The Ghost of John Proctor

The sky is the color of slate, the wind blows icily through my soul, and the Atlantic boils in cold foam around my feet. Massachusetts quickly moving toward winter. Dawn of a new day that looks suspiciously like millions of others, and I am walking. The scrub grass pokes through the white sand, and seagulls scream overhead. Where am I going? I do not know.

I am not alone. A tall, gaunt figure accompanies me. His clothes are in tatters, his face streaked with dirt and pain. A frayed circle of rope hangs from his neck. I know him through the pages of hundreds of years.

“John Proctor?”

“Aye.”

“What of Salem?” he asks.

“You would not recognize it.”

“Oh, I believe I would. And who are you?”

“I am a teacher.”

“A noble and true calling.”

“It is also how I know you,” I say. “Your story is familiar to history, and to the stage. Arthur Miller wrote about you and those events.”

“My story is real,” he says bitterly. “It is not fit subject for pretend, for actors. My story is a warning, a presentiment of the danger of living the truth.”

“All the more reason why it is a fit subject for theatre,” I tell him. “Because things have not changed. Because they never will.”

The wind whips our hair as the waves crash all around. We are on some kind of coastal plain, the aquamarine swirling and smashing around the rocky coast on one side, and hills of scrub grass and low trees on the other. The sky has gone red and orange.

“Red sky in the morning, the sailor has his warning,” I recite.

“Aye, winter is coming,” John Proctor says. “So teacher, where do you teach?”

“I teach the young at a school across the country from here.”

“Harvard still exists?”

“Yes, but it is very difficult to go there. It is one of the best schools in the country.”

“There are more schools than Harvard?”

“Many.”

“And why is it so hard to go there?”

“Because there are too many people.”

He contemplates my words for a moment. “Decent learning is a valuable thing.”

“It is not valued now,” I say. He stops and turns to face me, his eyes bore into me. “The people of this country do not value education,” I explain. “They value the piece of paper that comes at the end of education, or they value the name of the university they attend, but few value the learning itself.”

“This makes no sense.”

I search for a metaphor he would understand. “It is like farming,” I say. “A field must be cleared of stumps and rocks, spread with manure in the early spring with the plowing, seeded, watered, allowed to grow, so that the crop will be good for the harvest in the fall. Today, people are only interested in the outcome, the crop yield. They are not interested in the preparation for growing, the work that must be done during the other parts of the year. And if the crop is not sufficient, they condemn the farmer: the teacher.”

“This is illogical.”

“This is ignorance,” I tell him. “America is a nation of ignorance now. Children are neglected, abused. People cannot make enough money to put bread on the table. And those in power at every level are cowards without vision, without imagination, without ideas.” We resume our walk. “This is why your story is important. You stood up for the individual. You died for the right to think differently.”

“I did not,” he sighs. “I simply would not give in to the hypocrisy. I wanted to save my wife, preserve my family, keep my name so my children could be proud of who they were.”

You died for something,” I insist. The words hang in the misty air. “You died for something.”

“Ah, but what matter is that now?” he replies.

“It is everything. Will always be everything. The right to think, to believe, to determine your own destiny, that is the bedrock of what the country you colonized was founded upon. But we are losing the battle.”

“Teacher, you have the power to stop this error. You can teach the children to hold fast to their ideas. You can encourage them to think differently.”

“I am speaking into the wind,” I reply. “Those that run the schools, who should safeguard the system, they are often the most ignorant.”

“Teachers do not run the schools?”

“No, and if they did, the system might be saved.”

He turns to me, stopping our progress down the beach. He places his palm on my shoulder. “Teacher, you must not give up. You must not back down. You cannot surrender your name. You are the teacher.”

“I may not be able to go on,” I choke.

His eyes well with tears. “Like me, you have no choice. These are the wars we must fight.”

“Everyone dies,” I tell him. “Maybe this fight is not my destiny.”

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will always be the teacher. You have no choice. You are helpless in the face of your own nature.”

“What will happen?” I ask him. “What is to come?”

He looks out over the roaring sea, the golden light of the autumn sun. “I cannot tell you, nor could you imagine.”

“Is it bad?”

“It is neither bad nor good. Those words have no meaning. There is only what is. And what is will be beyond your ability to dream.”

