Category Archives: lit

The Problem With Lifelong Reading and YA Literature

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As the new school year begins, I’ve been catching up on young adult literature; being a teacher gives me an excuse to put down hefty literary tomes and cerebral collections of literature and jump into visits to Hogwarts, Paradise, Ohio, or Forks, Washington.

Last week I raced through the second book in the Lorien Legacies series, The Power of Six. I’m also in the midst of The Knife of Never Letting Go (book one of the Chaos Walking trilogy). I’m eagerly anticipating the final book in the Maze Runner series coming out in October, The Death Cure. During my daily commute to school, I’m listening to the Emerald Atlas.

And the good thing is, these are all largely popular series. By many accounts, the myth that the current generation of students is turning into illiterate buffoons is being debunked. Reports are showing that these students are reading more, not less, than other generations. And fears of a crumbling book industry–Borders excepted–are looking to be false.

If you’ve ever successfully navigated through my living room’s piles and shelves of books, it would be easy to see that I’m something of a bibliophile. Somewhere in the chain of schooling and parenting the concept of being a “lifelong reader” clicked into place and has taken hold since long before I exited the K-12 public schooling system. However, as I’ve been looking at the kinds of books that are being produced for young adults and children today, I wonder how much the publishing industry and its expectations of readers have shifted.

 

Largely, the biggest change I see is one that I find problematic–particularly with regard to creating “lifelong readers.” This change is serialization. All of the books I mentioned I’m reading at the beginning of this post are purposefully designed series with have-to-know-what-happens-next cliffhangers concluding all but the final book. Publishers are stringing teen audiences along more than before.

Yes, there were serialized books and series long before Potter and Katniss and Cullen. And yes, I would say that serialization has often been common in genres like mystery, sci-fi, and mystery. And yes, I would even go so far as to acknowledge that serialization has been a large part of the publishing industry’s modus operandi from the beginning; books by Dickens and Dumas, for instance, began as serialized chapters in newspapers.

The problem, today, is that if I am a young and avid reader there are limited options for me in the flourishing publishing market. I am being catered to as a very specific type of actor within the book market. The last remaining holdout of corporate booksellers, Barnes and Noble, now has shelves in their teen section specifically labeled for “Paranormal Romance.”

To put it more specifically, to be a lifelong reader is–for the most part–an explicit encouragement to be a consumer. Flying through one book with the need to finish the series is an expensive proposition. And with limited library hours and fewer library options for students particularly at my school (did I mention our school currently doesn’t have a librarian?), this isn’t a very feasible option. Teachers I work closely with often personally finance student reading interests, but going to Barnes and Noble nearly every weekend to buy the novels and manga that will interest students isn’t a sustainable model (my checking account can attest to this).

Finally, how are YA authors being encouraged to make the leap to from young adult to adult texts? Where the serialized gimmick is helpful in certain genres, I’m concerned that it is now replacing other ways young people traditionally related to and came to appreciate books.

What happens to book reading when it is trivialized to little more than long, continuing soap operas?

No, I’m not predicting any kind of death knell for the printed word or making a call for boycott or anything along those lines. I am however, worried that as a society we are not looking at the shifts in reading practices of young people and that, in turn, we are not looking at the shifts in capitalist practices of booksellers. Yes, kids like vampire series and post apocalyptic literature that goes on and on. But they like that, on the one hand, because they aren’t being offered many other alternatives. They are particularly not being offered many self-enclosed novels.

Ultimately yes, of course I hope all of my students are passionate “lifelong readers.” But I’m also hopeful that all of my students are offered the opportunity to choose the kinds of books they read. I am hopeful that they are not limited to series because series equal more money for publishers.

 

NOTE: In snapping some pictures at my local corporate bookseller for this post, I was reminded of just how white popular YA is. What happens when the racial and cultural experiences of my students are not expressed as popular literature?

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

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I finished this book today. The book is so immersive, and funny, and poignant and somehow not read by anyone I know. I called the Hobo Hotline from within the book. I went to the crazily interactive website (once you pull the lever). And as excited as I am to jump into The Magician King, this one was a bummer to be through with.

