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ENGLISH
The professional journal of the
California Association
of Teachers of English
Volume 15, No. 3 – March 2010
CALIFORNIA WRITERS, CALIFORNIA STORIES
Articles by Pete Barraza • Cathy Blanchfield
Marek Breiger • Cathy Cirimele • Todd Finley
Deborah Lapp • Glenn Morgan • Joe Perez
Steve Tollefson • Stephanie West-Puckett
In This Issue
6
New Life for Local Poetry: Modeling Hometown Poets
by Cathy Blanchfield
8
California Dreaming: Teaching the Literature of the
Golden State
by Pete Barraza
12
Five Weeks, Five Essays, Two Grades
and a New Perspective
by Deborah Lapp
14
Using Funny in Farsi to Engage Student Writers
by Glenn Morgan
18
Seeking a Newer World: Harte, Sarovian and Steinbeck
by Joe Perez
20
A Project About a Community:
William Saroyan’s Human Comedy
22
An Idiosyncratic California Reader
24
Gerald Haslam’s Many Californias
25
Teacher Plans in the Aftermath of the Space Shuttle
Challenger Disaster
by Todd Finley & Stephanie West-Puckett
i
n
r
fo
i
l
Ca
a
ENGLISH
March 2010
Volume 15 • Number 3
Features and
Columns
President’s Perspective – 4 • Editor’s Column – 5
Call for Manuscripts – 5 • Letter to the Editor – 9
by Cathy Cirimele
CATE Ballot – 10 • Reconcilable Differences (a
response to Doug Lassen) – 28
by Steve Tollefson
Directory of Advertisers
by Marek Breiger
Bible Literacy Project
2
Educational Testing Service
21
Inside Shakespeare
19
Peace Corps
32
Secondary Solutions
17
University of California, Irvine
7
The Artist of thie Issue
Jerome C. Harste
This issue’s artist, Jerome C. Harste, is Professor Emeritus at
Indiana University. He has served as president of the National
Council of Teachers of English and is a recipient of the
prestigious David H. Russell Award for his cutting edge work in
early literacy. Dr. Harste has made enormous contributions to
the field of education and is a member of the Reading Hall of
Fame.
The watercolors featured on these pages represent Jerry
Harste’s recent creative endeavors.
Shown on the cover: Take 2: Little Girl Reading (12”x16”, Watercolor) • (above) Self-portrait
CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF
TEACHERS OF ENGLISH
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
President – Robert Chapman (2010)
Past President – Michelle Berry (2010)
Vice-President – Charleen Delfino (2010)
Secretary – Carrie Danielson (2011)
Treasurer – Anne Fristrom, (2010)
Council Representatives
Capitol: Angus Dunstan • Central: Liz McAninch
Fresno: Tish Griggs • San Diego: Ron Lauderbach
Kern: Barbi Lapp • Redwood: Anne Sahlberg
Southland: Nancy Himel • Tulare: Carol Surabian
• Upper: Shelly Medford
Members-at-Large
Kathy Allen (Elementary, 2010)
Karen Brown (Middle, 2011)
Jim Kliegl (Secondary, 2012)
Cheryl Hogue Smith (College, 2011)
Jill Hamilton-Bunch (Small, 2012)
Carrie Danielson (Unspecified, 2011)
Richard Hockensmith (Unspecified, 2012)
Chairpersons
Membership Chair – Joan Williams (2011)
Resolutions Chair – Kathleen Cecil (2010)
Policy–Angus Dunstan (2010)
Conventions
Convention Coordinator : Punky Fristrom • Registrar: Edwin Hase
Exhibit Manager: Tammy Harvey
CATE 2010 Convention Chair: Nancy Himel
CATE 2011 Convention Chair: Michelle Berry
Communications and Liaison
CATENet Moderator: Jake Stanford • CATEWebmaster: Cindy Conlin
Policy Analyst: Martha Zaragoza-Diaz • CTA Liaison: Debra Martinez
CCCC Liaison: Bill Younglove • CYRM Liaisons: Joanne Mitchell
CWP Liaison: Jayne Marlink
CALIFORNIA ENGLISH
Editor:
Design:
Printing:
Carol Jago
GoalCoast Publications, (310) 663.9905
Sundance Press, Tucson, (800) 528.4827
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dues of $40 include $35 for a one-year subscription. Known office of
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I
am sitting here next to the fire at Moondance Café
in Pokhara, Nepal. It’s a long way away from my
classroom in Humboldt County or the trials and
tribulations of California politics and economic woes.
Nepal has its own problems and some are very
noticeable today. It’s the third bandh of our trip—a
general strike called by the Maoists closing factories
and businesses, roads and highways, and basically
bringing normal life to a halt here. Thanks to
sensitivity to tourism, a few restaurants and bars are
open. We just came back from four days in the village
I lived in when I served in the Peace Corps twenty-five
years ago. Sadly that part of our trip was shortened
by the second bandh we experienced. We had
planned to begin a three-day trek today but are lying
low for the strike, and so we’ll do an overnighter
instead. It’s disappointing to us but hardly serious
when I think about all the Nepalis who cannot work
today; who are forbidden to earn a living. The first
bandh lasted three days and while it made Kathmandu
a quiet, calmer place, with a lot less air pollution than
normal, the stress of the situation made Nepalis edgy.
The average Nepali citizen is tired of the political tugof-war and just wants the nation’s politicos to sit at the
table and work out their differences.
The instability within Nepali politics has grave
impact on education in the country. Though education
is far more accessible than it was twenty-five years
ago, the education system is totally fragmented.
Government schools—essentially public schools with
both federal and regional organization—are
floundering due to overcrowding, understaffing and
lack of funding. In contrast, private schools are
flourishing and many provide excellent educational
experiences. Community schools—both federally and
locally funded, but controlled by local committees—
are trying to bridge the gap between a centralized
bureaucratic system and the autonomy the private
schools enjoy. Community schools are only as good as
the interest placed in them—in villages where the
community is involved and willing to fund them, they
excel. In villages where the community is less
involved or where local funding is more of a hardship,
the results are less hopeful. Most Nepali students
attend government schools and may sit in classes with
over one hundred students to one teacher. Teachers at
these school admit that school is merely a formality
and that no actual teaching or learning is taking place.
With some time to reflect, I recognize that the
problems facing education in Nepal and the US are
surprisingly similar. Though education in the US is
P
resident’s
erspective
Bob Chapman
greatly controlled by
individual states, and
county and district
offices, more federal
control seems be coming,
and national standards
and curriculum are on
the way. Our public
schools are also divided, between traditional schools
and charter schools, not very different from the
government and community schools of Nepal. In
much of California, and the rest of the nation, private
schools offer excellent alternatives for parents and
students who are concerned about the overcrowded,
understaffed and poorly funded public schools in their
area. Though vouchers are not currently being
discussed much, that idea is sure to return and
threatens to increase the divide between public and
private options. Both countries’ systems seem plagued
by financial stress, and though creative ideas keep
surfacing, more fragmentation results.
The fundamental difference I see between our
two national systems is how teachers are viewed. In
Nepal, whether one focuses on failing government
schools or successful private or community schools,
teachers are appreciated and celebrated. When I tell
Nepalis that I am a teacher, I get praise and
encouragement, as do my Nepali counterparts. In
comparison, when I tell people I meet in the States
that I am a teacher, I usually get pity or a saddened
empathy. Nepalis are enthusiastic about educators,
and Americans are not. I know it is because education
is a relatively young profession in Nepal, and it is a
new opportunity that is exciting because it pays well
and earns respect. In the States, we have many
career opportunities and teaching is neither exciting
nor lucrative. Whenever I am in Nepal I always feel
good about being a teacher; all too often in the US I
feel too exhausted and confused to be enthusiastic.
Coming to back to Nepal is always an amazing
experience. Both my wife and I feel as at home here
as we do in Humboldt County. We love Nepal.
Coming back is cathartic and rejuvenating, and this
time, with this extra time to reflect, thanks to the
bandh, Nepalis have encouraged me to be satisfied
with my profession. A lot of Nepalis hope their kids
will become teachers, and that’s a great thing.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 4 –
From the
Editor
Carol Jago
alifornia is rich in writers.
Two of my favorite California
essayists — Joan Didion and
Richard Rodriguez — have
written with amazing grace about
the golden state. Not being a
native son myself and keen to
understand my adopted new home, I read with trepidation Joan
Didion’s essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem about the Santa
Ana winds making people crazy. “I recall being told, when I first
moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the
Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind
blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a
Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by
the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of
surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of
light sometimes called earthquake weather.”
My family back in Chicago worried a lot about my living in
earthquakes country. Not so my students in Santa Monica. I’ll never
forget the day the ground beneath our feet started to roll and the
classroom walls began to shake. Within seconds, Lee — a 12-yearold blind student — announced in a clear, steady voice, “Don’t
worry, everybody. It’s just an earthquake. Put your heads under the
desks.” I wondered, could it be something in the air Californians
breathe that makes them different?
Of course I adapted quickly and soon accepted as the norm
wildfires, mudslides, and buildings built to sway. I taught students
to Stop, Drop, and Cover and when another powerful earthquake
C
loosened a bank of lights hanging over my desk, I knew to call for
help. It wasn’t only a new climate that I was adapting to, though.
Without quite realizing it, I was detaching myself from the place I
was born and the people who knew me when. I was becoming a
Californian.
What is there about California that makes it such a seductive
place? In a 2003 PBS Newshour essay called “California Dreaming”
Richard Rodriguez explained. “What I have come to appreciate
most about California is the creative confusion that results from the
convergence of alternate points of view. Asians speak of the West
Coast as the beginning of the continent. Easterners call this the end
of the line. And Mexicans speak of this most western place as el
Norte… So we live in a state where people are simultaneously
coming and going, where up is also down, where the end is the
beginning.”
California’s “creative confusion” has inspired a host of writers
to explore their California dreams. From John Steinbeck’s East of
Eden to Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, writers describe how
the place changed people and how people changed the place. I’m
reminded of Frank Chin’s coming-of-age novel Donald Duk in
which the young hero keeps having vivid dreams about his Chinese
grandfather who helped to build the California railroads while
himself dreaming of being a tap dancer like Fred Astaire. Talk
about creative confusion.
Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, and Brian Moore all
found themselves drawn to California. Raymond Chandler whose
books define a particular California experience and inspired a whole
genre of detective stories once said, “If my books had been any
worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood. If they had
been any better, I would not have come.” This issue of California
English invited teachers to share how they use California authors to
inspire critical reading and writing. I hope you find many ideas here
for engaging students in powerful conversations about our golden
state.
CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS
APRIL 2010, ADOLESCENTS ON THE EDGE, (DEADLINE MARCH 1, 2010)
In Adolescents on the Edge: Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning
(Heinemann 2010), Jimmy Santiago Baca and ReLeah Cossett Lent explore
methods for engaging today’s teenagers in the kind of learning that can
shape their lives. How have you helped students who live “one the edge”
find meaning in your classroom? What literature speaks to them? What
kinds of writing helps such students find their voices? California English is
interested in publishing stories of your continuing challenges as well as
your successes.
JUNE 2010, LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER (DEADLINE MAY 1, 2010)
Modeled after Rainer Maria Rilke’s slim volume Letters to a Young
Poet, Basic Books publishes a series that includes Letters to Young
Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Therapist by Mary
Pipher (author of Reviving Ophelia), and Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel
Boulod. This issue of California English pays homage to Jonathan Kozol’s
Letter to a Young Teacher by inviting you to submit your own letter to an
imaginary or real young teacher. You might include insights from your
experience, questions that you continue to grapple with, and advice for
anyone contemplating a life in the classroom.
Manuscripts are peer-reviewed. Please send all submissions to California English editor, Carol Jago. Articles should be limited to 2,500 words. Please submit manuscripts to
cjago@caroljago.com or contact Carol Jago at the same e-mail address. MSS should, by preference, be submitted in Microsoft Word or pasted into an e-mail message.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 5 –
New Life for Local Poetry: Modeling Hometown Poets
by Cathy Blanchfield
ecently, I wanted my students to write during our NCTE
National Day of Writing. For years I’ve used a technique to
teach poetry called modeling. The technique can be adapted
to many forms, but when I first learned it we read a published
poem, then took unique style elements of that particular poem
and reconstruct those lines, using them as a model for a new
poem. My tenth grade English class was about to embark on a
multigenre project, so I thought this would be a great time to
read and model one of my favorite poems by Leonard Adamé
entitled “My Grandmother Would Rock Quietly and Hum.”
Because I require that poetry is one of the genres included in our
project, using Adamé’s poem was a good starting point.
Adamé was born and raised in Fresno, attending local schools
and eventually California State University, Fresno. He ultimately
taught at Fresno State in the English department for many years.
His poetry is often biographical and cultural which is why many
of my Hispanic students are drawn to it.
Whenever I use a poem for a model, I first read it aloud,
pausing where I want my students to concentrate. In “My
Grandmother Would Rock Quietly and Hum,” I read through the
images. The first lines of each stanza set the stage for a new
image. I want the students to understand each image so they can
recreate a new image for a person of their own choice.
After reading the poem a few times, I ask the students to close
their eyes and think about an elderly person in their own lives.
We then try to hear that person’s voice, feel his or her presence,
remember times they have shared.
Adamé begins his poem with:
in her house
she would rock quietly and hum
R
I ask the students to begin with a place. I give suggestions
such as “in her kitchen” or “in his car.” Then I ask them to write
2 – 4 more lines that describe the person that they have chosen.
Adamé continues his first stanza with:
until her swelled hands
calmed
Jeweleanna writes one example of this model:
in his garden
my grandfather would work
everyday even if he was ill
watering, planting, or just watching
Adamé’s second stanza begins with “in summer” then
continues with a further description of his grandmother. We
model that stanza with a time element. This may be a season or a
time of day. Later Adamé uses her clear eyes as a metaphor for
her understanding life better than the poet. My students see this
as a time to begin describing their relationship. Again Jeweleanna
writes:
His voice was so quiet
Yet when he spoke
It would always make me smile
For I knew he was fortunate to be alive.
