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Finding the Truth in 10th Grade English Class by Sarah Darer Littman
Last year, after my congressman (who serves on the House Intelligence Committee) argued that the NSA had broken no laws, only to be contradicted a few months later by documents obtained by contractor Edward Snowden, I decided to re-read George Orwell’s 1984.
I last read it 36 years ago, during one of the most influential years of my reading life, 10th grade honors English with phenomenal teacher Suzanne Price.
What particularly set my synapses alight that year was the Utopia/Dystopia unit, in which we read Utopia, Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies.
After revisiting 1984 with an adult eye, I decided revisit some of the other books on the syllabus.
The 60th Anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 includes an introduction by Neil Gaiman. “This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted….”
Gaiman highlights the three phrases that make possible “the world of writing about about the world of not yet”:
What if…
If only…
If this goes on…
The last question is one I use with my writing students when we talk about world building. I ask them to take something in today’s society and extrapolate into the future. It’s always one of my favorite sessions.
One wonders how Ray Bradbury would have survived in today’s high stakes testing environment. In his essay “The Story of Fahrenheit 451,” Jonathan Eller writes, “Ray Bradbury never really figured out how to learn in a lecture hall or a classroom environment. The printed word seemed far more real to him, and the pages of countless library books formed the core of his education.”
I can think of so many successful, creative people for whom the same is true. It’s why, when I hear Common Core ELA standards architect David Coleman disparage narrative fiction and personal exposition with the comment “As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a s*** about what you feel or what you think,” I feel like a modern day Montag trying to escape from the Mechanical Hound, and that the children’s book writers and illustrators I’m gathered with at the retreat from where I’m writing this post are like Mr. Granger and his group of book memorizers hiding out in the countryside, trying to preserve the memory of story and why it is so important in our lives.
“We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen.” Granger tells Montag near the end of Fahrenheit 451. “They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them.”
You might think my passion for books and stories is because I grew up reading them and now I write them. But recently, as I sat in synagogue listening to my rabbi’s sermon, I realized how storytelling is integral to my faith. It’s how we accomplish לדור ודור “from generation to generation.”
“Stories are a comprehensive, encyclopedic treasure of the spirit of the nation, reminders of is concepts, beliefs and opinions from many different periods that have been crystallized in its folklore. They contain segments of its communal and individual life, whose soul was originally transmitted orally, in conversations with other people, then it was written and stored as a treasure for future generations. The form of the story and its contents were transmitted together, but the nation was the real creator of those stories.” Mordechai ben Yecheskayl. Sepuray Mahahseyot. (Tel Aviv. D’vir Publishing Company, 1927)
Why does Coleman have such antipathy to story? Rereading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and checking out Brave New World Revisited for the first time helped me find answers to that question.
In the preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World Huxley wrote, “a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned…to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and school teachers” – not, I hasten to add, the teachers of the Nerdy Book Club, who encourage their kids to love reading and to think critically.
But maybe it’s not because of such sinister motives. Maybe it’s due to what Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited, calls the “Will to Order” – the “wish to bring unity out of multiplicity.” Peter Greene at Curmudgucation wrote a great blog post about that could explain why an education system created by tech billionaires is doomed to fail:
“I’ve lived most of my life around engineers and their modern offspring, computer systems guys (as an English teacher, I’m a bit of an anomaly). And here are two things I know about folks in those fields:
1) They love neat, pretty systems.
2) Human beings often fail to behave the way they think human beings ought to behave.”
I, too, have spent a lot of time around engineers and computer guys, and so couldn’t help smiling and nodding.
But as anyone who has spent time as a parent or an educator knows, children aren’t easily ordered into neat, pretty systems, even in the smallest of units, the family.
I’m leaving this retreat with renewed vigor, to write more stories and to fight for the right of our children to read them in schools and libraries. Literature contains the collective soul of our nation, and the books I read in tenth grade taught me what Neil Gaiman said so eloquently in his preface to Fahrenheit 451: “Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”
Sarah Darer Littman, is the award-winning author of Confessions of a Closet Catholic, Purge, Life After, and Want to Go Private? Her latest YA novel (still in search of the right title- stay tuned!) will be published by Scholastic Press in Spring 2015. Sarah teaches creative writing for Writopia Lab in Fairfield County, CT, and is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Western CT State University. In her spare time (!) she’s an opinion columnist for CTNewsJunkie.com. You can find her online at http://sarahdarerlittman.com, on Twitter as @sarahdarerlitt, and on Facebook.
Nerdy Book Club 
This is so dead on. I’ve read 1984 with 10th graders, & I reread it every few years myself. Each year it’s a little scarier, a little more urgent. Thank you!!
I love this post so much I’m printing it out so I can read it again later. Spot-on.
I like your article a lot, and it’s making me want to go back and read those novels! Thank you!
I do think you’re being a little harsh on David Coleman, though. The context of his quote above – which is startlingly frank for a bureaucrat – only relates to the personal essay. In numerous speeches, he’s railed against the classic “What I did this summer” essay prompt. And he’s correct to do so. While his words could have been better chosen, I haven’t read anything from him that suggests narrative fiction isn’t worth students’ time. What I take away from the standards (and his interviews) is that he just wanted all teachers – not just the good ones, like you (I’m being serious! You seem awesome!) – to give informational texts equal weight. And, to write about him in article about dystopian futures – to create such a parallel – seems pretty unfair.
As far as what Ray Bradbury would think about today’s exam-focused education system, I can be reasonably sure he wouldn’t like it. And that certainly gives me pause. But, there are many teachers and students who are thriving in it, and I think the best teachers are able to take the standards and exams, learn from them, and teach better as a result.
Thanks for posting! This woke me up this morning, and got my teaching juices following. Back to class now!
