For the past several years our summer issue has presented brief reviews of an eclectic assortment of books that A.L.R.I. staff (and others) recommend as good reading, for the summer or any other time. Most of the books can be found in the A.L.R.I. library.
Breath, Eyes, Memory is a novel that grips you slowly, tenderly and explosively as only the best pieces of literature can. Many times while reading it, I looked at the back jacket to stare at the picture of the author, for I wanted to figure out how someone so young can know so much. From the picture, the pretty young woman stares back with only a hint of a smile in the closed lips and the older soul peers from eyes that are solemn from the knowing of life's joys and sorrows.
Because the story and the novelist are from Haiti, the book has been described as a Haitian-American novel, a "narrative…that bears witness to her people's suffering and courage." And that it is, for Haiti's history during the time of the Tonton Macoutes, its culture, and its language are the backdrop for the story of a Haitian girl who gets sent to New York to live with the mother who had left her behind to immigrate to the grand states. But there are other themes here that Danticat weaves into the Haitian world that she knows so well. The main one is that of exile and how, in this story, it interrelates with the reality of the lives of the Caco women, the Haitian incarnation of woman everywhere.
Indeed, the Caco women are all in various stages of exile, whether literal or emotional. We see how Tantie Atie, who takes care of Sophie when her mother leaves Haiti for the U.S., is in a slow retreat from reality that ends in alcoholism. Granmamon, the matriarch of the family has also retreated into that space of aloofness that elderly women take when they realize their best dreams won't be realized and there is nothing they can do about it. Central to the story is the migration of Sophie's mother, not just for economic reasons but also to escape terrible memories. But trauma cannot be denied, for beating it back like an ugly weed only makes it grow into a tangled mess. It continues to torture Sophie's mother, as the child finds out soon enough when she goes to live with the parent she hardly knew. It was a shock to go from the verdant, cozy world of Tantie Atie in Haiti to the asphalt and treelessness of Brooklyn, New York.
With the change in setting, the novel loses some of the colorfulness of the images that make the narrative powerful and magical. There is not enough about how little Sophie copes with the shocks and thrills of being in a new place. Dandicat accelerates the narrative so that we find Sophie at eighteen falling in love and eloping with the musician next door. She returns to Haiti in search of answers to her mother's traumatic past and how in turn it has traumatized Sophie almost to the point of breakdown. At that point in the novel, the writing becomes lush again, almost lyrical, as at the beginning. It suggest that Dandicat, like many writers of the different diasporas of the world, writes about her place of origin through the lenses of nostalgia and longing, as if writing about paradise lost.
The strength and charm of this novel lies in the vivid descriptions of Haiti, its people and its culture, which the author writes about honestly and lovingly. Edwidge Danticat is a writer to watch out for in the future. Breath, Eyes, Memory is an extraordinary first novel and I can't wait to read her next one, The Farming of Bones, also available at the A.L.R.I. library.
--Maria E. González
Best for our Children is a collection of fourteen empowering essays, written by mostly female Mexican American scholars and teachers, about the education of Latinos in the adverse climate of California's recent anti-bilingual and anti-immigrant legislation. Much has been written in education research about the value of Freire's concept of concientizaçaõ and Vygotsky's "area of proximal development." As an educator I have always found the concepts useful in framing my teaching but have rarely read so much about their importance in driving the education of Latino students.
The essays contain examples of successful learners as well as educational approaches, from the level of pre-school children's education to the level of Family Literacy and teacher training. While they are guided by the theoretical stands of research (the "why"), most importantly each one of the essays offers an example of the "how" and the "what." It should be possible, after examining the circumstances particular to our own ABE and ESOL classrooms, to design approaches comparable to those described in the book. Finally, the book is an inspiration to all Latinos, since the authors, many of whom are university professors, represent success stories themselves. This book is full of "garra" and is a must read for any teacher.