We continue modeling stanza by stanza. The last stanza in
Adamé’s poem talks about memories with his grandmother.
Jeweleanna ends her modeled poem:
Now
When I go
Up to the snow, I always wish that
My grandpa could be there with me
Just me and him
But then I remember,
He’s safe at home, watching his garden.
Although a large number of my students are Hispanic, all
students are able to draw on Adamé’s experience and write
emotionally and responsively. However, many more of my
students are Southeast Asian, and although they all enjoyed the
Adamé exercise, I also want to use a Southeast Asian poet for a
second model. I often choose another product of the Fresno
State English department, Soul Vang. Vang immigrated to the
Fresno area as a young boy and is published in Tilting the
Continent, How Much Earth, Bamboo Among the Oaks, and
Central California Poetry Journal. He lives in Fresno, California
and is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. He
writes in what I dub the Fresno State style. It is usually
biographical, and consists of “stream of consciousness” images.
After reading his poetry, we try our hand at copying his style. We
notice that he often paints a series of three images. His themes
usually involve the difficulties in maintaining a cultural heritage
while merging with the American society.
Again, I begin by reading aloud, stopping after key phrases.
My students are always eager to try this style. I use Vang’s poem
“A Tropical Garden in the San Joaquin Valley” in which he
describes his garden that he grows in his Fresno back yard. The
students understand that the garden is an extended metaphor for
his Hmong culture, and all my students see how they might write
with figurative language in the “stream of consciousness” style.
He contrasts the soothing images of his tropical garden to the
harsh realities of the Fresno climate.
This year, the best comes from Borin Setha, a student in my
10th grade GATE class. Like Vang’s model, his poetry captures
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 6 –
Corruption of a Country
in a Country,
where light radiates
upon sprouting viridian gems,
reflections capture
the immaculate tranquility.
Children, neighbors and workers
are bound by the hymn
of life, soul, and labor.
Peace pleasantries, and sweet delicacies
remain trapped
until basked by the luminous moon.
The soothing teeth of rustling leaves
bathe the waning night away.
The sound of silence
echoes the atmosphere
of humid assurance
for the approach of tomorrow.
Then comes a man
of utter cruelness and tyranny,
full of eager dominion.
Followers clad in dismal colors—
men and children of shared blood—
approach with stubby, cool metallic points
pressed against malleable flesh.
The hymn of connection
is disrupted with inconsistent rhythm
to the devoured, isolated souls of innocents.
Through labor, villagers
are cradled in the embrace of death;
they rest in murky pools of corpses.
A soft breeze whispers through
black meadows, leaving only blood
to spew from deprived vegetation
and tears showering from the families of
A Country—
A Country seeking
evasion from a false salvation
and to release the shadow
obtrusive to the
radiating light,
that is prepared to permeate.
- Borin Setha
the style while describing the struggle his Cambodian family
endured before leaving for America. In the poem shown to the
left, Borin illustrates with exceptional clarity the contrast of
images that is also pervasive in Soul Vang’s poetry.
Although these are two very different styles, and many in the
class choose to write poetry from other types of poems we
study, it is very important to give them models from our own
local writers, representing the different cultures of my students.
Through this exercise my students are able to see themselves as
poets, expressing a cultural awareness within their own writing.
About the Author:
Cathy Blanchfield teaches 10th and 12th grade English at
Duncan Polytechnical High School in Fresno, California. She
has been an active teacher consultant in the San Joaquin Valley
Writing Project for nearly 25 years.
Letter to the Editor:
I empathize, if not agree, w ith Research
Update Bartholomew and Lopez's concerns
(November '09 issue) about the impending Race
to the Top strictures. I w onder, how ever, if,
teachers unions' fears aside, it isn't time to
consider utilizing standardized test score
outcomes as part of the matrix in teacher
evaluations? The key w ould be teacher input
regarding the selection of valid and reliable test
instruments; then an outcome w eighting,
according to how much control site teachers
have in bringing about those student
achievement measures.
As for accountability? Not in a state w hich
elects its Superintendent of Public Instruction
and Assembly and Senate Education
Committee members, plus has an appointed
Secretary of Education and State Board of
Education. 'Tis easier/easiest to shift the blame.
By the w ay, of all the achievement gaps noted
by AERA and others, the continuing one
betw een various Asian-American groups and
Anglos, especially in mathematics, seems to be
minimized. How about that?!
Bill Younglove
teacher/instructor (46th year)
– California English • Vol. 14.2 • November 2008 • page 7 –
California Dreaming: Teaching
the Literature of the Golden State
The appeal of the road and our desire for roots has defined our
lives, personally and professionally, and so we find that our
complicated relationship with place informs our teaching and
our writing.
--- From Teaching About Place,
Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel
ne of the gifts that any English teacher hopes to have is the
opportunity to teach the literature of his or her true interest. In
my case, it is the literature of my own beautiful state, California.
As a high school student, I had the fortune of taking a California
geography course, an experience that became much more real when
our instructor, Dr. Emmett R. Hayes, took all of his classes on a
three-day trip through the Sierras following the California Aqueduct.
We visited areas such as the San Andreas Fault in the San Cajon Pass,
the spectacular lava flows of Fossil Falls sculpted by rushing water
and wind late in the Ice Ages—a “fossil” of nature’s handiwork, and
the majestic tufas of Mono Lake. To this day, I can still remember
the smell of sage and rabbit brush in the California dessert, the
magnificence of Mt. Whitney, and the powerful silence at Manzanar.
In conjunction with the geography lessons, Dr. Hayes provided
lessons of folklore, history, politics, and environmental science in
order to make the curriculum relative to our lives and to our role as
California residents. Twenty-one years later, that experience resonates
with so much that I do as a teacher.
A number of years ago, when I felt that I needed to reinvent my
space and purpose as a teacher of literature, I recalled the impact of
my California geography course and its interdisciplinary and
progressive aim to make content applicable and alive to all students.
Thus came my own desire to create the California Literature course at
Santa Monica High School. The vision was to provide an
O
by Pete Barraza
experiential opportunity that would use a set of core texts to study
the various elements of our golden state, a place of region and myth--a place of dreams and realities. What began as a simple idea
supported by my colleagues and department chair, is now a popular
course thriving with five sections. Prior to piloting the course in
2006, and before submitting the course for approval to the University
of California, I elicited the help from one of my former professors at
UCLA, Dr. Blake Allmendinger, whose work has focused on the
American West, paricularly that of California. With his assistance, I
was able to put together a syllabus with texts and units that I believed
would be accessible, engaging and fairly representative of the
California literary experience. The University of California would
eventually consider the course a model for an innovative English
course.
The makeup of the California literature courses at Santa Monica
High School is nothing less than diverse, what might be considered a
more accurate reflection of the campus and community as a whole.
Although California Literature is not an AP course, its intent is to
provide a rigorous yet accessible experience for all students interested
in the class. Because the classes reflect a spectrum of diversity,
including student ethnicity, economic class, and academic experiences,
the course works to breakdown the invisible borders that often occur
through unintentional tracking or perceptions of achievement. This
allows students to see themselves reflected in both the literature and in
the critical dialogue that transpires within the classroom. In this
course, all students attempt to place their fingers on the pulse of
California through a set of core texts, through an examination of
supplementary readings and sources, and through a “hands-on”
experience along the lines of fieldwork or community-based
participation. This unique experience allows for the study of
literature in a traditional sense but also experientially, as it can be
National Council of Teachers of English Needs You
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is devoted to
improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts
at all levels of education. The Council promotes the development of
literacy, the use of language to construct personal and public worlds
and to achieve full participation in society, through the learning and
teaching of English and the related arts and sciences of language.
BECOME INVOLVED: http://www.ncte.org/action
JOIN THE CONVERSATION: http://www.ncte.org/community
ORDER BOOKS: http://www.ncte.org/books
CENSORSHIP ISSUES: http://www.ncte.org/action/anti-censorship
TO BECOME A NEW NCTE MEMBER, GO TO
HTTP://WWW1.NCTE.ORG/STORE/MEMBERSHIP
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 8 –
argued that literature is more meaningful when it acts as a conduit for
greater learning outside of the classroom.
After a successful pilot year with a group of students who helped
to shape the course’s future, the course grew in its popularity,
provoking the need for an additional teacher. What better choice
than to have a book-loving transplant from Oklahoma who is also a
yoga teacher, surfer, and a vegetarian to join in this literary endeavor.
Jenna Gasparino, my colleague and friend, has been instrumental in
helping shape and reshape the thinking behind the course, providing
for a more encompassing experience for our students. Being a native
of Los Angeles, I learned quickly that the outside perspective could
be just as Californian as my own, and possibly more critical being that
California is often seen as an anomaly to the rest of the country.
Regardless of our different backgrounds, Jenna and I share the same
belief that California literature speaks to many experiences, histories,
and places, and that California is continuously being redefined by the
many new voices that add to the California mosaic. We have enjoyed
teaching about the disenfranchised and the empowered through
Helena Viramontes’ Under The Feet of Jesus, about history, place,
and community through Steinbeck’s East of Eden, The Pastures of
Heaven, and Cannery Row, about uprooting and re-envisioning
through T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, about the San Francisco
Renaissance through Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, about local noir
and its current implications through Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet,
and about many other subjects through the use of poetry, non-fiction,
and the visual arts. We also share the belief that the most powerful act
of learning takes place outside of the classroom.
Part of the original intent for the course was to provide students
with a culminating literary trip, an experience that would allow the
literature read throughout the year to play out tangibly. Similar to my
own California geography experience, students in our California
literature courses have the opportunity to embark on a four-day
literary journey through the Central Coast of California, visiting
places such as San Luis Obispo’s famous farmer’s market, The
National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Corral De Tierra (Steinbeck’s
landscape for The Pastures of Heaven), Cannery Row, the Pacific
Biological Lab of Ed Ricketts in Monterey, Point Lobos (a place of
inspiration for Robinson Jeffers and Robert Louis Stevenson), and
The William Hearst Castle. At different locations along the journey,
guest lecturers visit in order to provide additional insight into the core
texts of study. Some of these lecturers include Dr. Kathleen A.
Cairns, professor of California history at Cal State San Luis Obispo,
Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, Director for the Center of Steinbeck Studies at
San Jose State, and Dr. George Matsumoto, Senior Education and
Research Specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
For many students, it is their first time away from Los Angeles,
experiencing what Gerald Haslam refers to as the “many Californias”
of our state. Since the first Cal Lit Trip, which took place two years
ago, it has been evident that experiential learning matters to all
students. This phenomenon allows for a shared interest to occur
when intellectual curiosity is created and fostered in a safe forum,
allowing the learning to occur between peers and not just through the
instructor.
Teaching literature at any level is a shared gift. So much of why
one teaches both canonical and contemporary texts is because they
provide some insight into our lives and the places we inhabit.
Interdisciplinary and experiential teaching of literature provides an
opportunity to question why it belongs to a particular place,
especially when it comes to a complex state like California. In reading
the kaleidoscopic literature of California, one will realize that it is
made up of a multitude of voices, experiences, histories, and enclaves,
all of which manifest themselves in the tension between California
utopia and diaspora. Although experiential opportunities to
understand the literature of a particular place may be rare or unique,
this is the intent of the California Literature course at Santa Monica
High School.
About the Author:
Pete Barraza has taught English for 14 years. He has been at
Santa Monica High School for the last 8 years, where he teaches AP
Language and Composition and California Literature. He serves as a
member of the Academic Committee for the Western Regional
Office of the College Board, has been a presenter at several forums,
and recently was as a speaker at the 2009 Steinbeck Festival.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 9 –
CATE Ballot 2010
There are two ways to vote in the CATE 2010 election:
1.Go to: http://www.cateweb.org/2010election
You will be prompted to enter a user name and password. Enter 2010 for the user name and nine (the number of CATE chapters
spelled out) for the password. Both the user name and password are case sensitive. You will need your CATE memership number
and your e-mail address to complete the ballot. The deadline for voting is April 15. (You can find your membership number on
the label on the front of California English. It is the four numbers above your name.)
2. Cut this ballot out from the magazine, complete it (include your membership #), and mail it today to:
Michelle Berry, P.O. Box 1402, Windsor, CA 95492.
Membership # ____________________
CATE President– Charleen Silva Delfino ___________
Teachers face incredible challenges each day from many areas—the federal
and state government, the local community and within the school community
itself. CATE provides support for teachers and concrete ways for teachers to
address and meet the challenges facing them. I would like to serve CATE as its
president and the teachers CATE represents by strengthening ties with other
organizations and agencies such as CWP and CRLP; The Reading Association
and The California School Library Association. I would also like to extend
CATE’s relationships with elected officials to influence the decisions that have
an effect on teachers and students. I want to serve you.
___________ CATE Vice-President – Liz McAninch
“These are the best of times; these are the worst of times.” Dickens’ oftquoted paradox could describe the turmoil of California educators today.
CATE faces a daunting task as support for professional development wanes
in this new age of scripted teaching and reliance on standardized tests. You
may well ask “where is the best” in this equation? Even as public education
fights to survive, CATE stands strong in its mission to provide opportunities
for California English teachers to share their best practices. In my early
years of teaching, I would not have survived without CATE Conferences, the
Bay Area Writing Project and CSC seminars at Asilomar. In order to bring that
sense of sharing and camaraderie to young teachers, I want to be part of the
team that works to increase CATE’s effectiveness as we look for creative and
innovative approaches that will shift the balance to the “best” of times.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 10 –
CATE Ballot 2010
___________ Member at Large, Secondary – Ron Lauderbach
I want to thank the membership and leadership of CATE for my
sustained enthusiasm for teaching. The four years I have spent as a
GSDCTE board member, almost two as president, have created the lens
through which I can focus on students and real learning. Although my term
as local president is almost over, I want to continue serving CATE as a
MAL.
