Topic: Study Skills

Question: How help students develop study skills?

10-second review: Prepare videotape for each content class showing the use of study skills with the actual materials being used in that class.

Source: MF O'Hear. College Composition and Communication (October 1977), 277-279. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: The content-area teacher will probably say, “That’s doing it for the students.” I say, “It’s teaching.” RayS.

Topic: Speeds of Reading Silently and Aloud

Question: What is the relationship between speed of reading aloud and reading silently?

10-second review: "It is of interest to note that the rates of 250-300 words per minute...as more-or-less 'maximal' rates for silent reading, correspond closely to the fastest rates at which trained readers can read aloud."

Source: TG Sticht in Understanding Reading Comprehension. J Flood, ed. Newark, DE, 1984, p. 150.

Comment: Seems to imply that the way students read aloud is the way they read silently. I would suggest that students who do not read aloud well, halting, stumbling, etc., be given training in fluency. Teacher and student read aloud together. Students re-read the same short piece of material repeatedly until they can read it smoothly and effortlessly and with expression. RayS.

Topic: Teachers' Questions

Question: What kinds of questions do teachers usually ask?

10-second review: Evidence from previous research suggests that teachers in all academic disciplines are given to using low-level factual questions.

Source: RA Lucking. Research in the Teaching of English (Winter 1976), 269. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment. Other types of questions: questions to which both students and teachers do NOT know the answers and work together to find the answers. Open-ended questions that can have a variety of possible answers. REAL questions to which students want to find the answers. Questions that begin lessons and units. RayS.

Topic: Research Paper

Question: How prepare students for writing a research paper?

10-second review: Author suggests using the familiar FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) format—questions followed by answers—to prepare for writing the traditional research paper. The Q & A will include the information the student has found before writing the actual research paper.

Suggests the FAQ format also as a method for introducing students to the research process with students' questions about the research process answered by the teacher in writing.

Source: J Strickland. English Journal (September 2004), 23-28. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: I think both suggestions are excellent. The second FAQ should help to answer the students’ many questions about the research process. The first FAQ should give both teachers and students an understanding of what students have learned from their research. I wish I had used both ideas. RayS.

Topic: Reading in Secondary Schools

Question: What is the attitude of secondary teachers in subjects other than English about helping their students read?

10-second review: Secondary teacher: "I'm not a reading teacher; students should already know how to read when they get to middle school. My job is to teach them social studies content." The author responds by suggesting the steps in the directed reading assignment.

Source: DD Massey & TL Heafner. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (September 2004), pp. 26-40. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: The social studies teacher is right. Her job is to teach the ideas in social studies. But for students the topic of the reading assignment is probably unfamiliar. Some of the vocabulary is probably also unfamiliar. And students need to know what to look for as they read. The social studies teacher can help students read what is unfamiliar and difficult.

The author calls using the directed reading assignment "teaching reading." I disagree. Teaching reading to me is teaching reading skills directly, finding main ideas, details, inferring, etc. For me, using the directed reading assignment in content areas is not teaching reading, but helping students succeed with specific reading assignments that are difficult to read.

The directed reading assignment consists of four steps: building the students’ background knowledge of the topic to be read about because the more students know about the topic, the better they will understand what they read about it; pre-teaching unfamiliar vocabulary; setting purpose for reading (questions developed by the students after reading the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the last, summary paragraph) and having students apply or extend the ideas that they have read. RayS.

Jargon Watch:
“Content area teachers”: Teachers of subjects other than English, social studies, science, etc.

“Pre-teaching vocabulary”: Teaching unfamiliar words before students read the chapter.

Topic: Questions

10-second review: What kinds of questions do we ask? John Searle: There are two kinds of questions, (a) real questions, (b) exam questions. In real questions “S” wants to know (find out) the answer; in exam questions, “T” wants to know if “S” knows the answer.

Source: WB Horner. College Composition and Communication (May 79), 169.A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Nothing motivates students like real questions, questions to which the teacher and students do not know the answer. But close to “real” questions are questions that students ask about the topic of the day or the unit, which helps the teacher focus the content of the unit. RayS.

Topic: Literature

10-second review: Why study literature? "Our focus should be on helping children learn from literature about themselves, about their lives, about the lives of others."

Source: H Mills, et al. Language Arts (September. 2004), 51. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Comment: There are a number of reasons for reading literature. One reason for reading novels is information. Many contemporary novels tell about hospitals, law, and other professions in addition to telling a story. James Michener is one example of writers who provide a great deal of information in telling stories. Reading for the story itself is another reason. People love to read stories. Reading to relate the story to one’s life is a reason for reading literature. Reading to understand experience emotionally is a reason for reading poetry. Reading to understand the use of language in literature is the reason for explicating (New Critics). But I think that the reason most students who are not English majors will give for reading literature is to add vicarious experience to their own lives.

Reading literature to relate to the readers’ own lives and to learn about the lives of others are really the only reasons for most students to read literature. The trouble is that most English teachers teach their students as if they are going to be English majors. That means they concentrate on explicating the literary work without regard for personal experience. RayS.