--Yvonne LaLyre
In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol opens with a portrait of East St. Louis and its schools. The description of the raw sewage, the kids with no health care, the brazenness of surrounding industry and suburban districts in isolating the families in this African-American community made me sick to my stomach. New news? Not really, especially since the book has been out for ten years. But if you are like me, and have a piecemeal understanding of the way defining issues in education fit together to create the school landscape that overwhelms children, parents, schoolteachers and principals today, this book lays it all out. Where are we with desegregation, litigation, property taxes, and magnet schools? Why does Boston seem like a white city, particularly in staff meetings, yet dismissal time across the street from a school tells a completely different story? Several court cases have challenged the unequal funding structures that support the "savage inequalities." Is there evidence of gains as a result of litigation? Why do my relatives in the suburbs pay lower taxes and have better schools? Kozol contrasts schools numerically and graphically. He describes facilities and staffing in pairs of schools--Camden and Cherry Hill, NJ, P.S. 261 and 24 in New York, East St. Louis and Winnetka, IL--with regard to things like bathrooms and science labs, ratios of counselors to kids, and class size.
Quotes from interviews round out the pictures. A fourteen year old girl with short black curly hair says, "We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King, the school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It's like a terrible joke on history." (p. 34-35) Another girl says, "You see a lot about the crimes committed here in East St. Louis when you turn on the TV. Do they show the crimes committed by the government that puts black people here? Why are all the dirty businesses like chemicals and waste disposal here? This is a big country. Couldn't they find another place to put their poison?" (p. 35)
Throughout the book, I kept consoling myself. At least things aren't so bad in Boston. I live around the corner from an inner-city school. The façade is a little fortress-like, but there is a lawn and it sports nut trees and a grape arbor, thanks to EarthWorks. Then again, I have no idea what the science equipment is like. Do the kids have their own books in each subject? I'm 100% certain that on a daily basis students don't have to contend with raw sewage. Nevertheless, I must remind myself of the flood a couple years ago which had Roslindale residents awash in sewage. I remember having to cancel a workshop when the Archdale Community Center closed. Has the city fixed the problem? And what about the huge numbers of children whose rest and respiratory systems are under siege from Logan Airport and diesel buses? Does a state that really cares about its children not only allow but support the sixth largest polluter in the commonwealth to expand its operations near a densely populated area?
It seems as though most of the new and recent funding for schools is channeled into testing. Against the backdrop of this book, high stakes testing is such a ludicrous plan. Kozol's research shows that we systematically saddle poor kids and especially children of color with educational disadvantages--large class sizes, no books, reduced access to clean air, water, health care, dental care--and then, when the children don't test as well as kids who have all the advantages, the rhetoric blames their home environments and the proposal is to impose consequences (read punish) the schools where kids aren't performing. I loved how Kozol deconstructs the rhetoric that surrounds these debates. Frankly, I've been confused by the studies which show that class size isn't a determining factor in learning. As Kozol explains it, certain sources, such as The Wall Street Journal, say, "The usual reduction in class size from 30 to 24, for instance, isn't enough to make a difference." (p. 135) So Kozol reasons, then deeper cuts, to the class size of 17, as in Winnetka, might be in order. But the Journal notes that "as a universal principle, the idea that smaller classes automatically mean more learning doesn't hold water." (p. 135) And so, one by one, suggested changes are ruled out because they alone won't guarantee major change and the idea of more than one expensive change is anathema to taxpayers. Now I feel armed when I hear policymakers and suburban parents finish explaining how money and the advantages it brings, like low student-teacher ratios, don't really make any difference.
What does any of this have to do with adult basic education? You would think our programs would look like heaven, especially to young adults leaving classes of 30, schools with hundreds of kids where there are two working toilets. In adult basic education, they find student-teacher ratios of 15 or 12 to one, often a concerned counselor. Why don't prospective students have an epiphany when they walk into a local GED program? An example from a third grade teacher stuck with me: "I passed out dictionaries once… One of my students started ripping out the pages when he found a word. I said, 'What are you doing? You leave the pages there for the next person.' And he told me, 'That's their problem. This is my word.'" (p. 64-65) Once the scarcity is ingrained, it's difficult to overcome. If I was in the mood to be stingy about giving each learner a book, Kozol's prose has disabused me of that notion.
In some sense, Kozol left me feeling better about adult basic education. I sometimes see myself working in a field that is a band-aid on a festering wound. No. We are really an alternative system. I feel re-committed to the idea that districts' per-student dollars ought to follow the learners into our programs. We are a viable alternative, not just a band-aid.
