Quiet, Please

Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian
By Scott Douglas
Da Capo Press, $25.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-7867-2091-0

What are we supposed to glean from Scott Douglas’ memoir of his five years as librarian in the public libraries of Anaheim, California? Here are some random first impressions: patrons often use the computers and bathrooms for inappropriate behavior; librarians do not read, and Douglas himself lies about his own reading; Douglas now believes books are not everything; he is a typical slacker who goes off to graduate school on the city’s dime; the main attractions at modern public libraries are food sales and computer usage; he wants to be the next David Sedaris; the very idea of a public library as a gateway to knowledge for the masses is a pipe dream.

To be fair, Douglas does work in some history of libraries, from Alexandria in 300 B.C. to Andrew Carnegie and the first public institutions, and finally, to Bill Gates and his gifts of computers and software from the Microsoft empire. But there is little discussion of books. Douglas could have just as easily set his memoir inside an airplane factory. He is, in fact, into paper airplanes, as well as the computer game, FreeCell. His smug tone and attempts to channel Sedaris are off-putting and at times, downright irritating.

His use of footnotes, ala David Foster Wallace, another of his admitted heroes, is also annoying, and adds nothing to the narrative. “I think [the footnotes] give the book a certain urgency and energy,” he says. “The generation I grew up in is now being raised on DVD’s (sic) with commentary tracks. In many ways, the footnotes serve as my commentary track to the memoir.” Sorry, but a book is not a film. And, in a clarification, if the generation has already grown up they cannot now be raised on DVDs.

Douglas begins his story with his first days on the job as a library clerk. He tries to pass himself off to his co-workers as a reader and a man of intellect only to discover that his fellow employees are as clueless about literature.

He goes on to discuss his first forays into storytelling for young patrons, and to discuss how his first week in the library is the week of September 11, 2001. But he cannot give the tale sharpness or poignancy. His discussion of terrorism and resulting mood of the country is particularly shallow. While discussing the collapse of the twin towers with a friend over lunch, he writes, “How long until people don’t remember what 9/11 means?” His friend does not think anyone will ever forget. “I looked down at my pizza,” he continues. “My friend had picked the place for lunch because he had seen a commercial on TV advertising free bread sticks.” After pausing for a footnote about how much he likes free samples of bread sticks, Douglas compares the way Americans remember the Oklahoma City bombing to the way they might someday remember 9/11: as a shadowy, unfocused memory. It all comes off as superficial.

Douglas moves on to discuss his adventures in graduate school, an opportunity paid for by the city of Anaheim. He characterizes one professor as a “cocky, boastful goof who used big words to prove points.” Should he have used smaller words? “Nothing he said made any sense,” Douglas writes, “but I liked him because he had sweaty armpits, which were fun to draw in my notebook in lieu of real notes.”

Later in the book, Douglas takes offense when a teenager calls him a “faggot” for no particular reason. He takes great pains to tell us he is not gay, and that this incident, and similar ones, makes him hate teenagers. So name-calling and ridicule are fine when hurled at a goofy professor, but not when the insults are directed at him?

His remedy for putting an entire class to sleep with a boring story? “[T]ell a fart joke. Or if you don’t know any fart jokes, make a fart noise.” Douglas reveals his immaturity and vacuity with such comments and scatological attempts at humor. David Sedaris, Mark Twain, David Foster Wallace, he is most certainly not.

The book is a disappointment on so many levels. Even in the nuts and bolts editing, Douglas and his editors miss the mark. Awkward and grammatically challenged phrases abound: two fellow librarians “reminisce of the career of Julia Roberts.” He changes the names and characteristics of people in his story “so as not to receive a lawsuit.” He writes in another place that conspiracy theories “centered around 9/11.” When he questions an advisor about a failing grade, he writes that “the program prohibited her to tell me.” The problematic passages detract from the effectiveness of the writing, although the book would have made only a slightly better impression if it was copyedited properly. Inept writing and use of language in a book allegedly about books and libraries does not impress.