“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” I recite to him.

“Time is the fire in which we burn,” he replies. “Wisdom transcends death.” He smiles at me. “All the words of the wise, the wise themselves, they continue on after. Wisdom does not die.” He grabs me by both shoulders. “Teacher, you must go on. The only way wisdom dies is if it is ignored. One cannot force someone to be wise; one must embrace the lesson, the process to learn, to discover, to understand.”

“Keep spreading the manure each spring, clearing the stumps and rocks, seeding the soil?”

“It is what you do.”

He turns from me and continues walking down the beach. The waves crash, the gulls scream. I am alone in the frigid daylight.

I watch him walk away, moving down the beach, a solitary man striding purposely into the future, until the fog swallows him up, and winter descends.

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies: 50th Anniversary Edition
By William Golding
Berkley Publishing Group; $22.95, cloth
ISBN 978-0-399-52920-9

I first read Lord of the Flies by William Golding in ninth grade. I remember being horrified because I could recognize the decline of civilized human behavior in the novel, to a lesser degree, in the high school I attended. The personalities were clear: jock, nerd, leader corresponding to Jack, Piggy, and Ralph. And although we never killed anyone, the athlete-hunters picked on the thinker-nerds. Leader-politicians had already established themselves and learned to play the game, keeping their student constituencies happy while staying on the good side of the administration.

I was riveted by the book then, and as I prepare to teach it to my classes now, I am amazed at how William Golding captures the microcosm of a society gone horribly wrong, the classic dystopian world of the island in the ocean where marooned British schoolboys degenerate into animals only to be saved at the last minute by the Royal Navy. I find the book even more relevant today, with the rash of school shootings in the last two decades. The school society is every bit as dangerous as that deserted island world upon which the boys find themselves.

Many critics see Lord of the Flies as a retelling of the Eden story in Genesis, how nature and beauty and childhood can all be corrupted by the darkness within mankind. This is indeed a dark and evil story, and the ending spells out clearly which way Golding thinks mankind is headed. Evil will, as evidenced by the novel, triumph over the intellect and the good, unless some force intercedes. In the novel, that force is much too late to save our protagonists, Ralph and Piggy. Ralph barely escapes with his life, and Piggy meets the most poetic fate for the intellectual: his brains are bashed out on a rock and his body is given up to the sea. Adam and Eve do not literally die in Genesis, but they realize through the Tree of Knowledge that evil exists in the world, that there is pain and suffering, and that they will one day cease to exist. These are the realizations of Ralph as he and the remaining survivors are rescued.

Golding is a bit light on some details. It seems the boys were being evacuated in a time of war. How they managed to be on the island, safe and sound and uninjured, is a bit of a mystery. The plane jettisoned the passenger compartment, and they crashed on the island leaving a visible scar in the jungle terrain. Several boys believe the plane crashed after they were hurled to the island. There is no wreckage to speak of, no resources to draw from for the boys. They must build their shelters and find food. The latter comes immediately from the island’s abundance of fruit trees, although the fruit is rather generically described. Its effect on the boys is clear: they suffer from diarrhea and must evacuate their bowels in an around their camp. Later, they turn to slaughtering wild pigs for meat.

The symbol of an organized society is embodied in the conch, a large sea shell that the leaders blow into when they want to summon the others for a meeting. The one who holds the shell is allowed to speak. The others must listen. It is this shell that shatters along with Piggy at the end, symbolizing the destruction of the rules of organized society.

Along the way, innocence, as demonstrated by Simon and others, is killed off. Simon discovers a dead parachutist on the mountain that the others mistake for a beast. When he stumbles back to camp with that knowledge, he happens upon a frenzy of orgiastic behavior, with the hunters led by Jack chanting: “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!” The animal-boys mistakenly seize the intruder—Simon—and in an orgy of violence, kill him, spilling his blood on the sand.