--Martha Merson
What does cultural studies mean in a Puerto Rican context? Juan Flores, a sociologist at the City University of New York, provides his version in his new book of essays From Bomba to Hip-Hop, Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. One of Flores' main approaches is to use expressions of popular culture and literature as a vehicle for considering contemporary issues in Puerto Rican culture, the culture of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, and the connection between Puerto Rican culture and the larger entity referred to as Latino culture. The essays are built around his proposition that the pan-ethnic concept of a Latino community can be useful but only in so much as it takes into account the component cultures of the different Latin American groups and their counterparts in the diaspora. Flores' home territory is the Puerto Rican community in New York City. He situates the experience of U.S. Puerto Ricans alongside that of other Latinos, most notably Chicanos, and also non-Latinos as well, particularly African Americans. Flores argues that as an internally colonized group, Puerto Ricans share much with other groups who have shared this internally colonized status.
Flores has an interest in looking at the flow of cultural currents between a number of groups. He explores the connection between Puerto Rican folk music forms--for instance, the bomba--and more recent music trends like hip hop. He notes that the trend of using music as a means of publicizing important issues in the community (its newspaper-like function) has been most closely replicated in rap music. Indeed, some of the most accessible and enjoyable parts of this book are the chapters that explore the contemporary music scene. In his preface to the collection, Flores recounts a hip hop conference at Hunter College that took place in 1998, from which he borrows the title for his book. He is clearly moved by the vitality of a popular gathering of performers and fans of hip hop music as they recall their immediate history of production in New York and Puerto Rico and their deeper roots in other Puerto Rican music traditions.
Flores explores the theme of identity as it is represented in literature in at least two of his chapters: "Life Off the Hyphen," and "The Lite Colonial, Diversions of Puerto Rican Discourse." For Flores, "Life Off the Hyphen" is his own code for referring to Puerto Ricans in the U.S. who have declined a hyphenated identity (i.e., Puerto Rican-American). The reference in the code is to a book by Cuban critic and fiction writer Gustavo Perez Firmat's Life On the Hyphen, a book in which the author explores the experience of the "one and a half generation" of Cuban-Americans. Flores' discussions of literature and writers who write about literature includes writers of Cuban, Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, yet, in terms of fiction writers, Flores' central interest is the Puerto Rican author Abraham Rodriguez.
For most instructors, teaching about the experience of Puerto Ricans means integrating Puerto Ricans into a discussion of some larger topic, like different cultures in the United States. Teaching the Puerto Rican experience can be viewed as a part of a larger project of teaching the Latino experience by using a specific example. Is From Bomba to Hip Hop an appropriate text for a teacher or educator who will include a brief focus on Puerto Rican culture? Perhaps the whole book would be difficult to use, simply because the nature of the debates this author is responding to are somewhat complicated. However, its useful organization as a set of stand-alone essays means that some of the essays can be used as background reading. The book represents an important contribution to the current dialogue regarding Puerto Rican studies and could serve as background reading for the lively debate regarding Latinos and Latino studies today.
--Vicky Núñez
World history used to portray the colonization and domination of much of the world by Europeans and others from the territory of Eurasia as essentially inevitable and morally right. In more recent times, although the morality of this conquest has often been called into question, the sense of inevitability has largely remained. Eurasians developed superior technology, especially weapons, and carried with them a host of diseases that proved lethal to other populations--the "guns, germs, and steel" of this book's title--and were thus able to conquer the world. If the question of why it worked out this way was ever asked at all, it was ususally answered in terms of what was essentially a notion of global manifest destiny that explicity or implicitly ascribed European or Eurasian success to some form of biological (racial) and/or cultural superiority.
