger intra-word segments (such as rhyme) to analysis at the level of the phoneme (the critical requirement for reading).10

These activities, according to Hallie Kay Yopp, “encourage children’s curiosity about language and their experimentation with it.”11 Dr. Hempenstall takes the argument one step further by stating “Engaging in rhyming activities with stories may also have strong motivational influences on children’s attitudes to books and reading.”12 Finally, Roger Sensenbaugh in his article, Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning to Read recommends teaching rhyming and “sound/symbol” relationship as well as how to “transfer knowledge to other contexts.”13

What else do nursery rhymes, Beowulf and Green Eggs and Ham have in common? They are all poetry. Our Anglo-Saxon warrior, our Welsh poet and our twenty-first century child have been exposed to alliteration and rhyme from a very early age through various types of poetry. Just as all children become fascinated with alliteration and rhyme at a very early age, very often many of our children continue that fascination by listening to and memorizing the lyrics to songs, and often to rap music, later in their childhood. If fact, it could be suggested, that our children’s fascination with lyrics and rap might just be an unconscious effort on their part to repeat the phonemic experience to compensate for the lack of it in their own reading experience. After all, it contains the very elements that allowed the scops in Anglo-Saxon England to remember the exact words of the epic so that they would be able to repeat it in performance after performance, and so that their listeners would be able to remember it. In fact, the epics of many of the world’s cultures were written in poetry. The tales of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the French Chanson de Roland, the Spanish El Cid, the Italian Divina Comedia and the German Das Neibelungenleid are all written in poetry, rich in alliteration and rhyme. Poetry has traditionally been the genre used to pass down the most lofty and important tales of almost every major culture from generation to generation. Why then, in our curricula today, is it “the redheaded stepchild?”


Why have we made poetry “the redheaded stepchild?”

In African-American communities, “the redheaded stepchild” refers to the child that is set aside from the family unit or ostracized completely because he or she looks different or is from a different family of origin. Applying that definition, it appears as if we have done just that to poetry in our classrooms, in our curricula, even in our assessment testing. But why have we? Poetry is in most cases the first exposure to literature that our ancestors had. It is also often the first exposure to the spoken and the written word that our children have through nursery rhymes and the literature of early childhood. It has been sung, read and written throughout the course of literature and history. It has spoken of our greatest human achievements, of our relationships with each other and even, in the case of the Psalms and some of these epics, with our God. It has given our loves, our fears and our pride a voice. It could be said in fact that poetry speaks to the essence of our language, using words in unique ways for sound as well as for meaning. If all of this is true, then why do we use it so little in elementary grades, treat it as an afterthought in our middle schools and bury it in the curricula of American Literature, English Literature and World Literature in our high schools? Do we even encourage our students to write poetry outside of creative writing classes?

We know that phonemic awareness is an important component of reading for children that have failed to read on or above grade level by the third grade as well as an important component in the reinforcement of those skills for the children who have achieved that goal. We know that poetry is particularly rich in the very language that promotes phonemic awareness. We know that poetry contains the two basic abilities (rhyme and alliteration) in the first two levels of phonemic awareness, and that it is “the child’s subsequent sensitivity to (these) common letter sequences that makes a significant contribution to reading strategy development.”14 We know that “Engaging in rhyming activities with stories may also have strong motivational influences on children’s attitudes to books and reading.”15 We know that teaching literature with rhyme allows children to “transfer knowledge to other contexts.”16 Why, then, isn’t the reading and writing of poetry a major component of our language arts curricula?

I believe that we don’t teach poetry because, as with the redheaded stepchild, most of us don’t feel very comfortable around it. In fact, in American education, poetry has most often been treated as “artifact” rather than “art.” While a part of our understanding of the literature of the past, it is not an art form that has spoken to us often in the present. Since we were not encouraged to read it beyond our textbooks, and we certainly were rarely encouraged to write it, it is not treated as a living art but, like most artifacts, is placed under glass to be admired from afar. Yet, we are surrounded by poetry in the lyrics of our songs. Why then is such a major source of the sound and rhythm of our language given such a minor role in our teaching of that language? While this has been true in the past, we do not have the luxury any longer to treat poetry as the redheaded stepchild in either our present or our future. Poetry has to be taught as a living art, one that contains basic elements necessary to read as well as to write.