I find the novel similar to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The theme of human society corrupted by evil and turning to violence and incoherent destruction is readily apparent in both books. The twentieth century is rife with novels of Man’s inhumanity to Man, as is the history of that period. Genocides, wars, weapons of mass destruction, all make our recent history steeped in blood and violence. Of course, human history in total is botched with blood and war, but what these novels do is portray civilization as the root of violence and evil. Man claims to be more like God, made in His image and likeness, yet that same Man has an overwhelming capacity to destroy himself, his fellow man, and the world around him. Animals kill for food, to protect their young, to secure their territory. Man kills for sport, for enjoyment, as an expression of power; few animals share such bloodlust.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the book contains essays by E.M. Forster from the 1962 edition, as well as a variety of critics weighing in on the power of Golding’s work. According to the notes, the novel was ignored when it was published, but became more recognized as the years went on, building to Golding’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Although the dialogue is a bit stilted, and the culture is decidedly English, the novel resonates. We live in a violent, inhumane world filled with jealousy, corruption, desire for power and control, and bloodshed. We are all, in a way, civilized school children marooned on this island earth and our future is in doubt. The Lord of the Flies—Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan, the true embodiment of evil—lurks in the darkness of the human heart. Writers such as William Golding believe our end is inevitable, our destiny is clear, and nothing can save us from our own destructive and terrible impulses.

Gutenberg

Gutenberg: How One Man Remade The World With WordsBy John Man
MJF Books; $24.95, cloth
ISBN 978-1-56731-743-5

Oh, the things one can find in the remainders section of the local chain bookstore!

Can one really remake the world with words? This past summer, we heard how one man remade the world, allegedly, with music—Michael Jackson. Walter Cronkite remade the world of journalism with his work for CBS. Marlon Brando, Normal Mailer, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Pope John Paul II—pick a subject and one can find a pioneer, a king of pop, the greatest writer, artist, financier, technology guru of his or her generation. Hyperbole goes hand in hand with death. Upon the funeral pyre, we heap the praise, but history may not be so caught up in the hysteria.

Shakespeare, Dante, Homer—now we are getting close to the immortals. If one’s work is still around after half of millennium, we can conclude that the writer, artist, actor is a revolutionary.

In the list of revolutionaries, we must include Johann Gutenberg, and it is most important that we single him out now, when every talking head on the news channels, in books, magazines, and think tanks proclaims the death of the written word. Just last week, we heard how electronic reading devices might soon include snippets of video and pictures mixed in with text. Books are dead, we are told; “dead tree media” is so yesterday.

“In the beginning was the Word; the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God,” begins the Gospel of John. To a writer, equating the Word with God is a no-brainer. In the hierarchy of saints, we must include Gutenberg, the inventor of moveable type, the creator of the modern book. Those of us who love the written word, worship the smell of leather binding, glue, and paper, cannot get enough of the biblio-mania, we commit the sin of idolatry when it comes to Gutenberg.

So it was that in browsing the bargain bin I came across John Man’s biography of the man who remade the world with words. Like Shakespeare and his biographers, Man must piece together Gutenberg’s life from fragments of documentation and legal paperwork. He is forced to fall back on speculation at times, but he manages to give us a picture of the man himself, and more importantly, the times in which he lived.

The invention of moveable type—the printing press, which was based on the process used to create coins—occurred 550 years ago, about a century before Shakespeare waltzed his way across the Elizabethan stage. This was the English Renaissance, a time of explosions in humanistic rejuvenation, an orgasm of art and culture. According to Man, in the space of a single year, published books went from taking two months to produce a single copy, to a production schedule of 500 copies in a week. In 1455, all of the published books in Europe could be carried in a single, horse-drawn wagon. Fifty years later, 10,000 plus titles overwhelmed the shelves. Today, we publish “10,000 million a year,” according to Man.

In his story of the age of Gutenberg, Man also includes some neat historical detail. He explains how the Bubonic Plague was spread by marmots and fleas, and how in the lungs, the disease was ninety percent fatal and one hundred percent deadly in the bloodstream. He tells us that Mongols threw plague victims’ bodies over the walls of Italian cities to infest the populace and make them easier to conquer.

Gutenberg actually based his invention on a number of other developments in printing. In fact, Man tells us, if Gutenberg had not invented the press, somebody else would have, and there is the possibility that someone did beat him to the punch, but Gutenberg gets the credit in history. The real story is that he had three partners—Hans Riff, Andreas Dritzehn, and Andreas Heilmann—and the invention forced Gutenberg into litigation and legal wrangling to control the explosion that followed.

