Real-Life Dystopia

From Uglies to The Giver to The Hunger Games, kids just love their dystopian novels.  In an earlier post I mentioned that even The New Yorker had taken notice of this trend, and on the last day of the KMWP Summer Institute, I recommended a quasi-dystopian novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) that might interest high school students.  The science-fiction component of these novels gives us a tendency to distance ourselves from their urgency.  Even though they are meant to be cautionary, we still assume that what happens in these books will not happen here.  Never Let Me Go cuts away at this in that it’s set in the 1990′s (the novel was published in 2005) and is absent of any technological wizardry.

That science-fictional distance is also why it’s important for students to know about the real dystopian society that is  North Korea.  I’m encouraged that this year’s winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction is Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.  I haven’t read the book, but I would be shocked if it was anything but a compelling look at just how oppressed that nation is.  I’m excited to get my hands on a copy and possibly share it with my classes.

If any of this interests you, I’d also recommend Guy DeLisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang, in which the author-artist details his own business trip to North Korea.  DeLisle’s artwork portrays the bizarre, egomaniacal urban planning and architecture of the city in a seriocomic light, and his empathy for the North Korean people (supposedly among the saddest in the world) keeps readers from simply hating the country.  It might be the only place on earth I could describe as tragically fascinating.

Why Our Students Have to Know Us

For my professional reading, I’ve been going through Mike Rose’s book Lives on the Boundary, which is about the author’s experiences working with at-risk and underprepared students of all ages.  Rose’s approach to education is fully aware of content, but not without first considering the student who has to master it.  This is critical when the students have had academic struggles because they already perceive themselves as incapable of doing whatever they’re supposed to learn.  For that situation, Rose offers this lesson:

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance.  You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk.  You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water.  Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.”  Knowledge gained its meaning, at lest initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation…My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me (102).

I suppose this ties in with my earlier reflection comparing teaching and cooking.  Students need to know more than just how to do something.  They also need to know that it matters, and the teacher’s concern for them is the first sign that it does.   It’s easier for teachers to be concerned and win students over if they’re passionate about both their subject matter and their students.  Rose had a few dynamic teachers who introduced him to the Beat writers, Albert Camus, Abraham Maslow, and tons of other thinkers, all of whom were challenging to read.  Rose’s teachers, though, had a contagious passion for ideas that was easy for Rose and his friends to catch.  I hope I can fill my career with that kind of outbreak.

The Cookbook Is Never Enough

In Bill Buford’s Heat, the author quits his job at The New Yorker to work as a kitchen slave at Babbo, Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant.  It’s a crazy experience where Buford learns that there is much more to cooking than any book or TV show could ever offer an amateur like him.  When he attempts to recreate dishes from Babbo’s kitchen, he finds that for all the precision and food science the cookbook claims to have, he can’t get the home version to taste like Babbo itself.

I wonder if we do the same thing with best practices.  Researchers (or administrators, or curriculum coordinators) enter a class looking for what makes a great teacher tick.  They write down their observations, thereby legitimizing them, and other experts or bosses proclaim what the teacher does as “best practices.”  But can other professionals recreate what happened in the original kitchen?

What really confounds Buford is that the kitchen staff never measures a single ingredient–recipes take a pinch of this or a handful of that.  This is particularly frustrating when he attempts to make polenta, a deceptively simple food.  Polenta takes three things: cornmeal, water, and time.  But how much of each?  Every set of instructions–even the ones on the bag–is misleading.  “It’s not so much water and so much polenta and so much time,” Buford writes, “but water and polenta and time, in whatever quantities it takes, until the dish is ready, which is never forty minutes but as long as three hours.”  Apparently polenta doesn’t cook itself quickly, and it requires effort unique to a given situation.  Just like true teaching and learning?

While certain principles and methods may arise from a great classroom and be transferable elsewhere, what made magic happen can never be duplicated as accurately as others would like.  The magic comes when you add yourself.  As teachers, we can borrow best practices all we want, but sooner or later, we have to be ourselves.  Our comfort with that inevitability may be a major determinant of our success in the classroom.  We can’t just ask what we’re doing; we must also ask how we can make it our own.

Summer Reading

It’s funny that today’s visiting writer, Jeffrey Stepakoff, spoke briefly about Nicholas Sparks.  I’ve been trying to deal with Sparks for a few days now.

This year, for the second year in a row, I have asked my students to assign me some summer reading.  It’s fun to let them turn the tables on me, and some of them relish the opportunity to force me to read something I would never pick up.

My first assignment is to read Sparks’ novel Dear John, a book I would not normally give the time of day.  Sure, I’ve never read him, but I know enough about his stories to know they aren’t my thing.  Still, I want to give Sparks a fair shot at impressing me.