Member at Large - Elementary – Denise Mikkonnen ___________
I have been teaching reading and writing for the past 13 years to
students from 4 - 10 years old. Organizations such as CATE, GSCTE and
CWP have been a tremendous asset for me, providing a forum for
conversations about literacy with teachers K - 12 and have encouraged
me to become a better teacher - knowing the big picture of what we do
and how we all work together to support student learning. It would be an
honor to serve on the CATE board as the Member-At-Large, Elementary
and continue the conversation.
Please also vote for your Council Representative to the CATE Board
CCTE (Capitol): Angus Dunstan
__________
CCCTE (Central): Susan Dillon
__________
RCTE (Redwood): OPEN
__________
FACET (Fresno): Shannon Taylor __________
SCTE (Southland): Nancy Himel __________
GSDCTE (San Diego): Lisa Ledri __________
TUCATE (Tulare): Carol Surabian __________
KCTE (Kern): Kim Flachmann
Upper: Shelly Medford
__________
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 11 –
__________
Five Weeks, Five Essays, Two Grades and a New Perspective:
Comparing T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain and Paul Haggis’s Crash in Freshman Composition
by Deborah Lapp
ENGLISH 1A (COMPOSITION AND READING) focuses on research and
source-based writing, so we read university-level prose mostly, but
occasionally fiction and film generate topics for writing and discussion.
In a California community college freshman composition class (two
hours of class and two hours of lab per week), TC Boyle’s Tortilla
Curtain and Paul Haggis‘s movie Crash with supplemental readings
support a portfolio of short papers and a documented source-based
essay.
Set in the Topanga Canyon area of Southern California, Tortilla
Curtain begins with the White liberal nature writer Delaney crashing
into illegal Mexican immigrant Candido, and their lives repeatedly
collide over the course of the novel. In Crash, characters of different
ethnic backgrounds overlap and collide as well. As one character in the
movie declares, “Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide
with each other.” My students, about half Hispanic, half White,
immediately identify with or recognize the characters in both works.
CLASS 1: When the students come in, they have the book Tortilla
Curtain, but don’t know about the movie. I’ve written the word
CRASH on the board, and they start with a free-association quickwrite on the suggested word. The result is an impressionistic
backdrop for the whole project: some relate the story of a crash
they’ve experienced or witnessed; some have seen the movie and write
about that; some immediately jump to the figurative collision of ideas.
Since both works exploit stereotypes, I do too: I’ve written each
ethnic group represented in the movie on a card. Students write down
stereotypes they know about that group (from experience, the media,
hearsay) on a page which stays with the group of three or four. The
cards rotate from group to group. Eventually each student group
responds to each subgroup: Black, Asian, Hispanic, White, the
wealthy, men, women, teenagers. I encourage them not to filter.
Without any comment, then, I show the first few minutes of the
movie in which an Asian woman crashes into two cops (a Black male
and Puerto Rican female), up to the scene in which two Black teenage
carjackers observe “over-caffeinated [wealthy] White folks.” They
respond, first in writing, to the racial slurs then we discuss. Students
are likely to engage in the discussion because they’ve formulated their
responses on paper. We speculate about the origins of prejudice.
Before sending them off to read the novel on their own, I read the
whole first chapter of Tortilla Curtain (12 pages) aloud--the scene in
which Delaney hits and injures Candido and hands him a twenty
dollar bill to assuage his (Delaney’s) guilt. Again we explore the
stereotypes (Delaney’s on the way to recycling, etc). Students predict
the outcome. Homework: Read Tortilla Curtain over four weeks.
LAB 1: Read Brent Staples’ “Just Walk on By,” a brilliant example
essay in which Staples shows first- and second-hand instances of how
he and other large Black men are feared simply by virtue of their size
and race. After pre-writing: “Reflect on a specific scene-based
personal experience which involved prejudice (someone prejudged you
or vice versa). Think of another example, even a second-hand example
(as Staples does), to further support your thesis about how you have
been viewed through the lens of prejudice,” the students write an inclass essay. The thesis is an observation of prejudiced behavior (e.g.
“because I am an athlete, people assume I’m not smart and don’t care
about my education”). I ask them to use each of those scene-based
incidents from the prewriting as examples to prove the thesis and to
model Staples’ conclusion—Staples proposes a solution: he will
whistle Vivaldi and give nervous pedestrians wide berth to diffuse the
tension—I prompt them: “so, offer a solution to how you do, could,
or will respond.” Because I tell the students not to share these with
their classmates, they usually do. (Paper load note: I collect in-class
essays, three or four at a time, in a portfolio at the end of a series.
The students choose their most effective based on a rubric, justifying
why the one is more effective, what went wrong with the others, and
steps to progress to the next level in the next series).
CLASS 2: A quote from the movie: “You think you know who you
are. You have no idea” is on the board as they come in. They think
they’re going to write about it as usual, so they start buzzing, but we
don’t have time on this day as we spend this class watching the rest of
Crash (1 hour 47 minutes total, an entire class period for me). The
time is worthwhile because we can stall while they are reading Tortilla
Curtain for homework. I hand out a slip of note questions—things to
look for: “how are stereotypes “used and abused in the movie?” Are
they fair? Are they short-cuts? Are they intending to make every
group uncomfortable?” No one comes out looking very noble in the
movie.
LAB 2: Having speculated earlier about the origins of stereotypes,
we read excerpts from Gordon Alport’s “The Nature of Prejudice.”
By “we,” I mean I read the selections out loud—not because I’m
pandering, but I want them all to have the background. Okay, I’m
caving to their reticence to read anything difficult, but I submit that
they learn from this “lap-reading,” and they appreciate the ideas and
the language when I read it. Having doused them with theory, I ask
them to write a second in-class writing assignment. I ask the students
to develop a specific cause-effect relationship from the book,
supported by Alport. (e.g. Kyra’s prejudice is based on fear, lack of
interaction and experience with anyone unlike herself, her own
insecurity, and her misplaced priorities. A bright student might
include a comparison to the Sandra Bullock character in Crash).
Again, this paper is saved in a portfolio; one will eventually be deemed
“most successful” and graded.
CLASS 3: Some criticisms of Tortilla Curtain deal with the
“unfair” portrayal of the white male buffoon and his cold ambitious
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 12 –
wife. Alternately, Chryss Yost from the Santa Barbara Independent
sarcastically writes, “Who the heck does this middle-class white dude
think he is to write about this stuff [an immigrant’s experience] as if
he knows about it?” In the quick-write, students choose which
character most resembles him or herself (or a close relative) and
support that choice. Then I group students by character (all the
“Candidos” together, etc) to share the responses and explore how
“fair” the stereotypes are of “their” characters. Just before they start to
wind down, I re-sort students into jigsaw groups (one of each
character in each group—generally four per group), and each student
in the group has the job of debunking or justifying the stereotype one
holds of another. Some groups resemble play-acting, students using
the first-person while defending a character (“of course, I trusted my
husband Candido because he’d been to California before!”). Most
refer to themselves in their analogous roles, but I observe lively talk
and stunning epiphanies. I ask them to write on the earlier page of
notes about their new revelations, alerting them that they’ll want to
refer to these ideas in the in-class essay next lab—they should look for
support in their homework reading.
LAB 3: Review MLA in-text citation (can’t do this often enough).
Referring to OWL Purdue website, we write a Works Cited page
together for three works: Tortilla Curtain, Crash and Alport (this way
they have a correct bibliographic entry for at least three works (a book,
a film and an article) on the ultimate paper. The students write a
third in-class essay describing the stereotypes in the book for one
character, supporting, in the body paragraphs, how these are justified
or not justified. Conclusion: Compare that character in Tortilla
Curtain to a Crash character and revisit the question of justification in
the comparison.
CLASS 4: This day we overtly tackle some of the reading goals of
the class. The board reads: “What harm comes from stereotyping?
Can’t we just shrug it off ?” We read psychologist Claude Steele’s
Atlantic Monthly article “Thin Ice,” which discusses “stereotype
threat” (the notion that we are particularly vulnerable to stereotypes
people hold about us; that, because I’m blonde, I’m expected to be
ditzy, so, if I ever act ditzy, the reaction isn’t one of shock or
disappointment, but acceptance—of course she would act that way
because she’s blonde—and that I’m vulnerable to seeing myself that
way and will perform with concomitant self-doubt. Of course, the
ramifications are more critical for students of color (but Steele and
Aaronson report similar findings with women in difficult math
classes). This nine-page article is dense (although there are a couple of
interesting pictures of a Black child with a hand mirror, which we
analyze in class), so I take all class to go through it. I read some while
students scrutinize each paragraph and write in the margins—“what
does it say; what does it do?” They read a short bit silently, then pair
up to compare annotations. I read some more; they read in pairs.
Steele’s solution doesn’t come until the ninth page, so we don’t reach
closure for the opening question until the end. I conclude with the
same question that has been on the board all class: “What harm comes
from stereotyping?” and I add: “What can anyone do about this?
What can you do about it yourself ?” (n.b. I use this work when I
teach Othello in a literature class as well). Homework: finish novel.
LAB 4: Since the premise for choosing Tortilla Curtain and Crash
is to compare them, we develop a Venn diagram to compare the two
generally, and a series of Venn diagrams to compare sub-points. For
more linear thinkers, we develop a three-column chart with headings:
“Tortilla,” “Both,” and “Crash.” The students fill in the chart on the
computer, then turn that into a topic sentence outline (a most
practical outline--a list of the body paragraph topic sentences). With
the time available, they gather quotes for support. At some point, I
usually do a “Chinese Fire Drill” (I use the term on purpose to show
how we casually employ pejorative stereotypes--to us, it means they
scatter to another computer and read what a classmate has written).
There’s ample opportunity for me to peer over the shoulders of
struggling students and try to guide them. Homework is to develop a
typed draft of the comparison paper between Tortilla Curtain and
Crash, a relatively simple paper for English 1A.
CLASS 5: Quick-write (intended to elevate the content and critical
thinking in the ultimate paper): “Referring to Steele (“Thin Ice”) and
Alport (“Nature of Prejudice”) and Staples (“Just Walk on by”),
comment on the state of ethnic and other prejudice in a) your world
today and b) Tortilla Curtain and Crash. Read to a partner; the ideas
hopefully bleed into the papers in the form of an upgraded thesis. We
workshop the drafts in a complicated read-around, the goal of which
is to add Alport, Steele and Staples to the final draft due next class.
As they read papers from other groups, a group of three or four will
annotate: “Staples,” “Alport,” or “Steele” where they see opportunities
for connection on their classmates’ papers. Switch--and they suggest
support from the novel and the movie in each of the body paragraphs.
Switch—Check for certain elements in the introduction including the
more complex thesis, then comment on the conclusion (Does it repeat?
No need for that. Does it say something? How about referring to
Alport, Steele and Staples?) There’s a face-the-front segment. I ask:
“what grammatical reminders do I need to cover right now?”
I find that “adequate” students are loath to really revise, so I try to
insert a new challenge at the revision stage which forces them to “resee” the paper and upgrade it to college level. Homework: Complete
upgraded Tortilla-Crash essay including all five sources in the paper
and in the Works Cited; be prepared to bring all three in-class essays
up on the computer in lab.
LAB 5: Students must have the source-based papers printed and
stapled by Classtime:05. At that point, I assign them each a partner to
read their papers aloud with a pen in hand. I allow them to correct
typos and even alter text or add citations. “I’d rather have it correct
than pristine,” I tell them (and I mean it). There’s a lovely hum in the
room infused with pride. They hand in their papers and begin the
evaluation of the series of in-class essays (three of them). They know
they were to have chosen the most successful, based on the class rubric
which incorporates a) content and critical thinking, b) organization
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 13 –
and support, c) language and style, and d)
grammar and mechanics. The chosen
essay I grade, along with the evaluation,
which they write in the lab: “Describe the
experience of writing an in-class essay
(you may want to compare it to a revised
essay assignment). Early in the evaluation
reveal the most effective essay of the three
and the reasons it is most effective. For
each reason, develop a paragraph and
support the assertion with evidence from
the essay or elsewhere (e.g. This essay has
more sophisticated vocabulary, such
as…”quote.”). After you have exhausted
the paragraphs of praise for the most
successful essay, explain what went wrong
with the others. Conclude with new
insight on what you’ll do in the next series
or in future in-class writing to even
increase your effectiveness.”
At this point, the students have
composed three in-class essays, an
evaluation, a college-level paper based on
two scholarly works, one memoir-style
essay, a novel and a film (sometimes I’ve
thrown in Obama’s “Speech on Race” as
well), and they’ve completed an MLA
style works cited with in-text
documentation. I have two papers from
each student to evaluate (probably 50 of
each), but I stagger these with my other
classes’ papers, and we can embark on
another project and another series of inclass essays. The next paper is a
researched proposal paper about illegal
immigration with an interview and an
annotated bibliography, but I promise
they’ll have both grades back before
another paper is due.
About the Author:
Deborah Lapp is an English
instructor and Honors Program
Coordinator at Reedley College in rural
Fresno County, California. A former high
school English teacher, she is studying the
transition from high to college writing.
Using Funny in Farsi to Engage
Student Writers in Discussions
About Voice
by Glenn Morgan
F
unny in Farsi (Random House, 2003) is Firoozeh Dumas’ memoir about coming to Southern
California from Iran in 1972 when she was seven years old. For years, I’d been searching, with
little success, for a satirical writer whose voice and subject matter was suitable for my 10th-grade
English classes. In the first weeks of school I tried out Funny in Farsi as a read-aloud, but as fall
turned to winter I returned to Dumas’ text again and again because it proved to be such a rich
storehouse for teaching students how to use conventions in their writing and to write in their voice.
My criteria for selecting a read aloud book are that its themes should highlight the instructional
focus of the unit (or year); be at or above most students’ reading level; model writing moves I wish to
teach; have short chapters or easily digestible chunks or vignettes; take cultural elements familiar to
my students and present them in novel ways; and showcase writing with a strong voice.
