Daniel Wolff's Blog - Posts Tagged "learning"
How Lincoln Learned to Read
There are lots of different “reviews” a book gets.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor’s website had a “newspaper” review of How Lincoln Learned to Read where Brad Knickerbocker said,
“This is a terrific book. It’s compact (25 pages or so per individual) but rich and thought-provoking. It draws heavily on each character’s own writing, mainly letters and diaries. It gave me new insights into great Americans I thought I knew pretty well, and it taught me much about those I’d barely heard of before. Broad in scope, peppered with detail, insightful, it could be the basis for a classroom or book club review of American history from our founding as a nation through the 20th century.”
(Of course, the Monitor switches this week to only internet publication. I kinda wonder if I killed the paper version?)
I’m delighted in the response and hope readers, respecting CSM’s reputation, will want to get hold of the book.
Then there are the reviews you get from people you know, family and friends. Danny Alexander and I have been having a conversation about education and how it does and doesn’t work for many years now. He’s a teacher for pay and a student out of a fierce desire to learn. On his blog, Take Em As They Come, he talked about the first third of Lincoln:
“Though I am a teacher, a member of a teacher's union, and I will fight for our rights whenever they are threatened....
I think the teacher should never quit striving to heal thyself. There are some serious sicknesses going around in our educational system, and I don't think they have much to do with the liberalization of the curriculum but rather the aspect of school that is all about teaching the institution and teaching the status quo. A past that is quickly dying used to say that we held the keys to our students' futures. We have long declared that our curriculum is essential to worldly success. But the lie in that statement is akin to all that wishful thinking down on Wall Street. What we need to do is begin seriously talking about what it is that we do have to offer.
I think we do valuable things in the classroom. I feel extremely lucky to get to teach everything I know about writing to students who could use the insights, and I know it works for a sizable number of them. But I also know we've got a lot of work to do, particularly getting over ourselves. How Lincoln Learned to Read is an extraordinarily useful compass to set us in the right direction.
At least the first third is...”
And then there’s a guy I haven’t met, yet, who had heard of me and wanted to read the book. It’s something more like a cold reading and yet another kind of review. He emailed me:
“There are turns in the prose, for instance-- those 180s you do--that made me laugh out loud... just the syntax, I mean. It's funny, in a way the prose seems perfect and proper--not a false note anywhere--and it is, but at the same time it seems there's an anarchist smiling behind it who just might pull back the curtain at any moment with a sort of malatoff cocktail of language lit in one hand--, and I found that tension exhilarating. I think that may be a way of talking about soul....”
How Lincoln Learned to Read was written not so much to offer answers but to ask questions, to maybe broaden perspectives on an on-going conversation about learning and democracy. All these reactions – and the ones to come – help contribute to that. And I’m grateful for them.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor’s website had a “newspaper” review of How Lincoln Learned to Read where Brad Knickerbocker said,
“This is a terrific book. It’s compact (25 pages or so per individual) but rich and thought-provoking. It draws heavily on each character’s own writing, mainly letters and diaries. It gave me new insights into great Americans I thought I knew pretty well, and it taught me much about those I’d barely heard of before. Broad in scope, peppered with detail, insightful, it could be the basis for a classroom or book club review of American history from our founding as a nation through the 20th century.”
(Of course, the Monitor switches this week to only internet publication. I kinda wonder if I killed the paper version?)
I’m delighted in the response and hope readers, respecting CSM’s reputation, will want to get hold of the book.
Then there are the reviews you get from people you know, family and friends. Danny Alexander and I have been having a conversation about education and how it does and doesn’t work for many years now. He’s a teacher for pay and a student out of a fierce desire to learn. On his blog, Take Em As They Come, he talked about the first third of Lincoln:
“Though I am a teacher, a member of a teacher's union, and I will fight for our rights whenever they are threatened....
I think the teacher should never quit striving to heal thyself. There are some serious sicknesses going around in our educational system, and I don't think they have much to do with the liberalization of the curriculum but rather the aspect of school that is all about teaching the institution and teaching the status quo. A past that is quickly dying used to say that we held the keys to our students' futures. We have long declared that our curriculum is essential to worldly success. But the lie in that statement is akin to all that wishful thinking down on Wall Street. What we need to do is begin seriously talking about what it is that we do have to offer.
I think we do valuable things in the classroom. I feel extremely lucky to get to teach everything I know about writing to students who could use the insights, and I know it works for a sizable number of them. But I also know we've got a lot of work to do, particularly getting over ourselves. How Lincoln Learned to Read is an extraordinarily useful compass to set us in the right direction.
At least the first third is...”
And then there’s a guy I haven’t met, yet, who had heard of me and wanted to read the book. It’s something more like a cold reading and yet another kind of review. He emailed me:
“There are turns in the prose, for instance-- those 180s you do--that made me laugh out loud... just the syntax, I mean. It's funny, in a way the prose seems perfect and proper--not a false note anywhere--and it is, but at the same time it seems there's an anarchist smiling behind it who just might pull back the curtain at any moment with a sort of malatoff cocktail of language lit in one hand--, and I found that tension exhilarating. I think that may be a way of talking about soul....”
How Lincoln Learned to Read was written not so much to offer answers but to ask questions, to maybe broaden perspectives on an on-going conversation about learning and democracy. All these reactions – and the ones to come – help contribute to that. And I’m grateful for them.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in NEW ENGLAND, Part One
To drive up through New England – past the Merrimac River, past Lawrence and Lowell – is to think about Thoreau and all the factory girls whose names were once known to friends and family and are now considered nameless.