The only real value in this sophomoric carnival is the ample evidence that public libraries are in trouble. When Los Angeles went on a campaign to remodel its branch offices, many reopened in fantastically modern buildings with a bit more square footage, but with half the books replaced by a large number of computer stations. Douglas details this process in his library. As the influence of the computer grows, older books are not replaced. The budget shrinks for new books, and people come in to surf the Internet and check email. The library becomes a community center. The idea of a public library is diluted and eventually will be discounted altogether, the real “dumbing down” of our society and culture.

To his credit, Douglas does make an issue of how many immigrants and non-native English speakers come in to find books and information to learn the language and culture. It seems the public library system is ignored by middle and upper class Americans, with the exception being the elderly and the mentally handicapped. But Douglas is condescending and superior in his tone with these patrons as well.

Indeed, like the classroom, the library is changing. What disturbs is not just the lack of books, the limited funding of libraries by the city, the disrespect patrons show towards books, learning and the life of the mind. These are the fault lines in the rupturing American culture, but it is deeply disappointing that those whose job it is to promote learning, reading and writing, the librarians, have such poor attitudes and insufficient maturity to redefine and invigorate sacred space, the temple secular, the holy library. Front and center, that is the message clearly offered in Scott Douglas’ memoir.

The Toughest Road

Stick a fork in this school year; it is done. I signed off on the last grade sheet after scoring the last final exam.

So let the reflection begin. What did I learn this year? How will I revise my courses and syllabi? How will I do things differently next year? What will I spend my summer doing to improve my craft?

A glimmer of an idea arrived on my doorstep in the form of the denigrated and declining Los Angeles Times, dateline June 21, 2008. In a front page story, we learned about Phil Holmes, “one of the great English teachers of his generation,” who is teaching the final years of his career at View Park Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles after thirty-five years at upper crusty Harvard-Westlake. Was he fired? No, he chose South L.A. for the students, the same students he now informs are failing the quarter.

Mr. Holmes is relentless. He demands excellence and he will stop at nothing to get it. He is a role model for teachers and an inspiration for students.

“He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important,” Mitchell Landsberg, the Times staffer writes, “and, at age sixty-six, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day’s lessons.” Holmes leads the class in a thorough examination of an essay, even criticizing the student critics, ripping up their theories and responses, labeling arguments as “mindless.”

“The entire class was like this, Holmes leading a discussion in which no point, no word was insignificant. He could be brutal…” The students, most of whom are African-American, love and appreciate Homes’ efforts. Therefore the testimonials for Holmes’ methodologies are numerous. “I was taught to think,” says Barton H. Thompson Jr., a Stanford law professor and former Holmes student.

Landsberg writes that “Creative writing, Holmes believes, is a frill for most high school students. How many, after all, will become poets or novelists? But virtually all will need to write some form of persuasive essay, in college and in their careers. That is Holmes’ central focus.”

I studied the article and ordered the textbook from Amazon: The Uses of Argument by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. I absorbed the mantra of Holmes’ courses: “Writing a sustained case, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style…Claim, clarification, evidence and warrant, cemented by ‘backtracking,’ a practice in which the writer re-reads and challenges his own work and answers any questions that arise.”

Next year, I must push harder. I must take the students down the toughest road. Notes will be collected frequently and graded. The syllabus will not change, I do not care how many other tests are scheduled for that day. I will pound in lessons on vocabulary, writing, grammar, critical and analytical thinking, and literature. The reading schedule will be set in stone. In short, 2007-2008 will serve as the last year I am waylaid by superficiality, triviality and distraction. There is nothing more important than the study of English in the classroom, every day, for the full hour, for the 180 school days of the year.

I will spend the summer preparing for this intensive focus. I will review every text, every note, every lesson plan, every activity. I will sharpen and refine and revise until everything shines like the sun and cuts to the point like a razor. I will redouble my efforts to teach and be the best possible teacher for my students.

