Beyond School

[Since my students just finished reading Nabokov's Lolita, I thought I'd give their responses to the notion that it shouldn't be taught in upper secondary. This is the third in the Why We Should Teach Lolita in High School series. See Number One here, Number Two here, with many interesting comments. If you want to comment, please read those posts - especially the comments - first. The 21st century, social media/web 2.0 context is important here.] Just one for the Long Tail: I posted the question below in a forum to my AP Literature students - all 17-18-year-olds, all, except one, ethnic Korean but Westernized anglophones:

I blogged about teaching this novel, and my readers were split on whether AP Lit students should be allowed to read it. What do you think? Should it be banned from high school “college level” literature classes? Why or why not?

Below is every response in the forum, in the order they were posted. I didn’t cherry-pick, and I only removed names. All said AP Lit students should be allowed to read it; two suggested making an alternate available for those uncomfortable with the premise; one expressed discomfort (not as bad a thing in a classroom as it could be elsewhere). Several addressed the benefit of exposure to this before they hit it in solitude in college. And many were plain puzzled that people think the book is any worse than nighttime television or movies. (A few made me scratch my head. Follow-up discussion time approaches.)

It just seemed right to put their voices here. Here they are:

Student Responses to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

3.1. I don’t think it should be banned. There is nothing to ban about really. I don’t understand why we have to protected from great literary works just because it has inappropriate concepts like sex. I think AP Lit students should be definitely allowed to read it though I’m not so sure about just the general seniors or other grades that aren’t mature to handle it. It really depends on the maturity level and how the students can handle that inside a classroom. Besides, for AP classes, which are supposed to be “college prerequisite” classes, should be handling students that are ready to take the advanced material for college and should level up to the college level. Out of the shell, I say.

More under the fold . . .

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{Update 15 April: After reading this and the comments, be sure to read this follow-up post and the comments there. Interesting stuff in those comments.]

Constance incarnate Diane Cordell tagged me for this literature-themed meme begun by Paul C. at quoteflections. It’s a fun one for me, for a couple of reasons. But first, here are the rules

• Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
• Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise.
• Include an image with your post.
• Tag four blogger colleagues.

Why Fun #1: I Think I Wrote This Blurb Years Ago (A Pedagogical Parable)

Before I started blogging, I piddled around in an AP Literature list-serv. I wrote a little post to share with other teachers there, and somebody emailed me and asked me if he could add it to his Huck Finn resources site, because he liked it. Why fun? It was the first time anybody (outside of a teacher or somebody I’d written emails or letters to) ever noticed my writing. It was only around five years ago, so I find it both pedagogically pregnant and psychologically cute that I, a 40-year-old professional literature teacher, spent the rest of the day floating a couple inches above the earth like the tooth fairy had just slipped a million under his pillow. Somebody out there in the world plucked something I did with words, and told me it had value.

Do I have to spell it out? Phi Beta Kappa (okay, from a state university, but still ;-), Magna Cum Laude (is that supposed to be capitalized?), Yadda Academy Yadda - all those “honors” didn’t hold a candle to this simple act of spontaneous recognition by a real reader whose bizness wasn’t grading what I wrote. When I saw the little thing posted on his website, I felt like maybe I could try being a Writer.

And this is why at least our excellent student writers should be blogging. End of Parable.

Now here’s the funny part: I searched for the Twain website that housed my little (weedy) rose, and it’s gone to Website Heaven, I guess. I couldn’t find it on Google, anyway (and yes, I tried Wayback Machine). But I searched a little more, and found this:

Some Passed-Over Classics
Rule Of The Bone, by Russell Banks

Arguably one of the funniest books in recent history. A contemporary retelling of Huck Finn, Banks has turned Huck (named Bone) into a 14 year-old stoner from upstate New York, who drops out of high school and eventually meets the Jim character (called the I-Man) who is a 40 year-old Rastaman living in an abandoned school bus in Plattsburg, NY. Together they make a pilgrimage to Jamaica where Bone believes his father is living, and where I-Man can resume his life as marijuana dealing shaman. Although the premise might sound a bit sophomoric, the story so neatly and creatively translates Twain’s classic into the modern world that you can’t help finding the time to read the whole thing in a day or two.

Why do I find this funny? Because the author is not attributed, and I’m not sure if it’s what I wrote - but I’m almost positive it is. If it’s not, is this plagiarism? You tell me.

I also find this interesting because of the name and thrust of this meme: “From High School Daze to Praise.” If I get that thrust right, it’s aimed at how soporific most assigned, schooly novels are for students (for students, mind you) who are living today and reading things their grannies read - and would still “morally” approve - in high school. Sanitized by either time or content, the novels we feel safe assigning are the ones that steer us clear of the rocks of parental complaint. Graphic depictions of sex? Challenges to Church or State (it’s okay if it’s a challenge to another country’s state, by the way)? We want to keep our job, so we keep these novels out of our students’ hands. And the upshot of this schooly bowdlerization of the taboo-probing nature of literature at its most powerful is this: “High School Daze,” to quote the meme. The students switch off of literature and switch on to pop culture, letting Marilyn Manson or Tupac, Quentin Tarentino or the Daily Show fill the shoes that real literature could fill for them. The Banks novel above? It’s a real depiction of teenage life for so many of our students - drugs, crime, a chilling pederast, a teen Hero’s Journey through that real world we so fear in our classrooms.

Why Fun #2: Case in Point

I took an AP Literature workshop from the queen of AP Literature - she wrote the book for the College Board - and the final assignment was an AP Literature syllabus that would win the approval of the College Board bureaucrats.