Topic: Publishing

10-second review: What do writers need to know about publishing? "Nowadays, writers largely have to edit themselves. The better you can make your manuscript before submitting it to a publisher, the greater your chances of getting published."

Source: C Leddy. The Writer (September 2004), 41. The Writer is a magazine by writers for writers.

Comment: If you’re not an expert grammarian, ask someone who is pretty good at grammar to look over your manuscript. Specify what you want him or her to help you with. General instructions like “Look it over and tell me what you think” will lead to judgments that might even offend you and comments on spelling that are irrelevant to what you need. Tell them you are looking for help with grammar. The trick with having people read and comment on your writing is in the directions that you give. The more specific you can be, the better directed will be the comments. RayS.

Topic: Starting a Writing Career

10-second review: How can writers get started on a writing career? Become an expert on something and then write about it.

Source: K. James-Enger. The Writer (September 2004), 18-19. The Writer is a magazine by writers for writers.

Comment: Sounds like a flip answer to the question, but when you think about it, it makes sense. All those experts who are quoted on newscasts have become knowledgeable on the topic of concern. RayS.

Topic: Struggling Readers

10-second review: Students need explicit demonstration of what good readers do while they read…. Struggling readers must come to know that their job is not just to answer questions, but also to ask them. This may necessitate pointing out that skilled readers question as they read as a way to monitor their understanding and that...raising questions aids comprehension.

Source: Ganske, et al. The Reading Teacher (October. 2003), 123-124. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: Interesting concept to share with struggling readers what good readers do. Probably true that good readers ask questions as they read. How teach it? Take a chapter in a textbook. Have students read the first paragraph, the first sentence of intermediate paragraphs and the last paragraph and have students raise questions about what they want to know. Then read to answer the questions. That’s a start.

Good readers probably intuitively question as they read. I’m not sure how to teach struggling readers to consciously raise questions while they read. I need to think about that one. And then, what else do good readers do when they read? RayS.

Topic: Motivation Defined

10-second review. Motivation: That which gives both direction and intensity to human behavior.

Source: Frymier. English Journal (May 1969), 709. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: “Motivation” is one of those terms we all know the meaning of until someone asks us to define it. I appreciate Frymier’s definition. RayS.

Topic: Learning vs. Education

10-second review: Lewis Perleman: Learning has to do with satisfying curiosity; education is being told things.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (May 18, 1995), G1/G6.

Comment: I think I would re-define “education” as satisfying curiosity and “schooling” as being told things. Try beginning each class with a question. Check at the end of class to learn how many students are able to answer the question. I wish I had thought of that when I was teaching. RayS.

Topic: Motivation to Learn.

10-second review: Profile of eighteenth-century Mennonite school master Christopher Dock reveals that his methods were strikingly modern. He saw the need to motivate students to learn rather than to expect motivation and emphasized treating students as individuals.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (January 20, 1996), CC6.

Comment: I wonder how many teachers today still expect students to come to class motivated, teach to the students who are, and ascribe student failure to “laziness”? RayS.

Topic: Purpose and Learning

10-second review: One of the chief aids to learning is the sense of purpose.

Source: Highet, The Art of Teaching, 69. Although he focuses on lecturing, Gilbert Highet's book provides excellent ideas on teaching in general and on lecturing in particular.

Comment: Probably the most unasked (out loud) question in education is “Why am I learning this?” Students are afraid to ask it because everyone will think they are dumb. But those other students do not know the answer to the question either. The effect is boredom.

Teachers can improve their instruction significantly if they will make clear why they are teaching what they are teaching.

Is it possible that teachers don’t know why they are teaching what they are teaching? I certainly did not know why I was teaching grammar until my mentor, Mrs. May, asked me why I was teaching students the differences between the direct object and predicate nominative—whether to use I or me, he or him, she or her, they or them. After that, I never taught any grammar without knowing exactly how students were going to use that information in their writing. I always began my lessons in grammar by putting a problem on the board that the grammar I was going to teach them would solve. RayS.

Topic: What Is Learning?

10-second review: Proverb: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Source: N Quisenberry & M Willis. Language Arts (September 1975), 885. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: To the degree that students see the application of what they have learned, they will both remember and understand. Several years ago, I observed a 7th-grade science teacher who taught students the facts about the circulatory system from a textbook. The students were bored. She then distributed articles from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report on the use of the circulatory system in today’s medicine. The students were amazed at how knowledge of the circulatory system was being applied in today’s medicine. They were also fascinated by the questions that arose from working with the circulatory system in modern medicine. They could not stop talking about it.

Suggestion: Before planning your lessons on a topic, check the topic on the Internet. You will be amazed at what you find, sometimes thousands of hits. RayS.

Topic: Marshall McLuhan

What Was Marshall McLuhan’s Contribution to Education?

10-second review: Degree of involvement is key to how much we learn; inquiry is essential; exploration rather than instruction; need to be able to apply what is learned in activities outside of class.

Source: English Journal (January 1993), p. 55.

Comment: These are the keys to lesson plans. Building involvement, inquiry, exploration and application into your classes will motivate your students to learn. I wish I had known these keys when I was teaching. I might not have made light of the chore of lesson planning, and lesson planning might not have been such a chore. It would have been more of a challenge. RayS.

