TE 849 Methods and Materials for Teaching Children and Adolescent Literature

Offered by the same professor as the Awards and Classics of Children's Literature course, this course focuses on various genres of children's literature including picturebooks, historical fiction, realistic fiction, biography, poetry, graphic novels, and film. It is a rigorous course that required extensive reading of children's literature and criticism. Much of the writing and discussion in the course focuses on issues of multiculturalism and power relations represented in children's literature. The course was a transformative experience in my thinking about the role of literature in children's lives. The following is a literary biography that was one of the beginning assignments of the course.

 
Trying to Remember What I Read: A Reader's Autobiography

Most nights are dark, but I’ve never been told it was a stormy one. April 18th, 1969, the miracle of birth occurred and I showed up on Earth. My parents and older brother were living in Iowa City, Iowa as my father finished his doctoral work at The University of Iowa working closely with Sherman Paul on a dissertation about the American novelist Henry James. It was three years before my mother would become born again and would claim The Bible as The Book of her life. So I grew up in a house where books were powerful forces. I was fortunate to have a mother who could stay at home and read and sing to me through the first years of my life. Mother Goose, Goodnight Moon, The Little Engine That Could and others from the traditional canon of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and folk tales were read to me in a gentle, loving voice. I remember the songs “Hush Little Baby” and “Sweet Baby James” being sung to me, and a variety of funny rhymes and poems that were repeated throughout my early childhood. “Peanut lay upon the track, his heart was all a flutter, along came a choo choo train, choo choo peanut butter,”  “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy, ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” and  “London Bridge is Falling Down” are all rhymes that I recollect from the primordial land of early sights and sounds. Reading and language in my early life was about fun, delight, and hearing the rhythm of language. I was a happy kid.

Richard Scarry, Curious George, Where the Wild Things Are, D’Aulaires’ Trolls, Aesop’s Fables, Grimms Brothers, and Dr. Suess inhabited my preschool and kindergarten years. My mother read these books aloud to me. She recounts visions of me carefully studying the pictures in Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever for hours. D’Aulaires’ Trolls was checked out by my father from the Texas Sate University library and stayed in our home for many years. I was fascinated by D’Aulaires’ illustrations as well. Being read to was a time of being with my mom and brother. It was about listening and talking around texts and about looking at pictures.  At the same time my father would lull us to sleep with stories he made up called Monkey Boy stories. These usually began with “the monkey boys sat in their tree with their elbows on their knees, and their chins on their hands, and they said,  “What are we doing today?” and then their adventures would begin. I still remember one story when the dad brought home really tall chairs and a table and they all sat around the tall table up high eating banana pancakes. So before I could read, stories saturated my life and this story-making was imitated in my intense dedication to playing both with toys as well as in acting out adventures in the woods with my brother. As I began school, this seemingly ideal foundation of language and story seemed to have had a rather shabby construction hobbled to it.

First grade in Mrs. Lumpkins’ class was a successful indoctrination into the life of school. Dick and Jane were my introduction to phonics, learning to read, and following a narrative independently. I do not remember any other books I read in first grade, but the traditional approach of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School ensured that it was a regimented, sit-in-desks approach to reading, spelling, and handwriting. This initiation certainly gave me the skills to become a young reader, but the joy of reading seems to have been slowly worn down. My recollection of second grade revolves around a vivid, emotionally charged reading moment. Though I remember few details from second grade, I remember my reading group being scolded and sent to the back of the classroom because we read poorly. We sat in the back of the classroom crying. I can still see the rabbit in the picture of the basal reader blurred by my tears. I remember struggling with the word “rubbish,” a word I had never seen or heard before in Texas. I do not recall any other books that I read in school during second grade, third grade or fourth grade. I have tried many times to recall what I experienced at school during those years because I taught third and fourth grade for many years. I always draw a blank. I think I read Ramona and Beezus, maybe Homer Price, and possible Henry Huggins. I’m trying to figure out if this blind spot is because I was traumatized by my parent’s divorce, I was bored out of my skull, or because I had some undiagnosed learning disability. I do have vivid memories from outside of school: scoring a touchdown in Little League football, jumping bikes with my brother, building tree houses, and standing on a soccer field on a cold spring morning with the coach yelling, “Put your hands in your pants!” A few random memories of reading emerge that seem connected to that time: the librarian read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki aloud to my class at some point in upper elementary school, I remember reading Blueberries for Sal and Old Yeller at some point, and I remember a chapter book about pioneers that I read many times. So I guess it is not a complete void.

