The Experience of Oxford, Part 2

The Experience of Oxford, Part 2
Christopher Bogart

The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Camelot, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Lowe

One of the great things about the time I spent in England, and in Oxford in particular, was the weather. Now I know that sounds a bit paradoxical, as England has a reputation for rainy and damp weather, but in the ten days I was there we had only one overcast day. It rained only briefly in the evenings, and the days were sunny and dry. I was there in the beginning of August and the temperature never rose above 78 degrees F during the day, but descended to the mid-forties in the evening. It was almost comical seeing people walking around in the evening in sandals and heavy woolen sweaters. Each of the 38 colleges has greens and gardens that, in typical English Garden fashion, are overflowing with flowers. Coming from New Jersey where our summers over the last decade have been hot and humid but with little rain, I asked one of the gardeners how often he watered these gardens. He replied, “Maybe twice a summer.”

While the colleges were built in a variety of styles that reflect the eras in which they were built, they were almost always built with honey-colored Cotswold stone. As a result, the city seems to have a certain uniformity of theme. This stone catches the light of day in different ways and at different times of the day, making it appear pale yellow in the morning to almost golden in the evening. The stone is now getting rare, and even small pieces of it are kept to make repairs.
In the summer of 2005, there were at least four Shakespeare plays being performed around town at any given time. I went to see an excellent student presentation of A Comedy of Errors in the garden at Magdalen College. Weekly orchestral and choral concerts, some in Sheldonian Hall, a hall built by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who designed and built St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in 1668, were advertised all over town. Museums, art galleries and botanical gardens as well as guided tours of the university and of Blenheim Palace, the “Alice in Wonderland Walk” or an evening with Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse mysteries, and the inspiration for the Inspector Lewis mysteries.

And then there are the pubs or public houses. Each of these pubs reflect different atmospheres and named for anything from the historical to the religious to the fantastic, with names like The Royal Oak (named after the oak the future Charles II hid in), The Lamb and the Flag and The Eagle and Child. The Bear is the oldest pub in Oxford was built in 1242. The Eagle and Child (or as the locals call it, “The Bird and the Baby”) was the pub where the Inklings, a group of authors which included J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (the Narnia books) met to discuss their writing. And while the serve the English “favorites” (steak and kidney pie, steak and ale pie and fish and chips), they also serve a wide variety of food, and of course, pints of ale with foam like whipped cream.

However, one night, a few of us decided to go on “an adventure.” We walked down Observatory Road out of Oxford toward the setting sun. Chatting carelessly and relieved that we had made it through the first day of the conference; we walked over the Oxford Canal Bridge and across the meadows where cows were grazing as the sun set over the field. It was a beautiful night, and reminded me of Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” We found a dirt road and walked down it until we came to a wooden bridge that spanned the Thames River. On the other side was the little town of Binsey, a town that consisted of only about five houses, and The Perch. The Perch was a thatched roofed pub that was founded in 1468. It had an outdoor eating area that fronted the Thames. We went in and found exactly what we expected – wood paneled walls and the locals having a pint and talking about the day’s events. Most of our fellow travelers sat in booths, but I went to the bar, ordered a pint and spent the evening talking to Simon, the bartender. Lost in conversation and the excitement of where I was and what I was experiencing, I barely noticed how late it was. Simon called us cabs. We were afraid of walking into the cows in the pitch black fields on the way home.

When the cabs brought us back to Oxford, I sat on the steps in front of the dorms and thought about the experience I just had. It was almost a walk back into time to a place in the past that was very similar to the one I had just experienced.

The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

Christopher Bogart

I don’t want these entries to sound like a travelogue or a diary of my own particular experiences in Oxford. Personal remembrances tend to lock the reader out of the experience by seeming to say “This is what I did. Don’t you wish you were there?” I want to write something more inclusive, something that would say “This is what awaits anyone who goes to Oxford.” I know that some of the details will have to be based on personal experience by necessity, as I would not be able to share what you could see and experience without having been there myself. However, I will try to be “inclusive” rather than exclusive. And I will try to be informative as well as inspirational.