Topic: Role of the Teacher Today

10-second review: The teacher should cease to accept the role of fact-peddler and become with the students investigators, questioners.

Source: C McKowen. English Journal (November 1965), 702. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Someone else once said that best class he ever observed was one in which both students and teacher were searching for the solution to a problem. RayS.

Topic: Why Students Lose Interest in Learning

10-minute review: Ernest J. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: “Around the fourth grade students stop asking ‘Why?’ and start asking ‘Is this on the test?’ We need to keep ‘Why?’ alive for our students. ”

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (November 2, 1995) W3.

Comment: Someone once said that students are required to answer questions they haven’t asked and couldn’t care less about. Try beginning every unit with the students’ questions about the topic. You might find that they will care about finding the answers. RayS.

Topic: Purpose for Reading

10-second review. Preparing students to read: Give students a question, the answer to which is hidden in the text, that contradicts their prior beliefs.

Source: VA Ciardiello. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (November.2003), 228-239. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: This would be a good exercise in skimming. Beyond that, giving students a question to answer gives purpose for reading. And having a purpose for reading results in active rather than passive, pointless, purposeless reading. The worst, most boring reading assignment is “Open your books to page 35 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter.” Those directions have about as much motivation as a wet dish towel.

How do you help students read a difficult, apparently boring, apparently unfamiliar chapter in a textbook? Build up the students’ background knowledge of the topic of the chapter. Pre-teach unfamiliar vocabulary words. Either give students a purpose for reading in the form of a question or have the students preview by reading the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraphs and the last paragraph and raise their own questions to read to answer. After they have discussed the answers, have them apply or extend what they have learned. RayS.

Topic: Formula for Organizing Expository Writing

10-second review: 1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them; 2. Tell them; And 3. Tell them what you told them.

Source: D Greenburg. The Writer (June 2004), 32. The Writer is a magazine by writers for writers.

Comment: Here’s a real writer telling how he writes. (Expository writing explains something; narrative writing tells a story, usually in chronological order, from beginning to end.)

For some reason this advice about how to organize expository writing has become a cliché. Especially when people woodenly apply it in Microsoft’s PowerPoint, this very exciting approach to communication bores rather than excites. Yet all effective communication, both in writing and in formal speaking, follows this formula. The reader hears or reads the message three different ways. As one of my community college students said, “It’s like hitting your reader over the head three times.”

To me, this formula means an introduction to interest the reader, followed by a thesis sentence or statement of the main idea to be communicated, followed by paragraphs with details headed by topic sentences that develop the thesis sentence and concluded by a last paragraph that summarizes the thesis and its details a third time.

I think I am a fairly effective speaker and writer and I follow this formula every time I write or speak formally. If you don’t organize exposition in this manner, how do you organize it? RayS.

Topic: Reluctant, Alienated, Disadvantaged Readers

10-second review: Teach students labeled “reluctant,” “alienated,” “disadvantaged,” etc. to learn how to learn.

Source: LR Johannessen. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (May 2004), 638-647. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: In general, students labeled “reluctant,” “alienated” and “disadvantaged” have no interest in reading or learning. The idea of teaching them how to learn means using independent study. They pick a question to which they really want the answer. They prepare a plan of action, including a variety of resources to find their answers, especially people in the real world who are involved in the topic. You’ll need to teach them how to conduct an interview, use e-mail, the Internet, but also books and magazines. They will need to plan both written and creative methods of presenting their findings. From this project and others, students should learn how to learn whatever they want or need to learn. If possible, show them how to apply this newfound knowledge of “how to learn” to the classroom. RayS.

Topic: Six Levels of Thought

10-second review: A useful chart of levels of thought: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Summary: lowest—recall facts (knowledge); summarize, explain (comprehension); relate to real life (application); compare/contrast (analysis); create something new (synthesis); give an opinion (evaluation).

Example of using levels of thinking. Knowledge: draw and label the parts of the human heart; comprehension: describe the functions of each part of the heart; application: write a paragraph describing the things you do to keep your heart healthy; analysis: compare and contrast the lifestyles of a person with a healthy heart to a person with heart disease; synthesis: describe the journey of a blood cell through the arteries of an unhealthy heart; evaluation: evaluate a friend or relative’s lifestyle related to what you know about maintaining a healthy heart and make any recommendations for improvement.

Source: A Paziotopoulos & M Krull. The Reading Teacher (April 2004), 673. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: Useful in teaching students how to think. Useful in preparing questions; students should learn and apply these levels of thought. RayS.

Topic: Questions

10-second review: What type of question do you ask?

Summary: “There are really two different reasons for asking questions of a class: to find out if each individual has done his work...and to expose the difficulties they have found...in preparing the work; the former is a method of making them learn, the latter helps them to learn.”

Source: Highet, The Art of Teaching, p. 125. Highet’s book gives common-sense advice on how to teach effectively. Emphasizes lecture, but there are good lecturers and lecturers who put their students to sleep. Highet tells the reader how to be a good lecturer. Victims of boring lecturers will appreciate his advice.

