The Grouse on Mango Street

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting.

Last year, I decided to change one of my class texts, from short stories (Poe, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Thurber) to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I changed the text for two major reasons. One, I thought Mango would be a more accessible first book of the year for seventh graders. Short as they are, some of those stories were rough reading for kids barely out of sixth grade. Two, I thought writing vignettes about their lives would be a more interesting and personally relevant assignment than writing stories modeled after Poe’s or Vonnegut’s. For sure, the previous class had fun writing horror and sci-fi, but I wanted my students to have a chance to express who they were, to use their writing to bring people and places and objects and moments and questions to school that they were used to leaving at home. That was the goal, at least.

For more than a few of my students, writing vignettes was a highlight of the course. The assignment was simple: turn in a collection of at least three vignettes connected by a common theme. (We’d also been talking about the difference between topic and theme.) One girl wrote about her trip to see the orphanage she’d been adopted from in China. One boy wrote about how he loved trains when he was small and told how he leaned down to the grates in the street to listen for passing subways. Another girl wrote about the mural-painted, piss-stinking tunnel near her home, describing how it felt shabby and sometimes scary but also like home. And predictably, I got stories about dogs and camp. (I don’t mind the topic; I mind the lack of emotional connectedness. I’m hoping good peer review will help with that.)

Given the quality and investment in the vignettes, and given that I’d chosen Mango because it’s approachable and lends itself to personal writing about identity, I was stunned to see how few students liked the book. On my course evaluation, of the 62 students who responded, 7 said they loved it, 17 said they liked it, 33 said it was OK, and 5 said they hated it. So, only 24 liked or loved it, and 38 thought it was OK or hated it. By contrast, for A Raisin in the Sun, 39 liked or loved it and 23 thought it was OK or hated it; for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55 liked or loved it and 7 thought it was OK or hated it. What’s going on that my students like (or love) Shakespeare—ancient, incomprehensible Shakespeare—more than contemporary (well, OK, 25 years old, but that’s the most recently-written text they read, which is itself problematic), early-teenager-friendly Cisneros?

I’m going to start with the assumption that I made the right decision last year when I switched the text. Maybe that’s wrong, but I had some pretty convincing reasons for making the change then, and I’m still convinced now. So under that assumption—that Mango is a good book for my students to begin 7^th grade English reading together and writing off of—I figure something in the way I presented the book turned students cold, or lukewarm, to Mango. (Lukewarm is even worse than cold, isn’t it?) This year, I’m going to have to make some revisions. But what?

Whatever I change, I want to keep the vignette-writing assignment mostly the same. That was a successful part of the unit, so I’ll just tinker a little to get from silver to gold. But the reading bit—the discussion topics and structures—need to change. I think last year might have been a little too scattershot; with a book of vignettes, it’s hard not to be. I need an essential question to stick to. I also think I was a little too heavy-handed in introducing the identity themes in the book. The Big 8 do not have to be force-fed to them the first month of school. And finally, as much as the students need to learn about literary devices, I’m no longer willing to scrap writing time. The House on Mango Street will be, first and foremost, a model of how to write. Along the way, we’ll look at what Cisneros does to make her writing so cool. We’ll do some discovery and interpretation of the devices, and some using of these techniques.

Here’s how I want it to play out.

About half of our class time will be devoted to writing vignettes. Maybe 20 minutes of each class. I want those little buggernuts writing. A lot. That’ll give them even more material to go on when they compile their final collection. I’d also like to have them spend more time doing meaningful peer review and revision.

In that vein, I’m going to give writing prompts related to each vignette. After reading a bunch of them for homework, the kids can choose a prompt based on one vignette they want to write about. Last year, I think I gave too much freedom of choice, overwhelming some of them and leaving others feeling uncertain if what they were doing was “right.” The vignettes in Mango are about things, moments, relationships that make Esperanza who she is, so if the prompts ask the students to write on the topics in the Mango, the students will be writing about who they are. That should tease out the personal stories that make them who they are much better than discussing the Big 8 social identifiers.

As for reading/discussing/analyzing the text itself, I’d like to focus on what Cisneros does that makes the writing work so well. I think the essential question is going to be, “What do authors do when they’re writing for adults?” because to date, most of what they’ve read has been young adult fiction. Mango is a nice crossover book, not quite YA and not quite adult. The kids can see how Cisneros uses motifs, symbolism, irony, foil characters, foreshadowing, unreliable narrator—and that’ll pave the way for the Steinbeck unit. I want to take my students to MoMA to see how some of those literary devices come up in art too (and maybe to use art as a way into more vignette writing). Then, when they’re writing their paragraphs on literary devices, they’ll have points of comparison.