Leading up to the printing press, thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa were writing and producing works of political thought and philosophy. Books were in demand, and the only way to make copies was by hand. The Brothers of the Quill, a group of laymen who printed and copied early manuscripts, worked in concert with the monks and religious figures who labored night and day to produce the Bibles, prayer books, and devotional texts that the Church and other organizations demanded. The first public library originated in Florence, Italy in 1441, according to Man, and the fires of man’s quest for knowledge engulfed all of Europe.

The details of the press are fascinating. Man presents a flow chart explaining the process from metal punch to hand mould to type to forme and press. Ink, he tells us, was composed of vermilion crystals once believed to be the blood of dragons, and the intensely blue stone lapis lazuli.

Gutenberg’s most well-known printing was the Bible. Twelve copies of the edition on vellum survive today out of thirty or thirty-five originally printed. He also printed some 150 paper copies of which thirty-nine survive. Gutenberg was obsessed with quality control, and Man tells us this obsession bordered on “the fringes of sanity.” Margin justifications, indentions, hyphens and punctuation, all had to be worked out in minute detail in advance, and in some cases, Man tells us, the average reader would not have noticed this detail. Gutenberg simply “yearned for perfection, not only because this was the culmination of his life’s work, but also because only perfection beyond the reach of any mortal scribe would persuade a prince or archbishop to buy.”

Man includes appendices in his book that explain the economics of printing. We see balance sheets for his business. He also lists the printers down through the ages who capitalized on Gutenberg’s work. Of course, he adds an extensive bibliography for further reading.

The book is an interesting read, especially for those who love the book. This is the meat of bibliographic history. I simply marveled at the staying power of Gutenberg’s technology. When we hear talk of disappearing books, newspapers, all kinds of printed matter to be replaced by electronics, diodes, digitalized content, I am skeptical. The book has existed for at least a millennium in one form or another—papyrus, parchment, animal skins, paper, hand-copied, printed on a press, cloth binding, and paperback. I am convinced such longevity of the printed word will not be so easily preempted. We may do more reading on our Kindles, Sony Readers, and the internet, but the weight and heft of the book, that marvel of old school, dead tree technology, will not be so casually vanquished. Come what may, for most of us lovers, the book is still the king.

Additions: I want to express my appreciation for those who have recently added themselves to the list of followers for this blog, including Shantello, Jamie Mitchell, Troy.Holm, Amanda, Tim Wilkins, NEFrost, and DWalls31. The appreciation is long overdue.

And of course, there is the man who was there from nearly the start: William Michaelian, hero and dragon-slayer.

Thanks to all for reading my words.

Gary

We were building Central America in my classroom. That tiny slip of countries between Mexico and South America was the subject of my unit in sixth grade social studies, so I asked for volunteers, and parents and students chipped in to buy us a plywood platform that covered eight desks, modeling clay, miniature trees, vegetation and other model pieces from a father’s architect firm, chicken wire, and paint.

The kids could have worked all day on the project, and thrown the other subjects out the window. Students arrived an hour before school, stayed in at lunch, and remained until dark in the evening, all to work on Central America. One night, I found myself with five boys working on various areas of the board. Gary was one of them.

He had transferred to the school that year. I never saw his transcripts from his other schools, and his parents did not attend Back-to-School Night. From the start, he struggled. He was smaller than the other boys, painfully thin, with a yellow cast to his skin. I had tried to call his parents to discuss his lack of progress in my classes, but there was no answering machine and notes I sent home went unreturned. Mostly, Gary slept in class and turned in blank tests. Central America gave him a reason to live. He loved working on the project, and would take meticulous care crafting mountain ranges and rainforests. He told me he wanted to go there someday.

So there we were, five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun long since disappeared from the late autumn sky. Gary was painting his mountains with cans of spray paint, and we were all a little high from the fumes. “Mr. Martin, can we get extra credit for helping so late?” Carlos asked. I told him I was keeping track.

“My mom was really mad at my last report card,” Steve offered.

“My dad gave me the rice and beans,” Gary said.

“Rice and beans?” Carlos laughed. “You mean that’s all he gave you to eat because of bad grades? That’s messed up.” They all laughed, even Gary.