Comment: Highet’s types of questions are about catching the students in not doing their work vs. finding out the difficulties in completing the work and helping them complete the work successfully.

For me, there are two other types of questions. The first type of question is to elicit from the students the answers given to them by the teacher. There’s a correct answer and the game is whether students have memorized what the teacher has taught them. Such questions are a bore.

With the second type of question, both teacher and student do not know the answer and must figure out how to find the answer. That type of question is honest inquiry, involves students actively in seeking the answer and helps students learn how to learn. RayS.

Topic: Planning

10-second review: Demonstrate planning by sharing with students the teacher’s plans.

Summary: “The best way to demonstrate the value of long-term planning is to plan all the work which the class will do, to explain the plan to them, to make sure that they keep it in mind, and after the work has been completed to look back over it and sum it up; the young have very little ability to make long-term plans; they live from day to day, or at least from one Saturday to another.”

Source: Highet, The Art of Teaching, p. 69. Highet’s book gives common-sense advice on how to teach effectively. Emphasizes lecture, but there are good lecturers and lecturers who put their students to sleep. Highet tells the reader how to be a good lecturer. Victims of boring lecturers will appreciate his advice.

Comment: Highet’s approach to teaching students long-term planning is called “modeling” in today’s educational lingo, demonstrating the skill by using it with the class.

The most significant question that students ask themselves every day in class is “Why am I learning this?” Purpose for learning needs to be an important part of lesson planning.

But Highet is also right. Teachers need to help students plan long-term projects. I remember being assigned long-term projects like term papers, but was never taught how to plan for them. RayS.

Topic: Punishments and Rewards

10-second review: Too much in teaching focuses on punishment for not doing things; why not focus on rewards?

Summary: “There is too much emphasis in the world on trying to get people to do things by threatening them with punishment rather than by offering them positive rewards. That’s true in all spheres, including government education and child rearing.”

Source: BF Skinner. U.S. News and World Report (November 3, 1980), 79.

Comment: The message of Walden Two. The best reward in teaching is to show students that they can develop and master the skills you are teaching. When students realize that they can read and they can write, that they encounter and understand the words they have covered in vocabulary, that people enjoy reading what they have written, that they have gained new ideas in reading and can discuss them intelligently, that they can stand in front of a room and deliver a tightly organized formal speech, students will feel the glow of achievement. The best way to teach them these things is to show them how and watch them succeed. Punishment means failure. RayS.

Topic: High School Reading

10-second review: A first-year high school teacher discovers that her students could not read literature independently.

Summary: “Ellen explained that she had been rudely awakened during her first year of teaching when she discovered her students could not read well. She had assumed that students in high school classes would be independent readers. ‘Well, first I assumed that everyone in my class could read, which is not the case…. Well, they could read but not the level of literature that we were reading. They could read the words but they couldn’t comprehend them.’ ”

Source: FL Hamel. Research in the Teaching of English (August 2003), 66. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Where to begin? I am assuming that the teachers will provide an introduction, including why the poem, novel or short story was chosen for reading. They will help the students build up background information on the piece of literature. They will pre-teach unfamiliar vocabulary and either set a purpose for reading or have the students develop their own purposes as in the following:

Poetry: The teacher reads the poem while the students read it silently. The students read the poem silently a second time. They underline or write any words and phrases about which they have questions. The class discusses the answers to those questions. After the discussion, students read the poem silently a third time and summarize the meaning of the poem and reactions to it.

Novel: Students read for five minutes near the beginning, half way through, three-fourths through and near the end. After each reading the students together summarize what they have read and raise questions to which they want the answers. Teacher records the questions and summarizes them in key words on the board. After this preview, teacher and students divide the questions into questions of fact that can be answered from the text, interpretation (why?) and criticism (style, etc.). Students read to answer the questions. Suggest to the students that if they become bored, they should read a paragraph a page until they are back to reading everything.

Short Story: Students read a single sentence in each column or on each page, tell what they have learned and raise questions about what they have learned. Students read a paragraph in each column or on each page and again summarize what they have learned and raise questions to which they would like the answers. They read to answer the questions and the class discusses those answers.

The key to helping students read these types of literature is their purpose for reading which comes from the questions they have raised. There are a number of ways to help students get ready to read literature. I will discuss those other techniques in other blogs on a similar topic. These, however, are basic methods for helping students read literature that is too difficult for them to read independently. RayS.

Topic: Educational Research

10-second review: When someone uses the words “Research says….” as proof for a certain educational practice, buyer beware.

Summary: “As education policy becomes a hot topic among those campaigning for local, state and national office, that well-worn phrase ‘all the research shows’ is cropping up with new abandon. We believe that research can indeed provide important insights to guide practice and policy—but given the complexity of school settings and students’ diverse needs, the research record seldom yields simple solutions that will do everywhere and for all.”