Art or Artifact?

In the spring of 878, King Alfred the Great beat back the Danes and established the land of the West Saxons as the core of a new England. Alfred realized that in order to unite his people, they must share a common language. As Melvyn Bragg in his book, The Adventures of English: The Biography of a Language puts it, “He (Alfred) saw that inside the language itself, in the words of the day, there lay a community of history and continuity…”17 All of the written language of the day, mostly religious documents and prayer books, was written in Latin. Alfred decided to have all of these books translated into English, and to use them to teach priests, and through them, the people. The language, Englisc or English, was to be used for all access to the written word. Even though he was then in his forties, he took on the task of learning Latin to help in this translation. He even provided costly pointers to aid in its instruction. Copies of these books and pointers were sent to the twelve bishops of the kingdom that was now called Wessex. Each pointer was made of ivory with a handle formed around a tear drop slab of rock-crystal with a figure formed from the delicate colors of cloisonné enamel and gold. The legend around the handle, written in Old English, read “Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan” (“Alfred ordered me to be made.”). These twelve pointers, works of art, were made to encourage the instruction of the people of his kingdom in its language, English. In 1693, the handle of the only surviving pointer was found in Somerset. Now an artifact, it sits behind glass in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. As Melvyn Bragg puts it “Alfred the Great had made the English language the jewel in his crown.”18

Has our great literature followed the path of the handle of Alfred’s pointer to become buried under glass rather than to become the jewel in our crown? Have we put aside the teaching of poetry as art, relegating it to the status of artifact? Have we done the same with countless novels and short stories as well by claiming that our students will find their vocabulary too difficult or their themes not relevant to life today? If we have, we are wasting a valuable resource, one that should not be considered as a cause of the problem, but one that should be at the heart of the solution.


Should we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings?

In the year 2000, William Shakespeare was selected by Great Britain as the “Man of the Millennium.” He is considered to be the father of modern English. In the 37 plays, 154 sonnets and various other poems, he displays a vocabulary that contains 34,000 words or roughly double the vocabulary of an educated person today.19 Ben Jonson said, “He had the mastery of the diction of common life.”20 Besides the 154 sonnets and the other assorted poems, Shakespeare’s 37 plays were written in poetry. But they were not “just” poetry. His themes, drawn from common life experiences that are as relevant now as they were then, teach a host of valuable lessons. In an age when women had few if any rights, Shakespeare created strong and independent female characters like Beatrice, Rosalind, Hermione, Portia and Lady Macbeth. His settings span over 2,000 years from the ancient world and through the length and breath of Europe. The themes of his plays explore the recurrent themes of life, that include dysfunctional families, historical figures, “star-crossed lovers,” kings and clowns, interracial marriage, true friends and friends betrayed, the uses and abuses of power, fable and fantasy, and they were written for comedy as well as for tragedy. “Shakespeare’s genius with language, his skill as a dramatist, his insight into the human soul, can inspire in even the least academic student a passion not only for Shakespeare but also for language, for drama, for psychology, and for knowledge.”21

