As in past years, we are including in our summer issue of the newsletter several brief reviews of books--some related to adult basic education, some not--that various A.L.R.I. staff recommend as good summer reading. All can be found in the A.L.R.I. library.
I must have been in the fifth grade when I figured out how old I was going to be in the year 2000, and I remember feeling that I was going to be too old to really enjoy such a momentous occasion. In spite of the fatalistic ageism common to the very young, I did the math for all members of my family and, except for grandparents, I was sure we were all going to "see it." I remember telling that to my mother with all the wisdom of an 8-year-old and her nodding and smiling at my excitement. It was with sadness that I relived this memory this past December, for my mother did not see the end of the 20th century, having died at age 69 three years ago.
A thousand years ago, I probably would not have lived beyond the year 999 if I had been born in England (or Engla-lond) in the year 956. Most people died in their forties, and by age twelve boys went to war and girls were married. These known facts plus many unknown ones form the bulk of the book The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. As they are not historians but journalists, they set out to report on everyday facts of how people lived in England one thousand years ago. Clearly, Lacey and Danziger wanted to capitalize on the millennium hoopla, but another motivation, at least for one of them, was the realization that he had picked up little history while studying at what sounds like a posh English prep school. For the book, the authors interviewed a long list of noted historians and anthropologists and consulted many different sources, including the 500-member-strong Regia Anglorum society, formed to recreate the life of the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and other inhabitants of the British Isles before the Norman invasion of 1066.
If the references to anthropologists and historical recreational societies have turned you off, don't be. This is a very readable book, only 201 pages long in an 8 x 5 format. As the authors mention, existing written primary sources from the England of 1000 can fit into four boxes, as opposed to the 36 that contain records of the testimony in President Clinton's sex scandal. With this perspective in mind, one can see why historians rely a lot on the research of anthropologists, whole branches of whom concentrate, for example, on studying the remains of outhouses. From them we learn that the diet of the average citizen a thousand years ago was full of roughage as nothing was spared, including the rather large pits of fruit. They know this because that's about all that remains of what people ate, as opposed to the more intact remains of dog poop from that era. The authors would laugh at my use of the childish euphemism for excrement since they use the other four-letter word which I guess is common in modern British. Of course, the saintly monks who copied most of the documents remaining from the Middle Ages never documented swear words, but bawdy limericks from around the year 1000 do exist, which Lacey and Danziger delight in reprinting, including a riddle about onions and one on the joys of churning butter. All of this about four hundred years before Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales.
One does have to know something about English history to follow the rapid pace and namedropping in this book. I am afraid that the bulk of my knowledge of this history is from historical novels, but it was sufficient to follow the book's broad strokes and actually piqued my curiosity to go check the sequence of certain historical events. Still, the most fascinating parts for me were the tidbits about how regular folks lived, what they ate and drank, how they viewed the world. The publishers capitalize on this modern hunger for People magazine-type details by printing on the backjacket tantalizing come-ons, such as "The recipe for a medieval form of Viagra, p.126," "Body parts a married woman had to forfeit if she committed adultery, p.171," and "How fried and crushed black snails could improve your health, p.127."
There are more serious details in this book which are also interesting if not entirely new. For example, Lacey and Danziger do a quick summary of the complex and long debate on how to measure time not just in hours but in days, years, decades, millenniums. The controversy had lasted centuries, with the Christian church furiously debating when to start counting Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD). The battle for the system we still use today was actually won by the English in the seventh century but it took hundreds of years to take hold in the European world. It didn't help that they were behind the Arab cultures, not having yet figured out the concept of "zero," which is why we are still debating whether the 21st century starts on January 1st, 2000 or 2001. Part of the problem was that they were still using Roman numerals, writing the year 999 as DCCCCLXXXXVIIII before it turned into a simple M. But these were worries only for learned men and perhaps there was no better time than 1000 AD to be illiterate. (Imagine having to multiply with all those letters!) The regular people were more concerned with the predictions of doomsday and the unleashing of the anti-Christ preached from the pulpits of the churches. But merely three years later, according to the Burgundian monk Ralph Glaber, there was a wave of church-building all across Europe: "It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches." (p.182) Uhm...I shudder to think what people may choose to do in our world now that the YK2 bug never materialized.