I’m not sure what it means that I don’t have more vivid, specific elementary school memories of reading. As I reread children’s books in adulthood, they seem familiar, but I don’t remember when or where I read them. Reading The Bible was a big part of my elementary years though. We went to church every Sunday, my mother would read us the Bible aloud at home, and we were paid to memorize Bibleverses. In elementary school, I attended chapel everyday and read “The Lord’s Prayer,” the “Apostle’s Creed,” and numerous other texts from the Book of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Hymnal. These religious books seemed vested with great power when I was a child. I now do quite well with Biblical questions when playing Trivial Pursuit.

After sixth grade I went to summer soccer camp with my two best friends. They were reading The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander. I remember starting the book because my friends were reading it. I found it challenging to read, but finished it. I may have read others from that series. I cannot remember a single book that I read in school during fifth or sixth grade.

Junior high is another vague reading period of my life. What I do remember is that, for some reason, I was in an elective class called Honors Reading in seventh grade. We acted out Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I wore ballet slippers attached to my ears with rubber bands to read the part of the Nick Bottom. I also remember that when we finished our worksheet assignments, we could continue our progress through the SRA cards. I remember being perplexed by SRA cards and their questions, and I avoided them like the plague. The only other specific book I remember reading was a book entitled Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater, another book I saw my friend reading, the same kid who was reading The Black Cauldron. It was a strange fantasy story, and I remember feeling proud that I had finished it. I think I then read some other books by the same author.

The rest of junior high and the beginning of high school was a continuation of my habitual disinterest in personal reading. I took Latin from seventh through tenth grade and remember reading Virgil’s Aenead in Latin. I remember using Cliff Notes to avoid having to read novels in high school. Before tenth grade I had summer reading assignments for my Honors English class. I remember sitting at a campsite in the Colorado Rocky Mountains reading Gods, Graves, and Scholars while my dad fished and cooked trout. But then something changed in the middle of my high school career.

I became a reader in high school. I think two factors caused this: one was that my friends were readers and they influenced me, and the second was that I started to have doubts about my Christian faith and was beginning to search for meaning in books. I remember reading poetry, especially e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. I took a course in my junior year of high school in philosophy and religion and read parts of the Bhagavad Gītā, and I remember reading Gary Snyder’s poem about dharma being like an avocado. I read Buddhist texts and went to see the movie Gandhi. This certainly all made my mother quite nervous, and she bought me a book by a Christian author that was a harsh critique of Gandhi. I remember reading and being shocked that someone would expend so much energy to criticize someone who had a positive role in the world. Also, in my senior year my father gave me a hardbound copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path. I read it and then read Fuller’s Grunch of Giants, Spaceship Earth, and No More Secondhand God. I chose to study Bucky Fuller for my junior year author project. I saw great genius and hope in Fuller’s writing and still do. During my senior year I started writing poetry and reading more and more. I became the editor of the school literary magazine and read lots of my peer’s writing. I read 1984 my senior year, as well as other essays by George Orwell. But what I remember most about my senior year is the senior Honors English teacher taking me out in the hall and lecturing me about not working to my potential.