It also wouldn’t hurt to have them do a cool project, like maybe a video interpretation, or artwork inspired by one of the passages. I’ll have to make time.

What made me love The House on Mango Street was how Cisneros used vignettes to tell a story without telling it. How she honored the importance of small things and events—a bike ride with friends, a pair of ugly shoes, a name—and used them to reveal her characters. How she didn’t feel the need to write in grammatically-correct sentences, and her text was all the more powerful for it. If I chose this book for its excellent writing, I should use it to help students see what makes writing excellent so they can do excellent writing too. If I chose it because it’s relatable, then I want to reach the parts of students that relate to it. I want my classroom to be a place where students can bring their whole selves. If The House on Mango Street shows them a way to do that, then maybe it doesn’t matter if they love, like, or hate the book itself.

Honoring Disagreement is Honoring Diversity

Sometimes, while reading student papers, I have moments of self-doubt. I hand the offending work—this time, it’s Zach’s Of Mice and Men essay that I’m about to give a C+— to my colleague, Jeremy, and ask him, What would you give this paper? He skims it and says, I didn’t read it that carefully, and I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, so you’d know better than I would, but I’d say a B or a B+?

Jeremy is kind enough to give the string of qualifiers that honor my professional judgment, but at the end of the day, what does it mean for Zach when he gets a C+ on a paper that another English teacher—who teaches kids in the same grade at the same school—would have garlanded with a B+? I can’t say to Zach that he earned a C+ when the teacher who sits RIGHT NEXT TO ME would have said he “earned” a B+. But in fact, Zach didn’t earn a C+; I gave him a C+.

Not that I’m wrong to give the C+. He rarely explained his evidence, he integrated his quotations poorly, and he didn’t bother to address the second half of his thesis. And don’t even get me started on the grammar problems. I should have given the paper a C. But in Jeremy’s view, Zach had a interesting and personally-relevant thesis about how Curley’s wife’s asserted a false power because she lacked true power, and how this kind of dynamic exists among the so-called popular crowd at school. Zach also brought his own biting, slightly sarcastic tone to the paper. If you knew Zach, you could totally hear him speaking these words as you read them.

Had I been using a different rubric, say the 6+1 Trait^® Rubric, or one that awarded more points for voice, creativity, and personal relevance, I might have given Zach the B+ that Jeremy would have given. But that’s not the point. The point is that Jeremy and I had very different reactions to this paper because he and I are two very different people. And why shouldn’t we be?

Right now, I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think is the most brilliant book I’ve read this decade. But I’m certain that there are people who wouldn’t like it. For one thing, the narrators use a lot of Spanish, and to understand it all, a whitegirl like me needs a background in Spanish and/or Spanish-English dictionary and/or Urban Dictionary and/or 33 years of knowing how to attack a word using context. For sure some non-Spanish-speaking readers would find all those Spanish words cumbersome to the reading experience. And though I wouldn’t know for sure, I’d bet good money that Junot Diaz thought about those readers and decided something like, “The Spanish is part of Yunior’s voice. I can’t take it out, and I can’t footnote every time. If some readers can’t deal with the Spanish, too bad for them.”

And that’s exactly the point! All writers make choices about who to include and who to exclude in their readerships. No writer writes for ALL readers. A text as universal as a New York Times article assumes a certain degree of formal education, worldliness, and familiarity with background events. Conversely, most writing is for more than one reader. In real life, the only time we write for one reader is when we write strictly for ourselves, as in a diary, shopping list, or notebook; or when we write strictly for one other person, as in a private email. Just think of the complexities when you decide, midway through writing, to cc an email: all of a sudden, you’re making subtle alterations to your tone, you’re asking yourself if you need to define a term, you’re deleting a joke. And that’s just for one extra person! Imagine how professional authors must feel negotiating the potential misunderstandings of their wide readerships. But they do!

With student writing, though, we make a funny compromise. We pretend students are writing for all readers—or at least all teachers. We pretend that any teacher could read their essays and give the same grade we did. We pretend that there is some measure of fairness to the way we grade. (For gorgeous proof to the contrary, just read the second chapter of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, by Maja Wilson.) At the same time, we know there’s only one reader this essay is written for. Sure, a peer reviewer or a parent might have a look, but the teacher is the Reader Who Counts.