And I will expect my students to be nothing less than brilliant, every day. Education is too important, and we are at a critical juncture in our cultural lives. If we do not inspire smarter students capable of thinking critically and analytically, competent with research and information technologies, able to think strategically and act decisively, then this country is doomed.

All of this will be done quietly, but with intensity and passion.

Mitchell Landsberg ends his portrait of Phil Holmes on such a note: “There are no fireworks, no speeches, no round of applause. Just this: As he walks out the door and heads to the parking lot, Phil Holmes knows that today he delivered a good lesson. He didn’t waste a second. He made the students think.”

Such will be my re-emphasized mantra for 2008-2009.

Lists, Lists and More Lists

I said these were difficult weeks. I stared at my book shelves and made some tough decisions. So what was left out, you might ask?

I teach all four high school grades, all honors or Advanced Placement courses. These kids still do not read enough, but they are far more likely to read than our mainstream college prep courses. Therefore, every book I had to cut was agonizing. The only bright spot is that several students asked me for a list of books I cut so that they could read them over the summer.

I lost a lot of literary blood in my ninth grade English course. Laurie Halse Anderson, an amazing writer of young adult titles, was usually our first read of the new school year. Catalyst is a moving and intense book, but it is a work the students can read on their own. They do not need me to teach it to them.

Within their Prentice Hall anthology, the students read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I usually add to this A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Considering that our theatre department performed this play during the 2007-2008 school year, most of the students know it well. Therefore, out it went.

I also cut Skellig, by David Almond. It is a book rated for middle school, but contains some incredible William Blake references. I teach it in conjunction with a set of Blake poems. Blake is covered extensively in tenth and twelfth grades, so Skellig got the ax.

English II Honors for tenth graders suffered some major cuts. I lost Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The play is showing its age. I find the last act incredible, but the lead up is a bit slow and small town, which is the point, however my twenty-first century students struggle to stay involved in the narrative.

I have taught Death of a Salesman to sophomores for thirteen years straight. The play makes me cringe—that is how well Arthur Miller nailed the characters. I see all sorts of people in the Loman family; they are the ghosts that haunt the American landscape. After thirteen years, I felt it was time for a rest. I will bring it back at some point, but not for next year.

I usually try to schedule a major work of mythology during the sophomore year, because once we hit AP classes in eleventh grade, I cannot squeeze it in. Students are supposed to have a handle on mythology by junior year; the AP exam does not go back past the sixteenth century, but students are expected to catch the allusions. However, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is extremely redundant. It also took a long time to teach—sometimes as much as three months. We cannot spend that much class time on a single work. Therefore, if they see any Ovid at all next year, it will be in excerpts, not the full epic.

I have decided to try to finish all the literature by the end of the first semester and then spend the entire second semester on writing skills, grammar, vocabulary, and research writing. I think we need this focus going into AP Language and Composition.

For the eleventh grade course, we have two class periods per day. The first class period is the actual AP Language and Composition course; the second daily class period is a writing, grammar, and test preparation period. Having ninety minutes each day allows me to cover a lot of ground. Still, there had to be cuts.

I have taught Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman for several years running, and it is an incredible book so I have kept it for summer reading. I have paired it with The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a novel I taught for the first time this year with success. I had to cut In My Father’s Name by Mark Arax, a local hero-writer of mine. I also dropped The Catcher In The Rye for the same reason as some other books: it needs a rest. I have taught it every year for thirteen years or so. The students love the novel and really respond to it, so I will bring it back at some point.

I dropped the Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried, a book that never fails to move me, especially when Tim O’Brien writes about dreaming Linda alive again. Linda is a girl O’Brien had a crush on when they were in fourth grade. She died of a brain tumor. The final scene of the novel, where they are ice skating through his dreams, is one of the most moving passages I have ever read. I wanted to focus on more material from the Norton Reader, several thousand pages of nonfiction writing, so O’Brien’s book had to go. This was a painful cut for me, but necessary.