--Maria E. González
After floundering around in what frequently feels like the quicksand of current policy and discussion on accountability, assessment, and the like, it is always refreshing to read the work of Frank Smith, who has a very radical (as in its meaning of "from the roots") view of education. Smith is a former professor of education at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. His most recent collection of essays, Between Hope and Havoc, presents a very different view of education from the one we usually see reflected in public discussion, in legislative debate, and in educational policy. I would urge everyone to read this slim volume--or even just chapters 4, 5, 7, and 9 on learning to read, literacy, schools, and our educational system. (You might also get hooked and want to go back and read Smith's other books, including Essays into Literacy, Joing the Literacy Club, and Understanding Reading.) A few very brief quotes from Between Hope and Havoc to whet your appetite:
A...profound change was instituted at the beginning of the present century when education, in an endeavor to be "scientific," adopted experimental psychology's contrived and nonsense-based theory of learning. The notion that learning was accomplished through repetition and application rather than sense and assistance turned the teacher into a scorekeeper and warped the personal relationship between teacher and student. (p. 82)
Only one kind of research has had anything useful to say about literacy, and that is ethnographic or naturalistic research--studies observing how literacy is actually learned and used in real communities, without the researchers' trying to manipulate the situation in any way. (p. 60)
All of these [packaged instructional] programs ignore the fact that literacy is a social phenomenon. Individuals don't become literate from the formal instruction they receive, but from what they read and write about, and the people they read and write with. Learning is also a social phenomenon. What everyone in every culture has taken for granted for millenia (until experimental psychologists took the study of learning out of the real world and put it in the laboratory) is that learning is a simple consequence of the company you keep. (p. 57)
Assessment, or maintaining pressure on people caught in the system, is the only thing many politicians can think of when they take a problem-solving approach to education....Yet no one can demonstrate that any test has ever had a beneficial effect on education. (p.107-8)
Smith is nothing if not provocative. Yet I am also afraid that he is, in some fundamental way, also largely correct. I say "afraid" because we have so totally accepted a view of education, learning and teaching that puts its faith in the world of experimental psychology and its derivatives--instructional programs, decontextualized learning, skill lists and hierarchies, quantitative evaluation and accountability--that it is extremely difficult to see how the alternative anthropological or ethnographic view might ever re-emerge. But it's crucial at least to keep in mind that it's there.
--Steve Reuys
<text>There are a million reasons to read poetry in our classrooms: because GED students need to be able to analyze it to pass their GED tests; because students from other countries, who are often themselves grounded in oral and written, folk and formal traditions of poetry in their mother tongues, are pleased when they can share their country's literature and study other poetic traditions; because poetry teaches us things that no other form of writing can. There are also a million ways to incorporate poetry into our classrooms so it can unleash its force and ignite our own and our students' memory and imagination. For instance, how many of us, when we design a set of lessons around a specific content area, such as health or community or, yes, even technology and computers, go to poetry to help us and our students make meaning of the topic at hand? I think a few of us do. There is no better way into any topic, I think, and perhaps no better way out, as well.
I first stumbled into Homecoming, a collection of poetry by Julia Alvarez in 1985. It was a year after graduating from school in D.C, and I had moved to Boston, where I was working shelving books at the Jamaica Plain Branch Library. I remember how, in seeing the beautiful face of my teacher glow through the smudged back cover jacket, I felt less lonely in my new life in Boston. For I had been blessed to have this remarkable writer as a poetry workshop teacher in Washington, D.C., a year earlier. There, she gracefully led a bunch of us undergrads to think about, to revise and tighten, to bring meaning to the thing that undergrads produce so well&emdash; reams of passionate, bad poetry. Later, I followed her into the worlds she created in her fiction&emdash;first, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991), her novel about issues of assimilation told through the voices of three Dominican sisters as they "become American," and later, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), as she recreated the historical narrative of the martyred Maribel sisters in their fight against the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Most recently, in my work with the Homebuying Readiness Curricula Project, where I am constantly searching for poems about home (of which, thank god, there is yet another million, due to the fact, I believe, that poets love to write about home, since they never feel like they have one), I restumbled upon Julia Alvarez's newly revised collection of poems, Homecoming, in the A.L.R.I. library. Talk about old friends!
These poems are daring, and they are written carefully and simply. While the persona of these poems details the paradoxes and pleasures of living life as a privileged woman in the Dominican Republic, a position that permits her both to reap from the bounty of her family's wealth while also remaining tied and bound to the rigid expectations of gender, these narratives do not allow for black and white assertions of either world. They ask us to question and observe as the voice in the poems questions and observes. So that, in the first poem of the collection, when the narrator returns home for her cousin Carmen's wedding, "...the guards/at her father's finca took the guests bracelets/and wedding rings and put them in an armored truck/for safekeeping while wealthy, dark-skinned men,/their plump, white women and spoiled children/bathed in a river whose bottom had been cleaned/for the occasion," and an entire complex interaction of race, class, gender is put into motion.