In real life, much of what we write will be read by multiple readers, our readers’ contexts matter. A Dominican might appreciate the historical and cultural details in Oscar Wao more than I, who have only a very cursory and second-hand knowledge of its history and culture. Someone who knows what cane fields, the SDF-1, and the Rutgers University campus look like will surely have an easier time visualizing these details. (It doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, especially in this wonderful age of Google images, but it makes the reading experience feel different if we have to look up pictures versus if we have deep-set memories the book calls up.) How I think about a text will be related to my geographic roots, my education, my race, my religion, my gender, my socioeconomic status, my biases as an English teacher, my personal interests, and even—gasp!—my mood at the time of reading.

How is that fair to students? How is it fair that my opinion of Zach’s paper depends on something as incredibly capricious as my mood? It’s NOT fair. But it’s also reality. When Zach’s dad reads my home report at the semester’s end, it will matter whether he opens the envelope after sitting through 90 minutes of traffic or after watching Zach win his season-opening baseball game. He’s not sitting there with the home report guidelines to help him figure out whether my comment is useful. HE, a real person, is sitting there. Reading. When Zach’s mother gets her copy of the report, she might read my words about Zach’s difficulties in English class and blame her ex-husband for not pushing Zach hard enough. People bring themselves to writing. The best I can do as the writer is be as aware of my audience as possible, anticipate possible interpretations, account for some, and knowingly ignore others.

The best I can do as the teacher is teach my students to know their readers for the messy, moody, opinionated, contextualized human beings that they are.

In her book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson spends an entire chapter discussing the fact that readers disagree about writing all the time, and that this disagreement can be very helpful to writers when they examine WHY different readers disagree. Forget the grades; WHY did Jeremy and I have such different reactions to Zach’s essay? Zach might learn that Jeremy used to teach a course on comedy, while my law school background has made me meticulous about logical organization and thoroughness in proving a claim. Then—and here’s what’s really important—Zach can make DECISIONS about how to revise. (When Alfie Kohn spoke at my school, he said something that stayed with me: “Children learn to make decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”)

What does that look like? After reading Rethinking Rubrics, I’ve decided to try some of Wilson’s suggestions.

Let’s say Zach just finished a draft of his essay. In a peer review session, two of his classmates will use Ted Nellen’s “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method to tell Zach (a) what they got out of the piece; (b) what struck them about it; and (c) what left them confused or curious, or any suggestions they have for revision. I’ve created a chart version of the “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method that we can use in class.

Next, Zach has to find two adult reviewers who will also use the “I heard, I noticed, I wondered” method. He can use his parents, his other relatives, his parents’ friends, his godforsaken tutor—whomever he wants. If a student doesn’t know any adults who can fill that role or doesn’t feel comfortable asking, I’ll give them mentors. (My big fat plan is to see if, at a nearby retirement home, there are people with time on their hands and wisdom in their heads. A reversal of good old community service. But I’m not there yet.)

Now, Zach has comments from four different reviewers—some his age, some older; some in his family, some not; some who know him well, some who don’t; some who did a similar assignment, some who don’t know what the assignment was. These different readers have brought their own subjective ideas, both about the content of the essay and about essay-writing itself. They’ve brought their backgrounds, biases, and moods. They’ve brought themselves. How does Zach “extract clarity from disagreement through careful study of readers’ context and [his] own purposes?” (Wilson, p. 65)

He can put all the feedback in one place (my very slightly modified version of Maja Wilson’s “Dealing with Disagreement in Response” chart on p. 97 of Rethinking Rubrics) and then make sense of all that feedback by finding common themes among the comments, thinking about his readers’ different perspectives, and using those perspectives to guide his revisions.

In real life, some writing is for only one reader. But essays are not meant for one reader, and I don’t want to be the one Reader Who Counts. I want to teach students that honoring disagreement is honoring the diversity of backgrounds, opinions, biases, interests, and moods that readers bring. I want my students to learn, in short, that readers are subjective and that writers need to make decisions that will ultimately include or exclude readers. I know the process is going to be messy, but that shouldn’t be what stops me.

An Open Letter to Ben (Or, Why I'm Changing the Way I Grade Papers)

Dear Ben,

More than a year has passed since I read your essay about Holden Caulfield. At the time, it was one of 62 essays about Holden that I was reading; since then, I’ve read 63 more. Still, I remember that your essay applied something you learned in a YES Institute course: that Holden had a “listening,” or biased way of understanding the world, that got in his way. I confess I don’t remember much more about the essay—as I said, it’s one of 125 that I’ve read, and it was more than a year ago—but I do remember two more things about it. One, I remember loving it so much that I told several colleagues about it, and I gushed (which isn’t something I do easily or often) about how creatively you’d applied what you’d learned in one context to something in another context. That kind of interdisciplinary connection-making isn’t something you middle schoolers do too often (not that we teachers help as much as we should), and it’s very exciting when it happens.

Two, I remember the score I gave you: 44/50.