In early September, at the same time I was using Funny in Farsi to show my students how to
mark up a text using metacognitive markers, Sandra Helmantoler, my content administrator, handed
me Teaching Adolescent Writers (2006). This pithy little tome changed my whole approach to
writing instruction; paired with Funny in Farsi, I now had a mentor text to demonstrate to students
the mechanics and writings moves Gallagher breaks down into easily understandable principles.
Using Funny in Farsi to teach Voice with Differentiation
A writer’s “voice” is a notoriously amorphous concept for both teachers and students. To be sure,
teaching voice consists of identifying an author’s repertoire of stylistic tendencies in a work, but also
using it as a mentor text for developing a student’s individual voice in his or her writing. I break voice
down into five elements: diction, syntax, subject, imagery, and tone words. Consider Firoozeh’s voice
in the following passage from the chapter titled, “It’s All Relative”:
Aunt Sedigeh also had a beautiful garden full of nasturtiums, roses, snapdragons, and
sweet peas, a veritable Disneyland for the olfactory sense. We went to her house for lunch
every Friday; while the smells of her cooking filled the house, I would go in her garden and
smell every flower over and over again. Even though I went there weekly, each visit to her
garden was as exciting as the first.
When we moved to America, I no longer had access to those fragrances and I forgot
about my aunt’s garden. Strolling through a market in Berkeley one day, I spotted a vaguely
familiar flower. I bent down and smelled a sweet pea for the first time in fifteen years.
Suddenly, I was six years old again and running around chasing butterflies in my aunt’s
garden. (Firoozeh 97)
Consider the possibilities for using this passage in teaching student writing. In choosing diction,
specifically vibrant action words, why does Firoozeh select “strolling” over “walking”? It implies
casualness, which sets the reader up for the unexpected pleasure, a gift, in a Berkeley market. Not only
does Dumas powerfully link her memory of her aunt’s garden to the sense of smell, she is unafraid to
use cross-content area words like “olfactory.”
During initial voice lessons where the focus is on comprehension and diction, a diffusion I ask
students to silently read the paragraph and underline any words where they are unsure of the
meaning or they think a classmate who doesn’t speak English as well as they do might have trouble
(this lets struggling students save face). Then I read the excerpt again aloud on the overhead and have
students call out words that they underlined, which I box. This way I can quickly diagnose which
words need to be taught. Then more proficient students can volunteer synonyms for the word, such
as “smell” for “olfactory,” which I write above the boxed word. The next step to have a student read
aloud the altered text aloud for the class. Finally, another student reads the original, altered text aloud,
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 14 –
and we discuss how the more difficult words contribute to meaning,
most often with connotations. In this case, a students usually prefer the
original, “olfactory,” because it implies specificity and preciseness of
imagery, something I’m always trying to teach students so they don’t,
like, write about stuff and things a lot. This method of diffusing the
text allows students with a range of ability levels in a single class to
participate. When I look for a read aloud text, I want a technically
proficient writer with a vocabulary of depth and breadth who can also
model good sentence structure.
The idea is to cue students to about writing using academic language
and the language of academic sharing. It is not to pronounce the writer’s
version as the correct and only way to do it, but to invite discussion what
makes her voice work, what choices the writer made, and how those
choices ultimately contributed—or detracted from—the effect she was
trying to achieve. Students, even students who are Basic or Below Basic
readers, can engage in this kind of conversation if the teacher provides
support for the pair-share, including sentence stems.
In communicating her experience of both learning English and
connecting her family to life in Whittier, she is showing us how to look
back at her own Iranian parents through the eyes of someone who has
one foot in both cultures, Iranian and Californian. One of her stylistic
tendencies is her use appositive phrases. In the first chapter, she describes
how she was thrust into the role of translator for her mother:
The problem was that my mother, like most women of
her generation, had been only briefly educated. In her era, a
girl’s sole purpose in life was to find a husband. Having an
education ranked far below more desirable attributes such as
the ability to serve tea or prepare baklava. Before her marriage,
my mother, Nazireh, had dreamed of becoming a midwife.
Her father, a fairly progressive man, had even refused the two
earlier suitors who had come for her so that his daughter could
pursue her dream. My mother planned to obtain her diploma,
then go to Tabriz to learn midwifery from a teacher whom my
grandfather knew. Sadly, the teacher died unexpectedly, and my
mother’s dreams had to be buried as well. (5)
At this point in the semester, we are ensconced into our initial sixweek unit, “Voices of Modern Culture,” and students are soon to arrive
at their first major writing piece, an autobiographical writing. In 9th
grade, students wrote a piece on the origin of their name, modeled on
the Sandra Cisneros vignette, “My Name.” 10th graders are given a more
complex autobiographical writing task that builds on those skills and
challenges them, so the assignment is to write two monologues, in two
different voices, and a metacognitive paragraph analyzing each voice.
This multifaceted writing task must be built up to slowly through a
series of low-risk journal writing that address various aspects of the
prompt. When students eventually re-read the prompt, I can point out
that the pre-writing has already occurred. Thus, even “Jamie”—a gifted
but troubled student who by day is my 3rd period’s star writer, by night
a moll for the Lincoln Park Bloods—wrote one monologue in the
“homie” voice she uses to post up with her associates, one in the “church
voice” with her mother and aunties on Sunday, and then a mini-essay
explaining why both voices were necessary for her survival.
Using Funny in Farsi to Teach Elements of Satire and Literary Analysis
It used to be that satire was a genre generally reserved for seniors,
juniors, and honors 10th graders, but teaching and writing in a satirical
voice yields such rich conversations about writing moves that it seemed
only natural to apply it to ELL instruction in the regular English
classroom. After teaching a mini-lesson on three main rhetorical devices
in satire: exaggeration (or hyperbole), understatement, and irony, and
reading aloud a chapter, such as “Mickey Save Me,” I passed our
different colored highlighters and invited students to re-read the chapter
in pairs and highlight their own copies for those three devices. I gently
remonstrate ELL students never to highlight unless they create a key on
the first page (e.g., green for hyperbole, yellow for understatement, and
so forth) and to accompany each highlight with marginalia. This
prevents overzealous highlighting, while marginalia in pencil allows
students to go back and clean up mistakes. This is one more way to
stress effort and “mistakes are good” over getting it right the first time.
The end product is a text that kids can scan and quickly identify which
one or two satirical devices Dumas relies upon to achieve satirical effect.
After the identification exercise, we’re ready to move into a graphic
organizer that breaks down elements of writing, such as a TWIST
(Tone, Word choice, Imagery, Style, Theme) or the more advanced
SOAPSTone (Subject, Occasion, Audience, Speaker, Tone) which they’ll
get in AP classes. Students can do this in groups or by themselves, but I
then write a sentence analysis frame on the board:
Kelly Gallagher details in his book several activities that help
students move beyond summary into analysis, but since I primarily work
with ELL’s and struggling writers, I find sentence frames can be
incredibly powerful instructional tools. More than just “filling in the
blanks,” sentence frames both allow the student to construct insights
into the author’s craft (literary analysis) and practice their own writing
moves until he or she reaches automaticity: Title, Author, Genre
sentences (TAGS); compound-complex sentences, varieties of adjectives,
introducing quotes, and parenthetical citation
Using Funny in Farsi to Teach Conventions
I like warm-ups that inform me of the teaching moves I’m going to
make. In an instructional activity Arlene Fink dubbed “Grammar Time,”
the teacher starts with 2-3 sentence paragraph denuded of all it’s
punctuation and possibly given some strategic spelling errors
(they’re/their/there, etc.). Pick paragraphs (such as the earlier example
in the chapter “It’s All Relative”) that provide particularly strong “hinge”
points in a conventions lesson, so you could go several directions
depending on the needs of the class: semicolon usage, independent
clauses vs. dependent clauses, or compound-complex sentence structure.
During the first week of school, I read aloud FIF's opening chapter,
“Leffingwell Elementary School.” In this chapter, Dumas recounts how,
on her first day of school in America, Dumas was pressed into
translating what little English she knew for her mother, who knew less.
A day or two after the read-aloud, I began class with Grammar Time by
writing an excerpt paragraph up on the board stripped of all its
punctuation. While I took roll, students transcribed the sentences into
their writer’s notebooks in pen, inserting punctuation in pencil so the
changes are both evident and easily reversible. I walked around and datestamped the warm-up. Students knew that if I saw attempts to
punctuate in pencil, then they would earn credit, so for the first few
times, it was less about getting it right than getting engaged.
Students pair-shared answers and came to a consensus. Then I
not-so-randomly picked student pairs to come up and
punctuate, each pair in a different colored marker. This way, if
what students changed was wrong, then it was not their mistake
alone and it was a shared error worthy of discussing at the
general class level. Prompt students to explain their thinking
behind their use of conventions. Because students know that
each punctuation choice must be justified, this discussion
method cuts down on scribes who simply wait for the teacher to
put up the right answers. It takes effort, time and patience to
develop a culture of confidence in the classroom where writing
errors are not seen as a sign of weakness, but as data gathering.
Again and again, Gallagher stresses the need for student writers
to become risk-takers if they are to grow; I would just add it’s
more fun to take risks with a friend at your side.
Beyond Voice into Cultural Conversations
If student are not taught subjects and verbs, they will not be
successful in tackling the rest of what Gallagher refers to as the
Shown here: Fall Hoosier Hospitality
(12 ”x 16”, Watercolor)
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 16 –
Big Eight: sentence fragments; comma splices, colons, semicolons;
subject and verb (with no intervening phrases); using the pronoun case
correctly; commas inside independent clauses; irregular verbs (and their
three stems for the six tenses); and pronoun-antecedent agreement
(Gallagher 150). In the chapter entitled, “Save Me, Mickey,” Firoozeh
relates the time she got lost in Disneyland. A recurrent trope in her
memoir is the symbolism of Disneyland to immigrants as an idealized
vision of America. Dumas was scooped up by security and whisked away
to the notorious Baby Center/Lost children depot. The child’s lack of
“voice” was presaged by the difficulty of once again being thrust into the
role of translator, and the results are both a stinging indictment of adult
behavior and Dumas’s not-so-subtle recruitment of the reader to her
point of view. She is deposited into the depot with another boy who
does not speak English and witnesses the adults trying to deal with the
situation:
After a few futile attempts to communicate with the boy,
another one of the women came to me and asked me if I
could please, in my language, ask the boy his name. I told her
that I spoke Persian and I was certain that the boy did not.
The woman then knelt down and got real close to my face,
skills picked up in Coercion 101. Speaking very slowly, she
told me that she needed me to do her a favor. I could tell she
was trying to remember my name. She was thinking hard.
“Sweetie,” she finally said, choosing to sidestep the name like a
soldier avoiding a land mine, “could you just try to talk to
him? Will you do it for Mickey?” (21)
Dumas’s familiar, and universal, experience of adult insensitivity
helped even insouciant students conceptualize his or her own experiences
when writing about cultural conflicts. The read-aloud proved served as a
springboard for several low-risk journal entries dealing with
communication within, between, and across cultures, which then served
as pre-writing to lead up to our Cultural Conflict Essay.
Considering how many of my California students have been, are
now, or are soon to be, serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’d like their first
interaction with Middle-Eastern culture to be through the end of a pen,
not a gun. As Southern California is home to the largest Iranian
population outside of Iran, those of us who’ve grown up in such a lively
cultural mix must encourage dialogue between students—and colleagues
— from the numerous cultures living together in California. After all,
that’s where the word “university,” comes from: diversity and unity.
Works Cited
Dumas, Firoozeh. Funny in Farsi. New York: Random House, 2003.
Gallagher, Kelly. Teaching Adolescent Writers. Portland, Maine:
Stenhouse, 2006.
About the Author:
Glenn Morgan is a National Board Certified Teacher and teaches at
Lincoln High School, Center for the Arts, in San Diego.
Seeking a Newer World: Harte, Sarovian and Steinbeck
by Joe Perez
hree Northern California writers have characters seeking a
better, newer world. Bret Harte’s stories such as “The Outcasts
of Poker Flats” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp” are
outstanding examples of the lives of Gold Rush miners, particularly
after the initial excitement of “getting rich quick” had passed. Life
was hard and tragic at times. Harte’s stories are infused with the
melancholy felt by the gold dreamers who were missing loved ones
back home.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” is especially powerful in showing
the dialogue and character of these miners. In this story Harte
delves into the humanity of the grizzled prospectors. The story has
the charm of a Victorian melodrama. For classroom activities
questions might include: What would happen to these miners after
the main events of the story? How will they change, if at all? What
is the theme of “The Luck of Roaring Camp?” Also, have students
compare Harte’s stereotyped characters with people today.
I once saw an older man riding a bike in Fresno; long hair and
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whiskered, wearing an old suit with a battered hat. It was William
Saroyan, Fresno’s favorite son and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
He lived not too far from my home. His collections of short stories
- My Name Is Aram - was often used in my classes. I would
recommend this book to CATE teachers to read and to share with
their students. All of his stories are set in the San Joaquin Valley;
they are simple stories but with profound and worthwhile insights.
One “The Phonograph” is an autobiographical - type story
about Saroyan bringing home a record player which he had
purchased. Times are hard and his mother barely keeps the family
afloat. She is so angry about her son’s dubious purchase that she
chases him around the house. From the son’s viewpoint every life
needs music, culture - the things that feed the soul. As the boy runs
ahead of his mother, he is able to turn on the record player. The
sweetness of the music stops the mother in her tracks; she, too,
needed solace.
In another story “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse”,
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 18 –
Saroyan describes a simpler time, a time to appreciate the joyful
beauty of a horse, even if the horse does not belong to the narrator
and his friends. Their “borrowing” of the horse is without the
permission of the owner. In this story Uncle Kosgrove, a gruff old
Armenian who has survived the Armenian holocaust of World War
I, tells the fretting owner who is angry about what the boys have
done to “pay no attention to it”; it is not important.. And compared
to what Uncle Kosgrove has experienced, this is a true statement
which can give any reader perspective on life. In teaching Saroyan
keep Uncle Kosgrove in mind. How does this immigrant see
America? What makes America a newer world? What are the
possibilities for individuals? Will life be less harsh here?
The most influential writer I used in class was John Steinbeck.