Last week, I bought three other copies of this book on whim because I’m intending to just hand it out to people and make them read it. It’s that good. And it’s somehow ridiculously cheap on Amazon. It makes me want to donate money to the author (a la Helen DeWitt’s Secondhand Sales). It makes me want to draw a map with T.S. Spivet in the middle and directions for you to go and read and examine and search for Layton on every page of the book. So awesome.

The Perennial Outsider and the Problem with Bashing White Kids

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As critical as I get about depictions of race, class, and gender in media, I have a real problem with the thrust of this article.  While I think the author is trying to be inclusive in his vision of the need for non-White heroes (and I agree with him on this point), I think bashing Holden is the wrong approach. Let’s look at two specific passages from the article’s beginning and ending:

Teachers and writers who venerate Catcher have to ask themselves: How relevant is Holden in a world where he is an actual minority?

And

As for the coming minority represented by dying Holden, whose popularity among teens has waned in recent years, the prize is out there. The first writer who accurately describes what it is like to be the only white boy in the room in 21st-Century America can redefine the White Outsider and make him relevant again.

So, to make a long story short, as a teacher, I did ask myself if Holden was relevant for my class of all black and Latino youth. I did this seven years ago during my first year as a teacher. At that time, I specifically felt that the whiny voice of a rich, white east-coast male would be completely alien to my students. It would be patronizing to force them to spend their time with such a literary character. I said this to several of my teaching colleagues.

But what I forgot was that Holden is the apotheosis of being a teenager and growing up. I’ve had few texts that have quite the near-universal positive response as Catcher gets in my 11th grade classroom.

While I ask students to think about the critical nature of the text and its politics of representation, I also recognize that students need to look at the world from myriad viewpoints – especially when those of privileged folks like Holden end up looking a whole lot like their own. Each time I teach this book (and it’s been taught to every 11th grade class I’ve taught at this point), I have students ask to buy a copy when they are finished. I have students each year admit it’s the first book they’ve finished reading. Ever. I have impassioned and emotional reflections from students that discuss their fears, uncertainties, and desires about growing up. The fact that Holden is white or male doesn’t get in the way of this pathos or this ability of students to engage meaningfully with an aging text.

Ultimately, I think there is a danger in taking an effective and proven piece of literature like The Catcher In The Rye and allowing it to function as an effigy to burn in tribute to large and significant questions about racial diversity, representation, and media. These are important questions, but the approach is misguided and uninformed. And isn’t this kind of writing specifically what would lead to popularity waning? Is a text’s popularity tied to its relevance?

Cartography & High-Wire Not-Believing

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A novel is a tricky thing to map. At times the invented landscape provided me shelter from the burdens of having to chart the real world in its entirety. But this escapism was always tempered by a certain emptiness: I knew I was deceiving myself through a work of fiction. Perhaps balancing the joys of escapism with the awareness of deception was the whole point of why we read novels, but I was never able to successfully manage this simultaneous suspension of the real and fictive. Maybe you just needed to be an adult in order to perform this high-wire act of believing and not-believing at the same time. – T. S. Spivet

Your Summer Syllabus: Three Recent Examples of Participatory Media that Teachers Should Know About (Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy Ahead)

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My browser is overcrowded with tabs of information I want to share here. Instead of focusing on a single example, I want to briefly reflect on three different aspects of the shifting nature of culture in participatory media: community, copyright, and civic engagement. By looking at all three of these, educators can get a quick & robust snapshot of what is on the horizon for pedagogical implications vis-à-vis all of this “new media stuff.”  The examples below speak to three different ways that media and culture are changing the ways young people are learning, interacting, and acting upon the world. For teachers, all three of these bring up significant ways that pedagogy needs to shift. (I’ve called this, previously, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy.)

 

How to Have the Number One Book on Amazon Without Actually Finishing It

When it comes to YA literature, John Green’s works are not only a personal favorite, but also a consistent hit with my students. During the final days of June, John Green went live on YouTube to his legion of fans and (over the course of nearly two hours) announced the title of his new book, answered questions being sent in real time, and read a chapter from the unreleased work. He also announced he was going to sign every copy of the first edition of the book. As a result, The Fault in Our Stars shot to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites & Green’s work was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, and media sites are pointing to the phenomenon of the sudden sales. What’s important to notice here is specifically how this happened. Green didn’t go online overnight and simply announce the book title (as mainstream media like WSJ signals). Instead, this has been a sustained relationship with readers that has developed trust and identity. John announced that the title came from someone within his online community. Fans have created tons of covers for the book. John’s hosting an online book club that’s reading the Great Gatsby. He has a series of video exchanges with his brother. He interacts with readers through twitter constantly. If anything, part of the fun of being a “fan” of John Green is being able to interact & engage with other readers, the author, and other artifacts in varying degrees of intensity. Spending some time meandering across his official site, his tumblr, his various twitter accounts, and fan pages is a great way for educators to think about ways to collaborate and share the learning experience with young people.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bloop of Fair Use & Copyright