Source: A DiPardo & M Sperling, eds. Research in the Teaching of English (May 2004), 349. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Nothing makes me more upset than the statement, “Research says….” in education. I read a lot of educational research and gain many interesting ideas from it, but proof positive I don’t find in conclusions that say “indicates” and “suggests,” which are usually found in most educational research conclusions. As teachers, we are supposed to be critical readers, but, at least in the journals I read, even the best educated offer blanket statements from an educational research that has been termed “poorly designed” in general. The questions are good and the conclusions are helpful and they deserve thinking about, but they do not provide proof positive for the “best” educational practices. As the quote above says, education is too complex to apply to every situation. RayS.

Topic: Comprehension

10-second review: “Interest and background knowledge are two factors that enable students to read beyond what is considered their normal reading level.”

Source: K Ganske, et al. Reading Teacher (October 2003), 121. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: The more students know about a topic, the more they comprehend. Building background knowledge about the topic that is the subject of the students’ reading assignment really helps them to read beyond their so-called reading level. Add a purpose for reading and their chances of completing the assignment successfully increase measurably.

In my book, Teaching English, How To…. I spent a lot of time on the directed reading assignment, important activities of which are building background knowledge and setting purpose for reading. Pre-teaching unfamiliar vocabulary to be found in the assignment is another big help to the struggling reader as is having the students apply or extend what they have learned from reading after they have completed the assignment. Much better than “Open your books to page 35, read and answer the questions at the end of the chapter.”

The worst teacher I ever encountered was a high school biology teacher who gave a group of struggling readers the same textbook she was using with honors students, assigned them chapters to read and, without providing any assistance, tested them on what they could not understand. For her, it was the students’ fault that they could not read difficult material. Blah! What’s a teacher for? RayS.

Topic: Improving Teaching

10-second review: Keep a journal reflecting on the process of your teaching, noting problems, questions, possible answers, etc.

Source: D. Gorman. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (March 1998), 434-442. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: I think this technique would have been the quickest way for me to improve my teaching. Of course, I was young and, like most professionals carrying out their daily tasks, I didn’t take the time to reflect in writing on what I was doing. RayS.

Ideas from Professional Journals on Teaching English

From ideas in books, I now shift to interesting ideas that I have recorded from professional publications on the teaching of English like the following:

1. English Journal, 2. Language Arts (elementary, middle school), 3. College English, 4. College Composition and Communication, 5. Classroom Notes Plus, 6. Research in the Teaching of English, 7. Teaching English in the Two-Year College (publications of the National Council of Teachers of English. NCTE), 8. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (middle school and beyond), 9. The Reading Teacher, 10. Reading Research Quarterly (publications of the International Reading Association, IRA) and 11. The Writer, a magazine by writers for writers.

If you have been reading this blog, you are aware that it is based on my book, Teaching English, How To.... The ideas from professional publications in teaching English that I will discuss in some ways are related to the ideas I have published in my book. All of the ideas come from recent and not-so-recent publications. It is my intent that these ideas should make you pause to think about teaching English and its many complex parts, reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary, literature and teaching English as a second language. An example of an entry follows:

Topic: Improving Reading Comprehension

Summary: George Spache: “Students who can set strong purposes for their reading comprehend significantly better than those who set vague purposes” (or read with no purpose at all, RayS). C Cox. Language Arts (Sept. 75), 771.

Comment: When I was in school, no one ever mentioned purpose for reading. It was just, "Open your books to page 35, start reading and answer the questions at the end of the chapter." The idea of specifying a purpose never occurred to me. I read everything as if if it had to be memorized, a tremendous waste of time and a bore. Identifying a purpose for reading, a question to answer, the three causes of X War, etc. turns the passive reader into an active reader. I am a big believer in setting purpose for reading--and teaching students how to do it. RayS.

Reading, Books and Ideas

People do not have much time for reading anymore. Their time is taken up with working, household repairs, TV, radio, computers, e-mail, video games, the Internet, DVD’s cell phones, texting, shopping and sleeping.

Newspapers are becoming obsolete. My most recent morning edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer had more advertising space than news, a kind of newspaper infomercial. TV and the Internet present the news almost instantaneously along with video recording and streaming video. The cell phone has made talking and texting almost a 24-hour continuous activity.

TV and movies provide the entertainment that novels and short stories used to supply.

So why read? Ideas! Words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books produce ideas. Ideas result in reflection and understanding. The visual electronic media do not give the viewer time to reflect. Reflection enriches lives.

People will read if they are immersed in what they read. The purpose of this section of Teaching English, How To.... is to tell people how to become immersed in reading.

The books and ideas listed in the last part of this section on reading give some samples of the ideas that I have found in books over the years—books in which I became immersed because of the techniques I have experimented with and learned and shared with my readers. For me, ideas are the treasure to be found in books. Ideas have enriched my life. They have raised and answered my questions. They have helped me think about and understand the world around me. They have especially helped me understand me.

I hope these techniques and ideas will help you to become readers again.

Books and Ideas (43)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Edward Hoagland. “Heaven and Nature.” 1988. Reflections on committing suicide.

Stephen Jay Gould. “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown.” 1989. The author believes that people prefer “creation myths” to the reality that most phenomena evolve. Baseball is an example. It was not started by Abner Doubleday, a man who didn’t “know a baseball from a kumquat.” It evolved from primitive stick-and-ball games played by working people even before America became a British colony.