Today, Shakespeare is known as the most read, most performed, most prolific poet/playwright in the history of the world. He occupies this position in literary history because his plays uniquely mirror the comedies and the tragedies of our own lives. In the lines of these plays, Shakespeare takes the mundane problems of daily life, and through the beauty of his words, makes them seem, at once, human and divine. “Our remedies oft’ in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven.” (All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 1, Scene I, lines 231-232) Because these plays, unlike our movies today, could not depend on camera angles, the miracles of makeup and computer generated special effects, they were performed with meager sets and hand-me-down costumes used for all occasions. The majesty of performance was not in the presentation, but in the words. Shakespeare had to use words to convey imagery as well as to explain feeling. He had to have a huge vocabulary at his disposal in order to paint the scenery and dress the set, instill importance into nuance and inspire his characters to lofty action. He invented words by the thousands, making nouns do the work of verbs, making Latin and Greek words into new English words to convey his meanings. “Duke me no duke” and “Out Heroding Herod” are but two examples of his skill. “Incarnadine,” another example, taken from the Latin word for raw meat, describes the seas of blood on the hands of the murderous Macbeth. Shakespeare plays with words the way a cat toys with a mouse, reveling his unique abilities to make metaphor as well as produce pun. In Romeo and Juliet, (Act 3, Scene 1, lines 98-100), he places in the mouth of the dying Mercutio, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” Charles Dickens later mirrors Shakespeare’s pun in A Christmas Carol when his main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, comments on the apparition of Jacob Marley, “There is more gravy than of grave about you.” Or finally, from Much Ado About Nothing, “Note this before my notes: There is not a note of mine that’s worth noting.” (Balthasar, Act 1, Scene 3, Line 56-57)

John Barton, a leading English director of Shakespeare’s plays, has said “In the end, above all, what first drew me to him, is his language.”22 The Folger Shakespeare Library advises, “The words are the soul of the play and if you don’t have time to do everything – concentrate on the words.”23 In the Folger Library Shakespeare Education and Festivals Project Handbook, there is a diagram of “O’Brien’s Unfinished Taxonomy” which “represents visually the centrality of Shakespeare’s language – THE WORDS – in Shakespeare education.”24 Because his vocabulary was, to a great extent, what our modern vocabulary is based on, it is incumbent upon us to read Shakespeare. Why? His plays have dynamic themes that are relevant to our own lives. His language soars with simile, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, rhyme and rhythm enough to make us phonemically aware for a lifetime. His plays are not just poetry, but performance as well. And because he’s a darn good read, one that will inspire our students to want to read more and to write better. After all, aren’t those our goals?

"If we do now what we did before..."

What is our competition?

“It is true that there is more material written and printed and read today than ever before, but there is also a new electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word. Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio and TV.” 4


Marshall McLuhan wrote these words in his book, Understanding Media in 1964. One reviewer, Dwight McDonald, who is quoted on the first page of this book under the byline “Good-bye to Gutenberg,” stated “The serial logic of print is fading out before the intuitive ‘mosaic’ of instantaneous communication. Books ‘contain,’ TV ‘involves’.”5 In 1964, McLuhan saw the challenge that the “electric technology” was making to our print culture. In that year, homes had radios but usually only one TV. I wonder if McLuhan could have guessed that the world over forty years later would be further electrified by multiple TVs in the home as well as in planes and cars, by CDs and DVDs, by hand-held video games, by cell phones and by computers and the Internet. All of these electric progeny of the technology of 1964 involves the attention of our youth today in that same intuitive mosaic of instantaneous communication, the expansion of which might have boggled the mind of the author. That schools would use much of this electronic technology as a basic component of the educational process would have truly amazed him. It is this technology that is the real competitor for the attention of our youth. It is this technology that we must compete with if we want to develop in our students a love of the written word for it has changed their world and ours in ways we have only begun to comprehend.

Some of these changes have been for the better, as technology has broadened our world with information previously unavailable to us. Movies and television have often inspired us to want to read books we had not thought of reading before. Within a few years, the contents of many of the world’s best university libraries will be as close to us and to our children as the nearest computer screen. At their best, these technologies are an introduction to a literary world open to us by opening the cover of a book. So in this age of technology and electronic media then, are we really saying goodbye to Gutenberg? Has the importance of the invention of the printing press, an invention that opened the door almost eight hundred years ago to the possibility of completely literate societies and a metaphor for reading today, become irrelevant in a world of technology? Only if we want it to.