Do you like Kind of Blue? How many times have you heard a soloist riff on those opening bars of “So What”? And while the music is constantly pointed to as a vanguard album in the history of jazz, a recent reinterpretation of the music finds itself a useful case study in when art appropriation exceeds “Fair Use.” I’m regularly talking about the importance of discussing fair use, copyright, and Creative Commons with young people; I’m convinced that this is a space that  students need to explicitly understand as we shift toward a cultural shift from merely consumption to production. This case study, “Kind of Screwed,” is a fantastic introduction into the challenges that are being faced across artistic mediums. Related to this, I regularly either include Free Culture or the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto in courses I teach to teachers about media and technology- both of these are great resources for further investigation on this topic.

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

Think of Eve Online as the geekier, way (way) more complex version of World of Warcraft. With political and corporate intrigue at the center of a game that takes place on ships and in fleets of aircrafts, Eve isn’t as widely played in the U.S. as other MMORPGs. However, that hasn’t stopped EVE’s distributor, CCP, from cashing in on game updates & expansions. In doing so, the company’s revealed a strategy that is more interested in a bottom line profit than in continued support of a long term player community. The result? Nearly 5,000 subscribed players walking away from the game and community. Digging through forum postings and news articles, a clear tension between creator and user emerges. And while teachers aren’t likely to utilize EVE Online in daily instruction (though the class that does has got to be an interesting one, no?), the way that these players are signaling dissent within the game, through canceled subscription and through collective organizing demonstrate how civic engagement is reshaped through participatory media. There are past examples of this kind of work described by researchers, particularly in America’s Army and the Sims, for those who want to look at other work in this area.

 

Summing Up

While all of the examples above have related precedents, they point to the fuzzy edges of socio-cultural interaction that most educators aren’t thinking about. They are all from within the past two weeks and are related to the kinds of practices our students are engaged in every day. When are we, as educators, going to formally sketch out a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the paradigm shift that affects our classrooms?

 

 

Two Links: Social Media, Isolation, Goon Squads

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I guess the ranting tech-part of me felt obligated to point to this. I’m leaving it at that … for now. I am thinking through current acceptable use policies at school and their implications; this will be the final brick that will need to fall before pedagogy can be addressed.

And this is pretty much a solid read for any writer. A Visit From the Goon Squad is one of the best books I’ve read this year (the Pulitzer folks got this one right).  The much-discussed “Powerpoint“ chapter is touching (and probably one of the few palatable uses of the clunky program). And this quote’s resonance on teaching implications is profound:

The desire to become a writer struck suddenly and without warning when she was a teenage backpacker in the early 1980s, traipsing across Europe, lonely and depressed, missing her family. This was the era of queuing for the public phone box: “There was a kind of intensity to the isolation of travel at that time that’s completely gone now. You had to wait in line at a phone place, and then there weren’t even answering machines. That feeling of waiting in line, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It’s hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I’m actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer.” [Hat tip to Ms. Hopper for pointing me toward both quote and profile.]

The human sense of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection as ascetic transformation is instantly recognizable and the kinds of feelings we strive (understandably) to avoid within formal learning spaces. However, apprenticeship/internship spaces to nurture, support and cultivate growth and occasional discomfort could be a useful area to think through educational reform.

Productivity and Unhinging Ideas From Books: A Collaborative Post with Jason Sellers (Part I)

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A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a fellow teacher, Jason Sellers. We’d met several months ago while I was in Orlando for NCTE and he for the National Writing Project’s annual conference. Jason is a high school English teacher in Staunton, IL, a rural high school 45 minutes outside of St. Louis. He’s also a NWP Technology Liaison with the Piasa Bluffs Writing Project, a member of the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory (an organization that provides professional development to schools), a Hill Country blues guitarist, a motorcycle adventurer, and an MMA fighter.

