During the course of the year, this newsletter includes occasional reviews of various books that are in some fairly-direct way connected to the world of adult basic education. Well, summer is different. Here we include several brief reviews of books that are not directly related to ABE but that various A.L.R.I. staff would generally recommend as great summer reading.
I know I'm behind the times. Everyone has read Barbara Kingsolver's books and is waiting impatiently for her next. "Everyone" being Maria Gonzalez and my sister who frequently shape my leisure reading choices. Because I read Animal Dreams a long time ago and didn't love it, it's taken me a while to borrow Kingsolver's book of essays, High Tide in Tucson. You have probably already read it. But if you haven't I hope you will. This book I love. I can imagine owning it, rereading it, using it as a source for quotes on various occasions. And if you have read it, what better present for a friend?
Some of Kingsolver's lines will be with me a long time. She can switch between chatty, pedestrian prose and the poetic so quickly it takes my breath away.
I had always watched single working moms with awe, wondering how on earth they did this with no one on standby to help or even cheer them on. Now I was learning. The key is something called "multitasking." You figure out how to combine compatible chores: phone consultations with your editor and washing the breakfast dishes. Writing a novel in the pediatrician's waiting room. Grocery shopping and teaching your child to read. Balancing the budget in the hardware store. Sleeping and worrying. Sobbing and driving. (p. 125-126)
"Sobbing and driving" might be my favorite line in the book. This paragraph is situated in the essay entitled "Confessions of a Reluctant Rock Goddess." I vaguely remember that a while back Amy Tan and other authors performed in a band to raise money for literacy. In this essay, Kingsolver packages the whole story, including the amusing details of how she was coerced into performing and vivid descriptions of her stage fright: "You have to picture the whole thing: in our jitters, the men have turned to alcohol and the women to makeup" (p. 132). I was so drawn into the story, that I forgot I was reading an essay until she transcended sheer entertainment,
When I was a child, if anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply first of all that I didn't think I would grow up, but on the off chance it happened, I planned to be a farmer and a ballerina and a writer and a doctor and a muscian and a zookeeper. This is not the right answer. I know that now.... A business card that lists more than one profession does not go down well in the grown-up set. We're supposed to have one main thing we do well, and it's okay to have hobbies if they are victimless and don't get out of hand, but to confess to disparate passions is generally taken in our society as a sign of attention deficit disorder. (p. 131)
How true. It seems if you are capable of more than one idea at a time, you too could be accused of being ADD. I've always wondered how to integrate all the different interests I have. It's an ongoing struggle whether to keep them in a separate sphere from work or whether to bring them into the workday world. Does it have to be a lose-lose proposition where they suffer from time neglect on the one hand or where, on the other, they lose the fun-filled joyousness if they are brought into contact with timesheets and quarterly reports? Kingsolver has found her own solution:
I'd like to think it's okay to do a lot of different kinds of things, even if we're not operating at the genius level in every case. I'd like to think we're allowed to have particolored days and renaissance lives, without a constant worry over quality control. If the Rock Bottom Remainders were a role model of any kind, I think that was our department: we went on record as half-bad musicians having wholehearted lives. (p. 132)
Kingsolver's band performance isn't the only way she is a role model for combining her interests. Her essays, like her novels (I think), include scientific theories and environmental issues. Kingsolver's scientific side enriches her book. Her understanding of animal behavior and the fact that she has read widely and can synthesize many ideas add to her insights about humans and their relationships. "Creation Stories" is particularly timely if you, too, are in contact with the soil after a long winter. I have many friends who garden in areas more rural than Jamaica Plain. While I am jealous of their space, they constantly struggle with woodchucks and rabbits. I, meanwhile, may be outnumbered by slugs and snails, but neither species runs particularly quickly. Kingsolver contextualizes her own garden struggles with the javelinas in "Creation Stories," where she examines teenager behavior, the idea of ownership, and what happens when humans and javelinas compete for hollyhocks. Through it all, Kingsolver's sense of self-irony and general good humor kept me entranced.
A hallmark of excellent novelists is that they really understand how people work. An autobiographer understands the self. What about an essayist? It's these plus the ability to understand the reader. This comes through in Kingsolver's essays. An essayist, at least in this case, seems to understand me. In the face of daily headlines that make me shake my head with non-comprehension, I found it reassuring to read, "Confronted with knowledge of dozens of apparently random disasters each day, what can a human heart do but slam its doors? No mortal can grieve that much. We didn't evolve to cope with tragedy on a global scale." (p. 231-232) She goes on to talk about the role of writers and artists and the principles that govern her writing. I have exited many conversations about politics in art because they became so abstract. Kingsolver made me want to think about these questions more.
Ultimately I feel gratitude for this book. I am grateful for the thought-provoking issues, for the poetry, for the insights, for the forgiveness, for the entertainment. The book is a good companion for summer reading.