“No, he made me kneel on the rice and beans, not eat them.”

We all put down our tools, glue, and paint cans. “Gary,” I said as evenly as I could, “what do you mean?”

“When I get bad grades, my dad puts a tray on the floor and dumps in rice and beans before they’re cooked, when they are really hard. Then I have to kneel on them while holding a half a bucket of water, sometimes for an hour.”

“What does that do?” one boy asked.

“You should see my knees,” Gary said. “They look like pizza when I’m finished, and sometimes, the blood soaks through and my mom has to throw the pants away.”

After I dismissed the boys, I found the principal, a nun named Sister Maria, and I told her what Gary said. She picked up the phone and dialed the 800 number for Child Services. She gave the information to the operator—Gary’s name, address, the school name, the reporting teacher (she used her own name for this, telling me she would take the responsibility), and other pertinent information. After she hung up the phone, she told me I did the right thing for Gary.

I was nervous the next day. Gary was unfazed, his usual self in class, staying in at lunch to work on the project. I kept waiting for the authorities to descend on the school, but it was an ordinary day.

The next day, Gary slept through reading class, and came alive for Central America. No storm troopers landed, and no helicopters hovered over the building. After school, I stood out on the second floor landing and watched over the playground as the kids went to their carpools and walked home. The playground was still busy when I heard a piercing scream, inhuman, like an animal being torn apart. I looked around the area beneath my perch, trying to find the source of the sound. Kids were running, mothers were herding their children away. Then I saw him. Gary stood at the fence, his hands gripping the mesh. He was screaming, long, wordless, blood-curdling shafts of sound.

I ran, down the stairs, across the playground to the fence. When I reached the boy, he began flailing at me. “Noooo! Nooo!” he shrieked. He pointed up the street. I looked in that direction and saw a battered car pulled at an angle to the curb with police cars behind. Two figures were out of the car, lying face down in the street. The cops had their guns drawn and were gingerly approaching the figures. “They have my mommy!” Gary screamed. “They are taking them, nooo!”

I grabbed Gary around the body and pulled him from the fence. I wanted to get him inside, out of sight of the incident down the street. Maybe I could settle him down. Outside the fence, an unmarked police car pulled to the curb. Two men in suits with guns in holsters at their waists got out of the car. One opened the back door, and a woman with a briefcase got out. They looked at me through the fence, and then glanced up the street. Gary was kicking and screaming. All the parents and students stood open-mouthed, staring at the spectacle.

In a few moments, the woman and Sister Maria came out on the playground and over to where I struggled with Gary. Sister Maria tried to quiet the boy. “Gary, this woman needs to speak with you.” He would have none of it.

“Come with me, Gary,” the woman said.

“They are taking my daddy,” he screamed in her face.

Suddenly, the two plainclothes police officers were next to us. They bundled Gary up and carried him away. I was stunned. I was only vaguely aware of the car screeching away from the curb. In seconds, it was all over. Gary was gone. One cop car remained down the street while his parents’ battered vehicle was towed away.

I went back to the classroom. The sun slanted through the windows, and I could smell the ocean just a few miles away. Sister Maria was suddenly in my doorway. “You did the right thing,” she said without prompting.

“I did not expect that to happen.”

“No, no!” she fired at me. “Do not think that way! You did the right thing. What his father was doing to him was abusive.”

“Maybe, but Gary did not seemed bothered by it. He was very matter-of-fact about it. Now I’ve destroyed a family.”

“You did nothing of the sort. It is not right to make your kid kneel on rice and beans until his kneecaps bleed. You did the right thing.”

After she left, I slumped at my desk. The sun flooded the room with late afternoon light. Central America sat in one corner, nearly completed, towering mountain ranges, rivers, rainforests. I pulled out a large magnifying glass that some teacher before me had left in the desk. I focused the rays of light on my desk blotter, and one by one, burned tiny holes in the felt. I wanted to destroy the model. It was all I could do not to smash the plywood into slivers and fragments, to annihilate Central America. I didn’t. I packed up and left the building.