He would have been a fine regional writer, but fate or his social
consciousness had him travel south through the mountainous
Pacheco Pass into the San Joaquin Valley. Here he discovered an
acute affinity for the downtrodden. He observed and depicted
human nature in the raw. Here he won the Nobel Prize and became
immortal.
Steinbeck wrote about challenges of our world: poverty,
prejudice, prevarication. The Joad family is still with us. Pick up
the newspaper and see their faces - unemployed farm workers
suffering through drought and political impotence. Students from
all parts of the country could benefit from reading The Grapes of
Wrath and its viewpoint of the Dust Bowl phenomenon. They
would also learn about family loyalty in dealing with tragedy: “The
men were ruthless because the past had been spoiled, but the women
knew how the past would cry to them in the coming days.”
I introduced The Grapes of Wrath by talking about the
Depression and the “Okies” who came here. I talked also of the
American dreamer who came as early as the 1830’s along the Oregon
Trail, later settling into California looking for the elusive happiness
that the Joads were after. Both California and The Grapes of Wrath
are about hope and despair, success and hard scrabble.
Students will learn that The Grapes of Wrath was made of
alternating narrative chapters and expansive essays; the microcosms
and macrocosms of life. Besides the traditional method of reading
this book - straight through from the beginning to the end - some
other strategies might be used. Students like stories, therefore
reading just Joads’ chapters first might be a good idea, with maybe
two or three of the essays read aloud in class followed by discussion.
This would introduce them to that “other” voice in the book, the
one students are inclined to skim through or pass over. Yet these are
powerful and sometimes involved viewpoints. After the book has
been read, the essays can stand alone to be read individually from
time to time for their literary merit as well as their pertinence to the
human condition.
A teacher when introducing Steinbeck must be true to his or her
own appreciation of both the Joads’ stories and the essays. The
Grapes of Wrath is uplifting in some ways, but it can be enervating
as well. I teach this novel toward the end of the school year, at the
end of our survey course of American literature. We would have
traveled in our literature journey from the East coast to the West
coast. Steinbeck, as a native son of California completes our literary
study. When we read The Grapes of Wrath the weather has usually
turned warm, even hot, just as it would have been for the Joads
doing their field work under the valley sun. More than once we
went outside to read the book; it added a touch of reality.
An added dimension to using Steinbeck in the classroom is his
strong social - political stance. He was a pariah to the farmers who
lived in the Salinas valley where he grew up. Steinbeck criticized the
impersonal nature of tilling the soil: “Now farming became an
industry and the owners followed Rome, although they did not
know it. They imported slaves - Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans,
Filipinos. They didn’t need much.”
He saw the beauty of sharing and cooperation in almost biblical
phrasing. Others saw in those kind of words a leaning toward
Communism which was the bête noire of the time: “A man with
food fed a hungry man and thus insured himself against hunger.”
Some saw such statements as threats to their own way of life.
The irony is that today the city fathers of Steinbeck’s home town
are promoting Steinbeck because tourists from all over come here to
the places he vividly described and to the beautiful museum about
his life and times. His name is a money-maker and people are
making profits because of the insights and descriptions their
grandfathers had condemned.
A non-fiction book Travels With Charlie gives students a chance
to see Steinbeck’s outlook in another light. Here Steinbeck, as with
The Grapes of Wrath, uses a truck as a vehicle to move along his
story. But Travels With Charlie is Steinbeck’s own Odyssey through
America, a chance to meet people and share the joy of life. Perhaps
sensing his own final chapter, he wanted to mingle with people at
campsites and see the cheerful main street lights of myriad prairie
town evenings. Possibly it was Steinbeck’s way of telling his readers
that America with all of its blemishes was still a place unique and
hopeful, unseen before in the world.
These three writers have been part of my curriculum in various
capacities for a number of years. Their clarity and power with the
written word should be experienced by all students and teachers
desiring to further explore the tapestry of California literature.
About the Author:
Joe Perez taught American and English literature for thirty-three
years at Chowchilla High School in the San Joaquin Valley. He also
taught drama, California history, Spanish and coached football,
tennis and Academic Decathlon.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 19 –
A Project About a Community: William Saroyan’s Human Comedy
by Cathy Cirimele
here are only two writers from Fresno who have won the Pulitzer
Prize for literature: Phillip Levine, a native of Detroit, and
William Saroyan, a native of Fresno. Like many regional writers,
Saroyan’s legacy has been amplified in his hometown. There is a theatre
named after him and every May some local Saroyan afficionados
sponsor a writing contest and a walking tour featuring Saroyan’s favorite
haunts. Some of Saroyan’s writings are complex, but his most familiar
pieces are nostalgic and sentimental. In fact, his most popular novel,
The Human Comedy, is a wonderful piece that celebrates the strength
and honesty of the everyday hero.
I love teaching The Human Comedy for many reasons. It is a
wonderful follow-up to The Odyssey. It too is a journey of discovery
that uses some of Homer’s motifs. But I enjoy principally because it is
about young people learning about the world around them and how
they need to negotiate their way to adulthood. The plusses are that the
main character of The Human Comedy, Homer, is very close in age to
the ninth graders who read the book and, more importantly, that the
book is about their hometown.
Of course, the Fresno that Saroyan writes about is the Fresno of
World War II. Homer’s older brother is away at war and he finds
himself becoming the man of the house. For some of my students,
this is not an unusual situation: many of them are being raised by
single parents and are forced to accept responsibilities that adults cope
with every day. Some are like Saroyan’s Homer: their fathers or
mothers or brothers or sisters are away at war. But the Fresno of The
Human Comedy is not the Fresno that my students know. At least,
they are not aware of that initially. That is my job. This project is a
way to help students make the connection to both the novel and to the
Fresno they may not know.
The Fresno Project started out as a way to get students engaged in
The Human Comedy while teaching them about their city. Like many
cities, Fresno suffers from urban sprawl and the downtown area,
Saroyan’s primary domain, has lost much of its business and a lot of its
support. Various government and private groups have discussed how to
“revive” downtown Fresno. Plans range from building a lake with an
amusement park to creating a cultural center with lofts and businesses
catering to artists. The reality is that not much progress has been made
and Fresno continues to move outward away from its center. Most of
my students are from the north end of town; many of them have never
been downtown.
Acquainting my students with Saroyan’s Fresno is a joy. A man
named Claude Laval accumulated thousands of photographs capturing
Fresno’s historical roots. Not only are these photographs in book
format but some have been catalogued on the Internet as well. They
offer a visual record of Fresno through the early decades of the
twentieth century. These photographs make it so much easier to
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prompt my students to become immersed in the Fresno Project. The
Fresno Historical Society has a fine website with some of Laval’s
photographs as well as other significant information about Fresno that
helps students with their research.
The project itself has several parts to it: there is the I-search essay,
the pie segment/presentation and a field trip/scrapbook. As a way to
introduce Saroyan’s Fresno to my students, I spend at least a week
involving them in some background activities. Students break up into
groups of three or four and each group chooses a focus to research.
They select their own group members and I let them choose their own
topics that have included: fashion, sports, architecture, industry,
entertainment, politics, and newsworthy events. Although the
information covers life in Fresno during the Depression and World
War II, I find that once students begin the research, they become
immersed in Fresno’s history. For most of them, it is the world of their
grandparents or even great-grandparents. The goals for the group are to
write a group essay detailing their findings, present what they have
learned to the class and illustrate a segment that condenses their
findings that will go onto a class pie chart to be posted in the room.
The three-page essay that I ask students to write is not too
forbidding as three or four of them work on it. They must have a title
page and works-cited page in MLA format. They must organize their
essay and include an introduction, body and conclusion. Like most
research essays, the I-search essay is based on student-generated
questions. We generate questions about Fresno and the lifestyle of
WWII Fresno. Each group picks a question or a series of questions
that they would like to answer. Since this project is designed for ninth
graders, I spend a great deal of time working on research skills. The
research takes place over a week, which includes the librarian’s
orientation then a few days for students to investigate their topic.
The I-search essay has a specific but informal format that allows
students more creativity. The introduction introduces the topic and
gives some background information focusing on questions they were
trying to answer. The body of the essay must include information
gathered from three to five sources, including the internet, books, other
written material and perhaps personal interviews. The conclusion must
tie everything together and make final comments. Often the essay
serves as a kind of personal quest for knowledge and includes a great
deal of reflection on the part of the students as they gather
information then ruminate on what they have learned.
The I-search paper is a way to condense ideas. It focuses the
students’ efforts and gives them the information they will need to
complete two other components of the project: the pie slice and the
presentation. Although these are ninth graders, I want them to learn
the rudimentary facts about research. If they can complete a simple
essay like this, they will be able to write more complicated essays for
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 20 –
their other classes, including other English classes. Because we have a
computer lab and most students have some basic computer skills, the
essay must be typed. It must have a separate title page---with or
without decoration---and a separate works cited page. Students
complain at first, but I remind them that they are working together and
that they have a month to complete the assignment. With my support,
all of them accomplish what I ask from them at least at a basic level.
We move step by step through each part of the assignment: from title
page, to works cited page, to introduction, body, conclusion and
internal citation. I don’t mind spending a lot of time on this
assignment because it is the foundation for all the research essays my
students will write from this point on in high school and beyond.
As they work on their group essay, the students are also
accumulating information for their pie slice. The slice should have
photographs or drawings as well as single words and relevant short
quotes---from the novel or from their research. The goal is that the pie
represents all of the segments of life in Fresno during the time period
in which The Human Comedy is set. To acquire what they need, group
members need to scour internet sites and use whatever material they can
gather from material that is provided. I ask students to complete the
slice in class so that I can supervise and give them help if they need it.
Since I provide most of the materials, I can also control what they put
on their slice and monitor the quality.
The I-search essay is due the date of the presentation so the
students basically summarize what they have learned. Each group must
present their slice to the class. They can choose to divide the task or
they can choose one or two of the group members as speakers. I want
them to explain what is on the slice and specifically focus on what they
learned as they were doing the research. After the presentation, the pie
slice is stapled to the wall. When the pie is finished, it will be about
five feet in diameter. I often choose yellow or orange butcher paper so
that the finished product will stand out in the classroom.
As students work on the project, they are concurrently reading The
Human Comedy. Depending on what we are doing in class, the
students may have a chapter to read at home or we will read a chapter in
class. If we are reading in class, we may practice an activity like
“popcorn” reading or “rude” reading: both are strategies aimed at
getting students to read aloud voluntarily. Sometimes I will let the class
read aloud in their groups. Most of the chapters in the book are short
and episodic so reading in class on occasion may not even take an entire
period. This allows me to walk from group to group monitoring
students and checking their work at the same time.
This work in class also gives the students time to make entries in
their literature logs. Because students are required to keep a literature
log as they read, I can model this activity then check it as they work.
Often literature logs can take the form of a dialectical journal; my goal
is to get students to include entries that are not just personal. I want
them to be able to respond to what they read textually and globally.
Consequently, I will often limit personal responses in the literature log.
Students must also respond to specific quotes or passages in the book
that require them to comment on the craft of the writer as well as the
global connections they can make with the ideas in the novel.
Sometime during the course of reading The Human Comedy and
completing the essay and presentation, I take my students on a field trip
downtown. I have taken as many as four busloads of students on this
trip with the help of colleagues and parents. Each group has a map of
important places they must visit in downtown Fresno; it’s a kind of
scavenger hunt. They must gather an artifact at each place and take a
photo with their own camera or a camera I provide (disposable or
digital). They visit such places as city hall, the public library, the
Amtrak station, an Armenian bakery, an Armenian church, and an
historical house located in the middle of town. I schedule time for
them to get lunch at the downtown mall, which has numerous shops,
sidewalk food carts and is decorated with outdoor art.
When they return to class, each group of students is asked to put
together a Fresno scrapbook that contains important information
about the places they visited downtown. They must include an artifact
and a photo. The artifact might be a flyer they picked up at the library
or a menu from the bakery. I usually provide the material for the
scrapbook and develop pictures taken with a disposable camera. The
scrapbooks are usually about 10-15 pages in length and the quality
varies depending on the skills of the students. But each scrapbook
demonstrates that the students have seen and been part of a downtown
area that they normally might not even have known about.
All facets of this project are engaging and educational. My
students are able to read a book about their hometown that focuses on
the experiences of someone their own age and learn to respond to ideas
as well as quotes and passages in a piece of literature. They learn some
basic research skills, write an I-search essay and are required to present
what they have learned to the class. And finally, they get to move
beyond the boundaries of the classroom and the school to take what
they have learned and apply it to the world around them. Every part of
the project creates a tangible reminder of what they have learned: the
pie slice, the essay, the literature logs and the scrapbook. If I choose to
give them a test on the book, they are prepared.
This project could work anywhere. The reading choice might be
The Human Comedy or it could be a work by a regional writer or a
collection of essays or poems that deal with issues relevant to an area. I
don’t see this as a project that is limited to just one author. Its strengths
are that students learn some important skills and become more engaged
in the world . For many of my students, this project was their favorite
not only as ninth graders but as high school students. I have to admit
that it was and still is one of my favorites as well.
About the Author:
Cathy Cirimele graduated with the class of 2008 and retired from
teaching English after 35 years. She now spends her time gardening,
volunteering, reading, traveling, writing and doing whatever she wants
whenever she wants.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 21 –
An Idiosyncratic California Reader
by Steve Tollefson
hen the father-in-law of a friend died last year, I
discovered that he had been the last collector to have
acquired the entire “Zamorano 80,” first editions of
eighty “distinguished” books about California, selected by the
members of Los Angeles’ Zamorano Club in 1945. I had never
heard of any of this, but the list (http://www.zamoranoclubla.
org/zam80/) is great fun. There are the expected: Brete Harte,
Helen Hunt Jackson, Richard Henry Dana, Twain, Muir, among
others. Then there are the totally obscure: Ogden Hoffman,
Reports of Land Cases (1862) and Winfield Davis, History of
Political Conventions in California, 1849-1892 (1893). It’s in
between that the gems can be found: Land of Little Rain (1903)
is a wonderful account of early life in the Owens Valley, by writer
and naturalist Mary Austin. Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly’s,
Voyage Autour Du Monde, Principalement À La Californie Et
Aux Iles Sandwich (1835) gave me a sense of a very early
California that I really knew nothing about. (Oh, by the way, I
cheated. I happened on fairly recent edition in English). And I
didn’t know that Robert Louis Stevenson spent his honeymoon at
the north end of the Napa Valley, living for a few months as a
squatter at an abandoned mine. He wrote about the experience in
The Silverado Squatters.
