Daniel Wolff's Blog, page 5
April 22, 2009
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.
April 11, 2009
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.
**
April 3, 2009
It was afterwards
It was afterwards that the teacher came up. She’d been teaching, she said, for twenty years in an inner city school. First she said that having all the tests associated with No Child Left Behind was like being “handcuffed.” For her and for her students. Then she added the stuff we’d talked about some that evening – about the role race plays in education – was “the elephant in the room.” It never got discussed in faculty meetings or curriculum workshops, but it was always there. And she added, “It isn’t race, you know, that’s really at work; it’s poverty.”
The guy who ended up an engineer spoke up during the reading. (It wasn’t really a reading at all. More a talk and conversation, April 2, at the RJ Julia bookstore in Madison, Connecticut.) He said he could still remember putting together model airplanes: the kind you made out of balsa wood and wrapped the wings in a fine cloth. It was the thing he cared most about age 8 or 9 (He looked to be 60 or 65 now) and was the direct beginning of his becoming an engineer, of his lifelong career.
My old friend in the first row wondered aloud how we could implement this sort of thing. If the thesis of How Lincoln Learned to Read had any validity – if people learn in all these different and exciting ways -- how can that be applied to the public school system? I think our small group agreed that we weren’t sure. That you had to start with an appreciation of how varied and astonishing learning was. And then see how it changed the way we think, teach, set up the thing called school.
Finally, it was after the discussion that the woman took the time to say that she got discouraged and wearied by all the arguments over testing, merit pay, failures and competitions. It was a great relief and a source of renewed energy to read a book that made her realize, again, how commonplace and astonishing learning can be.
How Lincoln Learned to Read couldn’t have gotten a better, communal review. And C-Span’s Book TV taped it so one of these nights it will be playing for all the insomniacs amongst us.
The guy who ended up an engineer spoke up during the reading. (It wasn’t really a reading at all. More a talk and conversation, April 2, at the RJ Julia bookstore in Madison, Connecticut.) He said he could still remember putting together model airplanes: the kind you made out of balsa wood and wrapped the wings in a fine cloth. It was the thing he cared most about age 8 or 9 (He looked to be 60 or 65 now) and was the direct beginning of his becoming an engineer, of his lifelong career.
My old friend in the first row wondered aloud how we could implement this sort of thing. If the thesis of How Lincoln Learned to Read had any validity – if people learn in all these different and exciting ways -- how can that be applied to the public school system? I think our small group agreed that we weren’t sure. That you had to start with an appreciation of how varied and astonishing learning was. And then see how it changed the way we think, teach, set up the thing called school.
Finally, it was after the discussion that the woman took the time to say that she got discouraged and wearied by all the arguments over testing, merit pay, failures and competitions. It was a great relief and a source of renewed energy to read a book that made her realize, again, how commonplace and astonishing learning can be.
How Lincoln Learned to Read couldn’t have gotten a better, communal review. And C-Span’s Book TV taped it so one of these nights it will be playing for all the insomniacs amongst us.
March 29, 2009
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.
