Reading

This blog will be all about me... as if the others weren't and will concern reading.  I don't remember not being able to read so I can't say when I learned or whether I taught myself.  I don't think I did.. Currently I am reading 3 books: The Four Agreements, The Lost Wife and White Noise.  No three books could be more different.  The Four Agreements is about Toltec wisdom and spirituality.  The Lost Wife about concentration camps and families sent to Terezin ( a show camp) and Aushwitz. It is a tragedy and a love story of epic proposrtions.  At times I can only read a page or two, the events being so devastating, the inhumanity so immense.  Finally White Noise.. a black comedy  which I've read before (several times).  Often I read a s many as half a dozen books simultaneouly. Not bad for a guy who read 1-2 books in high school  My reading and self-edacation began the day of my collge graduation  (which I wa unable to attend for financial reasons). On that day I began Moby Dick  So what's the big deal.. many people read and read several books at the same time.  Yes, true but I discovered over the years that I have 2 very unique abilities.  The first one is that I can begin a book, read perhaps half of it, then put it down for an extended period of time and then pick it up and begin reading as though I had never stopped reading.  The second skill is one I must have developed when I taught.  In order to keep students attentive and enjoy what is called 'shared reading' I often, most often read  books aloud to my students.  I'd often practice, voices, accents, cadences and other elements to make my reading more fluid and hence more interesting to students.  Some books I have read as many as two dozen or more times. Some books I can quote passages from memory or if asked about a particular episode, I can site chapter and page.  Nothing amazing about that.. but here comes the freaky part.  One day while reading Of Mice and Men of Huck Finn aloud, I realized that I was thinking about other things, making plans, planning.  In short, while I was reading one book aloud, my brain could think of other things.  Perhaps it's just that I had memorized the text and my mouth was working independently, perhaps.  But it was freaky.. how can that be I asked myself.  I shrugged my shoulders and used that unique skill to my advantage.  I could make plans for my next class (say I was teaching Macbeth next) while reading of Mice and Men.

So it is that a guy who read less than a handful of books in high school and not too many more in college has now read thousands and that doesn't include the books I've read numerous times.  Some may wonder how a teacher (like myself) could read the same books aloud year after year and not get bored?  The secret is that every time I read a book I was a different person and came to the page a different person.  Of course there was also the fact that between readings I had learned something new that made the book that made it  even more impressive.  For example in The Lord of the Flies.. the twins (Sam n Eric) have a inside joke about their teacher whom they refer to as old 'waxy'. I often wondered why old waxy which I learned later was because in previous times, people used wax on their faces to cover the pox marks.. hence the saying crack a smile.. So it came to me that old 'waxy' had waxed his face and was a very stern task-master.  Little gems such as that were added to my discussions and information sharing.  Another book that I really loved reading aloud and which was inaccessible to most of my junior classes is The Scarlet Letter.  There are passages so profoundly beautiful that I reveled in reading them and such phrasing as the women of the town use to refer to Hester Prynne as  "the naughty baggage" always got a chuckle.

Often when reading a great book ( and The Lost Wife) is in that category.. I will put it down , the book that is.  I find that the experience is so overwhleming and wonderful that I don't want to finish the book.  Day by day the books and plays I've read and studied gain more depth.  Tom Stoppard's End Game befuddled me until I saw a piece on the History Channel that explained that end game is a method of playing chess by starting in the middle of a game rather than at the beginning.  One year I taped myself reading Animal Farm so that I could play the tape and grade papers simultaneously. One day while the tape was playing,  I saw a shadow outside the door to my room (it was an open school so there was no door but I saw a shadow shifting this way and that). When I went to see who was there, it was my supervisor..who dressed me down for my creativity.  She said she thought I was actually reading the book instead of attending to other things.  I responded that books on tape were a very popular thing.. this happened probably 15-20 years ago.  From my viewpoint I was using my time wisely and had given of my free time to tape the novel.  It was a damn good rendition.. I wish I had it so I could  hear myself reading it.  I added music between chapters to signal myself and students that it was time to move on to a discussion or a written assignment.  This is how creative teachers are often treated.
In the Fall of 1992  I took the giant leap and brought Jurassic Park into my tenth grade classes The assigned book for tneth graders is and was Great Expectations.. and when my daughter read Jurassic Park and asked why her class couldn't read interesting books like Jurassic Park.. I answered the challenge.  First, where would I get the money to buy 30 copies of the paper back?  The principal had no money, the supervisor had no money.  So I solicited funds from local business people, the orthodontist and a pediatrician.  This was a definite no-no.  Why?  It has come to me lately that what I was doing was demonstrating how unnecessary supervisors are in education and how defensive they become when a teacher comes up with an original and enticing idea!  You see supervisors are supposed to know it all.  Since that time our county curriculum expressly states that no book can be taught except those approved by the school board!  Mea culpa.  But those kids loved Jurassic Park.. and even began reading all of Michael Crichton's books, as I had been doing.  It gets better... on the last day of school that year, my classes and I went to see Jurassic Park at a local theater, a day before it opened in the theaters.  But that's not all.. on October 28, 1992 my classes interviewed Michael Crichton via teleconference.  Quite a year for those kids. By the way it was his 50th birthday. He is gone now and I miss his writing!  I wrote it all up and submitted the unit to the MIldred Dodge Curriculum Contest and received a reply that I had not won the prize but was mentioned as an honorable mention in that prestigious contest.  I'd gotten my students involved in something and they loved it.  I'd pissed off the big wigs. Which reminds me Watership Down was another of those novels I introduced into the country curriculum.. I taught what I loved and I loved what I taught.  I would force myself to love a required piece.. I had never read or seen Hamlet but one weekend a snow storm was expected, so I got a copy of the play, a tape of the play and a case of beer and sat down and listened to it.  I then watched several different versions of the play.

That's all folks.