Reading about the Zamarano 80 gave fresh fuel to a bookson-California train that I have been on for a couple of years, and
I hereby humbly submit the “Tollefson 22 or So.” If you want to
have a feel for California, these are a good start.
W
Books that shouldn’t have disappeared:
I honestly don’t understand why Upton Sinclair’s Oil! has
dropped off our radar, and I’m afraid that the movie There Will be
Blood--hardly based on it at all--might turn some people away
from not only a satisfying read but a wonderful exploration of the
early oil business in California, complete with strikes, grand vistas
of California countryside, Hollywood starlets, and neighbors
fighting over who owns oil rights on their block. (FYI, the father
in the movie is not a crazed Daniel Day-Lewis at all, not even a
little.) If you’re familiar with Sinclair only for the relentless
suffering in The Jungle, please don’t worry. This is a big, sprawling
book in the best sense. Still muck-raking, but grand.
Storm, Fire, and Earth Abides are three important books by
the prolific George R. Stewart, who taught for many years in the
English department at UC Berkeley. Storm and Fire are novels
about a storm and a fire. (Ok, for some reason I don’t feel like
that catches your interest.) We follow both from their infancy to
adulthood and death. (Not catching you yet?) The storm sweeps
over northern California, and we follow road crews trying to keep
the pass from Reno to Sacramento open, a commercial airline
flying over the Sierras, a young couple driving to Reno, and the
person in charge of keeping the delta in working order. It’s an
amazing, complex discussion of how people respond to nature’s
fury, and about California. And I thought I knew all about forest
fires until I read Fire, which follows a pattern similar to Storm. I
recently gave—with some trepidation—a copy of Fire to one of
the foremost forest fire experts in the nation, who teaches here at
Berkeley. He thought it was an excellent view of firefighting in
those days. Finally, Earth Abides is set in Berkeley after a plague
has killed most of the people in the world. It’s about starting
over, it’s incredibly detailed (why water to houses stops running a
year after the disaster), surprisingly ecologically-oriented for its
day (1949), and terribly prescient—think SARS, AIDS, Swine
Flu. If you mention it, most people who have read it will say,
“Oh, that’s one of my favorite books.” Stewart has an eye for
detail and the sheer amount of information in these books, about
everything, is astonishing.
Then there’s The Last Wave by another Berkeley professor,
Eugene Burdick (better known for Fail-Safe and The Ugly
American, both of which he co-wrote). It’s a detailed, engrossing
book about California politics (Burdick was a political scientist)
set against the backdrop of the early days of surfing. It’s part an
introduction to political science, a bit of California noir, and a
bit the tv series Falconcrest. Rather than go on, I’ll simply refer
you to my attempt to raise this book from the dead, an article in
the Berkeley Daily Planet <http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.
com/issue/2006-09-26/article/25174?headline=BooksBurdick-s-Lost-The-Ninth-Wave-Deserves-New-Life&status
=301>
Less obscure, but not as widely read as they should be:
If you can read only one Frank Norris book, you should not
read further. There are two books by Norris that are different
enough that I must insist on both. The Octopus is in the vein of
Sinclair’s Oil! except about the railroads. Regardless of your
feelings about big business, you’ll be rooting for the farmers in
this one. And the descriptions of life in the Central Valley
opened my eyes to how people lived there at the turn of the last
century. McTeague is the source of the classic silent movie
Greed, directed by Erich von Stroheim. It’s about small, mean
people, not big business. There can’t be any better descriptions
of early San Francisco, and the story ends up in…well, let’s just
say that after you read the book, you should see the movie (and
not the other way around).
Ok, no critics I’ve read think Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday is
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 22 –
his best book. But if you look on Amazon.com, you’ll a lot of us
just plain folks who call this sequel to Cannery Row their favorite
Steinbeck. It’s hilarious and sweet, not things the casual reader
associates with Steinbeck. To do it justice, however, you should
read Cannery Row first. A more Steinbeckian Steinbeck is his
first substantial California novel, To a God Unknown, set in his
beloved Salinas Valley. Even though it did seem immature at
times, I loved this book for its descriptions of the land, and for
the characters. Steinbeck can make you ache with homesickness
for a piece of land you’ve never seen.
A couple of more blips on the radar:
When I finally decided this year I needed to read at least one
book by Norman Mailer (no, I hadn’t, so shoot me), I picked the
shortest one in the used book store: The Deer Park. I was
pleasantly surprised. It’s set in Desert D’Or, a not-verydisguised-at-all Palm Springs, among producers, stars, starlets,
hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes—oh, and one good-looking exAir Force pilot who wants to become a writer (Norman, is that
you?). No one is particularly nice and not much happens. But
it’s a great slice of a certain kind of California life: one that may
never have really existed, but we secretly think did.
For those who want the completely weird and entertaining, I’d
go for Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer, set in England,
Hollywood, and a sort of Hearst Castle somewhere not far from
L.A. There’s a secret in some manuscripts; there’s some science-y
gobbledegook that we need to go to England for, but the
Hollywood aspect is fun.
A year or two ago, I happened on a little book called Jacob’s
Hands: A Fable . It’s by Aldous Huxley and Christopher
Isherwood. (I didn’t see that coming when I picked it up.) The
manuscript was discovered in a trunk at Huxley’s estate by the
actress Sharon Stone. Yes, really. That’s not part of the plot of
the book. That’s what happened. A sweet fable of a ranch-hand
in the Mojave Desert who discovers he has the gift of healing
animals. It’s really very nice.
No serious list of California books will be without Wallace
Stegner’s Angle of Repose, of course, but I want to add his A
Shooting Star. The title sounds so Stegner-y and western-y, but it’s
misleading. It’s about disaffected, searching, really really rich people
in Hillsborough (Northern California’s Beverly Hills). The 1962
paperback edition I have calls it, unfortunately, “a novel of the
American wife.” It’s nowhere near Stegner at his best, but it’s the
only book I’ve read about this subject—and it is Stegner, after all.
Finally, I’ve always been afraid to read anything by John Muir.
I think all those photos of him looking like an emaciated Walt
Whitman led me to believe that his prose would be vaguely
Victorian, emaciated, and not…well…fun. But he’s actually a
wonderful writer. I started with The Story of My Boyhood and
Youth (not strictly a Califor nia book, but necessary to
understand his life), and have now moved on to The Mountains
of California—I alternate between being amazed at what he does
and jealous of what he gets to see.
The others:
Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson
I don’t know why people dismiss this as “just” a romantic
novel. It’s filled with the flavor of early California and Jackson
was a staunch advocate of the rights of native people. The guys
in my book group made fun of it; some day they’ll see the error
of their ways.
Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana
This is not a book about sailing (which I always thought). It’s
a book about trading for hides on the coast of California from
San Diego to San Francisco from 1834-36. I was completely
fascinated. And I didn’t know that the book led to changes in
how seamen are treated.
South of the Angels, Jessamyn West
Ok, I admit I haven’t finished this book yet—it’s a bit of a
slog. But what a fascinating portrait of people looking for a new
life in the precursor to a subdivision in Orange County during
WWI. And I’ve seen it referred to as The novel of Orange
County, which should count for something.
City of Night, John Rechy—not just California, but enough
California to get it on this list. It reached third place on the New
York Times Best Seller list in1963, which is a little surprising
given its subject: the life of a hustler from his youth to his
wanderings around New York, New Orleans, L.A., Oakland, and
San Francisco.
Double Indemnity, James M. Cain
A classic, needless to say. But no one ever talks about the last
chapter, and the last line. Blew me away. (Of course, I can’t talk
about them; that would spoil it for you.)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West
A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
“Mojave,” short story by Truman Capote
It’s been a wonderful ride reading these, and I feel like I have a
much better sense of place than I had before this journey. I know,
however, that the books on this list do not give an allencompassing sense of California, its present and past; for
instance, there are few books by women, and none by people of
color. That will be another interesting list.
About the Author:
Steve Tollefson is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs
at UC Berkeley and Director of the Office of Educational
Development. In addition to four books on writing and grammar,
his work has appeared in Writers' Forum, The San Francisco
Chronicle, the Stanford Magazine, and Kitchen Sink.
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 23 –
Gerald Haslam’s Many Californias
by Marek Breiger
G
erald Haslam, short story writer, essayist, novelist, historian and
anthologist is, in my view the most important literary figure of our time in
California: the writer who has continued John Muir’s, William Saroyan’s
and John Steinbeck’s line directly. He is the author of such acclaimed books as
Okies, Masks, Coming of Age in California, That Constant Coyote, and Working
Man Blues —as well as hundreds of other essays, articles and short stories
dealing with life in our state. It was Haslam who, with James Houston, more
than thirty years ago put together the first crucial Central Valley anthology,
Valley Heartland, (Capra Press), and it is Haslam who recognized the dynamic
nature of the literature of California.
By dynamic, Haslam means unfrozen, alive, moving towards completion.
Haslam’s faith has been that California literature is helping us grow into
something better, “tending toward justice, “as Thomas Wolfe wrote of America
during the 1930’s. Yet his Ben Franklin award winning anthology Many
Californias (Second Edition, University of Nevada Press 1999) is not the book of
a mere optimist. Included in the book are biting views of historic and present
California—from the days of Native California to the robber barons described by
Frank Norris, to Steinbeck’s dispossessed Okies and Saroyan’s Armenian
dreamers, to Nathaniel West’s Los Angeles nightmare to Kate Braverman’s lonely
deserted women to Gary Soto’s pensive cotton pickers-- Haslam’s essays both
introduce important California writers as well as show lines of continuance. Many
Californias like Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American music “looks both to the
past and the future. Haslam literally gives aspiring California writers a place to
stand or rather to continue and contribute to a multi-regional and multi- cultural
literature as powerful as any in our nation –a literature derived from Muir’s
commitment to saving nature, Steinbeck’s advocacy of social justice, and
Saroyan’s awareness that one could keep pride in one’s ethnicity and still be
totally American.
Haslam focuses upon the places within the geography called California. He
attempts to define our state as a place divorced from the California of popular
myth. He writes: “Where is California? What is it? It is out there where
Californians, including authors really live, a collection of distinct regions, of
unique histories, and varied people gathered under one name: we call all of it
California but is has no homogenous or geographic core. To paraphrase poet
Gary Snyder, the state is fiction but the region is real. Actual people live in
particular places—Huron or Susanville, Watts… or El Sobrante—no one lives
in the mythical golden state…except in their imaginations.”
Halsam includes pieces that define both public and private realities, from
the powerful Japanese-American Toshio Mori’s rendering of his feelings on the
day of Pearl Harbor, to Luis Valdez’ stirring monologue of a haunted Chicano
Vietnam Veteran, to Floyd Salas’ meditation not on politics but on the woman he
loves and the death of his dog, to Wallace Stegner’s argument on behalf of
environmental protection in “Our Common Domain,” to Jean Wakatsuki’s
Houston and James Houston’s description of Japanese-American dignity at the
Manzanar Relocation Camp.
Haslam ends the collection with what he calls “A Contemporary Sampler,”
yet the whole book is in essence a sampler of the humanity within the state. The
anthology honors careers, from Jack London’s to Maxine Hong Kingston’s to Amy
Tan’s but it is also, in 2009 still contemporary, and accessible for students and
teachers to read. The anthology is paperback, and can be usefully excerpted by
teachers. In fact at an Asilomar session in the late 1990s devoted to California
literature, participants simply passed the book from teacher to teacher, reading
aloud a favorite poem or passage. In this time of budget cutbacks, one or two
copies of Many Californias as part of Junior English/American literature classes
will go a long way. Additionally, creative writing students in college, from
reading this book, might eventually add to what Saroyan began and Soto
continued, what Steinbeck described and Gerry Haslam and Wilma McDonald
updated. This book can be, for students, a bridge to the future for new
Californians hopefully inspired by other first generation Californians such as
Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodgriguez and Amy Tan. Students, of all races
and religions, can feel themselves part of a living tradition of California writers
and citizens.
Haslam’s essays introduce each section and his intelligence informs these
pieces. Haslam has a grasp of entire California history, from the time of our first
peoples, the California Indians, to our present urban dwellers in the Bay Area
and the Southland.
Haslam knows how endemic prejudice and racism have been to our region:
“There were indeed savages in California then (writes Haslam) but few of them
were Indians.” Yet Haslam does not believe that the California story is about the
defeat of humanity. He celebrates the way California writers, many from
deprived backgrounds, have enriched the literature of our state. Haslam, a
native of Oildale, lauds the literature, especially, of the Central Valley, a literature
that came out of “…human complexity, passion, yearning and anger…”
Haslam, who himself is of “Okie” Anglo and Latino background, has a special
feel for the persecuted Mexicans, Blacks, Okies, Asians and Native Californians
who created literature out of oppression and anger. Yet he recognizes too writers
like Joan Didion, Ella Leffland, and Kate Braverman who have created powerful
works from very different perspectives.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, it is easy to despair.
Only a fool would not be anxious at the state of our state. Yet, it seems to me
that the intellectuals are behind the experiences of the “common” men and
women of California who are, of course, not common at all. Our cities are more
than places of violence and poverty. They are also places of immigrant hopes and
real culture. Our middle and working class suburbs are not exclusive but a
bubbling cauldron of whites, including ethnic whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians.
Our children are increasingly multi-racial. For every horror story, we have stories
of success, and our stories thanks to writer and anthologist Gerald Haslam, have
been recognized and are being told.