I briefly flirted with teaching On The Road by Jack Kerouac and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. My students have expressed interest in the Beat writers before, especially after our visit with Aram Saroyan. In the end, Kerouac’s work was a little too specific to an era, although it killed me when I first read it. Kesey’s book may return another year.

In many ways, the senior AP Literature and Composition course was the most challenging to pick books for because those students have a shorter year than the rest of the school. I cut units on the Bible, including the Book of Genesis and Book of Revelation. I might still give them some copied pages to study.

I cut completely an excellent textbook, Writing About Literature, mainly because the book is expensive and I have handouts that cover many of the same topics as the chapters. I did not feel we did the book justice this year, and I do not like that feeling. Students pay money for a book; we need to use it to its fullest potential.

I cut Beowulf, like Ovid, because it was drawn out and redundant. With the poor movie version released this year, it has also become cliché. Again, I had to consider the sixteenth century-present focus of the exam.

I reinstated Shakespeare’s Hamlet, replacing the Scottish play, and briefly toyed with also adding Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but we barely have time to go through Hamlet once from Shakespeare’s point of view.

The biggest battle on the senior level was whether to add in Frankenstein and Crime and Punishment, both novels that have appeared in essay questions on the AP exam, and that I have taught previously. In the end, I added them in, even though I am still not sure I will have time to cover everything. I told my students today that we will be racing the clock, but with the school year drawing to a close, their minds are not wrapping around this information. Therefore, I will have to push hard with them in the fall in order to get everything covered.

On this year’s exam, the students had a free response essay question that contained the following books:

The Age of Innocence
Alias Grace
All the King’s Men
All the Pretty Horses
Anna Karenina
Billy Budd
The Brothers Karamazov
Catch-22
Cold Mountain
The Color Purple
Don Quixote
Emma
Equus
Frankenstein
Glass Menagerie
Henry IV, Part I
Huckleberry Finn
Invisible Man
King Lear
The Kite Runner
The Misanthrope
The Piano Lesson
Pride and Prejudice
Pygmalion
Reservation Blues
The Sound and the Fury
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sula
A Tale of Two Cities
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Tom Jones
Wuthering Heights

Based on this list, and others like it, I felt the heat to pick the books that would maximize my students’ reading level. As always, planning classes is an activity that is never finished. The classes and texts are always changing, always being adjusted.

Several years ago, I compiled a list for each grade level of all the books we have taught in previous years. It is from this list that we choose books each year, and the list is always being updated. Here it is:

Grade Nine
1. The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
2. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
7. Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
9. The Giver by Lois Lowry
10. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
11. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
12. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
13. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
14. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
15. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
16. Skellig by David Almond

Grade Ten
1. Night by Elie Wiesel
2. The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
5. Antigone by Sophocles
6. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
7. My Antonia by Willa Cather
8. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
9. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
10. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
11. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
12. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
13. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
15. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
16. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
17. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
18. The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
19. Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson

Grade Eleven
1. The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
2. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
3. October Sky by Homer Hickam
4. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
5. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
6. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
8. Fences by August Wilson
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
10. The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11. The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
12. A Raisin In the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
13. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
15. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
16. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
17. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
20. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
21. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
22. A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton
23. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
24. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
25. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
26. The White Album by Joan Didion
27. In My Father’s Name by Mark Arax

Grade Twelve1. The Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. The Stranger by Albert Camus
5. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
8. Othello by William Shakespeare
9. King Lear by William Shakespeare
10. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
11. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
12. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
13. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
14. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
15. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
16. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
17. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
18. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
19. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
20. Remains of the Day by Kashuo Ishiguro
21. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
22. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
23. Lucky by Alice Sebold
24. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
25. Big Fish by Daniel Wallace
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

I have moved books around over the years for honors and AP courses, but this is basically what my students should read before they leave high school. I just wish we had time to teach every book every year.