And it doesn't stop. Because poetry and story are not servants to analytical or reductive summary, writers are able to recreate complicated experiences in all of their changing and nuanced truth. Ah, a fourth reason to bring poetry into our classroom. Or, as in the case of the last lines of this first poem of the collection, there is captured, only through concrete detail, the moment of synthesis when the narrator pulls together the seemingly disparate images and reflections into something simple and large: "...I had a vision/that I blamed on the champagne:/the fields around us were burning. At last/a yawning bride and groom got up and cut/the wedding cake, but everyone was full/of drink and eggs, roast pig, and rice and beans./Except the maids and workmen,/sitting on stoops behind the sugar house,/ate with their fingers from their open palms/windows, shutters, walls, pillars, doors/made from the cane they had cut in the fields."
From this introductory poem we are led through a series of twenty poems called "Housekeeping." Poems like "Folding My Clothes," "Naming the Fabrics" and "Woman's Work," which tell of an adolescent girl who, though denied the freedom of play, succumbs to the realization that the sensuality of the world can also exist in one's relationship to the hard work of keeping things beautiful and useful and in having ways to describe all that.
In her next section of poetry, "Heroines," Alvarez's five poems again explore the traditional construct of upper-class Dominican women as mothers against the new childless, familyless, American women who gets to write her own future: "Sadly, we turn the page/to right our hearts/knowing our lives too well/to be the heroines of our mothers' stories./We're careful with the words/we pick, the loves with no returns/like the ones we wanted./Godmothers to our sisters' girls,/we bring them squawking rubber monsters,/birthday poems pasted in the growing albums."
As with the previous poems, and the ones to follow, there is loss and gain in this new kind of homeless, unrooted freedom. These poems, afterall, speak to the experience of immigrating to a new country and making a life here while sometimes feeling like you don't belong in either place. The final poem of the collection, "Last Night at Tia's," captures the experience of drifting and of belonging to no place. In the final stanza of the poem the narrator compares herself and her grownup sisters and cousins who are now living permanently in the United States to "nightblooming cereus...opening their flowers slow motioned to the moon," and which are cut and thrown into the pool, "set afloat like fragrant caravels on their brief journey."
These poems are good for us to read by ourselves, with our families and with our students because they use language beautifully and tell important stories. In loving detail, they tell readers about one aspect of a country in the Caribbean that shares an island with Haiti, a specific home, a real family, the abrupt disorientation that comes from changing one's homeland and identity. They are about immigration, of being of two, and of many, worlds. But ultimately, these poems speak of creating your own home through the means by which you express that experience&emdash;the ability and desire to use language to make a home. What other braver and more useful lesson to bring to our language learning classrooms and to our students?
(Please check out the literature section of the 1999 Homebuying Readiness Project web pages at <http://www.alri.org.> by clicking on the Special Projects link and then the link to the 1999 Homebuying Readiness pages. And let me know what you think if you use Homecoming or any of the other writings or lessons with home-related themes.)
--Deborah Schwartz
A useful book for ESOL and bilingual education teachers is The Learning Strategies Handbook, by Anna Uhl Chamot, Sarah Barnhardt, Pamela El-Dinary, and Jill Robbins. This book gives practical examples, ideas and lesson plans containing an array of learning strategies. The learning strategies described are intended to help students take more control over and to be more aware of their learning processes, styles and preferences. These strategies offer students insight into and awareness of how they approach learning content in a non-native language and also offer options and choices on ways to approach new information. The strategies are based on four metacognitive processes: Planning, Monitoring, Problem solving, and Evaluating. This book is also for teachers working with the ABE ESOL curriculum frameworks. It can be challenging to find resources that help teachers with the Developing Strategies for Learning strand. This book gives concrete examples that can be directly connected to both your teaching and the Frameworks.
--Katy Hartnett
No, this is not another lightweight supernatural thriller, but it's just as much of a compelling page-turner as any beach book you could pick up this summer. Ron Suskind's book, subtitled "An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League," tells the fascinating story of Cedric Lavar Jennings, an African-American student at an inner-city high school in Washington, D.C., from whose population little is expected (by teachers, by society, by students themselves). Cedric, however, is academically ambitious and is determined to get into and succeed at an Ivy League college. And he does. He's accepted at Brown University and by the end of the book is a junior with good grades and every hope of graduating. But the road Cedric follows to get to that place is far from easy or smooth, and it is the detailed chronicling of his day-to-day struggles and the reactions of his family, classmates, and teachers that makes this book so intriguing. (Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize for the series of Wall Street Journal articles upon which the book is based.)