As you know, I graded the essay using a rubric. For everything of yours that I graded, I used a rubric. I don’t have the exact rubric I used for your essay, but here’s the very similar one I used for essays this year:

Paragraph 1: Introductory Paragraph ( /5)

· Introduction explains your topic in general and leads the reader to your thesis.

· Thesis is strong, clearly stated, and interesting.

Paragraphs 2-4: Body Paragraphs ( /10, /10, /10)

· Begin with a supporting argument that helps show your thesis is true.

· Give specific, well-chosen examples from the book that show the argument is true.

· Use at least 3 well-blended quotations that directly support your thesis.

· Explain how each example proves the argument in the paragraph.

· Remind the reader how all points in the paragraph relate back to the main thesis.

Paragraph 5: Concluding Paragraph ( /5)

· Summarizes the points you made in the essay.

· Explains why what you said matters.

Writing Style and Mechanics ( /10)

· Uses clear and precise language.

· Ideas follow each other logically, with clear transitions connecting them.

· Is free from spelling, grammatical, and stylistic errors.

TOTAL ( /50)

I’ve gotten very positive reviews of my rubric. Students, parents, and tutors like that it’s clear and specific. From the rubric and the detailed comment I give at the end, struggling essayists know what was expected, what they did well, and what to work on next time. I like the rubric too. It keeps me honest, keeps me from inflating grades. If the paper lacks clear points, sufficient textual evidence, and underdeveloped ideas, I can’t give it a B+ just because I want to.

Here’s the problem, Ben. Every time—and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME—I give a writing assignment, there’s at least one piece of writing that I want to give a higher score than the rubric tells me I should. (There’s also at least one that I want to give a lower grade than the rubric tells me I should. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Your year, for the Holden essay, yours was the one I wanted to grade higher. Your thesis was brilliantly creative and the paper was well-written. I could hear your voice in it. In a big stack of essays where some were bad and some were OK and some were pretty good, yours was by far the most interesting. If it weren’t my job to read essays, I wouldn’t want to read most of the essays I read. I’d want to read yours. So why didn’t you get a 50?

I was reminded of your essay while reading an article, an oldie but a goodie, called Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment, by a writing professor named Peter Elbow. Elbow examines three different ways teachers look at their students’ writing: grading the paper, analyzing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses in order to help the writer develop, and connecting to the writing. I have tried to make grades more meaningful by tying them to a rubric. Instead of slapping an A- on a paper because something about it appeals to me (or slapping a B- on it because something about it doesn’t), I measure the essay against important criteria of good writing. A good essay needs to have an interesting thesis; it needs to be well-organized so the reader can follow the ideas; it needs adequate support for the claims it makes. I look for those elements when I read students papers, and the score I put on the paper reflects the extent to which a student has measured up to the aspects of good writing I taught. In Elbow’s terms, I don’t just grade; I evaluate. The grade is merely a reflection of that evaluation.

Except, there’s another dimension of reading a paper. I’m not a paper-reading robot—although, when I have 60 to read, I sometimes feel that way. I’m a person. I connect with some ideas more than others. I enjoy beautiful turns of phrase. I love creative thinking that makes me pause and say, I never would have thought about it that way, or, what an interesting connection, or, YES! Reading your paper as a teacher, I gave it a 44 because it measured up to most of the standards I’d set, but according to the rubric, there were little things here and there that it lacked, or places where it needed more development, or something. (By the way, I don’t remember what was “wrong” with it. I hope you don’t either.) But, reading it as a reader, I enjoyed it. It put enough ideas in my head that I still remember the paper now.

Whenever I read anything, I write on it. When I read student essays, I write notes about the clarity of the argument, perhaps, or the effectiveness of transitions, or the development of the ideas. Evaluative comments. I write evaluative comments on other forms of student writing too: your stories, poems, dialogues, descriptions, and vignettes. I also write on published writing, but not for the purpose of grading it. I’m thinking about it. I wrote on Peter Elbow’s article: arguing with it, jotting down ideas for my own classroom and team meetings, asking questions, connecting his ideas to other articles I’ve read, noting my (rather strong) emotions. I write on fiction and nonfiction, for work and for pleasure, to note the questions and ideas and feelings and associations I make as I read. As a general rule, I like writing that gets me thinking, and the more I think, the more I scribble down. The sheer amount of commentary I write in the margins of a text is a rough measure of how much I like it. Maybe I should start reading student papers like I read everything else and give a grade based on how much I write. That would be a lot easier and a whole lot more fun.