Gerald Early. “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant.” 1990. An African-American man watches the Miss America Pageant with his daughter. Confronts the unspoken belief that white women are the image of the perfect American woman.

John Updike. “The Disposable Rocket.” 1993. The author reflects on the male body and in the process contrasts it with the female’s. The man’s role in reproduction is like the rockets that propel the space capsule into space then fall away into the ocean. An interesting metaphor.

Saul Bellow. “Graven Images.” 1997. The author reflects on the process of being photographed. He thinks that photographers try to help the public see you as you really are, as opposed to how you want to be viewed. When you are being photographed as a public figure, the battle is on between the “photographee” and the photographer for how you will be immortalized in public. The photographer tries to reduce the public figure to the confines of a paper or a frame that makes the public figure look like everyone else.

The end of “Books and Ideas.” To be continued at another time.

Books and Ideas (42)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Alice Walker. “Looking for Zora.” 1975. In looking for the place where Zora Neale Hurston was buried in Florida, the author meets a number of people who knew her. Their stories sometimes contradicted each other. But Zora’s personality, her ability to look at life as it is, without tears, and her independent thinking, seem to have separated her from her family, from her husband, and from the majority of other blacks. “She was not a teary sort of person.” And she was a great writer and collector of African-American folklore, who died in poverty.

Adrienne Rich. “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” 1977. Using the technique of Pascal’s Pensées and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, the author jots down random thoughts on the phenomenon of women and lying, which most often occurs in order to survive in a male-dominated world.

Joan Didion. “The White Album.” 1979. The author tells about and reflects on her experiences in 1968, experiences with the Black Panthers and college takeovers. She summarizes by saying that another author had said he put his experiences in writing so he could find meaning in them, but she has put these experiences in writing and still finds no meaning in them. Reflects the mood of the time.

Richard Rodriguez. “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood.” 1980. The author noticed that the sounds, not the words, of his native Spanish communicated intimacy with his family, that the public language, English, did not convey that intimacy. It’s not the words, but the spirit behind the words that conveys intimacy among the family. It’s not the language, per se, that communicates intimacy, but the sounds and the spirit communicated through those sounds that enclosed the world of his family.

Gretel Ehrilich. “The Solace of Open Spaces.” 1981. Living in Wyoming required the author to adjust to the wide open spaces, the laconic conversations and the feeling of being sealed in by isolation. In general, space is a good thing, enabling people to welcome all kinds of ideas, whereas we in the East build obstructions against space by filling up our spaces with the things we can buy.

Annie Dillard. “Total Eclipse.” 1982. Impressions of the world as it looks during a total eclipse of the sun. The world no longer looks ordinary, setting off reflections on that changed world. A dead world. The world when the sun burns out. But then the eclipse is over and people hurry back to the now familiar world of their daily lives.

Cynthia Ozick. “A Drugstore in Winter.” 1982. The author tells how she became a writer—through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father’s drug store, all kinds of people either gave her or loaned her books and she consumed all of them.

William Manchester. “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All.” 1987. Manchester vividly describes the conditions under which his company of marines fought on Okinawa, the island from which, if there had been no atomic bombs, the invasion of mainland Japan would have been launched. The statistics of loss are staggering, more than Hiroshima, more Americans than at Gettysburg.
He pleads for Americans to remember those who died in war on Memorial Day. And he makes it clear that he has not forgiven the Japanese for what they did to his friends and fellow marines and to him personally. I think this essay should be read aloud at Memorial Day ceremonies. Americans need to understand the realities of war. They need to appreciate the conditions under which those who gave their lives—and those who survived—fought.

Books and Ideas (41)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Martin Luther King, Jr.. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963. In a letter that I think is as eloquent as anything I have ever read, King responds to white clergymen who criticize him for engaging in nonviolent peaceful protest that results in violence and who urge black people to wait patiently while white society adjusts to accept them. King quotes Aquinas and Martin Buber. He uses scathing logic. He uses plain statement of the treatment of blacks by whites. His message is, Why are not you, the white religious Christians, joining us in the march to justice in behalf of your black brothers to fulfill the Constitutional guarantees for its citizen? Unforgettable.

Tom Wolfe. “Putting Daddy On.” 1964. Father visits his college-dropout son, living like a hippie, to try to talk sense into him, but his language, almost unintelligible in its use of metaphors, is incapable of being understood by his son whose point of view is completely different from his dad’s. The two see the world differently, summarized by the father’s final comment to the narrator as they leave the son’s “pad” to take a taxi: “You tell me,” he says. “What could I say to him? I couldn’t say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn’t make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one.” That is, not one of his reasons for wanting his son to return to respectable middle-class life made sense to his son.

Susan Sontag. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” 1964. The best summary of “Camp” is in the last sentence: “It’s good because it’s awful.”

Vladimir Nabokov. “Perfect Past.” 1966. Reflections on the themes that emerged through writing his autobiography.

M. Scott Momaday. “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” 1967. As an adult, the author reflects on his Kiowa Indian culture as he experienced it through his grandmother in his youth. The love of the sun and of nature stands out.