Jared Diamond, an eminent biologist and anthropologist, has written a tremendously important book (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) that challenges and successfully refutes these notions of inherent racial and cultural superiority. Guns, Germs, and Steel instead attributes the European/Eurasian success story to the luck of the geographical and biological draw. Looking back into prehistory, Diamond shows that, when compared with the rest of the world, the Eurasian continent was uniquely favored in terms of both the number of native wild plant species that were suitable to large scale cultivation for food purposes and the number of native wild animal species that were suitable for domestication for food, transportation, and other uses. Large scale food production therefore developed first and most successfully on the Eurasian continent. And it was able to spread more easily throughout that area than was possible in the rest of the world, due to the generally east/west orientation of that land mass, which produced more similar climate conditions in contiguous areas, hence facilitating the spread of domesticated plant and animal species. With the development of large-scale food production came increased populations, higher population densities, and the capacity for accelerated technological development, including transportation and weaponry, and cultural development, including literacy and centralized government. And, since most of the infectious diseases that proved fatal to other populations were derived from diseases that arose in domestic animal flocks, Eurasians had over time developed general immunity to these diseases, while those without such domestic animals had no opportunity to acquire these immunities, resulting in the incredible epidemics that raced through Native American and other societies after contact with Europeans.
So, Diamond says, it's essentially because certain plants and animals just happened to live in Eurasia and not elsewhere and because Eurasia geographically favored the diffusion, once domesticated, of these plants and animals, that the chain of events began which ultimately resulted in, for example, Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish conquering the Inca Empire, rather than the other way around. No biological racial superiority, no inherent cultural superiority, just the contingent facts of planetary geography and biological evolution that influenced so strongly the possibility of certain populations being able to develop in certain directions.
I've only been able to present Diamond's arguments here in their most abbreviated, stripped-down form; the book itself is a much more elegant presentation that provides an enormous quantity of specific biological data and other compelling evidence to back up his overall thesis. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a fascinating book, written in non-technical, generally accessible language, that deserves the widest possible audience.
--Steve Reuys
Summer is a quiet time with fewer workshops scheduled here. The A.L.R.I. lab is open and we invite you to come in and spend time with our computers. If you haven't had time to learn how to search the web, I will be glad to sit beside you and help you get started. The lab is air-conditioned because the computers need to be comfortable. You can share the chilliness while surfing the web, experimenting with computers, peripherals, software, and programs, or even reading books--on computers, writing, assessment, math, volunteer management, whatever.
A.L.R.I. staff made an expedition to the NE Mobile warehouse for the final order of new books for this year. We reserved a portion of the money for new books on technology. Akira picked up some hefty reference materials on computers and networks, while I went looking for the skinny books with charts and color illustrations. Some of our new books include:
Virtual Power: Technology Education and Community (Pacific Southwest Regional Technology in Education Consortium, 1998) Think about the teaching first and then see how the technology can strengthen the good things that you are already doing. A special emphasis on bilingual classes, equity issues, global learning networks. This is also available on-line at <http://psrtec.clmer.csulb.edu/virtualp/virtual.htm>.
Technology for Diverse Learners, edited by Karen Gutloff (National Education Association, 1997) and Teaching with Technology, by Sabrina Holcomb (NEA, 1999) The books in the NEA "Teacher-to-Teacher" series are stories from K-12 classroom teachers. Descriptions of what works (and does not work) with reproducible checklists and tables that they think other teachers will find useful. Inclusion of high school at-risk and ESOL classes connects the stories to adult education needs. Reality based, practical, short.
Creating Presentations, by Terry Burrows; Creating Worksheets, by Robert Dinwiddie; Em@il, by Annalisa Milner; and Designing Documents, by John Watson (all Dorling Kindersley, 2000) I discovered the Dorling Kindersley series "Essential Computers" at my local public library and I brought Em@il in to work to help me set up my address book. Several of the titles in this series are now in the A.L.R.I. Library. These are pocket-sized books less than 75 pages long. You can open them up and put them on your lap and begin to teach yourself Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Outlook Express email and document design with Microsoft Word. Eventually you may need to move on to the hefty reference books and manuals. But these little books are clear and colorful confidence boosters that make a starting point.
--Sandra Darling
Half a Heart is a fascinating novel that deals with issues of identity--racial identity primarily, but also class, gender, and personal identity as well. It is the story of Miriam Vener, a White middle-aged woman living in Houston with three children and a hefty bank account as a result of her marriage, who suddenly decides to try to locate her daughter Veronica, the product of a relationship she had, while teaching at a college in Mississippi, with an African-American colleague named Eljay Reece. She hasn't seen this daughter for eighteen years, since she was essentially forced by Eljay to relinquish Veronica into his custody because, as a mixed-race baby, she will be seen by our society as Black. Can Miriam at this stage establish any sort of relationship, maternal or otherwise, with her long-lost daughter? Can this be done through the thick screens of race and class, as well as an eighteen-year separation? Can it be done in the context of Miriam's current and essentially all-White life?
