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.