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?
No comments:
Post a Comment