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.



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