Educator Book Club discussion
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ
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I have added this to my to-read list. Sounds intriguing.
Let me know if it is! Happy to discuss.
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.
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.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Northwest
Part 1
My prologue to the readings in the Northwest is a weekend stay up on the Olympic Peninsula. A walk down the beach facing the Juan de Fuca Strait reveals sea otter, bald eagles, loons, seals, grebes. Drawn by this wilderness, the folks I meet are in the middle of a re-education. They’re convinced the car-driven, oil-dependent, energy-wasteful culture is suicidal, and they’re trying to figure out another way to go. Public transportation, composting, grow your own food, used clothes, intense awareness of energy use, and a local focus that leaves the rest of the continent – from the news to the pop culture – blurry. Call it a re-Americanization: the thirty-something guys in their beards and flannel shirts, women in gore-tex and hiking boots, are like immigrants to a new, green land. They’re in the middle of inventing the language, the values, the customs.
So it makes some sense, later in the week, when the discussion of the good-sized crowd at Powell’s heads in the direction of alternative ways of learning. There’s the woman in the first year of home-schooling her 15 year old son; she talks about how he’s not only more curious but physically healthier. (Are pale, acned adolescents a product of fluorescent lights and history class?)
A soft-spoken, gray-haired guy wonders why, after all these years, our schools still can’t manage to teach the basics. A middle-aged woman behind him answers that the circumstances keep changing: both the present world and the imagined, future world kids are being prepared for. So, the basics keep changing, too. How we read and what we read shifts – or the emphasis shifts. We aren’t teaching for the farm anymore. (I wonder if 21st century green living will mean going back to educational basics, too?)
A woman up front makes a point about what she calls reverse discrimination. She has four kids, the youngest is mixed race, and that one is offered a richer variety of programs in high school. Because she’s part Hispanic the woman says.
A high school student a couple rows back answers her. Her honors program is mixed race. As are lots of the school’s programs. And, the teenager adds, what’s wrong about home-schooling is you lose that diversity.
The discussion zips back and forth, me adding some anecdotes from How Lincoln Learned to Read. One guys talks about his “a-ha!” moment in middle school when he stays up all night to finish a paper and realizes he likes learning. A librarian wonders what libraries have to do with early American learning, and we talk about Ben Franklin borrowing books, Abigail Adams holed up in her grandparents’ library.
Afterwards, the talk is more personal. One former elementary school teacher is now helping doctors with their handwriting. She sighs; penmanship has been a lifelong struggle. Another has self-published a book on the scripture. A guy wants to talk about the role of Free Masons. It’s a lovely, slightly loony conversation.
At the end, a man in his early 60’s with thick glasses and a gentle voice describes how college wasn’t very good for him: he never learned the skills he needed. It was too “de-individualized.” “Only now,” he says and looks to the ceiling, “-- what is it? May? --so five months ago, I realized what it is I need to know to do the things I want to do.” He pauses. “I believe in life-long learning,” he says and hopes his son turns out the next night when I’m reading at the University of Washington bookstore.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Northwest Part 2
Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads, and try to see the source high in the mist. It’s wet on wet: drizzle and mist watering ferns, little maples, beds of lush moss.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Mid-west
Printers Row Literary Festival runs three or four blocks in downtown Chicago: tents for booksellers, microphones for readers, a milling crowd flipping through sci fi, poetry, radical lit, and old postcards.
Kind of an extended outdoor library. With everything for sale.
Nice to see so many folks out even in slightly chilly, damp weather. Here’s a way to learn, right? Even if you don’t buy, you touch the covers, get some sense of what’s out there and available, feel that excitement of all the stuff you might read. Browsing = learning?
Our panel is called “The Art of the Biographer,” and there are four of us, sitting at a long table up front, with a moderator. It’s like a classroom: a packed classroom, 65-70 people. Each of us speaks for five minutes or so -- quick pitches: “Why You Should Buy My Book” – and then it ought to be time for questions from the audience.
Instead, the moderator asks us about process. And it begins to feel even more like a classroom. Or a school board meeting.
The theory seems to be that the longer the people up front keep talking, the less trouble there’ll be. We are supposedly the articulate ones; Q&A’s can get messy; the moderator wants us to talk just a little bit more about our “art.”
I wonder afterwards why it makes me feel so uncomfortable. I think it’s not only that we’re supposed to be the teachers, lecturing the crowd, but also that under the guise of being interesting and informative, we’re actually trying to sell. Our books. Which is to say, our perspectives.
How much of teaching ends up like this, inadvertently or not: selling a certain way of looking at things? Keeping the conversation closed.
Turns out that during the hour the panel lasts, there never is time for the audience to speak. It’s too bad. After this last string of How Lincoln Learned readings, I’m even more convinced that discussion is key. Without it, you may get more “information,” but you lose out on the humor, surprise, sadness, fun.
I'll attach the Kirkus review. Let me know if you get a chance to read and what you think.
Thanks.
(STARRED) Wolff, Daniel
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ: Twelve Great Americans and the Education That Made Them
A riveting, original examination of education inside and outside the classroom.
What makes this work particularly captivating is that music historian Wolff (4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, 2005, etc.) doesn’t focus primarily on the book learning acquired by a dozen Americans, from Benjamin Franklin to Elvis Presley. Rather, his interest is in how they learned—that is, the life experiences that helped transform them into the figures they became. Taught to read by his mother at home, Abraham Lincoln received little in the way of formal education. His unquenchable thirst for knowledge and constant search for new ideas led him to read widely on his own, notes Wolff, who quotes Lincoln declaring, “I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way that I could not understand.” Automotive pioneer Henry Ford, on the other hand, had little patience for books (“they mess up my mind,” he wrote) but loved to work with his hands, which in turn led to a lifelong love of engineering. Helen Keller excelled, the author convincingly argues, because she was allowed to create her own curriculum with teacher Annie Sullivan. John F. Kennedy, a poor student in prep school, learned how to be a leader by forming an on-campus club of rebels and iconoclasts. Wolff delves into the education of other prominent figures, including Andrew Jackson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Rachel Carson, but also looks at such lesser-known Americans as a slave named Belle and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Native American schoolteacher in the 19th century. Their stories attest that learning doesn’t just happen in a schoolhouse, and life itself may well be the most effective teacher of the most important lessons.
Well thought-out, well-argued and thoroughly engaging.