The next day, I let one of the students take the whole project home in his father’s truck. Sister Maria told me she finally got answers from the watch commander at the police station. Gary’s father had felony warrants for his arrest. That was the reason for the major league take-down in the street. “You did the right thing,” she kept insisting.

I never saw Gary again.

Saroyan's Ghost

“What future have you mapped out for yourself?”

“Future?” Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know for sure, but I guess I’d like to be somebody some day.” (from The Human Comedy by William Saroyan)

I am trying to get my students to write with present tense, active voice verbs. “The work may have been written a hundred years ago,” I tell them, “but your reaction to it is in the here and now. You want your writing to have a sense of urgency, a feeling of forward motion and immediacy.”

So we practice what we preach. We write, rewrite, revise, restate, and shape the truth to a sharp and decisive point. We will write with our blood and leave bits of flesh in the inkwell when we are finished. But most important, we will share what we write. We will publish. Then, let the discussion begin. Take no prisoners, leave nothing standing, scorch the earth, find the beauty in the everyday, sing the song of history. This is real.

In twenty-three years in the classroom, I have learned how to teach writing, and it is not about comments and grades, grammar and spelling, red pens and syntax. The best way to teach writing is to write for publication. Get it out there. Let the world have it and chew on it. Nothing motivates like someone pulling you aside to say your latest piece made them mad, made them think, made them laugh, cry, jump up and down, swear at the moon. When the audience roars, the grade becomes secondary. Someone read what you wrote, and it did things to them. That is what writing is all about.

So I started a blog for my students. And since they are American-Armenians, there is only one person whose name I could evoke: William Saroyan. We will publish under the name, Saroyan’s Ghost, because he haunts us, he urges us forward, he sets the example. We can trace our lineage from Saroyan to Kherdian to Bojahlian to Arax to Janigian to Michaelian to a growing multitude of which I hope my students will some day be members.

The blog will publish the best writing from our school, focusing mainly on nonfiction. This is the second step in the process of making the school a focal point for writing and publishing of student work. We started a school newspaper two years ago, and students assumed control of creating the yearbook. This year, we are adding several blogs of which Saroyan’s Ghost is the first. From here, the sky is the limit. I want to publish an end of the year “best of” anthology. We would like to have a school magazine, an alumni publication, podcasts and video feeds, indeed, all forms of media involving writing and publishing. I want students to swim in ink, revel in words, love and worship books and pens and paper.

So, we need readers. Please hop over and take a look. I will publish new writing at least once a week, maybe more often. Offer up a comment, let us know what you think.

Have you seen the ghost? Saroyan lives on.

Teachers Or Students: Who Decides What We Should Read?

The debate erupted in the pages of The New York Times a few weeks ago: is it time to allow students to pick the books they should read for English class?

The article, written by book critic Motoko Rich, details how several schools and districts across the country allow students in a variety of grade levels from elementary to high school to make up their own book lists for literature class. The students select a book and read it. When finished with the reading, the child meets one-on-one with the teacher, or in small groups to discuss the reading. He must also keep a journal about the book and his response to it. All of this “is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools,” according to Rich.

How prevalent is this wave of new reading? This month, “students in Seattle’s public middle schools will…begin choosing most of their own books,” Rich reports. “And in Chicago the public school district has had a pilot program in place since 2006 in 31 of its 483 elementary schools to give students in grades 6, 7 and 8 more control over what they read.”

As one would expect, the debate quickly became heated. Diane Ravitch, professor of education at New York University is quoted in the article as being strongly against this method of curriculum development. “Kids will pick up things that are trendy and popular,” she says. “But that’s what you should do in your free time.”

Letters that came into the paper following the article’s publication seem to be evenly divided. “Preparing students to read for 21st-century success requires that all educators rethink traditional approaches,” writes Michael L. Shaw, professor of literacy education at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

“As all English teachers know, getting students to read for both comprehension and enjoyment is a daunting task,” writes Walt Gardner, a teacher both at public schools and UCLA. “But because the accountability movement, as embodied by No Child Left Behind, ignores noncognitive outcomes, teachers will continue to ignore the attitudes of students. Too often this leads to teachers’ teaching the material in the curriculum while teaching students to hate the material in the process.”

Another writer comments that, “As a student and avid reader, I find it slightly insulting that teachers are giving up on class novels.”