Fun for me, but I wonder how it would affect you, and other students. What if you got back a paper, and instead of reading all the comments about what you did well and what you might have done differently, you got to read comments grappling with your actual ideas? There’d be responses to some of your thoughts and questions about others. You’d find out, through my reactions, where you’d reached me, where you’d convinced me, where you’d inspired me—and yes, where you’d confused me, where you’d bored me, where you’d failed to prove your point. You might come back to me and explain what you were thinking, so I’d get it, and I would say, OK, now go put that in your paper. We could talk about WHY I was confused. Maybe it was the lack of transitions. Or WHY I got bored. Maybe your thesis stated the obvious. See where I’m going?

Peter Elbow makes a startling point in his essay. He says that when teachers like a student’s writing, they find it easier to criticize. He says that when he doesn’t like the writing, he struggles to write comments, “trying to soften [his] criticism, trying to find something nice to say—and usually sounding fake, often unclear” (Elbow, 171). But when he actually likes the writing, when he’s excited about it, he’s also able to be more critical. I’ve discovered the same thing when I read papers. When I really love an essay, when it engages me as a reader and a thinker, I can give specific commentary on why I like it. At that point, I feel like I’ve established an intellectual relationship with the writer, like we are two scholars on equal footing, exploring an interesting idea together. On that equal footing, I feel entirely comfortable raising my objections to the organizational structure, or the wording, or the third paragraph’s content. And the student, who feels genuinely respected as a thinker, eagerly returns to his or her desk to make the writing live up to how much I like it.

I’ve seen it before. But I’ve also seen the opposite, when a student knows that even though he or she got a perfectly decent grade—thanks, rubric—I didn’t really like the paper. There was one essay this year that I remember reading, and though there was nothing really wrong with it and I think I gave it a 42, I just didn’t like it. The arguments were predictable and the prose was boring. It was fine, but it was boring, and I gave the B begrudgingly.

What’s weird about rubrics is what they do to me as a reader. I let the rubric make decisions instead of making them myself. Ben’s essay gets a 44 because he didn’t do x, y, or z. Walter’s essay gets a 42 because he didn’t do x, y, or z either, and he also didn’t do a couple of other things. Writing gets reduced to whatever categories I put on the rubric, and however thoughtful I was in designing those categories, their ultimate effect is still to reduce writing to x, y, and z. Writing isn’t algebra. (Even algebra isn’t algebra—there’s always more than one way to solve for x.) There are no formulas. There’s only me, the reader, you, the writer, and the spaceship of words that carries meaning from your planet to mine. Sure, I might not understand everything you say; I might even misunderstand, and everything you write gets filtered through the atmosphere of experiences, ideas, and biases I already have around me, not to mention whatever weather systems of feelings and thoughts are swirling around at the moment when I read.

But Ben, that’s what reading IS. It’s interactive. It’s as variable and diverse and messy as people are. I use my rubric to try to take all that messiness and make it neat and clean, but as I discover EVERY SINGLE TIME a pile of papers lands in front of me, that neatness doesn’t really exist. If it did, I’d be able to justify a C for Walter and an A for you. But then, if that neatness existed, I probably wouldn’t be an English teacher, because writing would follow easy formulas and would lack the richness and surprise that made me love writing in the first place.

So what happens now? Well, with the help of Maja Wilson’s excellent book Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, which echoes (or rather, presages) many of the ideas I’ve put down here, I am rethinking my entire system of assessing student writing? What possibilities are there beyond the rubrics that strangle my sensibilities? How can I grade (because I still have to grade) and make sure you get that A? And so very much more importantly, how do I honor the wonder and delight I felt upon reading your essay—the relationship we now have as reader and writer? I don’t think that volume-of-commentary system is going to fly, but I am committed to finding something that will.

Respectfully,

Ms P

Equity, One File at a Time

I have a website on Moodle where I post stuff that students might find useful: syllabi, assignments, writing guides, graphic organizers, reading recommendations, extra credit opportunities, useful links, and other fancy stuff. My students know that if they lose their handouts, or if they miss class, they can check Moodle and will find whatever they need. Moodle provides organizationally-challenged students with extra copies while keeping them more accountable and independent. You lose your stuff? Fine. Get a new copy. Just don’t come asking me for it, because you know what I’m going to tell you.

Whenever I make a new handout for class, I save it, print it, and upload it. Moodle has an absurdly clunky interface—it’s a 14-click process from login to uploaded document, and that’s not counting naming the file, writing an explanation of what it is, and all the scrolling it takes to get where you need to be—but it’s pretty easy once you’re used to it, and it saves stuff from year to year, so you don’t have to re-upload unless you make a lot of changes. I do make changes, so I do re-upload, but that’s my problem. Even with all of that, Moodle does save me the time of having to email students (or their parents) gazillions of attachments.