But the book is also Veronica's story, and it is increasingly told from her perspective as the novel progresses. Veronica (now known as Ronnee) was raised for the most part by her father in New York City and is, it turns out, also trying to locate her mother, but for a different reason. She's been accepted at Stanford but doesn't have the money to attend and, believing (correctly) that her mother is quite well off, is hoping to get her to finance her college education. How will she relate to this mother that she essentially never knew? How will she fit into her mother's new life? Can she play the role of daughter well enough to be able eventually to pop the question about money?
Things, of course, do not turn out quite the way either Miriam or Ronnee expects, and everything that happens has nuances of race and class that each must grapple with. Both characters are portrayed sympathetically, and the ambiguities and difficulties of the situation for both are fully explored. Brown sees no easy answers to their situation and to the questions mentioned above, and indeed the novel ends in mid-conversation, with no hint of resolution. Will some form of permanent mother/daughter relationship emerge from the extremely fragile connections between them? If so, how will Miriam be able to integrate this relationship into her other family? Will Ronnee get financial support for college from Miriam, whether out of guilt or otherwise? The reader is free to speculate.
--Steve Reuys
It's remarkable what hardship people will endure to satisfy their passions. In this mix of natural science, folklore and adventure, Sy Montgomery, naturalist and former Boston Globe columnist, recounts her travels in Brazil and Peru in search of the elusive freshwater pink dolphins of the Amazon. Her daily existence consisted of avoiding piranhas, spines, spiders and poisonous ants, not to mention contending with large rats trying to share her sleeping quarters. Taking this all in stride, the author offers a detailed description of the peoples and animal life amid the banks of the Amazon River. This is a place where little girls "play with crocodiles as if they were Barbie dolls," and children travel in waterbuses to schools built on stilts.
Her writing is a combination of science, folklore and poetry. Here's an excerpt from the book:
But if you stop and wait, the Encantados will come. At first you may feel a sizzle of bubbles rising beneath the craft, an effusion of pearls cast up below like a net of enchantment. If the night is moonless, you will only know their breath. But if the moon is full, you may see a form rising from the water, gathering into the shape of a dolphin. Inches from your canoe, a face may break the surface--a face at once otherworldly and eerily familiar. The forehead is eerily defined, like a person's. The long beak sticks out like a nose. The skin is delicate, like ours. Sometimes it is grayish, or white--and sometimes dazzling, impossibly pink.
The creature turns its neck and looks at you, and opening the top of its head, gasps, "Chaaahhhhh!"
In Brazil, they call this dolphin "boto." They say the boto can turn into a person, that it shows up at festas to seduce men and women. They say you must be careful, or it will take you away forever to the Encante, the enchanted city beneath the water.
The legends of the "boto" are undeniably rich in imagination and drama, and the scientific facts on these ancient creatures and the local human cultures are fascinating.
Sy Montgomery got the idea for this book in Bangladesh, while she happened to be studying man-eating tigers. For weeks she hadn't seen any tigers, which is probably a good thing, in my opinion. While looking out into the river she did, however, spot three pale pink fins, and though they were just seen for an instant she was haunted by their image. Many years later, at a marine mammal conference she met a man who was familiar with these rare fresh water dolphins. He told her why she felt this way when seeing these creatures. He said in a very matter of fact way that that they capture souls. The world's most primitive whales seem to stir a lot of controversy in the communities around the Amazon with regard to what is deemed fact or fiction about these strange pink mammals.
Whether or not you believe in their magical powers, you will find this a good summer book to read while visiting your favorite watering hole. This book is available at Boston, Somerville and Brookline Public Libraries.
--Katy Hartnett
Martha Merson is the Research Associate for the Extending Mathematical Power (EMPower) project based at TERC in Cambridge. Vicky Núñez has worked in the fields of adult literacy and secondary education and is currently studying and teaching at UMass Amherst. Yvonne LaLyre is a program specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Education/Adult and Community Learning Services. Sandra Darling, Maria E. González, Katy Hartnett, and Steve Reuys are all staff at the A.L.R.I.