The List

After weeks of late nights spent contemplating my book shelves, I have come to a decision regarding the books I will teach next year. Nearly all of the selections I have taught before, and all appear on one list or another for what students should have read before the end of high school. The only one I haven’t taught before is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This one came off of a recent list of newly published books that just might become classics. Of course, the book is not that new; it was first published in paperback April, 2006.

So, without further ado, here is the list for 2008-2009:

English I Honors (Grade 9)
Fahrenheit 451 (Summer Reading Assignment)
Ray Bradbury
Del Rey ISBN: 0345342968

Prentice Hall Literature (Gold California Edition)
Prentice Hall ISBN: 0130548057

Inherit The Wind
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Ballantine Books ISBN: 0345466276

The Man Who Was Thursday
G.K. Chesterton
Modern Library ISBN: 0375757910

Hard Times
Charles Dickens
Signet Classics ISBN: 0451526724

To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Warner Books ISBN: 0446310786

English II Honors (Grade 10)The Stranger (Summer Reading Assignment)
Albert Camus
Vintage International ISBN: 0679720200

Immortal Poems Of The English Language
Oscar Williams (Editor)
Pocket Books ISBN: 0671496107

Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
Bantam Classics ISBN: 0553149563

Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
Washington Square Press ISBN: 0743482743

A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Scribner Books ISBN: 0743253973

Prentice Hall Writing And Grammar (Platinum Level)
Prentice Hall ISBN: 0131166344

AP Language and Composition (Grade 11)Einstein’s Dreams (Summer Reading Assignment)
Alan Lightman
Warner Books ISBN: 0446670111

The Road (Summer Reading Assignment)
Cormac Mc Carthy
Vintage International ISBN: 9780307387899

The Norton Reader (12th Edition)
Linda Peterson And John Brereton (Editors)
W.W. Norton Co. ISBN: 978-0-393-92948-5

Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Bantam Classics ISBN: 0553210793

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner Books ISBN: 0684801523

Selected Poetry Of T.S. Eliot (Copies From Instructor)

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Harper Perennial Modern Classics ISBN: 978-0061148514

AP Literature and Composition (Grade 12)The Kite Runner (Summer Reading Assignment)
Khaled Hosseini
Riverhead Books ISBN: 159448001

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close (Summer Reading Assignment)
Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN: 9780618711659

The Portable Dante
Mark Musa (Translator)
Penguin Books ISBN: 0142437549

Major British Poets
Oscar Williams (Editor)
Mentor Books ISBN: 0451626370

HamletWilliam Shakespeare
Washington Square Press ISBN: 0-7434-7712-X

FrankensteinMary Shelley
Penguin Classics ISBN: 0141439475

Crime And Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bantam Classics ISBN: 0553211757

1984George Orwell
Signet Books ISBN: 0451524934

Composition (Grade 11)
Prentice Hall Writing And Grammar (Ruby Level)
Prentice Hall ISBN: 0134369696

Day Dreams

The approach of summer always makes me feel unsettled and disturbed. I know the rhythm of my days is about to change, and I am a person who likes an established rhythm.

This is also the time of year to think about signing another contract for another year of teaching. Always I wonder, is there something else out there? I feel poised on the precipice, tottering on the edge of something. Most likely, it is the beginning of another year, nothing more. Still, I wonder. Is this my life? Is this my destiny?

More and more, as I approach middle age, I realize that life is made up of doing the job, finding the rhythm, keeping on keeping on. It is not like when I was a kid, looking forward to Christmas, or summer vacation. Life is a journey and we are in it for the long haul, until we are not in it anymore.

Today, I am thinking, distractedly thinking about two things, even as I argue with my eleventh graders over the nature of poetry. It is most difficult for me to stay focused, and then I face class after class of unfocused students. I try to keep them in line as I feel myself falling away. Where am I falling to? These two day dreams are haunting me.