Here’s the problem, though: Henry doesn’t have Microsoft Office.

Henry is an awesome kid. He’s intellectually involved, he works hard, and he’s trying to understand himself as a learner. One thing he figured out about himself is that he’s not the most super-organized kid in the world. Sometimes, he loses stuff. When he does, he sometimes remembers to ask for a new copy. I give him the usual refrain: “Check Moodle.” But then he comes back with, “I did check Moodle. All the stuff is in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. I don’t have Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.”

And really, why should he? Microsoft Word, especially the most recent version, is not only counter-intuitively designed point that you need a gazillion hacks just to make it function acceptably, but it’s absurdly expensive. Why would anyone purchase a bad program for a lot of money when they can get a perfectly good one for free? Moreover, and more to the point, some students’ families don’t have the financial resources required to purchase Microsoft Office. If a student needs access to course documents, that access shouldn’t hinge on their parents being rich enough and/or dumb enough to buy Microsoft Office.

What I told Henry was, “Well, the school has Microsoft Office, so print it here.” That was a bad answer. It’s true that Henry could have—and sometimes did—print at school, but the whole point of Moodle is to give students access. Usually, the time when they need that access is when they’re at home, either doing homework or preparing for the next day’s class. Plus, when they’re at school, surrounded by their friends and rushing from one of their eight classes to another, the last thing on their minds is, “Oh yeah, I need a new copy of that essay organizer.”

So, what would have been a better answer for Henry, and all the other students who don’t have Microsoft’s family of products? PDFs. If you have a computer and internet access, you can download a PDF reader for free. And then, you can open any PDF. My problem was, I didn’t know how to make PDFs, but now I do. It’s easy, especially if you have a Mac, but even if you have a PC.

So now, I begin the process of saving all my files as PDFs, deleting the Word and PowerPoint versions from Moodle, and uploading the PDF versions. That’s a whole lotta clicks. All in the name of equity.

What Does it Mean for a Book List to Reflect Students?

My seventh grade classes read the following books:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, or Cannery Row (students choose one of the three), all by John Steinbeck

I Am the Darker Brother, an anthology of poems by African Americans

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

One by a Latina, two by black men and women, and three by white men.

One question I’ve asked is, where are the Asians and Native Americans? If my students reflect those groups, shouldn’t my curriculum? But a deeper question I’ve been thinking about lately is, what does it mean for an English curriculum to “reflect” the kids? A book by an author with the same color skin as mine, or whose ancestors come from the same continent as mine, or whose sex chromosomes look roughly like mine—does a book by that author reflect me? Why should Alicia feel reflected in the curriculum simply because she and Esperanza from The House on Mango Street are both Latina? A book about a white Jewish female writer with man trouble and self-esteem issues isn’t about me. In fact, I might rebel against identifying with that girl precisely because her outer characteristics are so much like mine. My experiences are as unique to me as everyone else’s are to them; I don’t want to be reduced to categories. (That individualistic stance is itself rooted in white culture, but I’ll save that discussion for another post.)

Some students do prefer characters who resemble them. In general, students do seem to get more into books with kid characters; I've had my students tell me as much. But some students don’t need the characters to share their own traits. In Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are middle aged male migrant workers in 1930s rural California, yet Grace, a young female from a Manhattan family in the 2000s, felt their pain and longing and frustration because these are human emotions. It’s not that age and socioeconomic class and gender don’t affect Grace’s experiences, but it would oversimplify and insult her human capacities to assume that she’d only be able to identify with those whose gender and socioeconomic class and age are the same as hers.

Maybe what it really means for an English curriculum to reflect student diversity is for the books to present a diverse array of human emotions, struggles, triumphs, failures, and experiences—including race-, gender-, ethnic-, and class-based experiences. That means a white girl like Grace should read Walter Lee Younger’s story, because he reflects her somehow, and she won’t know how until she reads A Raisin in the Sun. It means Adam, a black boy, should read A Raisin in the Sun too, because something of himself is reflected in Walter, though no one can assume what. Making the curriculum reflect my students is not only about finding characters who look like them. It can be about finding the ways a character’s encounters, decisions, and feelings look like their own.

To complicate the question, in our class discussions of The House on Mango Street, the Latina girls were the ones who spoke the least. Later, when we read A Raisin in the Sun, the black boys were the most silent. What messages the kids of color are getting—from me, from the curriculum, from each other, from the school—that they clam up when characters look like them? Are they protecting the uniqueness of their own identities by dissociating themselves from characters who resemble them outwardly? Or is the message that they’re being asked to represent their race? As a white girl, I never faced that. When my classes discussed Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Taylor in The Bean Trees, no one asked, explicitly or implicitly, “As a white girl, what do you think?” At the same time, I was allowed to claim an understanding of The Woman Warrior and The Invisible Man.