This isn’t the green New England of summer or the blazing of fall. It’s early spring, and there’s only the first reddish blush on the tips of the maples. Through the bare limbs, farms stick out on the tops of knobby hills, highways cut through pink granite, boarded-up ice cream shacks wait for warm weather and the first tourists.
It’s hard to picture the wilderness that settlers broke, but they did – right here – and almost as soon as they had, started hiring teachers and establishing schools to pass on … what? Wisdom, although who ever knows exactly what that is? It’s more like they were passing on tradition, establishing old benchmarks of knowledge in a new land.
As important as cutting down the big trees and wrestling the roots out of the rocky soil was making sure that books were available and a little time for kids to learn. That was a kind of seeding, huh, after the plowing of the land? And this second and third growth forest, these asphalt roads, those condominiums, are the results of that planting.
**
Up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire – a harbor town – there’s the protection of the breakwaters and an old lighthouse off in the distance. But beyond that a kind of wild loneliness. And that loneliness seeps inland, among the salt marshes and the mud flats. Docks have been built in the thin channels, lobster boats tied to them. They exist because of a whole encyclopedia of knowledge having to do with tides and weather, ropes and wood-working: a mostly unwritten encyclopedia, passed on and learned firsthand.
**
Highlights of the discussion at the RiverRun Bookshop on Congress Street.
The mother who stops at the edge of the crowd, listening, not sitting, till she finally speaks. She came in to buy her daughter a book ‘cause she’s been having trouble learning how to read. She stopped not because the book’s called How Lincoln Learned to Read, but because of the conversation, the Q and A. Her daughter, she says, is great at other things: the training wheels came off first day, for example, and she’s biking all over now; and she’s a wonderful dancer. Why should school define her by the thing she isn’t good at: reading?
A retired college football coach. He talks about sitting at faculty meetings and realizing he and his staff might be the best teachers in the place. Why? Because they listen to the kids and watch them and come to understand that some learn by memorizing the playbook, others need to run the plays over and over, others want to talk it out with their teammates, but all can learn – and have to – for the team to win.
The pretty young mother whose children had been going to a Waldorf school but now has to shift to public education because of the economy. She’s eager for them to get out of the “bubble” of private education, she says, but scared it means a shift from learning to learning how to take tests.
The retired history teacher who says his best classes were when he didn’t say, “Open your texts” but listened to the kids talk. And eventually, one would say, “Hey, is this stuff in Chapter Six true?”
Finally, the young woman who says her father was a factory worker and had no formal schooling, but always pointed out how the world worked: how spiders made webs or the stars turned. She never liked school that much but was always curious, liked learning. She ended up with a double major in anthropology and religious theory. Today, she’s one of the local cops in town. Do those majors help her on the job? Of course! In her police work, she doesn’t just ask what people have done but why.
**
This isn’t the green New England of summer or the blazing of fall. It’s early spring, and there’s only the first reddish blush on the tips of the maples. Through the bare limbs, farms stick out on the tops of knobby hills, highways cut through pink granite, boarded-up ice cream shacks wait for warm weather and the first tourists.
It’s hard to picture the wilderness that settlers broke, but they did – right here – and almost as soon as they had, started hiring teachers and establishing schools to pass on … what? Wisdom, although who ever knows exactly what that is? It’s more like they were passing on tradition, establishing old benchmarks of knowledge in a new land.
As important as cutting down the big trees and wrestling the roots out of the rocky soil was making sure that books were available and a little time for kids to learn. That was a kind of seeding, huh, after the plowing of the land? And this second and third growth forest, these asphalt roads, those condominiums, are the results of that planting.
**
Up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire – a harbor town – there’s the protection of the breakwaters and an old lighthouse off in the distance. But beyond that a kind of wild loneliness. And that loneliness seeps inland, among the salt marshes and the mud flats. Docks have been built in the thin channels, lobster boats tied to them. They exist because of a whole encyclopedia of knowledge having to do with tides and weather, ropes and wood-working: a mostly unwritten encyclopedia, passed on and learned firsthand.
**
Highlights of the discussion at the RiverRun Bookshop on Congress Street.
The mother who stops at the edge of the crowd, listening, not sitting, till she finally speaks. She came in to buy her daughter a book ‘cause she’s been having trouble learning how to read. She stopped not because the book’s called How Lincoln Learned to Read, but because of the conversation, the Q and A. Her daughter, she says, is great at other things: the training wheels came off first day, for example, and she’s biking all over now; and she’s a wonderful dancer. Why should school define her by the thing she isn’t good at: reading?
A retired college football coach. He talks about sitting at faculty meetings and realizing he and his staff might be the best teachers in the place. Why? Because they listen to the kids and watch them and come to understand that some learn by memorizing the playbook, others need to run the plays over and over, others want to talk it out with their teammates, but all can learn – and have to – for the team to win.
The pretty young mother whose children had been going to a Waldorf school but now has to shift to public education because of the economy. She’s eager for them to get out of the “bubble” of private education, she says, but scared it means a shift from learning to learning how to take tests.
The retired history teacher who says his best classes were when he didn’t say, “Open your texts” but listened to the kids talk. And eventually, one would say, “Hey, is this stuff in Chapter Six true?”
Finally, the young woman who says her father was a factory worker and had no formal schooling, but always pointed out how the world worked: how spiders made webs or the stars turned. She never liked school that much but was always curious, liked learning. She ended up with a double major in anthropology and religious theory. Today, she’s one of the local cops in town. Do those majors help her on the job? Of course! In her police work, she doesn’t just ask what people have done but why.
**
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in and out of Chicagoland
A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It’s like the book continues to be written – in public – person by person.
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