Still another says, “Books of the students’ own choices should certainly be a part of the curriculum, but not at the expense of the classics, which often surprise and delight even the most unwilling reader.”

For me, the issue is not black and white. It is not about surrendering complete control over the direction of the English curriculum and allowing students to make up their own reading lists, nor is it about imposing only the classical canon on them in a way that simply bores and stultifies what should be an enjoyable and interesting experience.

The canon, the so-called “dead white males,” might seem dated here in the 21st century, but I would argue otherwise. Many of those books have been read for a long time, and contain many truths about human existence and the way the world works. They have stimulated human minds to think, consider, reflect, and understand complex ideas and difficult situations. Those books have enlightened and entertained us, even given us the opportunity to expand our narrow view of the world. It would be heresy to dump them because we live in different century, or for what I suspect is the real reason, they are too difficult to teach and read because they challenge teacher and student to think and they do not offer easy or concrete answers.

There is also a need for students to learn to love and enjoy reading. To do this, they should have every opportunity to select their own books. My ideal would be to place the student in the book store and allow her to wander the aisle following her own instincts and interests. Let her read whatever she wants.

My perfect place of equilibrium in this debate would be my sixth grade classroom when I was a child. The teacher had the requisite basal reader, the English book. We might have slogged through a novel or two as well in this curriculum. In addition, my teacher made literally hundreds of books available to us in the form of a reading list with a brief summary of each title. We were required to select so many titles from the list to read on our own each quarter. I believe she gave us a quick test to make sure we had read. She made it very clear that if we did not like our choice, we should return it to the library and select another. This was reading for enjoyment. She also made it a habit to read to us every day from C.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, a sort of priestly Sherlock Holmes for Catholics. I remember being surrounded by books, and we read, often silently, or were read to, all the time. My teacher modeled what a life for a reader should be. She told us how she loved the cold, rainy Saturdays when she would bake fresh bread in her oven and spend the day reading and listening to the rain on the roof of her apartment. She told us how she read books about the places she traveled to in the summer, and visited the sites mentioned in the novels and stories. She carried books with her everywhere she went.

Guess what? I, and many others in the class, became readers. She changed my life, and without that experience, I do not know how I would have found my way.

This should not be a debate. We cannot just let kids pick whatever they want to read. “Would we be so eager to embrace a ‘choose your own math’ or ‘choose your own history’ class?” Times reader Lisa Dunick asks. What she says makes much sense. “We expect that students learn the curriculum in those courses whether or not they are ‘into it.’ Literature is no different, and literature courses shouldn’t be treated as glorified book clubs. By allowing students to bypass difficult texts or texts that don’t seem to relate to their contemporary lives in favor of ‘Captain Underpants,’ teachers miss a valuable opportunity to teach them that real scholastic and intellectual growth often comes when we are most challenged and least comfortable.”

We cannot abdicate our authority as teachers because students fight us over reading assignments. We cannot surrender the classics like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby because they are challenging and force us to rethink our lives. Left to their own devices, students will lose their way and possibly miss some life changing books. We must guide them. We select the books in the curriculum based on a variety of factors, but one real consideration is age. There are certain books that make a difference in students’ lives at particularly tender ages. I am thinking of The Outsiders and Flowers for Algernon in the eighth grade. I am thinking of The Catcher In The Rye in high school, and Lord of the Flies.

But students can also be reading Stephen King, James Patterson, and Nicholas Sparks. They can follow the adventures of that mouse on the motorcycle, Charlie as he explores the chocolate factory, and the sagas of vampires and teenagers in the Twilight series.

In short, there is room in the world for all books. Reading, both of classics and trash and everything in between, is always a good thing.

Laughing Without An Accent

Laughing Without An Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen
By Firoozeh Dumas
Random House; $15.00, paper
ISBN 978-0-345-49957-8

With all the disagreements, fears, and hatreds among the people of the world, and what seems like the total failure of diplomacy to solve these issues over the last few years, I often wonder if the world would be a more peaceful place if we all got together over some good ethnic food, a nice bottle of wine, and some deep conversation. Certainly such an event would not further damage the situation.