--Martha Merson
Junot Díaz' Drown contains ten short stories in which individuals struggle for a sense of place in the urban and rural Dominican Republic and the barrios of New Jersey. While the stories are not specifically written as a novel, the narrator remains nameless in several of the stories and it is tempting to follow the thoughts and explorations in the voice of a single character. Díaz starts with a quote which evokes his immigrant characters' search for identity, but also their restlessness and lost voice:
The fact that Iam writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
--Gustavo Pérez Firmat
The stories detail a search for belonging which is tasted in Díaz's rich sensory descriptions of elements from his Dominican family, friendships and community. The prose is spare, written from a gritty male first-person perspective that is at times disturbingly far from familiar ground. However, the storytelling is so raw and honest that it is surprisingly easy for the reader to be drawn into a world of lifestyles and motivations which are likely to be distant from the known.
The book's content is confrontational in its descriptions of the harsh realities of the immigrant characters' lives: drug abuse, sexism, domestic violence, adultery, abandonment and longing. It also contains descriptions of the characters' sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual. While the diverse situations depicted may be offensive to some readers, the reward is a clear and unobstructed view into the experiences and feelings of the characters, and, for adult educators, we may hear in these voices the stories of many of our students and their families.
Díaz's environments show the state of mind of his people. Envisioning the setting, we are drawn into the emotions we see there. In "Fiesta, 1980," describing his father's affair, Díaz writes:
Me and Rafa, we didn't talk much about the Puerto Rican woman. When we ate dinner at her house, the few times Papi had taken us over there, we still acted like nothing was out of the ordinary. Pass the ketchup, man. No sweat, bro. The affair was like a hole in our living room floor, one we'd gotten so used to circumnavigating that we sometimes forgot it was there. (p. 39)
The novel follows the developing disaffection of the characters from a younger, carefree version of city boys' boredom when they are sent to the country for the summer so their mother can work "long hours at the chocolate factory":
We caught jaivas in the streams and spent hours walking across the valley to see girls who were never there; we set traps for jurones we never caught and toughened up our roosters with pails of cold water. We worked hard at keeping busy. ("Ysrael," p. 4)
This moves to a more aggressive description of teenaged restlessness during summertime in New Jersey:
Days we spent in the mall or out playing stickball, but nights were what we waited for. The heat was like something heavy that had come inside to die.... Nothing moved fast, even the daylight was slow to fade.... ("Drown," p. 92)
By its end, Drown has invited readers to know yet another side of the immigrant story, one without romance and without pretense.
Whether you find time to do your summer reading on the beach or on the MBTA, Drown is a powerful book and deliciously crafted. The stories are so compelling that it is tempting to rush through them in a few short bites, but, as in Spanish the word saber indicates both "to know" and "to taste," I recommend that you nibble on this one slowly enough to savor its unassuming flavor.
--Diane Paxton
Ellen J. Langer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other awards, has written a powerful, innovative book offering a fresh perspective on the nature of learning. This book is quick to point out and dispel familiar notions of learning which rely on right answers, the basics, rote memorization, and paying attention. It asserts a "why to" rather than a "how to" approach and it gives plenty of examples and experiments she has done which have focused on ways to learn mindfully. She writes,
A mindful approach has three characteristics: 1. The continuous creation of new categories. 2. Openness to new information. 3. An implicit awareness of more than one perspective. Mindlessness, in contrast, is characterized by an entrapment in old categories, by automatic behavior that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective. Being mindless, colloquially speaking, is like being on automatic pilot.
She asserts that mindful learning happens within an awareness of context and changing information. A case in point is this excerpt from her book which is a retelling of the familiar children's story "Little Red Riding Hood":
Once upon a time there was a mindless little girl named Little Red Riding Hood. One day, when she went to visit her ailing grandmother, she was greeted by a wolf dressed in her grandmother's nightclothes. "What big eyes you have, Grandma," she exclaimed, clueless as ever, although she had seen her grandmother's eyes countless times before. "What big ears you have, Grandma," she said, although it was unlikely that they would have changed since her last visit. "What a deep voice you have, Grandma," she said, still oblivious to the shaggy imposter beneath the familiar lacy nightcap. "What big teeth you have," she said, too late, alas, to begin paying attention.
This story is illustrative of the dangers inherent in not paying attention to a new context and not adjusting behavior accordingly.
You may be asking yourself how can this be related to a real life situation. In the chapter "When Practice Makes Imperfect," she asks us to imagine reading a programmed text on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Using a step-by-step approach you learn how to rescue an adult and you've learned it so well you could recite it in your sleep. Another part of this CPR manual teaches you how to rescue an infant. The steps are very specific and methodical. A week later she writes, you are at a friend's pool and her seven-year-old daughter gets in over her head and needs CPR. What do you do? You haven't learned the material conditionally and now you need to adjust the information to suit a fifty-pound child. Her argument is that material needs to be taught in ways such that it can be modified to fit changing situations and taught with an emphasis which is framed not in absolute terms but in more conditional ones.