About the Author:
Marek Breiger teaches English at Irvington High School in Fremont,California. His
column, "California Classics and Contemporaries," appeared in CE from 19921995. Over thirty of his essays about California Writing have appeared in many
publications including the anthology:"Updating the Literary West."
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 24 –
Teacher Plans in the Aftermath of
the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
by Todd Finley and Stephanie West-Puckett
One of the maybe secondary objectives of this is students are
going to be looking at me and perhaps thinking of going into
teaching..."
— Christa McAuliffe, 1985
“…[T]he process [leading to the launch of Challenger] may
have been flawed (Vaughan, 1997).”
— U.S. Senate committee hearing on the Challenger Accident.
hile our country celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the
Apollo moon launch, the authors of this article recalled a
more traumatic NASA experience, the Space Challenger
disaster. The optics of our initiation by NASA were similarly
spectacular, but transmitted by gaunt Maria Shriver instead of Walter
Cronkite. On January 28th, 1986, when the sky above the Atlantic
Ocean exploded, we both watched from classroom televisions in
different states. Stephanie was a fourth grader and Todd was starting
his secondary English internship. That day, the explosion breached
the safety of our classroom walls and our faith in curriculum was
shaken. In the following narratives, we explore this 1986 initiation,
and the lasting meanings of The Challenger Accident for us as
curriculum creators.
W
Stephanie’s Challenger Learning-Teaching Story
The night before the Challenger blew up, I was writing another
letter to NASA with the 8x10 glossy of the seven astronauts on my
desk. I was ten years old. My young teacher,
Ms. Pair, attached mythic significance to
the launch. She focused our fourth-grade
class on Christa McAuliffe’s participation
as a member of the Challenger crew, and
the first grade school teacher to be sent into
orbit. Christa McAuliffe was Ms. Pair’s
heroine and mine; McAuliffe manifested
the dream that current events could be
integrated with classroom inquiry. I
couldn’t sleep.
The next day, our class sat “Indianstyle” in front of the school library’s TV. A
jubilant Ms. Pair quieted us for the
Kennedy Space Center’s mission control
count down. Three, Two, One…! After six
postponements, the Challenger lifted off at
11:38AM EST. We clapped and cheered
and high-fived as an inverted V of white
plumes, like strings of cotton, filled the blue TV sky.
For seventy-three seconds, my classmates and I shared in
breathless bliss. I already knew that I was destined to teach, just like
Ms. Pair and Ms. McAuliffe. I was so proud to be associated with
them, I couldn’t sit still. Then Ms. Pair’s face stiffened.
“Please sit down and be quiet.” Her voice was strange.
While most of my peers shrugged off the admonishment, I
identified horror in Ms. Pair’s tone. Ms. Pair was my emotional
barometer: watching tears smear her black mascara and down her
cheek, I turned cold.
Someone switched the television off and we were hustled back to
our regular classroom by the librarian. Inexplicably, she ordered us to
put our heads down on our desks. Ms. Pair would be back shortly, she
promised. But there was nothing short about the eerie silence that
followed.
What was happening? The predictable comfort and confidence I
felt in school was, just like that, erased--made insignificant. My breath
came fast as I waited for Ms. Pair to return. I wouldn’t dare lift my
head until I could read her face and to know what to feel and think.
It seems to me now that that moment was the end of my
generation’s collective innocence. Up until that late January morning,
we had basked in the brilliance of the New World Order and
observed the decline of the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear threat. I still
remembered how Reagan, after being shot in the chest, asked his
surgeons if they were Republicans; the man and his country were
invincible. “We are the World” showed that we were the hope of the
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 25 –
Shown here: Female Study
(12” x 16”, Watercolor)
world. Less than a decade removed from Luke and Leia, we knew
that “the force” was with us. But on the morning of Challenger, my
classmates and I fell back to Earth.
Ms. Pair returned to a silent room. Pale-faced, without the usual
beige-tone foundation, eyes less emphatic without their black outlines,
and lips that were small and quivering, she told us that the launch had
failed and the crew was presumed dead. Her tears came again; I
blushed, overwhelmed by embarrassment.
Could this really happen? We were supposed to watch Teacher
McAuliffe beamed to us from outer space in a PBS broadcast titled
“The Ultimate Field Trip?” Pair’s lesson plan was created; it would
be taught, of course. That’s the way things worked. Christa McAuliffe
and her other crewmates couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t in the plans.
That night, when I heard President Reagan’s speech, having never
before been directly addressed by our Commander in Chief, I finally
accepted the unimaginable:
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America
who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it
is hard to under-stand, but sometimes painful things like this happen.
It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of
taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't
belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave (The History Place,
2009, para. 5).
Prior to Ms. Pair’s class, learning had been contained in a secure
boundary where reason and believing held dominion. Learning, which
I conflated with getting straight “A”s, was artfully scaffolded so that
heroes never failed. But maybe there was more to learn on a day Ms.
Pair abandoned her plans and comforted my classmates through her
own tears. Watching dry-eyed as Ms. Pair broke ranks and grieved
alongside her students, I loved her even more.
Todd’s Challenger Story
The night before the Challenger tragedy, I remember struggling
with the Madeline Hunter lesson plan template that the University of
Puget Sound’s Department of Education told its English education
majors to use. My dorm room on the 2nd floor corner of A-L Hall
overlooked a bare Dogwood tree, soggy grass, and the gravel parking
area where Datsons and Chryslers rusted in Tacoma’s saltwater air.
KUBE 93 played “West End Girls” every hour, a song conceived to
be both infectiously repetitive and bleak. We’ve got no future, we’ve
got no past…” I remember feeling stupid as I tried to write objectives.
The top-heavy planning templates our intern supervisors and
education professors required seemed antithetical to art and about as
practical as mastering Walloon, the official language of Belgium. How
were you supposed to know what to teach? What made one chunklet
of content more important than another? And how was I supposed to
transcend the curricular pabulum that I had absorbed from my uppermiddle class coastal-suburban public school education? Was lesson
planning supposed to be this difficult?
At 11 p.m., I stopped working and laid out my tie, herringbone
jacket, dress shirt, black socks and rigid penny loafers. I’d given up on
creating a life-changing lesson. Simple and visual would have to do.
The next morning, four hours before the Challenger launch, I
drove to the downtown Tacoma overpass and crossed under the eerie
yellow lights of the industrial flats, and then floored my sputtering
VW Dasher in 2nd gear up the switchbacks towards Decatur High
School.
My university supervisor told me that she’d be popping by to
observe me teach sometime during the week, so my lesson plans were
airtight. She, like, many of my education professors at UPS were
probably ready to have me graduate. During recent methods Q & A, I
had challenged my education professor.
“Your methods courses have never modeled a Madeline Hunter
lesson plan format. So, respectfully, why make your students?” I had
read that Madeline Hunter disavowed using her planning template as
recipes. Nonetheless, a prescriptive interpretation of Hunter’s work
was forwarded as unimpeachable by the entire education faculty at
UPS.
Dr. Satterfield’s face, prematurely aged by cigarettes, turned
solicitous. “Hunter’s plans are training wheels that may be removed
after you’ve become a real teacher.” I shook my head. By his analogy,
balance could be employed at a cyclist’s discretion.
Lesson plans were invented to enhance sermons—by definition,
involving passive Christian targets. Why was it necessary to use Old
World strategies in the era of de-centered instruction? Why couldn’t
lesson design inspire wonder? Or pathos? Or the grand mysteries that
inspired Milton to transform western culture? Social science’s clinical
vocabulary—objectives, modeling, guided and independent practice,
closure, etc.—suppressed inquiry (the natural enemy of formula).
By the time I parked in the teachers’ lot behind the portable
classrooms, my windshield had thawed. Stars and darkness had
retreated from the Tacoma morning, replaced by blue and a chalky
moon that followed overhead as I lugged a box of graded essays across
the high school campus.
Later that morning, I found a dozen teachers fixated on NBC
Television anchor, Maria Kennedy, saying that Christa McAuliffe had
intended to implement her lesson plan in space in front of a TV
audience of schoolchildren. Smoke in the shape of cypress trees-organic and obscene--bloomed in the sky. Cape Canaveral visitors
shielded their eyes. The rubber seal O-ring on Challenger had
hardened and then cracked as soon as the rocket boosters ignited
(Vaughan, 1997). My plans for the day were useless, obviously.
Right then, I couldn’t comprehend the emotional shockwaves that
would spread across the country. I felt guilty for feeling emotionally
cool in a room filled with anguish. Wasn’t this accident minor
compared to the spread of HIV? My chief worry was procedural.
What was I supposed to tell my students, many of whom would be
shaken? At 6’3’’, I had the height of an adult, but zero gravitas. My
life script did not prepare me to supply comfort to anyone.
Five students slowly dislodged themselves from the exposed
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 26 –
radiator when I entered my clinical teacher’s portable classroom.
Leaning against the window, the middle-aged coach of the Decatur
Gators, Greg Flynn, bald with a walrus mustache, was eating lunch: an
apple and a box of raisins. Behind him, the late morning sky was so
bright that I could see the Cascade Mountains. Mr. Flynn stared at
his feet, withdrawing to let me take charge.
“By now, you’ve heard about the Challenger Shuttle explosion. It is
unlikely that there are any survivors.” Could I say this? What words
had the TV anchor used? Maybe someone had escaped?
“It’s a sad day for a lot of people.” Was I looking sensitive
enough? Imposter! “Many people remember the moment they heard
that Kennedy was assassinated.” Should I have mentioned Martin
Luther King, Jr. to be more diversity-conscious? “This morning will
probably be like that for many of you.” Did I really just say that? “I
wish I knew what to say to offer you comfort, but nothing like this
has ever happened in my memory.” And then I had nothing more to
say. The students looked at me, and I stared back. Mr. Flynn,
mercifully, stood to his full height and drew his students’ attention
away from me. Waves of shame wrecked me so fast that I could do
little more than hold my breath and look away.
What Todd Learned
In hindsight, I should have let a poem speak to the class, as I did
on 9/11 to a class of grieving college freshman, reading from Phillis
Levin’s End of April which includes the stanza, “It didn’t seem real /
but nature will do such things / from time to time (Levin, 1996).” In
Before She Dies, Karen Chase writes: “I wondered how finite these
lustered days seem / to you, A stand of hemlock across the lake
catches / my eye. It will take a long time to know how it is / for you.
Like a dog's lifetime -- long -- multiplied by sevens.” Ovid’s
Metamorphoses: “Daedalus and “ is too obvious a choice, but like the
other examples, depicts valor and loss.
“And as he called upon his father's name
his voice was smothered in the dark blue sea,
now called Icarian from the dead boy's name.
The unlucky father, not a father, called,
"Where are you, Icarus?" and "Where are you?
In what place shall I seek you, Icarus?"
He called again; and then he saw the wings
of his dear Icarus, floating on the waves
(The Internet Classics Archive, 2009);
While the lesson plan frame was too rigid to provide me the
wisdom I needed, the poetic frame was big enough and flexible
enough to embrace the chaos. When majestic language soothes
tragedy’s psychic lacerations, art wins.
My second realization took years to effloresce. Just as the
Challenger failed because of NASA’s systemic incompetence, my
professional self-satisfaction conduced misguided curriculum choices:
teacher-centered instruction, quizzes, gimmicky writing exercises,
worksheets, etc. I too often ignored the painful acquiescence of
students to the day’s lesson. Meanwhile I used the euphorically
successful classroom activity—glorious flukes—as validation of my
lesson plans and the assumptions that informed them.
In 1986, Dr. Satterfield’s implacable faith in lesson plans made my
teeth grind. Planning templates might be useful if you were teaching
kidney surgery and didn’t want anyone to mess up, ever. But that’s no
way to teach literacy. Every year, my hostility to the six-point lesson
plan strengthens. Jargon-bloated lesson plans participate in our
national fetishization of stanines. They cannot reflect a transcendent
moment or represent the danger of an authentic idea deeply explored.
If lesson plans were useful, we would not have allowed Whitney
Houston’s 1986 “The Greatest Love of All” to remain on the radio
for three years or Halliburton to negotiate no-bid contracts in 2003.
Imagine Ezra Pound, who wrote, “[G]enius has a right to any mode of
expression” (sometime after fixing T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland) forcing
ideas into these inelegant monuments to behaviorism. Art loses.
What Stephanie Learned
And I came to know that teaching is a terribly risky profession.
Teachers like Christa McAuliffe and Ms. Pair, who teach outside the
pages of the textbook and open the doors of the classrooms to the
world, and to the universe, are flirting with their own mortality. They
threaten to kill “the teacher” and create a more equitable classroom
where there are only learners. Guided by their understanding of
knowledge as fluid and elusive, their values of compassion and
humanism, they weave together the experiences of success and failure
into the fabric of an education. Spiritually inclined and secularly
pragmatic, they “slip the surly bonds of earth…to touch the face of
God.”
References
Levin, P. (1996). End of April. For further permissions information,
contact Copper Beech Press, P.O. Box 2578, Providence RI 02906.
Ovid. (n.d.). The Internet Classics Archive | Metamorphoses by P.
Ovidius Naso. Retrieved September 12, 2009, from
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html
Ronald Reagan Speech on the Space Shuttle Challenger. (n.d.).
Retrieved September 12, 2009, from
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/reaganchallenger.htm
Vaughan, D. (1997). The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky
Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University
Of Chicago Press.
About the Authors:
Todd Finley is the co-director of the Tar River Writing Project, an
associate professor of English Education at East Carolina University;
he blogs at EEprof.com. Stephanie West Puckett is a National
Writing Project Teacher Consultant and instructor of composition at
East Carolina University
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 27 –
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS A TWO-PART RESPONSE TO
“IN DEFENSE OF FICTION” BY DOUG LASKEN, PUBLISHED
IN THE MAY 2009 ISSUE OF CALIFORNIA ENGLISH.