Discussing the ways we get tied up with information, we thought it would be useful to share out some ways we are organizing, synthesizing, and being able to just remember the myriad information strands we are engaging with on a day-to-day basis. Below we begin our discussion of academic productivity.

How do you manage the information you read in books for future reference?
Jason:

Here are possible options I’ve explored: purchasing traditional books and writing in the margins; purchasing e-books and using Kindle’s highlight feature to save passages; taking snapshots of passages with my cell phone and saving them in EverNote; taking notes in a journal; creating mindmaps.

My main reason for leaning towards ebooks and/or saving passages in Evernote is that I feel books will inevitably move to an electronic format. I don’t want to have to comb through my collection of paper books for marginalia, which I’ll then have to convert to digital format.

The problem with margin writing and ebooks is that they both require purchasing the book. I can’t write in books from the library, and pirated e-books are difficult to find online (waiting on the book equivalent of Napster). Ultimitely, I ruled these two options out, because I’m poor.

I prefer to check books out from the library. I tried taking snapshots of passages of library books with my cell phone. This may be a good method, but I have an older model of cell phone with a crappy camera — doesn’t capture text very well. Someone with an iPhone might be more successful doing this.

The best method I’ve found for retaining information in books is to mindmap the book. I’ve been using this method that past two months after reading Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. I keep a 8.5″ x 11″ sketchbook with me while I read, and make notes with page numbers for quick reference. That way, I have all the information on one page. Single words and short phrases are enough for me to remember whatever it is I need to remember, and page #s help me track down the passage if I need to cite it directly.

When I finish a mind map, I take a photo, upload it to EverNote, and tag it. Easy to find, and EverNote recognizes handwriting, so it’s searachable.

Thanks again for starting off this discussion Jason. I’m definitely interested in finding out more about other people’s research and creative practices (and hope a few of you will share in the comments below).

As for me, if I’m reading generally, I do a lot of annotating in most books (with exceptions noted below). I also compile a note-taking sheet at the back of most books that allows me to reference back to specific topics and pages I think will come in handy later on.

If I’m reading for a specific project, I’ll also probably start typing my notes or direct quotations as they become prevalent. As I’ve talked about before, Scrivener is an essential note-taking tool for me and for how I organize work related stuff. If there are quotes, passages, or main ideas I want to draw upon or puzzle through, I will type those directly into Scrivener for later–they may get discarded, they may get expanded, they may lead to another book and to another ad naseum, but the point is to get them to the general “space” to which they are related.

I have a pretty strict but impractical approach to writing in books that I’ve been stuck with since beginning my undergraduate work. Basically, any literary, YA, or leisure reading text gets a kind of no-writing embargo placed on it. I’ll admit that the materialistic part of me appreciates the book as a product, especially Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them (BSRAYDEKWTDWT). I’ve amassed a handful of first editions of books that have felt important to me at one point in my life or another, and I’ll buy more than one edition of a book to have a “reader’s copy” of a book I don’t feel comfortable risking getting tattered by borrowers of books. Geek Love, Infinite Jest (though the second printing with Vollmann’s name correctly spelled, unfortunately), and–come to mention it–a healthy portion of Bill’s books as well:

Now, when it comes to academic texts, many get put through the wringer, as do books that are often drawn upon or which it’s a good idea to keep in a back pocket once in a while – some of Salinger’s books fit in this category and I’ve probably bought or given away a copy of Franny and Zooey on an annual basis.

The tricky thing for me is when a book straddles the line between work and play (Dewey reminds us that this is a false divide in the first place). So, having to read House of Leaves for an undergraduate seminar, made me struggle between writing in and not annotating (this sometimes leads me to do things like buy two copies of a book … I am not proud of this).

As for non-fiction, every page and inch of the book is fair game in terms of annotation. Some of my critical theory books are difficult to read due to third and fourth rounds of annotations. In general, however, the very last page of the book becomes a pseudo-index for me of pages, phrases, and ideas I may want to reference at some time in the future. The page is usually very sloppy may have notes to random people, doodling, and references to things that may not make sense to me. It’s pretty common for me to be unable to decipher some of these notes later on – the fact that many of these books are at least partly read in cars and on airplanes makes the notes that much messier. Here’s the back page of this book that I read last week:

Again, very random notes and jottings. However, considering that the majority of my academic books have similar pages, my library very quickly is distilled to a handful of pages that I can cull together around specific projects. It leaves me in the midst of an unfinished conversation I can pick up and add to very quickly.