I thought I was a capable reader of literature and philosophy until I attended Vassar College. While at Vassar the bar was raised and the power of reading changed my life. I started thinking I would study literature like my dad, and I read and enjoyed Moby Dick in the gothic grandeur of the Vassar Library. Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson and Joseph Conrad were all authors I read and studied carefully. I was looking for ideas to give meaning to my life. My faith in Christianity had almost completely eroded. But I found that the discussions in literature classes were too emotive and personal, and I wanted something truer and deeper. So, in my sophomore year, I declared my major in philosophy.

Studying philosophy is like learning multiple languages, interpreting authors’ neuroses, and questioning one’s own existence all at the same time. I pretty much spent three years in the library and summers on my dad’s farm reading philosophy. As I sat in the study rooms of Vassar’s Main Building reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, I felt a profound spiritual epiphany. Much of what I had grown up believing in and having my mother reference daily was revealed to have a very different interpretation. What was truth became one refraction of perspective. It was a dizzying moment. My later years of college focused on Michel Foucault’s work, Franz Fanon, and Herbert Marcuse. I wrote my senior thesis on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse as a form of power. My beliefs and preconceptions about knowledge and the world were deconstructed. Much of what I had been taught was unlearned and seen as constructions of truth that were forms of power to control and subjugate. I’d seen the wizard behind the curtain. At the end of my college career I was at the edge of an existential abyss and poised to become the author of my own meaning in life. In other words, I felt like I got my money’s worth.

After completing my B.A. in philosophy, I was pretty tired of books. I took a break from reading after college. I was interested in making films, so I occasionally read technical books about film grammar and film history. I read the autobiography of Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese film director, who said that one should always sit up while reading. Making films did not pay the bills; so when an opportunity to teach adults ESL and GED preparation came up, I took it. I taught in a county jail and a federal prison for three years. Having read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, I started reading other books about incarceration. My reading through my twenties and early thirties followed a similar trend. I read to supplement my knowledge of who, what, and where I was teaching.

I began teaching bilingual education at age twenty-five. I had studied Spanish in elementary school and one year in college, but I needed to become proficient quickly. Reading in English ceased, and I began intensely studying Spanish and reading bilingual children’s books. I read with my students the stories of Alma Flor Ada, Jose-Luis Orozco, Francisco X. Alarcón, Joe Hayes, and Pat Mora. I spent my summer in Mexico studying and reading in my second language.

Then I began reading the history of Mexico and Latin American to grow a clearer understanding of the culture of my students and their families. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America opened my eyes to the dominance of Latin America by European colonizers and American capitalists. My reading through my late twenties continued to focus on the darker side of history and how political narratives are constructed to ensure the hegemony of the ruling class. So my hankering for deconstruction arose again. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of America was a pivotal book during this time and then the works of Noam Chomsky. I was becoming a radical: more my father’s son and less my mother’s.

I didn’t read much fiction during my late twenties and through my thirties. I didn’t appreciate it. I wanted facts and reinterpretations of history. Then, in my late thirties my interest turned to books about health and environmentalism. The Future of Life, The World Without Us, Food Inc., The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life, Born to Run, and the books of Dr. Andrew Weill are titles that I have read in the last two years in a search for better health and stewardship of the Earth. I read Eating Animals by Jonathon Safran Foer last April and decided to reduce the amount of meat I eat considerably. My wife wouldn’t quite tolerate me claiming to be a vegetarian. My mom said that book really affected me. She offered to give me another book that would affect me greatly, the Bible. I declined the offer.

To me reading is about finding meaning in the world. It is only rarely about entertainment, even when I read literature which I have finally started reading again. As my parents have both found great solace in books, my mother in the Bible, and my father in literature, I too value reading for the role it plays in my continued search for wisdom and meaning. This is the message I craft for students, that there is something personally important at stake in our relationship with books. Hopefully, my students will have more memorable experiences than I had in fifth grade. Great books and discussions with peers and book clubs will hopefully foster a greater exploration of texts, inscribe indelible images in my students’ hearts and minds, and leave them on occasion aghast at what they experience. In the end I hope to guide my students to delight in the deeply powerful force of books.