Daniel Wolff's Blog - Posts Tagged "reading"
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in NEW ENGLAND Part 3
The drive across New Hampshire into Vermont is almost all through low woods of pine and white birch. These are the Green Mountains, and it seems like the wind and cold and thin soil must keep the growth down. Around a corner, there’s a rushing white river or a black pool of winter with a marshy, yellow fringe. The granite, blasted open for the highway, shows pink or iron-gold. In these sharp hills, 18th century settlers scratched out a living: felled trees, pulled stumps and then rocks, put up houses against the weather.
Today, both large settlements I stop in – Burlington and Bennington – are neat, liberal towns with their brick mills turned into coffee shops. There are educational institutions here and what are known as education people. I check the bookstores, and they don’t have How Lincoln Learned to Read. Too bad, because it might be part of this conversation over what our ancestors tried to build in these mountains. And what they actually built. And what they left us.
In Williamstown, twenty or so people fill the Water Street Bookstore: the majority grey-haired and retired. In a college town, the crowd includes ex-professors, students, writers, and others.
After I go over W.E.B. DuBois’ childhood (he grew up not far from here in the Berkshire Mountains), we talk some. A retired engineer discusses his need to have technical training – a schooling that could give him the facts and skills he needed. What DuBois would have called a practical education.
Asked how he learned what he needed to know, a writer says he learned in defiance of what he was taught at home – both parents wrote.
There are requests: please read that letter from John Adams about each generation’s education moving them farther from war, closer to peace and art. Someone asks what happens at the end of the chapter on Rachel Carson, what did she need to know? People have read and are comparing different sections of the book.
Afterwards, a teacher at Williams explains how he has to keep “tricking” his students. They play the game of education so well that if he reveals what he wants from them, they’ll provide it – without necessarily learning anything.
A woman talks about her two children, saying the youngest is “outside the box,” the elder “inside the box.” Meaning the first is finding his own way through middle school and not doing all that well in class, and the other works through the system, joining clubs, making friends, succeeding on the school’s (and society’s?) terms. It’s like fitting in or not to one of these small New England towns, I think, with its history and its unspoken but powerful rules. Like fitting into one of those 18th century frame houses built by a stream.
Later, this same woman starts talking about New Orleans and Katrina and the great sad lesson it taught and is still teaching. She’s from there originally, moved to New England, but went back often to visit family. The thanksgiving after the floods, her 70 year old father died of a heart attack. She has no doubt it was hurricane-related; she describes the cause as “stress” from the upheaval and the struggle to rebuild. And then adds that though her two kids (in- and out-of-the-box) have always lived here in the Berkshires, their connection to New Orleans and their sense of what was lost there continues to affect them. Sets them apart from their classmates in a way. Teaches.
Today, both large settlements I stop in – Burlington and Bennington – are neat, liberal towns with their brick mills turned into coffee shops. There are educational institutions here and what are known as education people. I check the bookstores, and they don’t have How Lincoln Learned to Read. Too bad, because it might be part of this conversation over what our ancestors tried to build in these mountains. And what they actually built. And what they left us.
In Williamstown, twenty or so people fill the Water Street Bookstore: the majority grey-haired and retired. In a college town, the crowd includes ex-professors, students, writers, and others.
After I go over W.E.B. DuBois’ childhood (he grew up not far from here in the Berkshire Mountains), we talk some. A retired engineer discusses his need to have technical training – a schooling that could give him the facts and skills he needed. What DuBois would have called a practical education.
Asked how he learned what he needed to know, a writer says he learned in defiance of what he was taught at home – both parents wrote.
There are requests: please read that letter from John Adams about each generation’s education moving them farther from war, closer to peace and art. Someone asks what happens at the end of the chapter on Rachel Carson, what did she need to know? People have read and are comparing different sections of the book.
Afterwards, a teacher at Williams explains how he has to keep “tricking” his students. They play the game of education so well that if he reveals what he wants from them, they’ll provide it – without necessarily learning anything.
A woman talks about her two children, saying the youngest is “outside the box,” the elder “inside the box.” Meaning the first is finding his own way through middle school and not doing all that well in class, and the other works through the system, joining clubs, making friends, succeeding on the school’s (and society’s?) terms. It’s like fitting in or not to one of these small New England towns, I think, with its history and its unspoken but powerful rules. Like fitting into one of those 18th century frame houses built by a stream.
Later, this same woman starts talking about New Orleans and Katrina and the great sad lesson it taught and is still teaching. She’s from there originally, moved to New England, but went back often to visit family. The thanksgiving after the floods, her 70 year old father died of a heart attack. She has no doubt it was hurricane-related; she describes the cause as “stress” from the upheaval and the struggle to rebuild. And then adds that though her two kids (in- and out-of-the-box) have always lived here in the Berkshires, their connection to New Orleans and their sense of what was lost there continues to affect them. Sets them apart from their classmates in a way. Teaches.