A Hope in the Unseen reads like a novel, but a novelist is really only answerable to herself and, to some never-endingly-debated degree, to her readers for the "truth" of her story. Suskind, on the other hand, is a journalist, responsible to all the "characters" in this book, as well as to the world, to make sure he got it right. The result is a meticulously detailed, obviously inspiring story of one boy's successful efforts to reach his goals despite almost overwhelming obstacles that also provides a compelling look at the current state of American education, at the nature of racism and racial identity in the U.S. today, and at the reality of affirmative action. A testament to his own determination and the crucial support of others in his life, Cedric's story is also an illustration of how affirmative action can work and why conservatives are so very wrong when they claim that it should be eliminated in all its forms since a level playing field now exists for everyone, regardless of past history and current reality. For Cedric would never have been admitted to Brown without an affirmative action policy that recognized the tremendous accomplishments he had already made against all odds, accomplishments that did not necessarily show up, for example, in his SAT scores. (Could and should this policy also have provided Cedric with more transitional support once he entered college? Probably.) Unfortunately, though, even with various now-endangered affirmative action policies, Cedric is the one-in-a-thousand exception to the rule of poverty in this country, which does little to provide opportunities for the children of the poor. It's too bad that Cedric's story has to be so incredible.
--Steve Reuys
Computer Books from Peachpit Press
More and more people are moving their computers on to networks. With good reason too. Networks allow you to do a myriad of things that would not be possible otherwise. With a computer network you can have one printer and let everyone in the office share it, or you can create a text file, save it to a shared folder and have others in the office make revisions, or have one computer connected to the Internet and have others share this connection simultaneously. If any of these scenarios are things you have wished for then you might want to take a look at The Little Network Book for Windows and Macintosh by Peachpit Press. The ambitious subtitle, "A friendly introduction to the basics of running a small network, including set up, Internet access, sharing printers and files, and troubleshooting..." is no lie. This user-friendly, well-illustrated book goes from the basic explanations to detailed step-by-step setups. It is aimed at the novice yet is in-depth enough for more experienced users. Maybe not what you'd bring to the beach but certainly accessible enough that it's something that you'd like by your side as you plan and setup your own networked lab of shiny new PCs. It covers the basics from installing a network card all the way to explaining how to set up DHCP. It's in our library for reference and available for loan to TCBoston and LTC members.
The other Peachpit Press book that we recently received is The Non-Designer's Scan and Print Book. Again a book aimed at the entry-level desktop publisher who wants to move beyond Microsoft Word and clip art. In layman's terms it covers the whole process from planning to printing. It's very useful for those times when you need to take a job to a print shop and the press operator asks you one of those jargon-filled questions that you have no idea how to answer, yet you know if your answer is wrong, the operator will think you're dumb and the whole print job will end up like mud. It helps you understand all the different processes out there that you have as options, like "Do I use my laser printer or do I pay for offset printing?" It also covers how you select the right paper, how you should scan your artwork, and finally how you can process your photos so they look good. It's not so much a step-by-step, how-to book as it is a broad overview of the whole printing process. So whether you need to make a high-end glossy promotional poster or a low budget 8 1/2" x 11" newsletter on a laser printer, it will make you more aware of the technical aspects of the job, so you can produce work with greater confidence and skill. Good bye, Word; PageMaker and Quark, here I come!
--Akira Kamiya
New Books in the A.L.R.I. Library
Yes, I have nice shiny new copies of the Azar grammar books and Equipped for the Future Content Standards and America Reads, A Critical Policy Analysis. But it is summer, and grammar can wait until September. So why not visit the A.L.R.I. library and borrow these other new books:
<biblio>Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader
Michael J. Caduto, Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants through Native American Stories
Martín Espada, ed., Poetry Like Bread
Luis Rodriguez, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.
Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love
Rosa Guy, The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind
Ellen M. Pals, Create a Celebration: Ideas and Resources for Theme Parties, Holidays and Special Occasions
Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted
Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
Michael P. MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Images of America series: Boston Harbor Islands
Images of America series: Dorchester II
Alternatives to the Peace Corps: A Directory of Third World and U.S. Volunteer Opportunities
--Sandra Darling
At the A.L.R.I., Sandra Darling is the Librarian, Maria E. González is SABES Coordinator, Katy Hartnett is Curriculum Frameworks Coordinator/ESOL Specialist, Akira Kamiya is Computer Field Technologist, Steve Reuys is Staff Development Coordinator, and Deborah Schwartz is the Homebuying Readiness Curricula TA Project Coordinator.