One involves the child I once was, pedaling furiously through the streets of my neighborhood to the public library. It is summer, and I am free to read whatever I want. My parents do not care, as long as my chores are done. I tend, during the summer months, to stay up through the night in manic bouts of reading, book after book. My reading betrays the solidly second rate student I try to be in the Catholic school classroom during the year. If my teachers saw me consuming books like a boy on fire, they would suspect demonic possession.

I miss those days. I miss losing myself in a book, not as a defense mechanism such as that employed by misfits and poseurs. No, my immersion in literature is like breathing. I crave the story, the sweet stories of my youth. Reading helps me with my loneliness, surely, but it also brings me life, because I cannot yet journey out to seize it. I am only in sixth, seventh, eighth grade. Reading is my only escape, my only salvation. Even on my parents’ long, dismal camping trips, reading saves me. It is my journey within the journey.

So as summer approaches now in my forty-fourth year, I dream of those days of endless reading, when everything was the book. Endless heat—and the only relief came late at night with a box fan and a Tarzan novel, or a western by Louis L’Amour.

My second day dream is not a vision of the past. It is an alternate present, or maybe a future. I am walking the steaming streets of New York, dressed in black despite the heat. I wander the southern edge of Central Park, go down Fifth Avenue, wind up near Rockefeller Center. I walk publishers’ row, maybe visiting my own publisher? Like Romeo in Juliet’s garden, I am too bold. South down the island to Wall Street, the Sacred Place, Battery Park looking out to the Statue of Liberty.

In this life, I have a 650 square foot apartment that costs way too much in the Village. Or, a multi-million dollar apartment on the Upper East Side near the Met. I find myself back at the start, Columbus Circle, again moving across the southern edge of the Park, where Holden Caufield once roamed in another parallel universe.

New York life is a hard life, and I would need a lot of money, more than I could make as a poor teacher. But I can dream, and dreams cost so little.

So it is the edge of summer, and I am dreaming again. It has been a habit since I was small. I used to go out into the back yard of my parents’ first rental, an entire acre of land in a suburb of Los Angeles that the city had not corrupted yet. I would play away the summer, day by day, in serial stories, breaking only for lunch and dinner. Then I would watch Gunsmoke with my father on television and be in bed before the theme music finished for The Lucy Show. Once in bed, I would twist and turn in the hot sheets and listen to the rain bird sputter across the front lawn. Eventually, dreams would come. Tomorrow, I would pick up my make believe story out in the back yard exactly where I left off.

I am thinking about all of this today, while trying to pull my students through the last books of the school year. They have their own dreams to tend. We make for a distracted group. Like everything else, this too shall pass. Some day, these days will be memories. We will dream them alive again, when we are older, closer to that other more permanent edge, the darkness that brings sleep to all our days, and hopefully, peace to our dreams. Until then, onward.

Two Views of a Weekend

When I reflect on this weekend, I see two events that bookend living in Los Angeles today. One is the picture of a writer in a library reading from his work and discussing literature, art, and culture as part of a school festival. The second is a school festival where people ran for their lives and the heroism of a couple of parents prevented further loss of life and destruction.

Aram Saroyan was everything I expected when he visited our campus Sunday. He is eccentric, insightful, thought-provoking, playful, all while suffering through a head cold. He read a number of his Minimal Poems, and they were as weird and obtuse as ever. Saroyan even admitted after reading one, “Crickets,” that the poem usually worked on people’s nerves. The poem consisted of the word, “crickets” repeated over and over again at one or two second intervals.

He discussed the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the public perception of his work. He also addressed the strong connections between current events and art, how cubism and other post-modern movements played out in literature, and the impact artists such as Andy Warhol and the recently departed Robert Rauschenberg had on his own writing.

And yes, he did talk about his father, William Saroyan, saying that having such a famous writer as a father is, in some ways, a curse.