As Chapter One begins, John describes his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina plainly, like someone reading straight out of a AAA guide.  Then he distinguishes Wilmington from the Outer Banks:

“The Outer Banks may have more romantic appeal because of their isolation and wild horses and that flight that Orville and Wilbur were famous for, but let me tell you, most people who go to the beach on vacation feel most at home when they can find a McDonald’s or Burger King nearby, in case the little ones aren’t too fond of the local fare, and want more than a couple of choices when it comes to evening activities” (7-8).

So you can go to the Outer Banks to be closer to nature and eat local food, or you can go to Wilmington and eat Quarter Pounders.  That says it all right there, not just about Wilmington, but about Nicholas Sparks himself.  Sure, you can read a more distinctive love story–Possession, perhaps?–but sometimes you just want a cheap hamburger.  Nicholas Sparks is proudly the cheap hamburger.  I don’t say this to trash popular fiction.  It’s very possible to write great popular fiction, as Stepakoff argued in today’s presentation (which was full of other great stories of his work in the TV industry).  But if I’m getting a chain restaurant hamburger, I’d rather go to In-N-Out than McDonald’s.

BONUS FEATURE: Here’s an interesting interview with Nicholas Sparks.  He seems fond of his work.

Jose Saramago Is Dead

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago is dead at 87.  Upon hearing the news, a former student emailed me to say that Death With Interruptions, a novel in which all death ceases, was on his list of vacation reading for next week.  Saramago’s death is sad news, but it’s always nice to know that former students (from eight years ago!) are still reading great literature.

I’m With Green

For our first book club meeting, I selected M.T. Anderson‘s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Vol. 1: The Pox Party.  I had previously read Anderson’s earlier novel Feed and found this one to be drastically different in style (not a shock, since the narrators are very different guys), but with the same sense of satire.  Anderson knows what he’s doing, but he’s written a very intelligent, challenging young adult novel, one that plays with kids’ brains more than usual.

Apparently Anderson’s gotten a little flak for this, and has even been accused of writing something that’s too intelligent for teenagers.  I found this out when I looked up John Green, author of the next book I’ll be reading, Looking for Alaska.  Green defends Anderson in a nice blog post.

I haven’t yet read the second volume of Octavian Nothing, but I’m with Green.  Literature of all genres comes in all depths and difficulties.  If Anderson wants to write a young adult novel like it’s the Great American Novel, then that’s awesome.  I’d love to see him attempt a young adult Moby Dick*, something big, audacious, and deep.  And it would be especially cool if he didn’t have to wait until decades after his death to get recognized for it.

* Take a look at Power Moby-Dick, an annotated online edition of the novel.

Today we did some stuff (Updated).

From what I can remember about my reading life, memoirs don’t interest me a whole lot.  I can think of a few recent engaging works of new journalism in which the authors are candid about their own involvement with their subjects–Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for example, or Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks–but the last memoir I both read and loved was Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  That was nine years ago.  So when I saw that we had to write a memoir, I wasn’t all that excited.  I thought it would distract from the writing I’m actually doing in my spare time (fiction) and the research that I started yesterday and need to finish by THURSDAY.

Then we actually started the exercises.  We completed a piece of snapshot writing, in which I recalled one of my daughter’s allergic reactions, and then we prospected, going back to random times in our lives and figuring out what we cared about way back when.  The allergic reaction story is one I tell all the time in order to explain to people why my wife and I are so insistent that our daughter not be allowed near any milk product (long story short: a severe dairy allergy is very different from lactose intolerance.  Milk can kill my daughter).  The prospecting, however, unearthed some deep feelings I hadn’t thought about in a very long time.  There are emotional states I went through years, even decades ago, that I have not been through since, and it was surprising to revisit them.  I won’t be going into any details about this stuff on a public website (none of it’s illegal; it’s just personal), but I do think I found some interesting fodder for whatever finished product I have to turn in at the end.  It won’t be fiction, but it’ll be just as much fun.

UPDATE: Okay, I did think of a few other memoir/autobiographical books worth mentioning:

Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One: “Bob Dylan” the troubadour is really Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota.  You won’t find out much about Zimmerman here, but you’ll find out plenty of interesting tidbits about the persona he’s constructed for himself.

Johnny Cash, Cash: The Autobiography: All the basic details of Cash’s life are here, but when he talks about others, he turns seemingly useless information into great entertaining anecdotes.  I love the last conversation he has with Roy Orbison, and what Cash discovers when he looks into Orbison’s casket.

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: I haven’t read this one yet, but I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with the old Steve Martin, the one who was funny.

In Case Anyone’s Interested…

The latest issue of The New Yorker has an essay about young-adult dystopian novels.