Do we want to say goodbye?

That today’s easy access to the host of technology arrayed before our children has been in competition with time spent reading is not hard to understand. That we are powerless to compete with it, while sometimes an understandable feeling, is not really a true evaluation, and betrays a lack of confidence not only on the part of the promoter but in the product as well.

This statement also begs the question: What exactly are we promoting? The answer in many of the nation’s school districts that are having trouble meeting their academic goals is that what we are promoting is the process of reading and not the reading of the literature itself. These districts, either on their own or through whole school reform packages, have invested in the mechanics of reading, reducing the process to skill related repetitive practice, or “skill and drill.” What did these districts teach in K-3 reading programs? Did these programs work? If they did, these students should be reading on or above grade level by the end of the third grade. If they didn’t, why are we still using the same models and the same techniques not only in those grades but in grades 4-8 as well? As students mature, don’t we run the risk of further alienating their interest? What we have done to reading, we have done to writing as well, separating it from the reading component and using the same type of skill related repetitive practices. Do our children demonstrate any incentive to write today? Has separating these two proficiencies improved our writing scores? It seems to me that until we have answers to these questions, we are just digging down rather than digging out.


“If we do now what we did before,
Will we get now what we got before?”

The answer to this question seems to be self-evident. It lies in the scores of “at-risk” districts all throughout the country. What we are doing now is re-teaching the same skills that young readers and writers learn when they first learn to read and write, and we are doing it with fragmented and mediocre reading and writing prompts, over and over again.

While it would be folly not to reinforce the basic techniques of reading and writing throughout a child’s education, we must challenge the minds of our students with ever more sophisticated reading material and writing tasks in which to use these techniques. We must introduce the use of critical thinking skills to these techniques to understand more complex plots and provoke written response. Reading and writing are two sides of the same linguistic coin. In order to teach our children language in its fullest sense, we must not only let it speak to them; we must encourage them to speak to it. In short, by continuing to feed that love affair a child has with language so very early in life with interesting and challenging literature and to encourage response through writing, we must insure that reading and writing remain an integral part of a child’s development well into adult life.

Remember Dylan Thomas’ response to the question of what made him want to read and write poetry? “I had fallen in love with words. What mattered was the sound of them when I heard them for the first time on the lips…”6 Would our children be able to say as much today, or have we placed on their lips a tepid array of words taken from small capsules of mediocre writing? Are we challenging their intellect with the complexities of master plots, or are we merely exposing them to literary types? I don’t believe that we have to worry about the influences of electronic technology on the lives of our students outside the classroom as long as we have a strong enough incentive to open the doors of their minds to the fascinating and challenging worlds that only great literature has to offer. Our language is our key. The beauty of its sounds will turn that key that will unlock the reading and understanding of great literature and will inspire students to read more and write effectively.

Absence

Absence

The last post I made on this blog was on Wednesday, July 28, 2010. I know. I had promised to post writing on this blog every day from December 30, 2009 until December 29, 2010. I guess I failed in that regard. For a while, I was not only generating new writing, but revising and finishing pieces that I started in the past. For a while,this blog really worked in encouraging me to write regularly. But not forever.

I had assumed that this task would be the boat I rowed down the river of the time from the first day I started it until long into my retirement. As a matter of fact, I had posted a number of poems and prose on how I was facing the decision I had made, and how ready I was to retire. I was wrong. I was not ready. At least, not emotionally. I failed to take into consideration how much of my life was entwined in my profession as a teacher, and in all the other duties I fulfilled in tandem with that profession. I never meant this blog to be a diary, and so this is not an entry in one. I have had a difficult time facing who I was, beside the job I held for over forty years. All the years of the rest of my life have stretched out before me, and besides the odd lunch or dinner, I had, and still do not have, any idea of how I will use it. What would be my purpose in life now. And I will be honest and tell you that anxiety, something I had fought and thought I had beaten over thirty years ago, returned with a vengeance.