My students made me proud. Two sophomore girls asked questions, and both received what I thought were sharp answers, yet they persisted. I do not think Saroyan really answered the questions, but I was proud that my students were not intimidated by him. Other students from my tenth grade class participated in a choreographed introduction involving the reading of some of his poetry. Still others simply came to support the cause of literature. Two boys manned the book table, selling Saroyan’s books for participants to have signed. These boys missed the presentation entirely, as the table was outside the library. They did not complain and like my other sophomores, did their jobs in the heat.

We drew a good crowd of adults as well. Several of my fellow teachers attended and asked Saroyan for comments, and I appreciated their interest and support.

I did want Saroyan to be more specific about what defines art and what constitutes poetry? He mentioned John Cage’s 4’33”, the three movement composition Cage premiered in the 1950s where a pianist plays nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I ask Saroyan, does Cage’s piece mean that the absence of music is music? He did not really address the question per se, but basically said that a reader, a listener, a viewer of a work of art must decide what that work is about for himself. The author can explain his intentions, but the individual determines what the work means to him.

According to Saroyan, when someone reads one of his poems, he hopes to make the person see the world differently. Art should make us reconsider our world. So his poem, lighght, consisting of that one word, makes us reconsider what makes up light.

Art is responsible for questions, not answers. I like that. Too much of what passes for art these days, especially in cinema, answers all the questions, leaves nothing to imagination. We need to wonder. We need to be engaged. Telling us is never as effective as making us think for ourselves and arrive at our own conclusions.

In the end, that is the message of a book like Minimal Poems and an artist like Aram Saroyan. Even if a reader does not see this work as art, or poetry, it has still made the reader consider how she defines art and poetry.

I did not get much opportunity to wander around the school grounds to the other events of the festival because the heat was simply too much. From what I did see, I know that the community came together for food, culture, art, music and fun. So it was with great sadness that I heard on the news and read in the paper the accounts of a much more chilling incident that took place only a few miles from my school.

Saint John the Baptist de la Salle Catholic Church and school in Granada Hills narrowly avoided a tragedy this weekend. On Saturday, during the school festival, Fernando Diaz Jr., embroiled in a bitter custody fight with his ex-girlfriend, kissed his nine year-old son goodbye and then opened fire on his former lover, wounding her and two other men before parishioners Charles Sternberg and Jeff Sempelsz tackled him to the ground.

For Catholic schools, the annual festivals raise valuable funds to keep the schools going financially throughout the year. I remember attending my school’s festivals, or fiestas, every October from second to eighth grade. Of course, I remember them as safe, fun-filled days with family and friends. There were booths, raffles, food, games, rides—everything that makes the day fun for kids and adults. This was not the case at de la Salle on Saturday. Still, the festival went on as scheduled. Volunteer crisis counselors provided by the city and state, roamed the grounds offering their services to traumatized parents and children. Police officers increased patrols of the school grounds, adding increased security.

The shooter in this case is another example of a terrorist. For those seconds when he was firing into the crowds, he created terror. It is the goal of terrorists to make us alter our lives out of fear. Even if bloodshed does not occur, if events are cancelled out of fear of the possibility of violence, the terrorists have won. So it was good to hear that the Saint John the Baptist de la Salle School festival went on as planned Sunday.

It is, however, a sad state of affairs when organizers of a church carnival for children must be wary of bullets, bloodshed, and the unreasonable actions of one man bent on violence.

In a year of increased murders and gang violence on our streets, I guess this was just another hot weekend in Los Angeles. Two schools, two festivals, two very different perspectives, all just a few miles apart.

So Many Books

It has been a nebulous time, these last two weeks.

My students are finishing up their Advanced Placement exams and I am planning next year. Meanwhile, the school community prepares for Sunday’s open house and festival which includes Aram Saroyan’s visit and book signing.