In my own experience as an ESOL teacher, I find it troubling when in class we've been studying past tense questions for some time and someone asks: "What did you did this weekend?" I realize how hard it is sometimes for students to truly apply new material into their everyday communication and how essential it is to allow learners time in the classroom to do so. The general ideas in this book are based on a flexible, adaptive teaching approach that is essential to allow students to apply material learned in a personal, more exploratory way. Langer's approach opens up greater possibilities for thinking more broadly.
Langer explains that her idea of conditional learning is based on the value of doubt. She writes: "This new way of teaching is based on an appreciation of both the conditional, or context-dependant, nature of the world and the value of uncertainty. Teaching facts in a conditional way sets the stage for doubt." You may be asking yourself how that would work in a situation where students are working towards the goal of passing a test. The following is an example of a pilot run of the conditional teaching of facts.
High school students were taught a lesson in physics. This lesson was on videotape and all students viewed the same tape. As a pre-viewing activity, half of the students received an instruction sheet explaining that they would participate in a program that involved two parts. Part I was a 30-minute program that introduced a few basic concepts of physics. Part II involved a short questionnaire in which they would apply the concepts shown in the video. Their "conditional" instructions read: "The video presents only one of several outlooks on physics, which may or may not be helpful to you. Please feel free to use any additional methods you want to assist you in solving these problems." The other half of students were told the same information but without mentioning several outlooks or alternative methods to solving the problems. The hypothesis here was that the instructions to allow for alternatives would encourage more creative outcomes. The results of this experiment showed that the groups performed equally well on direct tests of the material, but, for questions that required students to use the material and to apply what they learned, a very different level of comprehension came through. Only the students who were asked to use additional knowledge to assist them actually did so. This example especially reminded me that the way in which we phrase our questions to our students strongly influences the level of thinking that occurs as a result.
She explains that there are seven pervasive myths, or mindsets, that weaken the process of learning. These myths are as follows:
1. The basics must be learned so well that they become second nature.2. Paying attention means staying focused on one thing at a time.
3. Delaying gratification is important.
4. Rote memorization is necessary in education.
5. Forgetting is a problem.
6. Intelligence is knowing "what's out there."
7. There are right and wrong answers.
Each chapter is concerned with dispelling one of these notions, and to support her ideas she cites examples from her research and taps into a wealth of sources from science, psychology, gerontology, literature and philosophy. Her perspective in each is lively, original and, in some respects, radical.
You may not agree with this list, and in fact I have a hard time figuring out how some of these concepts would actually work in very pressured test-related situations. I do appreciate her concern with respecting the fact that everyone does not see the same information in the same way and with the need to encourage individualized teaching/learning styles. In our current climate where school performance is being judged by scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, I am very drawn to teaching philosophies which promote "mindful learning." At the recent teachers rally, where 20,000 teachers marched up Beacon Street in Boston to show their concerns with Education Reform, teachers held signs that read, "This is your mind on MCAS," and that showed an egg sizzling in a pan.
There is a unique voice in this fascinating book which leads me to think that mindful learning causes us to ask more questions rather than less. It also seems pressing, in the Age of Information, that in our role as teachers and learners we focus our attention on strategies that enable us to interpret information in a truly thoughtful way. Ellen Langer might not have all the answers but at least she's willing to admit it.
--Kathleen Hartnett
Occasionally on Friday afternoons, when looking for weekend reading, I have complained that the A.L.R.I. Library has "nothing" to read. And since I am the main selector of materials, whose fault is this? Where are the mysteries, field guides, travel and garden books? I hope that your local public library has weekend and evening hours in the summer and that you will visit it as well as the A.L.R.I. Literacy Library. This spring, many new books have been added to our collection. We still do not have "beach books," but we did buy new resources on ESOL, multiple intelligences, grammar, citizenship and curriculum. And we added many thoughtful, very readable and enjoyable books that would be excellent for front porch reading with your feet up and iced tea on your chairside table. Visit the air conditioned A.L.R.I. Library and borrow these:
Teaching Tolerance. Starting Small: Teaching Tolerance in Preschool and the Early Grades.
Martín Espada. Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems.
Esmeralda Santiago. Cuando era Puertoriquena.
Daphne Key. Literacy Shutdown: Stories of Six American Women.
Milton Meltzer. Non-Fiction for the Classroom: Milton Meltzer on Writing, History and Social Responsibility.
Enid Lee and others, eds. Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development.
Jessie Carney Smith. Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference.
Anne Raimes. Identities: Readings from Contemporary Culture.
Lisa Delpit. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.
Stephen Egaller. Nerds: A Brief History of the Internet. (Also the video.)
Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot. Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer.
Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man.
Beverly Daniel Tatum. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"
Michael Coffey, ed. The Irish in America. (Also the 3-part video.)
Dave Morice. How to Make Poetry Comics.
Kenneth Koch. I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People.
Herbert R. Kohl. The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching.
--Sandra Darling
At the A.L.R.I., Martha Merson is the Literacy/ABE Specialist, Diane Paxton is the ESOL Specialist, Kathleen Hartnett is the Curriculum Frameworks Specialist, and Sandra Darling is the Librarian.