I included in the syllabus a novel that, besides being one of the most mesmerizing displays of prose artistry in the English language, was also guaranteed to pique the interest of that most difficult of audiences - high school seniors. I’m talking about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

The AP Literature Queen’s reaction was predictable, but no less disappointing for that: “I advise you,” she said (and I paraphrase), “not to teach Lolita. Think about it. The protagonist is a 40-something literature teacher like you, and he becomes sexually involved with a school-girl younger than your students.”

I thought long and hard about that advice. AP Literature touts itself as a “college level course,” yet it’s advising me to teach it like my students can’t handle adult content. It’s encouraging me to perpetuate the Daze. So we’re reading Lolita this month.

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

Now more than ever, with social networking and blogging and Facebook and so many other global entryways into our students’ lives, Lolita is relevant. It raises the questions we need to raise. Are there predators out there? Should minors shut themselves off from all adults because of that? (I’m thinking of my introduction of my students to my Twitter network of educators who have been so helpful in their learning this semester.) Or should minors instead learn to distinguish the adult angels from the adult devils out there, and to conduct themselves wisely and react wisely to any bad apples among the barrel brimming with good ones?

And besides this tangential benefit, there is the purely literary one: by teaching Lolita and similar mature works, we introduce our students to the world of real literature - shocking, unsettling, disruptive, paradigm-complicating if not -shattering - and give them the opportunity to discover why we adults read it.

Or else we trot out the same old “safe” novels breaking the now-safe old taboos. The Scarlet Letter, anyone? AP Literature, were it alive when Hawthorne’s novel was new, surely would have advised against teaching it then. But we can teach that one now. In its exploration of now-quaint adultery, can’t we admit that now, in content and (archaic) style, this novel that once dazzled today only . . . . dazes?

I’d love to hear students in comments here.

Now who do I tag (I don’t believe in “whom”)? Okay: Nathan Lowell, Bud Hunt, Jeff Wasserman, Doug Noon.

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h/t to @drthomasho on Twitter for this Gary Vaynerchuk tip and a nice change of focus. I’ll make it a voluntary meme. As Gary says, if we can make time for Twitter color wars, we can make time to prop a good person. A fun, lovely idea for the beginning of Spring.

My good person of the day? History teacher John Larkin from Oz comes to mind - generous with his comments (I see him all over the web), gentlemanly in tone, of a scholarly bent, but in a down-home way. A fine writer too, with good enough taste to put Nick Cave in his sidebar.

His shining “good people” moment for me this week: Offering some first aid to my iTunes when he heard I’d accidentally deleted my entire 18GB library.

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I’m browsing the comments on last week’s Open Thread: Your Favorite Teacher Blogs?, and want to thank Bill Ferriter for sharing upstate New York English teacher Dina Strasser’s The Line.

I’ve read Dina before, and was struck by her writing then, but life has been too fast recently to bring me back to it. The return trip just now blew me away.

I want to share Dina’s first attempt at digital storytelling. Like Education for Well-Being’s Bill Farren’s “Did You Ever Wonder?”, Dina’s “Do You Know?” is a riff on Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” “Do You Know?” is Dina’s vehicle for expressing her reactions to a recent trip she made to New Orleans. Just watch it:

It’s an interesting thing, this trend of intertextual riffs on Karl’s and Scott McLeod’s “Did You Know?” If I were them, I’d be quite proud to have generated this type of connective and competing reflection on what education in the 21st century should mean.

And if I were Dina, I’d be proud indeed of such a powerful first outing as a digital storyteller.

Don’t stop here, by the way. Check out Dina’s blog. There’s much more waiting for you there.

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It’s 12 minutes from 2008 here in Seoul. It’s also 12 minutes from the One Year Anniversary of Beyond School. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m spending New Year’s Eve with my beloved B.S. (I do have an uncharacteristic glass of wine next to me as I write.)

I want to steal a trick from my favorite political video blog, Crooks and Liars (whose link to my “Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness” post last week opened this blog to readership beyond edubloggers - to the tune of almost 1,000 visits to that post - in what I hope becomes a wedding of educational and political blogging, and another escape, like Students 2.0, from the echo chamber), by creating a regular “Open Thread” feature.

The idea of an Open Thread is to pose an issue, and then let the comments come. The thread - and that means the conversations in the comments - is the thing, not the post. It’s crowd wisdom - it’s blogging - at its best.

The question I propose for this thread comes in response to the following recent posts in the ’sphere:

• The 33-and-counting comments to my “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher“
• Will Richardson’s “Some New Year’s Dreaming” from Weblogg-ed, and its 24-and-counting comments
• Graham Wegner’s “Parable 2.0,” and its 11-and-counting comments
• Jeff Utecht’s “One Door Closes….Where Does That Leave You?” (Jeff announces he’s leaving his job here, without a new one to go to), and its 25 comments
• Taylor the Teacher’s “You Got Punk’d: An Open Letter to American Parents” and its 11-and-counting comments.

And the question is this:

If you dream of starting a new school, what are the reasons you don’t try?

If you’d prefer a positive framing of the question, how about:

How would your dream school look, and how would you make it a reality?

or, to get really outside the box:

If you believe it’s time for schools to end, how would you replace them?

Happy New Year, everybody. Since realities begin in dreams, maybe this thread will make it really happy.

(Stay tuned for the next thread: “What are the biggest obstacles to education reform that you would like to campaign against?” - But again, that’s next time. Just priming the pump.)

Photo credit: …utopiacere… on Flickr

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