Usually, teachers and students function like Pavlov’s dog during an ordinary school day. The bell rings, and we move. The entire day is organized around bells. But this week, the bells are often irrelevant. They ring, signifying the end or beginning of a class, but there are still students in the hallways. Students and teachers rehearse programs and performances; artists paint banners and posters on the floor in classrooms and hallways; janitors hang banners and bunting around the quad and playground. In short, it is chaos, a cacophony of busy work and artistic endeavor, occurring during the time of year when everyone, teacher and student alike, struggles to maintain focus. Final exams begin in fifteen days.

One of my many tasks this week is determining what books I will teach next fall. I have spent more time than usual on this process this year. I feel more and more that my students do not read enough, and therefore I need to bolster the text lists in my classes. However, I also feel they do not read carefully enough, nor deep enough, and therefore I have spent this year feeling like we are rushing through material. I keep hearing my mentor teacher’s voice from all those years ago: “ We teach children, not curriculum.”

How do we best serve our students? How do we get them to read broadly while also digging into the books and reading with depth and critical thinking?

So I have spent the week cutting down the text lists for each class to the bare minimum, thinking that I would dig more deeply into the works I teach. More close reading. More intensity. More background. More projects that reveal the nuances of text and writing.

Then I read an AP article, or examine a released exam, and realize by cutting the list, I am limiting my students’ experience with a variety of texts. So I start adding books back to the list. I go crazy, adding this book or that book, things I taught last year, or five years ago.

I also think about themes. I like organizing my reading lists for courses by theme. For the seniors, I am thinking of picking books that illustrate the philosophical questions of good and evil. Heart of Darkness. Crime and Punishment. Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” Dante’s Inferno. For sophomores, I think of Existentialism and Eastern philosophy—Siddhartha, The Stranger. And since they purchase a separate writing and grammar text, I would like to devote a semester to that book alone. Research writing—they should do a major paper. Or, I could assign several shorter assignments that cover a variety of research techniques. Juniors hate Huckleberry Finn, yet it is on every major course list from the state and the College Board. Who does not read Huckleberry Finn in high school? The same group loves The Catcher In The Rye, yet I find the language dated, and I wonder at the value of the book. Are there others that might serve the same purpose and offer a richer experience? Why do they respond so well to Salinger’s writing? There must be something there.

I come to the conclusion that to lessen the number of texts is to cut the blood flow, so to speak. I need to push hard through the books. I cannot let the current trends in our American society to read less discourage me from making my students read more. As hard as it is this year with all the distractions, I must carve out the time next year to make my students read broadly and deeply.

In all of this, I must admit, there is the flutter in the stomach, the excitement. Yes, I get butterflies thinking about the teaching, the assignments, the work. I love this. I think about reading these books for the first time when I was in school, and the smells, the tastes, the intensity come flooding back. I start thinking about how I can recreate this experience for my students. How can I get them to feel the things I felt in ninth grade, tenth grade, senior year, when I read 1984, Romeo and Juliet, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I have already decided that this summer I need to refresh my notes and materials. I will work through each text, even the ones I have taught a hundred times, and re-prepare to teach them once again. I will research new websites, new articles, new project possibilities, new directions. I do this every few years. Freshness is important when you are a classroom teacher. I cannot wait to reread the books, to spend the summer weeks rethinking the writers I love, the books I cherish.

Meanwhile, I must finish this year. We have Monday off since we must spend Sunday on campus at the open house. Tuesday begins the final fifteen days of 2007-2008. I must still finish teaching Fahrenheit 451, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, The Bell Jar. I need to write some final exams, finalize the Summer Reading List, distribute the final draft of my text list for 2008-2009. Final, finalize, finish. But the work of a teacher is never finished. There are always more books to read, more learning to absorb, more thinking to do.

Summer is a time of fireworks and picnics, swimming and playing, of youth and beauty. I will be the one on the blanket with his back against the tree, face buried in a book, dreaming of autumn and so many books.