Elizabeth Hardwick. “The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King.” 1968. The author reflects on the meaning of the death of Martin Luther King. She suggests that the Christian religion will no longer play a part in the battle for civil rights.

Michael Herr. “Illumination Rounds.” 1969. Interviews and incidents in the Vietnam War. They add up to the incomprehensibility to the men who fought it. “The intel[ligence] report lay closed on the green field table and someone had scrawled, ‘What does it all mean?’ across the cover sheet.”

Maya Angelou. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” 1970. Growing up in Stamps, Ark., the author as a young girl suffers both indignities herself and the indignity of watching her relatives as they are threatened or taunted by whites. Her mother always sang hymns to help her endure existence and to dream of relief from that existence in God. That’s why the “caged bird” sings.

Lewis Thomas. “The Lives of a Cell.” 1971. The single cell with its complexity…. “…with too many working parts lacking visible connections….” is like the complexity of the earth and the earth is most like the single cell.

John McPhee. “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” 1973. Contrasts Monopoly, the game, with the real world of the sordid streets and places in Atlantic City.

William H. Gass. “The Doomed in Their Sinking.” 1973. Thoughts on the subject of suicide.

Books and Ideas (40)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Ed. Oates and Atwan (Continued).

S. J. Perelman. “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away.” 1944. “One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique, the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 degrees F., and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack and a pack of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like ‘Pass section F through slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washer (see Fig. 9).’ The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb.”

Katherine Anne Porter. “The Future Is Now.” 1950. An assessment of where we human beings are in the history of our existence in the world, with the atomic bomb, the symbol of humanity’s willful desire for self-destruction. But it may not be a world competed and, in the future, we could make a world in which its fragmented nature of today will be put together with some sense of meaning.

Mary McCarthy. “Artists in Uniform.” 1953. The author tells how she reluctantly becomes engaged in a conversation about Jews with a prejudiced military man. He thinks because of her Irish name that he can safely say whatever he wants about Jews. He doesn’t like them. The author waits until the colonel is about to depart again on the train to tell him that she is married to a Jew. A case study of a prejudiced mind and the futility of trying to change it with arguments based on logic.

Rachel Carson. “The Marginal World.” 1955. The shore brings land and sea together. The author reflects on the interaction of the two.

James Baldwin. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. Baldwin struggles with his hatred of whites. He recognizes that hatred is self-destructive, and concludes that he must accept life and people as they are, without rancor. But he is resolute that he will not stop fighting injustice.

Loren Eiseley. “The Brown Wasps.” 1956. People and animals cling to habits even though places have since changed—a department store replaces a field that once was tenanted by insects, birds, rodents and rabbits. The elevated goes underground and pigeons who used to be fed at its stations find the food they counted on gone. People and animals cling to the memories of what once was.

Eudora Welty. “A Sweet Devouring.” 1957. Author writes about her love of reading series books. She discovers that the volumes that follow are not as good as the first. Then she discovered 24 volumes of mark Twain, each book different. She had outgrown formulas for writing.

Donald Hall. “A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails.” 1961. The author reflects on the life of Washington Woodward who could do anything on his farm, but whose life was wasted on moving rocks and saving old, used nails and talking about every minute detail of his experience. The author seems to conclude that the activities of Washington Woodward’s life had no value to anyone. It was a full life, but it had no social significance. Seems to suggest that the traditional New Hampshire way of life was no longer relevant in the modern world.

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I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Ed. Oates and Atwan. (continued)

T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. Several ideas merge in this essay. The poetry of the past lives although the poet is dead. The poet’s craftsmanship puts emotion in the poem; it is not the emotion of the poet himself. The individual poet in the present must be aware of what lives in past work so that he can produce poetry that lives now and in the future as part of that past. Eliot is laying the groundwork for the “New Critics,” who emphasized studying the work of art, not the poet, and certainly not, as Rosenblatt contends, to encourage readers to interpret the work of art with their personal experience.

Ernest Hemingway. “Pamplona in July.” 1923. Hemingway reports on the bullfights at Pamplona in Spain.

H.L. Mencken. “The Hills of Zion.” 1925. Mencken went to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes monkey trial. While there, he observed a religious ritual of fundamentalist Christians who went into convulsions, howling hosannas.

Zora Neale Hurston. “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” 1928. The title is the best summary.

Edmund Wilson. “The Old Stone House.” 1932. A trip back to the town of his youth and a mood of depression as it reveals to him a way of life that he would never want to experience again.

Gertrude Stein. “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” 1935. Now I understand “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Convoluted sentences. Erratic punctuation. Her idea about masterpieces is almost like TS Eliot’s effacement of the author’s personality in creating a work of poetry. Stein says if you remember you are you, you cannot create a masterpiece. You are limited by your personality and identity. If you efface your identity, you can create a masterpiece. Automatic writing? Sensible ideas are occasionally thrown into what appears to be a random collection of thoughts in stream of consciousness. But the piece is well organized. She moves from defining a masterpiece to explaining why there are so few masterpieces—most writers remember themselves and their identities and therefore cannot produce anything truly original. I guess.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Crack-Up.” 1936. Reflections on what he now realizes was a nervous breakdown. Maybe it was only depression. Youth and life end in unhappiness.