Perhaps Alicia did nod in recognition when she read The House on Mango Street. Perhaps not. Perhaps she saw herself more in Beneatha Younger, or in Holden Caulfield. But even if that’s true for Alicia, the fact remains that it matters, for Alicia and for all students, whether there is a Latina voice in the books we read. And it matters that there are no Native American or Asian voices. If I leave Native American and Asian authors out of the curriculum, I send a message that Native Americans and Asians are unimportant. That’s not the message I want to send, not to Olivia, an Asian student, and not to Alicia, and not to anyone. Reading an Asian author’s story would not mean that Olivia, who was quiet all year, would suddenly have lots to say, but omitting Asian authors sends a negative message, not only to Asian students, but to all students.

As a white girl in middle school myself, I didn’t have to worry about representation. Throughout my school years, the curriculum was replete with white female characters. On the outside, and occasionally on the inside, the curriculum did reflect me. I want my students to say the opposite. I want them to look back on seventh grade English and say, on the inside, and occasionally on the outside, the curriculum did reflect me. If ALL of them can say that, I’ve begun to create an inclusive curriculum. At this point, not all of them can say that.

The Last Day of Classes

On their last day of classes, our students have a special schedule where they see all of their teachers for 15-minute mini-classes. Mostly, they sign yearbooks and said goodbye, but I couldn’t resist a last opportunity to teach them something, so I told them the following story. It’s a version of “The Turnip,” as retold by the Brothers Grimm.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. One was a soldier who had risen through the ranks and became rich and well-known, and the other was a farmer who remained poor and unknown. One year, the farmer-brother planted turnip seeds, and when the plants came up, he noticed that one was much bigger than the others. It grew and grew, and when harvest time came, he found that the turnip was so big that it filled an entire cart and required two oxen to pull it.

“What will I do with this turnip?” thought the farmer. “Will it bring me good fortune or bad? I cannot sell it, for who would want such a thing? I shouldn’t eat it, for little turnips would be just as good and easier to cook.” After much thought, the farmer decided there was nothing to do with the giant turnip but bring it to the king as a present.

When the king saw the turnip he said, “I’ve seen a great many wondrous things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything quite so wondrous as this turnip. Tell me, how did you come by this turnip? You must be a great man.”

The farmer said, “No, it is my brother who is a great man. He is a rich and well-known soldier whom you’ve heard of. I am just a poor and simple farmer. No one’s heard of me.”

The king felt compassion for the farmer and said, “I will raise you from poverty. You will have gold, and land, and herds of cattle, and your brother’s riches will be not match for yours.” And so it happened that the farmer became richer and more well-known than his brother.

Now, when the soldier-brother heard of what had happened to his farmer-brother, he became envious. He said, “If that could happen to my brother because of a simple turnip, imagine what the king will give me if I bring him the wonderful treasures from the faraway lands I’ve visited in my travels.” So, the soldier-brother loaded a cart with treasures from around the world and went to visit the king.

When the king was presented with the treasure, he said, “What wonders you have brought me! I would like to give you something wonderful in return. And in all my kingdom, I have nothing so wonderful as this magnificent turnip!” And so it happened that the soldier had no choice but to load the turnip onto his cart and take it home.

As the soldier-brother was on his way home, his rage turned to hatred, so that by the time he reached home, he had resolved to kill his brother. He hired some murderers and had them hide by the side of the road. The soldier went to his brother’s house and said, “I know of a great treasure buried near here. Now that we are both great men, let us go together to dig up the treasure, and we’ll divide it between us and become even richer.” The farmer-brother, suspecting nothing, went along. And the murderers fell upon him, threw him in a sack, tied the sack, and prepared a rope to hang him from a tree.

But suddenly, in the distance, they heard singing and hoof beats. Afraid they would get caught, the murderers simply tied the sack up in the tree and ran away. As it turned out, the singing and hoof beats came from a student who was riding his horse back to the university and singing joyously of all the things he was learning.

Meanwhile, the farmer worked a hole into the sack and poked his head out. When the student came riding by, the farmer called, “Hello! Today is your lucky day!”

“Who’s there?” called the student, looking left and right.

“Look up in the tree! Here I am, sitting in the Sack of Wisdom! Why, in the short time I’ve been in this sack, I’ve learned a great many things about the world.”

When the student heard this, he said, “Please, you must let me enter this sack. I too desire to learn a great many things.”