To begin with, Oxford University is the third oldest university in the world, and the oldest English-speaking University. Founded thirty years after the Norman Invasion in 1066, it really began to grow in 1167 when King Henry II forbade English students from attending the University of Paris. Today it consists of 38 self- governing colleges and 6 permanent private halls. Unlike most American universities, Oxford is based on weekly essay-based tutorials supported by lectures and laboratory classes. In other words, education is placed squarely on the shoulders of each of the students. Students do not apply for one college or another, but to the university, and is placed in a college, not based on the major, but on the profile of the student. You could think of it as being almost similar to the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. It is the home of the Rhodes scholarship, one of the most prestigious awards in the academic world. While each college has its own library (the Oxford Union, a debate club on the Oxford campus, has three of them), the university library is the Bodleian Library, one of the most unique libraries in the world, and that includes one of the original Gutenberg bibles, an original Shakespeare first folio and the oldest extent copy of The Iliad by Homer. The collection is housed in five buildings, including the Radcliffe Camera. It also has a number of museums that include the world-famous Ashmolean Museum, The Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as well as a number of art and science galleries and The Botanic Garden. The university has produced graduates that have been come presidents or prime ministers all over the world. President William Jefferson Clinton was the first American president to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

The last paragraph only skimmed the surface of the unique attributes that Oxford possesses, but it is not the whole story of what makes Oxford so special. Oxford is not only a university, but it is a town as well. The university and the town are not separately sectioned, but are merged into one entity called Oxford. And while in the beginning of its history, the two elements, the “towns” and the “gowns” fought so violently that many students fled to found a new university, Cambridge, these two elements together, working in harmony, form the beginning of the Oxford experience. Only a few miles outside Oxford sits Blenheim Palace, the historic seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. In Adolph Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Britain, Blenheim was marked as Hitler’s residence, and the colleges of Oxford would be the seat of the new Third Reich England.

So much for the background or the broad view. In the next post, I would like to go into that uniqueness that makes visiting Oxford such an amazing experience.

Sleeper, Awake!

Sleeper, Awake
Christopher Bogart

The title of this posting, “Sleeper, Awake” is from the cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. This piece of music is based on the parable from St. Matthew’s gospel of the five foolish and the five wise virgins. These virgins are tasked with awaiting the master’s return. The five foolish virgins light their lamps early and fall asleep, so when the master comes, they have to be awoken and have no oil left in their lamps to guide the master home. Like the five foolish virgins, many of us too sleep through our lives, wasting our “oil” and concentrating on what is immediate, whether by necessity or by choice, and therefore limit our world as a result. We, like the minor characters in the poem, “Richard Cory,” by Edward Arlington Robinson,“work, and wait for the light.” However, some of us, unlike those foolish virgins, wake up in time to experience something that, even though it might be a once in a lifetime experience, will alter their lives forever.

I make no apologies for the topic I have chosen to write about. Since I have spoken about this topic and written poetry about it and posted it many times before, my readers, if there are any, must be sick of it by now. But my awakening was a seminal event in my life. I too slept for many years, focusing on what was right in front of me. I am not ashamed of that focus, as it was a necessary focus that enabled me to grow as a teacher, and to help many of the students I taught. Yet, when I was invited to experience something I thought that I would never have the chance to experience, over five years ago, I anguished over the choice for months, walking in the brisk night air of autumn, and listening to this cantata by Bach as I watched the sun set in front of me night after night and pondered whether I had the guts to accept this very special invitation. In the end, I did. And, as Robert Frost said in “The Road Not Taken, “that made all the difference.”

B.J. Ward, a very dynamic and popular New Jersey poet, once asked me what it was like to have the opportunity to present my ideas on education at Oxford University, and my simple response was “It was like academic Disneyland.” He laughed and told me I should use that phrase someday in my writing. I am following B.J.’s advice and using it tonight, for, as simplistic as it might sound, that was exactly what it was like. And so much more. Now, I know you are thinking to yourself. Big deal! It was a unique experience but there are other educators that have had such experiences. And, while I know that to be true, that fact doesn’t detract from the uniqueness of my experience. I am not living their lives, and so I don’t know how it affected them. I only know how it affected me. It was a big deal to me. It was an experience that lives in my memory every day of my life.

So I intend in my next few posts to talk about Oxford and how I found it to be one of the most unique places on earth. I know that this blog was supposed to be dedicated primarily to poetry, but it is also dedicated to writing. To be honest, I really don’t feel like writing poetry right now, or using this experience again as a topic for my poetry. I feel like talking about it through prose, and maybe in the talking, I might be able to work out why it has had such a profound effect on me. It certainly couldn’t hurt. And in the process, if anybody out there is reading my blog, the worst thing that will happen is that you will learn a little more about the oldest English language university in the world and my experience of it. Or maybe you will die of boredom. I hope not. I’m hoping for the former.

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?