I am working on it now, and things are better for me, but the task, like a great blank page, of what I should do now, still looms before me, empty. But I am working on it, and I am sure that, in time, that empty space will be filled with what I really want to do. I have already begun by starting a few new pieces, but nothing I feel ready to share at this point. And a few new ideas on what I want to do with the rest of my life.

I have also spent a lot of this summer remembering back to a lot of past events in my life, most of which I do with great pleasure, and a few with some pain. Some of these memories are of a time, five years ago, that I spent at Oxford University, and the paper I presented at that conference in August of 2005. I have said more than once what a great experience it was, so I will not bore you with that. What I would like to share with you is the paper I presented at that conference on August 1, 2005 at 8:00 am over the next few days. I want to do this because I spent over a half a year of my life on it, and I believe that it sums up what I believe is most important about bringing our children to a love of literature, a journey that will teach them much about reading and life.

While I wrote this paper to present to teachers chosen from all over the United States and about how we should approach the teaching of literature, this paper is also a commentary on the importance of literature to our life, and the importance of poetry to the study of that literature. Needless to say, I was and am still proud of this paper. While I went through over twenty revisions to make my words speak for my beliefs, I don’t know whether it is good literature, but it is a great representation of what I believe about writing. Poetry. Words. And that is why I want to share it with you now.

I will continue to work on the new writing I have started, and hope to be back blogging on a daily basis with new writing soon. Not only for you, my readers, but for me as well. And, as always, I encourage comments. These last few weeks, if nothing else, have taught me that I still have a lot to learn.


Beyond Reading 1st: The Teaching of Reading and Writing

Christopher A. Bogart, Jr.

Presented at the Oxford Union Debate Hall
Oxford University
August 1, 2005


In response to the demands of federal assessment of students beyond the third grade level, many school districts throughout the United States have separated reading and writing instruction, and reduced their pedagogy to skill related repetitive practice. This is particularly true in states where whole school reform models have been imposed on school districts in order to raise scores to meet statewide expectations or to conform to the individual AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) goals set under the auspices of the federal “No Child Left Behind” legislation. When this is done, students are denied the opportunity to develop a real love of language by reading the great literature that is their common heritage, and by advancing their writing skills through its vocabulary and its style.

We know that the more children read, the faster they are able to read, the greater their comprehension, the more their vocabulary increases and the better they write. In order to provide our students then with the real incentive to read and to write more and effectively, the great wealth of literature written in the English language has to be placed before them to understand and to enjoy as listeners and readers, as well as to emulate as writers. To accomplish this task, we must first reconnect our children with the love of and fascination for words that they have innately at the earliest age. We must then expand upon that innate love of language by introducing and nurturing a love of literature. This will increase their vocabularies as well as develop their critical thinking skills as they learn to understand, appreciate and enjoy the great wealth of this literature and to relate its values and themes to their own lives.


What’s in a Word?

When asked why he first began to read and to write poetry, Dylan Thomas responded “because I had fallen in love with words.”1 He explained, in his “Notes on the Art of Poetry” that the first poems he was acquainted with were nursery rhymes. He continued:

…before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. 2

Like Dylan Thomas, tenth century warriors responded to words as they sat around the fires of sooty mead halls for warmth and listened to the rhythms and cadences of Beowulf. The words that fell from the lips of scops who sung these rhythms, weaving them into the tale of Beowulf and his comrades, fascinated and inspired these warriors, much as a child today sits near the warmth of a parent and listens with that same fascination to the sounds of the words of a language that has developed and grown over the last two thousand years. As with the earliest experiences of the Welsh poet, they fall in love with the sound of these words. At first, they barely care what the story is about. The sounds that emanate from the mouth of the reader are cause for fascination and experimentation. The adults who read to them and speak to them feed this fascination with their sounds. These children soon become “collectors of words.”

