The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Summer Reading and Karma

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Summer Reading and Karma

Years ago, when I was first given high school students as victims, I took summer reading very, very seriously. I made a comprehensive list by researching books that would help kids either on the SAT's or in September's English class, I wrote up thoughtful discussion questions, typed them out and stapled them into packets that I mailed home. I saw nothing wrong with asking 14 year olds to read five books and answer questions on them during their ten weeks off. After all, isn't that what summer was for -- reading?

Well, no. It had been for me, but I'm only now realizing exactly how weird a kid I must have been.

My summer packets rarely came back and the more experienced teachers smiled when I complained. They told me I would be lucky if some of the kids read one book. This was shocking news to me: what was wrong with the kids in that school district? Maybe something in the town's water supply was making them lazy.

But they weren't lazy; they were teenagers. (Though it could be argued that lazy/teen
are synonymous).

So fast forward. While I am diving for socks under my son's bed this morning, I find Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

"Why is this here?" I ask my 16 year old.

He yawns, shrugs, and turns away.

"This is required reading. Did you finish it?"

"Nah, it's just about this Jewish guy in Princeton who tells lies. And it's racist."

"Oh, right. That's a thorough analysis. Did you read it?"

"Ma, I told you. They let the writer talk about how he's stubborn because he's Jewish. You can't say stuff like that."

"You understand it's about the disillusionment of the time period after World War I, that..."

"How many books do I have to read for English this year?"

"Two."

"Dude, that's not gonna happen." He yawns again. "Not when they assign books with racist writers."

"Don't you have to write an essay on this? And on the other one?"

"Last year so few kids read that the teacher just let us do it on a short story she gave out in class. Actually, she read the story to us."

(He's in college prep level English)

"You know what's going to happen to you if you don't read, don't you, Christopher?"

"Yup. I'm going to end up homeless. You've been telling me that since I was 9."

"What about if we read it together and talk about the chapters?"

Christopher smiles very patiently at me. "Mom, it takes way, way too long that way. You like go over every little thing. Just tell me what happens."

"No, that would ruin it."

"You know what would be cool?"

"Not Spark Notes...please, anything but Spark Notes..."

"No, no, but why don't they just make video games out of these books and take out all the slow parts? Then we would do them. And it wouldn't take so long."

6 comments:

Marcia said...: Entertaining post! This is by turns humorous and dismaying. It really points up how kids call the shots today. And that video games have helped feed the demand for action, action, action. I wonder how teachers are addressing kids' charge that writers like Hemingway are racist. By the standards kids are taught today, you can't blame them for the conclusion. Literature and history really have to go hand in hand. But that makes our job even tougher . . .; Thursday, 14 August, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: When I taught, I would try to explain to the kids how we were not always so politically correct and how without some of the "racism" or sexism, the novel would not be an honest reflection of its time.
They usually accept that, but I constantly hear how reading is sooo slow, slow, slow - and it is when you think about the instant communication of emails, IM's, texts that this generation has grown up with.
They barely believe that I used to have to wait a week or so to get my pictures back from the developer...; Thursday, 14 August, 2008
Mary Witzl said...: I don't know whether to laugh or cry! I heard a kid say something like this a few weeks back -- that if books were more interesting, she'd read them, and why couldn't they be like video games? And the deadly boring books she was talking about were ones that had thrilled me to my inner core.

Help. I'm going to be teaching kids again very soon. I'm in for it, aren't I?; Friday, 15 August, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Getting them to read isn't easy, but my trick is to relate absolutely everything to THEM - how is this character like you or not like you, etc. That helps (but not with my biological kids)
I actually think you're in for a great time.; Sunday, 17 August, 2008
TerriRainer said...: Thank God I'm not the only parent with "non-readers"!

I am a PROLIFIC reader, always have been....my kids, not even close. I even tried to get my oldest daughter to read Nora Roberts, by promising her, ahem, juicy "grown-up" scenes (she was in 6th grade). She just exclaimed "EW! I don't want to read about THAT!".

That's not even the worst of it...I found out that my daughter (who is in Advanced Placement classes) uses Amazon reviews for her book reports, instead of reading the book!

SAD....

:) Terri; Sunday, 17 August, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: I know, Terri. When I taught English, the kids complained they didn't have "time" to read -- and I remember thinking they were probably overscheduled kids since it was a really affluent community.

But now I hear the same complaint/reason for not reading and I'm aware of all the time spent on YouTube, texting and lolling on the bed.

I offer money - shame on me, but I do. X amount per page...I follow the whatever works school of parenting.; Monday, 18 August, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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