Epiphany in Baltimore

Thursday, May. 15, 2003

Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com

I thought I'd disgress a little from the splintering of my heart to share this little e-mail exchange between myself and another reading committee team member. She's a traditionalist, wants all the canonical literature in the curriculum, and I'm more in favor of a good mix. Teacher types might find this interesting or even have comments. The first one is hers, and my reply is below:

>Dear (Epiphany),

>I am unavailable today--a dentist appointment.
Agree that we should be careful with sophomore year; we need
diversity there AND we need to expose kids to seminal works
of Am. Lit. to provide background for them as well as
dealing with language and style from prior periods.
(I always remember the statements of the young man in the book
A Hope Unseen. He had landed at Brown from inner city
schools in D.C., and while intelligent, found that he was at
a great disadvantage there. He did not know Twain, Faulkner,
etc., as did many of his fellow students.) A chronological
approach, in my humble opinion, is the best--it allows the
students to see the movement of ideas and language. This
does not negate tracing themes; rather it would facilitate
watching them move through time. I also think, as I
mentioned to you, that we need to "pump up" work with
poetry--again, a chronological approach here would be
beneficial. One could use the text for help, moving from
colonial up to modern to, once again (oops! split
infinitive), to allow for exposure to movement in style as
well as content and ideas. I agree that Gatsby should
remain. We owe it to our kids to prepare them for any
schools to which they may wish to apply.

And now, words from Epiphany:

Hi gang,

I enjoyed reading Celia's piece, and I thought it might be helpful to begin
conversations or at least thoughts about this over e-mail.

In terms of a chronological approach, here are my concerns:
If we go "chronologically," we will invariably miss some stuff. We'll never
be able to cover the spectrum of American Literature over a semester-long
course, even on an A/B schedule. So, we're going to be picking and choosing
what eras along the chronology that we want to highlight. This usually turns
out to be a (very) little Native American poetry to cover everything before 1650, then skip ahead a couple of centuries to cover Puritans with "The
Scarlet Letter", then skip ahead another couple centuries to cover the
slavery era with "Huck Finn," then skip ahead 70 years and squeeze in the
Jazz age. That's a lot of skipping around and, while other areas might be
covered a little, those seem to be the primary foci of many traditional
American Literature courses.
There are a couple of concerns with this. First, only select groups of
people were publishing work during those times, so we're not really seeing
how the collective American voice is forming, but rather how the white
privelaged male voice is forming. If there is an author of color studied, it
smacks of tokenism because they're usually squeezed in at the end and rushed through. This was my experience teaching an American Lit course both in
Lansing (we did the "classics," along with squeezing in "Tears of the Tiger"
at the end) and here (when it was taught last year, August Wilson was
squeezed in at the end).

Secondly, we ignore important eras when doing it. Why is it more important
to study the Jazz Age with Gatsby rather than Post-War Hemingway? Is Gatsby a more important novel or "classic" than "A Farewell to Arms" or "The Catcher in the Rye" or "As I Lay Dying" or "O Pioneers!" or "The Color Purple" or any other classic novel or era we don't approach? And, if it is, why?

Personally, I think Gatsby has a great opening line but then goes downhill,
and much prefer "Tender is the Night". Plus, I got through all of high
school and college without reading it, so I don't think not using it is a
disservice to the kids. And I'm sure everyone has these personal biases
about one work or another. I don't have a problem with teaching it or us
teaching it, but I think these things need to be thought about - why it's a
more important novel than others and why the Jazz Age - the voice of the
privelaged few on the east coast - is a more important era to study in
shaping the American voice than other novels and eras. The same goes for
"Scarlet Letter," "Huck," "Death of a Salesman," and the other selections.

My American Literature teacher is the one who made me want to become a
teacher, and I learned a great deal from his 10th grade course... but we
didn't read "Scarlet Letter," "Huck," OR "The Great Gatsby." Instead, we
read "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,"
"Winter Dreams," "My Bondage and My Freedom," "The Crucible," "The Grapes of
Wrath," and "My Antonia." I learned about all these important authors and
their ideas, and never felt at a disadvantage in college. We can take a lot of books and say they're books that should be read in high school, but we're
never going to get to them all.

I still like the idea of following a theme through time, and discussing the
best way to do that... I'm looking forward to our discussion!

Sorry for being so long-winded here! I just find this all very interesting
and thought writing this out would help get my thoughts together and perhaps
even gel others' thoughts about the topic. I agree with Celia that poetry
should be bolstered.

Wednesday works for me for the meeting... Charles, how about you? How does Rocky Run sound

to people?

I'll find Eddie and Jason.

-Epiphany