Firoozeh Dumas’ recent book, Laughing Without An Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen, feels like the reader and writer are meeting for coffee and some good, often very funny, conversation. Dumas is an excellent story teller, able to capture a moment at the tattered edges where one culture meets another, and uncover the human truth and humor inherent in such cultural clashes.

Dumas is originally from Iran through Berkeley, California, married to the “Frenchman,” as she calls him, a true multi-cultural citizen experiencing firsthand what it is like to meld food, language, dress, and religion from all over the world and somehow manage to teach the children (she has two) well.

In the first section of the book, Dumas discusses her search for a translator for her debut set of memoirs, Funny In Farsi. “Iran does not currently adhere to international copyright law,” she writes. “This comes as a shock to most people, given Iran’s law-abiding image.” She is trying to keep control of the process, but in her native country, anyone who wishes may translate a book and sell it to the public. This leads to all kinds of bootlegging and rogue publishing. She relates the story of a respected history professor who upon discovering the translated text of his book is radically different from his original, confronts the publisher in Iran only to be told, “Our translation is better than your book.”

Dumas spends much time discussing the way humor moves from language to language, culture to culture. Some things just don’t translate, like Carol Burnett’s Tarzan yell. In the end, the book is translated successfully, and Dumas is invited to receive an award in her country. When she asks the editor why he thought the book was successful with the Iranian people, he replies, “Your stories are funny, but the way you write about nationalities—you don’t make one bad and one good. We don’t hate Americans.”

In the chapter entitled, “Eight Days A Week,” Dumas analyzes the difference between education in Iran and school in America. “When I met my first teacher in America…I was so confused. She was so nice.” It is here in America that Dumas discovers the magic of books, reading and the library. As a child, she had a hard time believing that libraries loaned books. She brings along her purse on her first trip with her brother, thinking she must pay a fee at some point, and returns pleasantly surprised when she simply borrows the books. School in Iran, she remembers, was much different. Hours of homework, teachers were “stern, feared, and respected.” They gave no compliments and few superior grades. “Our teachers did not try to be our friends or to be liked,” she writes. “They were there to teach us.” Holidays in America like Halloween she finds ridiculous because schools lose a whole day of instruction to candy and parties. This would never happen in Iran.

In Iran, students face a challenging reading curriculum: Dickens, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Gorky, Nietzsche, Borges, Arthur Koestler, Stefan Zweig, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. Her father’s position with the National Iranian Oil Company gives her a privileged seat in better schools. Dumas takes advantage of this education, leading her to one of the best California universities, U.C. Berkeley. “I give credit to my Iranian schools for teaching me discipline. I learned that school meant work, not play. I never expected my teachers to make subjects fun. Fun was what I had with my friends, outside the classroom.” This is a refreshing change from the occasional “can’t we do something fun today” that I get from my students. Dumas believes the problem is that “Delayed gratification has fallen out of fashion.” What hope can Americans have for the future, she says, when smart kids “are called nerds and geeks and dorks?” A country that allows smart kids to be made fun of and bullied faces a descent into stupidity and banality. Welcome to the American twenty-first century.

There is much to love in this book, and not all of it is funny. Like the best humorists, Dumas has a satirical, sometimes bitter cast to her observations. And there is sadness, like the chapter about the death of her uncle. She explains how Iranians and Muslims mourn for the dead. But later, the family holds a more American funeral service featuring family members eulogizing the departed. There are pictures of her uncle in flush times, and near the end of his life when he is “frail and tired” from his battle with illness. He was a man, Dumas remembers, who always had a book with him, and who loved reading. “My uncle, along with the rest of my family, came to America seeking a better life,” she writes. “Like so many immigrants before us, we found not only what we wanted but a few things we didn’t even know we were looking for…”

I grew up with the Iran of the American hostages, held in captivity for 444 days. I clearly remember the angry fire of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the fatwa and Salman Rushdie, and now, the presidency and nuclear thuggery of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Firoozeh Dumas is a change of pace, a breath of fresh air. Through her writing, we can laugh at the culture clash, the differences in people, the richness and beauty of life. For the first time in my life, I sat down with an Iranian. I laughed, I heard her stories, I recognized that we are different, yet remarkably, we have much in common. I discovered that laughter does not have an accent, and I had fun.