The farmer said, “Well, you’ll have to wait a little while. There is still one more thing I need to learn.”

After a short while, the student couldn’t bear his thirst for knowledge and called again, “Please! You must let me enter the Sack of Wisdom!”

So the farmer said, “If you want to enter the sack of wisdom, you must use that rope to lower it down.” Eagerly, the student lowered the sack, let the farmer out, and began to climb in. “Oh, no,” said the farmer. “You must let the wisdom surround you. You must go headfirst into the sack.” So the student dove into the sack, and the farmer tied it up, hoisted it into the tree, and rode off on the student’s horse.

When I finished telling the story, I said to my students, “So, why did I tell you this strange story on the last day of school? Because I want you to be a little bit like each character and little bit unlike each character. I hope that, like the solider, you will have great things come to you. And I hope that, unlike the soldier, you will never think that just because you have some privileges, you are automatically entitled to others. I hope that, like the like the student, you will always seek new knowledge and take great joy in learning. And I hope that, unlike the student, you never expect learning to come easily. I hope that, like the famer, you will take all new situations—whether good, bad, or ambiguous—and find creative ways to make them good. And I hope that, unlike the farmer, you will never deceive or exploit another person for your own gain.”

What do you think? Too didactic? Or a good lesson for the last day of school?

Gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

One of my students, David, pointed out how odd it is that after a year of digging deeply into the themes and literary devices in texts, we end the year translating the plot of a shallow love story. David’s right. We don’t do much with A Midsummer Night’s Dream beyond understanding the words. Sure, we act it out, and sure, we use it to learn the concept of subtext, and sure, we talk about how it’s adaptable to different settings. But the level of depth still isn’t very impressive, especially for the motivated critical thinkers I get to teach.

David’s problem with Midsummer stung because I had identified the same problem and hadn’t done much to fix it. I’d thought, it’s the end of the year, so it’s OK to do curriculum lite. I’d justified it further thinking, it’s Shakespeare! Even if all we do is read it and translate the meaning (or, as Kelly Gallagher put it in Deeper Reading, “construct the gist”), the students are learning Shakespeare. But still, I wanted to get a little deeper into the characters—even if that meant exposing their shallowness—and the themes of the play. Quite by accident, or as if fairies had planned it without my knowledge, I came upon a solution.

For the first part of the lesson, I adapted a activity I’d sat in on in my friend Kalin’s classroom. I broke the students into four groups and assigned each group of students a group of characters: the four lovers, the three other main Athenians, three of the mechanicals, and the three main fairies. I put the characters’ names on the board, and as a group, the students had to write three adjectives that they felt defined the character. Easy enough.

Next, each group of students rotated so they had a new group of characters. They had to revise the list. The rules were that for each character, they had to keep at least one adjective and change at least one adjective.

In the third round, when student groups rotated to get a revised list, the students were allowed to circle only one adjective for the whole class to discuss and negotiate. At the end, they copied the lists into their notes.

The next day, I told them we were going to discuss a theme that interested Shakespeare: gender roles. We reviewed the difference between sex and gender, the concepts of gender role and gender identity, and the idea of a gender continuum (which some of them had learned by participating in the YES Institute). In each class, students mentioned terms our society uses to label those who defy gender expectations—terms like tomboy, metrosexual, and yes, gay. We discussed how sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing; there can be a gay man with very masculine characteristics, or a heterosexual woman with very masculine characteristics.

Groups of students then placed the characters on a gender continuum. I asked them to put each character where they, as the audience members, saw the character and not where the character would put him- or herself. As the day before, we rotated groups and revised; this time, the second group was allowed to move only one character, and then the class raised characters to discuss.

Toward the end of the lesson, I wrote the adjectives from the previous day under the character’s names. So Helena, who they’d deemed very feminine, was also insecure, jealous, and whiny. Titania, who they’d deemed more masculine, was aggressive, stubborn, and powerful. I asked the students, what does this reveal?

It was powerful stuff. Some resisted the implications. Some acknowledged that gender stereotypes affect them. Most protested that guys and girls aren’t really like that, and I kept reminding them that we weren’t talking about individual behaviors but about social expectations. I can’t say I changed their consciousness, but they did think about something they might not have thought about in a way that was just comfortable enough.

So for next year, too late for David but worthwhile for the class below his, I’m considering titling my unit Social Justice in Shakespeare. We can talk about the racist language (“Away, you Ethiop!”), the stereotypes perpetuated by framing working-class characters as ignorant and foolish, and the question of whether characters are responsible for their behavior when under the influence of the love flower.

What do you think? What other social justice lessons have you taught using Shakespeare?