Through an almost instinctive sense, they realize that the more words they accumulate and experience, the greater their ability to communicate with the world around them. It is not only the sounds that fascinate them, but their meanings become crucial to their own self-expression. They want to be read to, not only to hear the sounds of the words, but to listen to their combinations weave tales they seem never to tire of hearing. It is not too difficult then to believe that the more children are read to and spoken to, the greater their vocabulary and the greater their desire to read and to communicate on their own. They soon become acutely aware of what the Greek mythological king, Cadmus, learned centuries ago when he planted the dragon’s teeth, that words, like the fully armed men that sprung from that Theban soil, spring from the mind and the mouth, full of meaning. As these children sit closer to the reader, and look over the page to see where the reader is drawing this story, they see the “teeth of the dragon,” the phonetic symbols that we form into words to tell the tale. It is not long before they develop a desire to “break the code.” They want to read. But like each of these children, who asks as the page turns, “Then what happens?” we are now forced to ask ourselves that same question. What happens between the time that they fall in love with the language they are learning and the time that that love grows cold?

Then what happens?

There are many educators who think that they know the answer to this question, and their opinions echo down the corridors as well as in faculty rooms of schools throughout the United States. They range from blaming parents who use television as a babysitter instead of reading to their children more often, to video games, the Internet and now even cell phones. Each of these arguments has some truth to it. Each might be eligible to share the blame for lack of student interest in reading and poor scores. However, these arguments are about as relevant as the question “What if Adam didn’t eat the apple?” Schools cannot really control what happens, or does not happen, in the home. Teachers can provide examples and suggestions to parents to encourage their children to read. We know how important it is for a child to be read to, to be spoken to, even to have their parents model this behavior by reading themselves. However, there are numerous instances in our history when the child reads before the parent, and with no modeling at home. In Chapter 7 of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, Pip has learned to read and write before his parental figure, Joe Gargery. He writes a letter to the illiterate Joe on a slate tablet, “…and Joe received it as a miracle of erudition.” When he sees it, Dickens writes, he “…opens his blue eyes wide.” “I say, Pip, old chap!” he exclaims, “What a scholar you are! Ain’t you!”3 Like Pip, most of the children in the one-room schoolhouses that operated in the nineteenth century in rural America became the first literate members of their families. Even though these children attended school between harvesting and planting with the support of their parents, they were unable to benefit by being read to at home or modeling by literate parents. The importance of reading and writing was a societal value that was solely in the hands of teachers, sometimes the only literate members of the community. Today, many of our inner city schools are populated with children that are the first generation of English speakers. Many of them have not been read to or spoken to in English at home. They too will be the first English readers and writers in their homes.

As it was in the past, it is the teachers who inspire this first generation of readers and writers in America to value these skills. As they learn their value, worlds of language and imagination open before their eyes, insuring that reading will be the birthright of the next generation. Like the Anglo-Saxon audiences of the past, it is quite often one of the only doors that opens to the imaginations of countless authors and the worlds they created.

Ultimately then, I feel that it is not productive for educators to use lack of parental involvement as an excuse. Yes, it would be more educationally sound to leave the video games at home when traveling; or, while waiting in a doctor’s office, to encourage children to pick up a Highlights magazine, or bring a book. Yes, children would benefit more by reading on long car or train trips or just looking out the window, rather than turning on the TV in the SUV. But, once again, these are all things that ultimately we cannot control. We must therefore focus on what we can control, for, after all, we are the educators. As in the one-room schoolhouses of rural America, we are many times the only open door our students have to the world of literature. But unlike those schoolhouses in the nineteenth century, we are not the only door that opens to their imaginations today. There are many more competitors for the attention of our youth than there were in the nineteenth century. While we cannot make the home environment of our students the focus of our attention, what competes for that attention should definitely be our focus. For it is these competitors that many times play a part in our students’ lack of incentive to read and to write.