As a teacher who has contact with many, many (maybe thousands) of other teachers, I don’t know any who are “thriving” in this test-based environment. And even students who thrive are only succeeding at bubbling in answers on a test. The real world isn’t black and white. The real world requires critical thinking and analysis, not standardized answers.
Great teachers can take the standards and teach well. But many teachers are not permitted to do so because administrators and politicians are telling them what, how, and when to teach. That’s pretty dystopian in my view.
I certainly don’t want to condemn your experience. But, I also have a lot of contact with teachers, and I don’t know anyone who is foolish enough to attempt to just teach The Art of Test Bubbling as their Literature class. For what it’s worth, I’m a better teacher today – in this world of testing – than ever before.
The tests and standards have given me more clarity and direction than any of their previous iterations ever did. Each of us – including those attending Montessori schools – took standardized tests at least once a year when we were in school. So testing isn’t anything new. Do we publicize the data now? Yes. Do we talk about testing more? Yes. But, the fact remains: American children have taken exams since the 1960s, and graduation rates have stayed about the same since then. Some might point to that as evidence that the tests don’t work; I like to think of it more that the exams – and our subsequent analysis of them – were poor. Since I’ve been taught to look at them more deeply, they’ve only supplemented my work. In my classroom, we still study literature deeply and emotionally (tears were shed at the death of Rontu!), but I also work hard to ensure that every child actually learned something. I don’t work on hunches. I need the tests. The only way to know that is through the test.
As far as permissions from principals go, I agree with you that many people feel hog-tied by expectations and poor school leadership. But, the best teachers I know do what they know is right for kids, and the test scores always seem to fall into place without a huge devotion to test prep. Test Prep is bad teaching, and all of us would agree.
Overall, I think we’re agreeing on most of this, actually. I just don’t think high-quality teachers are drowning in oceans of test-prep as much as Diane Ravitch makes it seem. I don’t see the state of education today through a dystopian lens; I see a lot of people trying very very hard to find some way to right a sinking ship.
Great post, Sarah. It’s important to remember that the Common Core doesn’t remove fiction from the curriculum. It just asks students to read more nonfiction than they did before. This includes narrative nonfiction (i.e. trade books, not textbooks), which, like fiction, transmits cultural “concepts, beliefs and opinions.” Good nonfiction can be suspenseful, exciting, and thought-provoking, and can stimulate students’ imaginations. And fiction does not have a monopoly on story.
Ah, Sarah, a congregant who not only hears, but thinks. I hope you share this result with your Rabbi. Now you have me thinking.
Sarah, this is fabulous. And now I need to order the 60th anniversary edition of F451!
Great post. Very inspiring. What scares me is how easily so many of my colleagues just acquiesce to the latest so-called “reform.” May have sadly come to love their servitude. Not sure what “sinking ship” Roberto is talking about in his comment to your post. Testing and standards are not the way to fix anything in education, but can do plenty to make things worse. We’ve had decades of testing and standards and its the same old story. So how can more of the same be better? Standardized tests should be low stakes and should be examined as one indicator of skills our children are acquiring. But a very, very minor indicator. Good to look at every so many years to reflect on growth in skills over times. However, those tests don’t examine and can’t examine the complex ways in which humans make meaning of text and their lives–and the two go hand in hand. They don’t tell us anything about attitudes, passions, meta-cognition, introspection, and empathy. Let’s break free of our bondage. Don’t take the soma of testing and standards. Rebel, subversively if necessary, at every turn. Thank you for your post.
Thank you all for the kind remarks. A few comments
1) Roberto, I am old enough that I can actually dispute your contention that we took tests every year in school since the 1960′s. In fact, the friends I went through 8th grade and high school with in the mid-70′s (I graduated HS in 1980) worked out from our records (some of us have parents who are pack rats and are pack rats ourselves, so we have our report cards and test records) and we took a mere fraction of the tests our kids have been subjected to. What really brought this home to me was my daughter’s experience when she was in 10th grade honors English – the same year I write about here as being so influential on me. My friends and I worked out all the novels we read and analyzed that year, and my daughter and her class read 1/3 FEWER novels because they lost a full month to prep for the CMT’s (CT Mastery Tests and then the tests themselves). They will lose even more time now that CT is switching to SBAC. Poorer districts are being subjected to MAP testing at least twice a year.
When we were in high school we took the Iowa Tests, the SATS, the Achievement tests and AP’s. We had time to learn, to think and to WRITE – not to mention to take music, art, have PE, have more than 20 minutes to each lunch, etc. All of these things are being cut now, particularly in lower income areas, in favor of test prep. How is that an improvement?
As for the graduation rate staying the same, I’m not sure where you get that data. It has not only improved, but the achievement gap has narrowed. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/high-school-graduation-rate-hits-40-year-peak-in-the-us/276604/ And this is despite an INCOME gap that is the largest since the 1920′s.
The idea that schools are “failing” is a narrative being pushed by those who want to privatize public education. It is not one supported by the facts. Yes there are schools that need improvement, but inevitably, those schools are suffering from lack of resources.
I don’t think my kids were ever asked to write a “What I did on my summer vacation” essay. But perhaps you (and David Coleman) should investigate http://storycorps.org/education/storycorpsu/
They are using the power of personal narrative in amazing ways. My son and I corresponded with a class in Chicago that used our StoryCorps video, Q & A, as part of StoryCorps U, and the stories that came from it blew me away (and some made me cry). It showed me what some students in Chicago schools are facing before they even walk into the classroom every day, and how insane it is to expect a teacher – or a standardized test – to control for that, let alone have their job and salary based on it.
2) Susannah, I in no way meant to imply that fiction has the monopoly on story, and I’m sorry if you took that message from what I wrote.