So that’s a snapshot of two approaches to digesting reading materials. What are your approaches? I think we’ll, eventually, work through our approaches to writing, organizing, and moving from others’ work to our own. This reflective practice reminded me of this and I hope this can be a way to think about the different approaches pedagogues and researchers take in engaging with the mental labor of educating America.

There is Damage: On Finishing the Instructions

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It’s a weird feeling finishing a book as long as The Instructions and pretty much wanting to pick it up and start re-reading it.

Most of all, I’m impressed with the pacing of the book. For something that should feel like it moves at a glacial pace (the first 300 or so pages pretty much cover a single day of school for the protagonist), the text races toward the inevitable. Gurion may or may not be the Messiah, but the process of watching him push toward action is thrilling.

I generally struggle recommending longish post-modern-y texts because they are often so singular in their appeal to English Lit geeks. That this one plays with Jewish (Israelite?) scripture, is told with the cocky slang of middle school students, and presents violence in ways that is actually horrific in its calculated distance is even more of a reason one would shy away from suggesting this as the next book for light reading. All that being said, I think this book deserves a larger readership and that most readers would become a part of Gurion’s army of scholars if willing to crack the pages of the lengthy tome. As I mentioned earlier, the actual size of the book – while charming in design – is going to be a barrier from getting people to pick it up.

“Our stories are the bastard children of everything that we have ever experienced and read”: Reflecting on Chapters 3 & 4 of Create Dangerously

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[This post is my second set of comments related to Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously. The entire exchange between Daye and I can be found over here.]

Daye, thanks for checking in with the comments last week.

As we’re talking about chapters 3 and 4 this week, I am again struck by titles. It’s hard to really buy that “I am Not A Journalist” is a declarative statement by the author as she does little here but report on the death and aftershocks of a close friend, activist, radio-journalist. It reminds me of Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images.” And while I was personally oblivious to the effects of Jean Dominque’s influence, I can understand how listening, like reading in the first chapter of the collection, is poised as a political act.

Like one of your final comments, I’ve been thinking about the roles that Danticat places herself in and how these may relate to the immigrant youth I’ve been teaching for the past six years. Danticat quote’s Dominque, “The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in bother worlds. There’s no need to be ashamed of that.” I reflect on a conversation with one of my students years ago that started off the class by declaring, “Mr. Garcia, when we come to this country, we become different people.” He was initially referring to the way he lost his “second” last name as a result of traditional American conventions (and the fact that school documents simply don’t have the space to include the characters from two last names). The discussion in the class, however, circled around the transformation – one that often felt shameful – for the students throughout the class.

Daye, I’m wondering if you could talk about how diaspora is seen as a character in Lwa. Is it too the “floating homeland” around which your characters reside? This is also a good place for me to briefly step out of my role as critic and remind readers about Daye’s awesome film project on Kickstarter. Please consider making a donation to her project – even a small contribution will help her, too, create dangerously.

A couple of years ago, I created a unit plan for my students called “Voices of Struggle.” Its overarching goal was to locate students’ ideologies in the eye of the storm of larger, global conflict. Books like Persepolis, What is the What, and Invisible Man acted as exemplars for students to ultimately record and literally voice the way the world has helped shape who they are and how they have helped shape the world. I liked the way these two chapters melded the singular struggle across generations, a father’s cause taken up in the writing of a daughter.

Daye, you talked about the liminal state in which you are creating work. Do you relate to the role of memory that Danticat describes in chapter 4? I know Lwa revolves around memory too. Would you mind talking about this?

For next week, since they are slower chapters (and to make sure we wrap this up before you move from pre- to actual production), what do you say about covering the shorter chapters that make up the middle of the book. I’m proposing we comment on chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. Any objections?

Lastly, I know a few other people have been reading through Danticat as well. Please email me or post your reflections on these chapters as comments. We will include them in the exchange and welcome the extra “immigrant” bloggers.