From: Betty Ihlenfeldt <Ihlen>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 09:17:01 -0600

With no word the past couple of days on this wonderful issue, I want to add just a bit of the dialogue I had starting this past February with college instructor Jane Kurtz of North Dakota. She mentioned in her general February 1, 1997, note to ccbc-net about Lowry's -Number the Stars- and
-The Giver- that we might, in high school instructing of "literature" be missing some "compelling" book recommendations....that we might be forcefeeding the time?mented "canon" and that we might share such thought-stirring titles as -The Giver- to stir more discussion.

That grabbed me. I've been saving quotes/notes about "what is LITERATURE" for most of my 30+ years of high school literature instructing. At an ALAN convention a few years back in Baltimore I ran across a former department chairperson who was outside a YA author workshop door. When I asked her if she'd changed her mind about giving kids the "canon"--none of these
"lightweight YA things"--which she'd said back in the 1960's, she first just grinned and then said "Not a bit. They have only so much time. They'll find the other YA things on their own. They need us to push and pull and stir them into Cather and Shakespeare and Hansberry and TS Eliot. I'm just waiting for one of my younger teachers to meet me here. I was stunned. I guess I still am.

The last thing in Jane K's 2/1/97 note said "Does anyone have any creative thoughts about just what the process is or could be for getting high schools to consider using some books that, say, weren't being used...25 years ago."

I emailed her saying I often as a high school teacher got "flak" from college teachers about high school students in general not having read some things that like -Scarlet Letter- or -Huck Finn_, about these students not having enough reading background to discuss or compose in college courses. I said there were lots of pushes and pulls to do the "sposed to" lists but that I'd intersperse grabbing literature on or off those lists in a kind of word-doctor approach to relevance to their immediate and future lives.

On 2/5 she responded: "One of my cooperating teachers last year commented that she always taught -The Crucible- because she knew her students would never be exposed to it if she didn't--and there's a part of me that resonates with such thinking. I love -The Crucible- myself, and taught it some years when I taught high school English. Still, I observed the student teacher in her room during the discussion of that play that thought the students looked mighty tuned out, for the most part, as they did during
-Huck Finn-. I suppose one things I'm curious about is why it seems that elementary and middle school teachers do more incorpoating of new literature than high school teachers. Some of the same problems apply. I wonder why the difference is so striking."

"It's silly putty", I said on reply. Each of us is in the business of word warriorship because we love it and then comes the paperwork and the
"standards" lists. We have these official curriculum sit-down times to write down what each student can do. (Reminds me of the objectives our principal made us put in lesson plans back in the early 1970's: By the end of this unit, each student will be spell with 80% accuracy 75 of the 100 vocab list words.....or by the end of this book, each student will have comprehended and paraphrased all 1,057 plot nuances....or....)

Ms. Kurtz, 2/9/97 with the North Dakota flood all about: "Yes, these all seem thoughtful responses to the reasons why it's so hard to get more contemporary literature into the high school classrooms. They sound so good, in fact, that I find myself almost swayed to the point of view that it's probably okay that things are as they are. Only a coughts keep me from that point of view. One was that when I taught the adolescent lit. class last year, I noticed that my students (who were mostly juniors and seniors, English majors, and would? high school Englist teachers) were quite adept at navigating their way around the classics (which they'd had in school) and lightweight, genre books (romances and such, which many of them read for pleasure) and realy remarkably, remarkably unadept at navigaing contemporary literature. You would think that some of what they'd been taught in approaching the canon would have generalized, but it really didn't. We weren't looking at difficult books (some were middle school books, like -Maniac Magee-)--I assume these kids came up through the elementary schools before whole language and they hadn't read even the Newbery novels that we looked at--but they had real trouble with things like separating out author voice from a character's voice or knowing how to make sense of ambiguous endings or a lot of things that I consider basic good reading skills. The other is noticing my own kids' ractions to a lot of what they're reading in high school, including my older son't antipathy for -My Antonia--. Sad to say, it looks to me as if what he's really being taught is that reading isn't for pleasure; it's drudgery."

Instructor Kurtz concluded by saying she wasn't really a "literature person but a writer and a teacher of writing...only struggling to make sense of what I'm seeing."

Apparently the North Dakota floods arrived but that "struggle to make sense" is very much with me as summer winds down and teaching is about, again, to be my major concern. Please share while July lasts any and all
"what is a classic" --the discussion is classic and inspiring to this De Forest teacher.

Cheers. Betty Ihlenfeldt





"Your thorns are the best part of you." (Poet Marianne Moore)
Received on Fri 25 Jul 1997 10:17:01 AM CDT