Reconcilable Differences
by Kathleen Dudden Rowlands and Jennifer Fletcher
Part I: In Defense of Effective Pedagogies – Kathleen Dudden Rowlands
It was with increasing dismay and distress that I read Doug Lasken’s
impassioned “In Defense of Fiction” in the May edition of California
English. I was dismayed to recognize myself as the “maven,” nay the
“pundit” from the local College of Education who had provided an
introduction to the CSU’s Expository Reading and Writing Course
(ERWC) for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers in
preparation for its revised 11th grade American Literature curriculum.
My dismay didn’t arise from the name calling; nearly thirty years in
middle and high school classrooms (and several more at the university)
have thickened my skin appreciably. “But HOW ,” I wondered, “could I
have been so unclear about such important points? And, if Mr. Lasken
is confused, quite probably others are as well.”
My distress grew when, at a recent meeting of folks from the
California Writing Project, I learned that indeed, Mr. Lasken’s fears are
more than legitimate. There ARE schools in California where students
read only informational texts. In fact, teachers are forbidden to use any
literature in their classrooms. This, of course, was hardly the intention of
Shown here: I Love Cuba
(12” x 16”, Watercolor)
the CSU Task Force as they developed the ERWC. In response to a
nationally observed need to broaden students’ experiences with
informational text genres, a task force of secondary and college
educators developed a curriculum (the ERWC) for high school students
whose test scores suggested that—by the end of their junior year—they
had not yet developed as critical readers of informational texts. As a
result, it was anticipated that such students would find it difficult to
respond to the expository post-secondary reading and writing required
at the university with any measure of academic success.
Those of us encouraging the integration of non-fiction texts into
the English curriculum are hardly “foes of fiction.” In fact, my only
quibble with Lasken’s position is the way he limits literary study to those
genres umbrellaed by the term “fiction” (novels and short stories, I
assume). Broadening the conversation to include all literary forms
would better focus our discussion tightly on genre, thereby aligning it
more specifically with the language of the California English Language
Arts Standards for both Reading (2.0) and Literary Response and
Analysis (3.0).
I was also dismayed that my message about the need to rethink
approaches to literary instruction because students (other than English
majors) will rarely be assigned literary readings once they have left high
school for the university was so poorly understood. If high school is our
last chance to develop literary readers—adults who choose good fiction
or poetry as their recreational reading, it seems to me that we should
provide students with experiences that lead them to embrace literature’s
pleasures as they develop into life-long literary readers. Indeed, I do
worry that in the well-meaning rush to “cover content” we create
students who view literature as “boring,” because, as Laskin observes,
they “didn’t understand it.” And students often don’t understand what
they read because we miss opportunities to help them develop the very
human connections with literary texts that lead to the understandings
(and aesthetic pleasures) that Mr. Lasken so rightly champions! Always
the idealist, I want students to grow into adults whose nightstands are
stacked with volumes of poetry and collections of short stories
alongside the reports and business plans they must read in preparation
for upcoming meetings.
First, some background. Our current literature-centered curriculum
emerged because of decisions made by universities in the mid 19th
century. Ironically, literary study originally had to “develop a
methodology rigorous enough to win academic respect” (Applebee 21).
That is, literature was seen as presenting a “real threat to the moral wellbeing of its readers” (Applebee 21), as well as being too superficial to be
worthy of academic scrutiny. That is, the subject we defend with such
vigor today, originally appeared as both too morally dangerous and too
academically frivolous to be included in the university (let alone the high
school) curriculum! To truncate an extended and complex process
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 28 –
whereby literature emerged as a respected school subject, in 1876,
Harvard expanded its curriculum to include English literature and made
Francis James Child its first professor of English, thus setting the stage
for “systematic, regular instruction in literature” to emerge first in the
nation’s universities and then in the high schools (Applebee, 25-38).
LAUSD’s new American literature curriculum was developed by
teachers familiar with the ERWC and who used the ERWC’s
Assignment Template as a frame for planning effective instruction
around texts. The Template itself is designed to be used with any genre
and helps teachers plan instruction to lead students from prereading
through reading and post reading, to connecting reading to writing, and
finishes with prewriting, writing, revision, and publication. None of this
is new to experienced teachers, of course; the Template merely provides a
convenient instructional organizer for best practice, standards-based
teaching. It should be a comfort to Mr. Lasken to learn that by using
rhetorical approaches to texts, state standards are explicitly addressed. In
fact, it might be argued that many of the Reading Comprehension
standards (2.0) are addressed more comprehensively through the ERWC
than through many of the state’s adopted textbooks. For example, the
9th through 12th grade standards advise that “Students read and
understand grade-level-appropriate material. They analyze the
organizational patterns, arguments, and positions advanced” (56 and 74,
respectively). In fact, for 11th and 12th grades, Standard 2.1 explicitly
anticipates that students should be able to “analyze both the features and
the rhetorical devices of different types of public documents” (74).
This rhetorical reading and writing is precisely what instruction
organized by the Assignment Template is designed to teach—with both
literary and informational texts.
That is, the pedagogical premise underpinning the Template’s design
is to help students become independent, rhetorical readers of complex
and unfamiliar texts (in whatever genre), and to give them multiple
experiences as authors entering into academic conversations around
those texts. The instructional focus is on teaching kids HOW to read
and write in a variety of authentic academic modes. As Donald Graves
would suggest, we hope to get students off “teacher welfare” as they
prepare for the rigors of post secondary study—and as they learn to
read for personal understanding and enjoyment.
The specific texts (or genres) students read don’t matter as much
as what they learn to do with them. Indeed, in its full, year-long
version, the ERWC includes literature—a study of Ursela K. Le
Guin’s science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness as well as a
passage from Hamlet, for example. As teachers have increased their
familiarity with the ERWC, many have used the Assignment Template
in other courses to frame instruction around literary texts as well as
around informational pieces. In fact, students in my English Methods
course use the Assignment Template to design a unit plan around a
text or text segment of their choosing. Many choose to work with
literary genres and have responded with units based on texts such as
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, The
Giver, and “The Ransom of Red Chief ” among others.
Part II: Reconciling Rhetoric and Literature - Jennifer Fletcher
As Kathleen points out, the current discussions on some high school
campuses generated by the implementation of the CSU Expository
Reading and Writing Course are part of a long-running conversation in
our profession about what and how to read. Viewed from this historical
perspective, we can see English studies as inherently integrative and
pluralistic—an expansive discipline where literature can be written and
read rhetorically and rhetoric is a literary art.
The generic divisions Mr. Lasken discusses in his article also have a
long history, as does the practice of frequently redefining and
transcending these boundaries. The roots of some of these divisions
extend to the classical period. Both Aristotle and Plato see rhetoric as
distinct from poetry and myth. Aristotle describes rhetoric as “the
counterpart of dialectic” (Rhetoric, Book I, Chapter 1)—that is, as a
logocentric practice used for real-world inquiry and decisions. Poetics,
on the other hand, address “modes of imitation” (Poetics, Chapter 1,
line 16) in which human beings naturally delight (Poetics, Chapter 4,
lines 8-12). Aristotle further explains that poetry is more “philosophic”
than history (Poetics, Chapter 8, lines 6-7) and has not the “same kind
of correctness” as politics (Poetics, Chapter 24, lines 12-15). For Plato,
poetry is a type of divine madness that transports the soul, while
rhetoric is a discursive art that can be used for base or noble purposes—
and had better be used for good.
Attempts by twentieth-century critics to define and delimit literature
have similarly been frustrated by the instability of generic categories.
Purists like Harold Bloom who have sought to preserve the literary
cannon have faced numerous skeptics—including Roland Barthes, Terry
Eagleton, and Stanley Fish—who have challenged essential notions of
literature and literary value (McDonald 218-219). Indeed, many
scholars have noted, as Peter D. McDonald points out, that “one of the
pecularities of literature […] is that it is always disturbing or
overturning traditional ideas of the literary” (216).
In recent years, the explosion of new and divergent scholarship in
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 29 –
Shown here: Essence of Poppy
(12” x 16”, Watercolor)
the fields of literary theory and criticism offers a fresh perspective on
these old questions. No longer is English studies a two-sided coin. In
place of the earlier splits between fiction and nonfiction, interpretive and
expository practices, the sublime and the pragmatic, our work now
encompasses a wide array of disciplines, genres, and meaning-making
approaches. From New Criticism, we developed our skills in close
textual analysis; from Reader-Response criticism, we learned how
personal experience affects interpretation; from New Historicism, we
learned to see all texts—whether imaginative or informational—as
literary productions; from cultural studies, we learned how context
shapes the way texts are written and read. The list of current influences
on our thinking and our teaching extends to Marxism, gender studies,
psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, postcolonialism, and many others.
And present throughout this diverse array of approaches, we find the
key principles and practices of rhetoric. Like a universal decoder ring,
rhetoric can speak the language of all other critical theories. In The
Mirror and the Lamp (1953), M.H. Abrahms identifies the following
co-ordinates of art criticism: the universe, the work, the audience, and
the artist. Abrahms uses these co-ordinates to classify different critical
theories, with each group emphasizing different co-ordinates. For
example, mimetic approaches (such as neoclassicism) foreground the
relationship between the work and the universe while objective theories
(such as New Criticism) focus on a close reading of the work itself.
However, a rhetorical approach to texts simultaneously engages the
dynamics of all four coordinates. Rhetoric is interested in how all
meaning-making agents—text, writer, reader, and context—contribute
to the effect of a work. Consider Aristotle’s description of a
rhetorician’s tasks:
But since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions […] the
orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech
demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own
Shown here: Male Study
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character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the
right frame of mind” (Book II, Chapter 1).
In this description of the components of effective speech, we find an
even emphasis on three of Abrahms’s art coordinates: the work, the
audience, and the artist. Elsewhere in the Rhetoric, Aristotle gives equal
weight to kairos (the immediate social context of speech acts) or what
Abrahms might call “the universe.”
For example, a rhetorical approach to Marc Antony’s funeral oration
from Julius Caesar might require students to engage practices common
to New Criticism, Reader-Response, New Historicism, and Marxism.
Students could analyze the rhetorical effect of irony and repetition in
the speech, use pathos and personal experience to imagine the feelings of
the audience (“Have you ever been betrayed by a friend?”), study classical
conventions of funeral oratory to understand Marc Antony’s
manipulation of kairos, and critique the subject position Marc Antony
creates for his auditors in relation to his own powerful ethos. In this
manner, students could integrate multiple aspects of literary criticism
through their rhetorical analysis of the speaker’s strategies, audience,
context, and persona.
We likewise find this affinity between rhetoric and literary criticism
when we consider our objectives as English teachers. In Critical
Encounters in High School English, Deborah Appleman describes the
outcomes of direct instruction in literary theory in language that
suggests rhetoric’s capacity to function as a super-lens:
Learning to inhabit multiple ways of knowing also can help [high
school students] learn to adapt to the intellectual perspectives and
learning styles required by other disciplines. When taught explicitly,
literary theory can provide a repertoire of critical lenses through which
to view literary texts as well as the multiple contexts at play when
students read texts—contexts of culture, curriculum, classroom,
personal experience, prior knowledge, and politics. Students can see what
factors have shaped their own world view and what
assumptions they make as they evaluate the
perspectives of others […].” (Appleman 3)
Trans-disciplinary proficiencies, adaptive literacy
skills, understanding of self and the world, ability to
identify assumptions and evaluate perspectives—these
are the target competencies for both literature
programs and expository curricula. For Appleman,
acquiring these competencies involves practice with
several different theoretical approaches. Yet rhetoric
is internally pluralistic. The “repertoire of critical
lenses” that Appleman recommends to help students
“inhabit multiple ways of knowing” is embedded in
rhetorical training. Because skilled rhetoricians must
understand multiple views and fields simultaneously,
rhetoric can serve as a foundational practice upon
which advanced and portable competencies in other
content areas, including literary criticism, are built.
In the wake of the theoretical revolution, English
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 30 –
teachers are more aware than ever of the choices we have as meaningmakers. Choosing a rhetorical approach to fiction and nonfiction—like
the approach offered by the CSU Expository Reading and Writing
Course—helps teachers and students have a greater stake in the
conversations that continue to shape our discipline.
Works Cited
Applebee, Arthur N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English:
A History. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English,
1974.
Appleman, Deborah. Critical Encounters in High School English:
Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents. New York: Teachers
College Press, 2000.
Aristotle. The Rhetoric and The Poetics. W. Rhys Roberts, trans.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.
California English Language Arts Standards. July 6, 2009.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/elacontentstnds.pdf
Graves, Donald. “Let’s Get Rid of the Welfare Mess in the Teaching of
Writing.” A Researcher Learns to Write: Selected Articles and
Monographs. Heinemann: Exeter, NH, 1983. (43-51).
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1987.
McDonald, Peter D. “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature:
After Theory?” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 214-228.
Plato. “Phaedrus.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical
Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg.
Boston: Bedford, 1990. 113-143.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 1659-1759.
About the Authors:
Kathleen Dudden Rowlands is an Associate Professor in the Michael
D. Eisner College of Education at California State University,
Northridge and the Director of the Cal State Northridge Writing
Project. Jennifer Fletcher is an Assistant Professor of English at
California State University, Monterey Bay. Both are former high school
English teachers.
Revised Membership Fees for CATE
The CATE Board of Directors at its meeting on
September 20. 2009 approved presenting to the CATE
Annual Meeting, which takes place on February 14,
2010, a change in dues for membership in CATE.
Beginning on July 1, 2010, dues for CATE will be
One year
$40 (remains the same as current)
Two years
$75 (adds a new option—savings of $5)
Three years
$110 (savings of $10)
Retired
$30 (increases the rate by $5)
Lifetime
$250 (remains the same)
Student teacher $20 (increases from current rate of $12)
Rates are essentially the same, with the exception of
those for retired teachers and student teachers. We also
hope that the new two- year option will appeal to
members in order to keep their membership current for a
longer period of time without missing out on
membership privileges.
If you have any questions or comments about the
proposed changes, please contact me at
www.cateweb.org.
Joan Williams
CATE Membership Chair
– California English • Vol. 15.3 • March 2010 • page 31 –
Shown here: Apple Blossoms with Finch
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