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

What is our competition?

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


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

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


Do we want to say goodbye?

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

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


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

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

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

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

Absence

Absence

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

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

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

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

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

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


Beyond Reading 1st: The Teaching of Reading and Writing

Christopher A. Bogart, Jr.

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


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

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


What’s in a Word?

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

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

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

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

Then what happens?

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

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

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

Orange Crates and Other Treasurers

Orange Crates and Other Treasures
Christopher Bogart

A true treasure trove consisted of a broad spectrum of collections,
including things abandoned, things discovered,
and things rescued.

The discriminating collector, the true artiste, as it were,
found intrinsic worth in form as well as function.
Was it shiny, for example? Was it sturdy?
What was its potential as a conserver of treasure?

Shoe boxes were great for stamp collections,
coin collections, vacation photos, postal cards or
a backyard burial for a budgie or a hamster.

Soda bottle caps, filled with melted wax, made for
fast-moving games of street skully.

Tobacco cans, the maroon Prince Albert, were the best,
and kept dyed rabbit’s foots, bottle caps, baby teeth
the fairy forgot to take, and cat’s eyes and aggies safe.

Empty coffee tins with holes punched in their lids
kept grasshoppers, crickets and toads,
while marmalade jars kept butterflies, and ladybugs
and fireflies.

Our project apartments came with appliances,
but when we moved into new development houses,
empty appliance cartons were great for tumbling down hills,
four or five to the carton, for as long as the carton would last.

But the piece de resistance of all empties was the orange crate.
Its thick wooden sides and its long thin wooden slats
provided butt and barrel for a perfect Tommy gun.
And, just for fun, the crate as a whole could be
molded into a go-cart, with a little art, and just the right
pair of metal roller skates, mounted on a four-by-four.

In the years of my youth, I discovered treasures by the score,
but the more I collected, the more I stored; until
in the ripeness of age and acquisition, I found that
there was just no room left to stash them all, besides
they had been joined by more mature collections:
the errant letter from a friend, the college photo,
gold cuff links to a shirt I no longer wore, or had.

It seemed sad. But then again, maybe not so. For I have stashed,
stored them in a place that takes little space,
this treasure trove of memories.

L'Apres Midi d'un Faun

I have very eclectic tastes in poetry. I love Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's Paradise Lost, the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Dylan Thomas, to name a few. One poet, however, I discovered more for his interesting life, and only came to appreciate his poetry later. That was the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. He had his first poem published when he was sixteen. He was a wild child, a sexual and alcoholic libertine, and a devout Catholic, who loved many and various woman, yet was the teenage lover of the French poet, Paul Verlaine. But he was a magnificent poet, as well, writing verse that was raw and, at the same time, beautiful. His poetry, however, is more beautiful in its original French. Before he reached 21, he had given up writing altogether, and traveled all over Europe, Asia and Africa before returning to France with cancer which killed him at the age of 37.

He wrote a poem, called "The Faun's Head," in which the reader discovers a young faun munching on flowers. In tribute to his genius, and as a thank you for the enriching hours spent reading his poetry, I am posting that poem tonight. I am also posting a poem I wrote. It has a similar topic and form, but is very different in approach and intent.

The Faun’s Head
Arthur Rimbaud

Among the foliage, green casket flecked with gold,
In the uncertain foliage that blossoms
With gorgeous flowers where sleeps the kiss,
Vivid and bursting through the sumptuous tapestry,

A startled faun shows his two eyes
And bites the crimson flowers with his white teeth.
Stained and ensanguined like mellow wine
His mouth bursts out in laughter beneath the branches.

And when he has fled - like a squirrel -
His laughter still vibrates on every leaf
And you can see, startled by a bullfinch
The Golden Kiss of the Wood, gathering itself together again.


L’Apres Midi d’un Faun
Christopher Bogart

Brittle branches crackle crisply.
Thump upon darkened thump
echoes softly through the thicket,
as cloven hooves hit forest floor.

Its tangled fur of brown
with threads of red, its slender form,
dappled in shadows, rustling limbs,
reclines upon the bed of dead leaves.

And from its reedy pipes,
nasal notes float high
above the leafy canopy, to
permeate the wood with haunting song.

Brotherhood

Brotherhood
Christopher Bogart

Brotherhood
Is at the central core
of Christianity.
The very word
defines relationship,
the language of a single word
of camaraderie.

Brothers in arms,
Brothers in crime,
Brothers- in-law,
Step-brothers,
Foster brothers,
The Brotherhood of Man,
An ancient brotherhood
“Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers …”
A brother’s love.

But what’s so great about brothers anyway,
Particularly if you have one?

If they’re older,
they’re bullies.
If younger,
they’re the brother
you’re bound by blood
to protect.

And what about sibling rivalry?

Sometimes it seems
“He ain’t heavy …” really.
He’s just a pain in the ass.

Across the Fields of Yesterday

Across the Fields of Yesterday
Christopher Bogart

Across the fields of yesterday
Lie dreams that hang like summer smoke,
that, once afloat,
hover over slender blades of grass.

Each gentle puff of wind escapes
and separates diaphanous dreams
to single, slender strands of hope.

Some dissipate into the air.
Some curl and form
like clouds, and
shapes like figures,
Waiting to be read
by desperate eyes.

Some spread
and fly around like
pollen in an August wind,
to populate to newer hopes,
newer visions,
newer dreams,
form faces chasing
traces into alien worlds.

They twirl as airy ballerinas,
pirouette above the fields,
only to yield
to breezes cooler,
crisper, sharper,
curling into faerie forms,
and catching them
before they are borne.

New York Rhapsody

This post was a poetic exercise in sound that I wrote many years ago. I was always fascinated by the sound of words and how that sound affects the meaning of the words together. Like the ancient Greek King Cadmus, who sowed dragon’s teeth into the ground to grow soldiers, fully armed and ready for battle, I too wished to sow words that would do the same thing.

When I was in college, a friend introduced me to the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. It seemed that Thomas too was as fascinated with words as I was; but it wasn’t until later in my life, that I really grew to appreciate his poetry. In his “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” he said the following about his childhood fascination with nursery rhymes:

…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.

I wrote this poem, more like an exercise in sound, on my fascination with New York City many years ago. I don’t know what I want to do with it. Maybe expand on it someday, or maybe just leave it alone, and let it speak for itself.

New York Rhapsody
Christopher Bogart

Along the empty sidewalks and the streets,
Glimmering in the neon-tinted glow,
A city has its never ending birth,
Baptized by the moisture-laden steam
That rises in white wisps from tiny holes
Of large metal sewer caps in the street.

But then, amid the silence, comes the life …

Feet, feet that beat familiar rhythms
Rhythms of the city’s melody.
Wheels, wheels cause the metal caps to clatter
As if to keep in time with soft, clear strains
Of music seeping from beneath marquees.

A symphony, a symphony of sounds,
A symphony of city-scented sounds
The clamor, and the clatter, and the bang
Of city movement, city harmony.


One way or the other, I think that the fascination with sound and meaning that I have had all of my life, and, more recently, with the poetry of Dylan Thomas, has deeply affected my poetry and has set a direction for it in the future.