James Thurber. “Sex ex Machina.” 1937. Man vs. technology.

Richard Wright. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” 1937. Learning to live in a white man’s world, a world of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Richard Wright and other blacks who endured this cruelty were bitter. His story is raw and inspires hatred for the Southern whites.

Robert Frost. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” 1939. Frost reflects on the response he has to poems. His most memorable line: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

E.B. White. “Once More to the Lake.” 1941. On his return to the Maine lake where he spent his summers as a child. As an adult with his children, the author feels the years slipping away. Everything is the same as when he was a child. Almost. Outboard motors are an irritant. And as he watches his young son, he has a premonition of his own death.

Langston Hughes. “Bop.” 1949. The origin of Bop, from the noise a cop’s nightstick makes on a Negro’s head because he’s black. Whites cannot understand Bop since they haven’t been beaten about the head because they are white.

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I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Why read it? The essays are in chronological order, from Mark Twain’s “Corn-Pone Opinions,” 1901, to Saul Bellow’s “Graven Images” in 1997. If you expect these essays to be pleasant, comforting and fun to read, you are mistaken. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the editors of the book, says, “My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.” Most of these essays provoke. [Many of these essays I had never read before, but they paint a mostly disturbing portrait of the twentieth century. RayS.]

With the following summaries of the essays in this book, I bring to a conclusion my review of some of some books and ideas that I have read. Books produce ideas. Pictures present images. An idea in a book is worth a thousand images. Ideas and images appeal to different parts of the human personality. Ideas appeal to the mind. Images appeal to the emotions. Ideas can appeal to emotions. Images can appeal to the mind. Both can lead to action. Both can lead to contemplation. Both enrich the human experience.

Mark Twain. “Corn-Pone Opinions.” 1901. The source of most men’s ideas is in imitation of others’ ideas.

W.E.B. DuBois: “Of the Coming of John.” 1903. John, a young black man, has been educated at college to think and to question. When he returns home to the South from college, he is met by the stone wall of prejudice. The white people want nothing to do with thinking and questioning the status quo. [A touching drama of the black experience in America. RayS.]

Henry Adams. “A Law of Acceleration.” 1906. The complexity of the modern world as bombs and knowledge double in power and ideas every ten years, leading to unresolvable contradictions. [A “classical” Future Shock (by Alvin Toffler). RayS.]

William James. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” 1910. William James suggests that the “moral equivalent of war” would be universal service for young people in the country’s behalf. Young people would be “drafted” to be trained to work in mines, on highways, etc. Thus the military virtues—the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching—would be preserved without war. [Did this essay influence John F. Kennedy when he suggested the Peace Corps? Harry S. Truman suggested universal service after WWII. Couldn’t get it through Congress. RayS.]

Randolph Bourne. “The Handicapped.” 1911. The inner thoughts of a disabled person. He analyzes his condition, the responses of others to him, and understands that his disability has advantages as well as disadvantages. He insists especially on developing and recognizing his individuality as opposed to the stereotyped beliefs of those whom he encounters that disabled people do not have the potential for success as do the healthy. [A remarkably contemporary essay. RayS.]

John Jay Chapman. “Coatesville.” 1912. Expresses his horror and rage at the burning of a black man in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, while hundreds of white onlookers did nothing. [I live less than five miles from Coatesville. I had never heard of this incident. I’m shocked. RayS.]

Jane Addams. “The Devil Baby at Hull-House.” 1916. A rumor that a devil baby is at Hull House brings many women to see what they believe to be retribution for some domestic sin committed by a man against a woman or child The stories of most of these women are of unrelieved suffering at the hands of their husbands. The problem of the rights of women in a man’s world pre-dates the later Civil Rights movement of the treatment of African Americans in a white world.

Books and Ideas (37)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Yankee from Olympus: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Catherine Drinker Bowen.
Why read it? Although this book concerns primarily Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., i.e., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, spends time in the first quarter of the book describing in colorful detail the grandfather, called Abiel, and Junior’s father, called Oliver or Dr. Holmes. The grandfather, Abiel, was a lawyer and Junior’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Autocrat at the Breakfast Table fame, a physician.
It is a good thing that Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote this book. If the book had been written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., its contents would have been as obscure as his legal opinions and dissents.
Although Justice Holmes was a student of law, he was also a student of life. He thought deeply about it and his words are often memorable.
I think my overall impression of Holmes’s life is that of his sense of purpose throughout his life. He appears not to have intentionally wasted a single day.
Quote. Holmes’s attitude toward death: "At the grave of a hero, we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”
Quote: “Time, events, history itself, would prove his dissents. One by one they became law.”
Quote: “There was indeed a great contagion in this courage—a courage not born with Holmes but handed down with all the accumulated force, the deep spiritual persuasion, of the generations behind him."

Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. Elizabeth D. Samet. Why read it? The title of the book, Soldier’s Heart, refers to the symptoms of heart disease that appear in soldiers with post-traumatic disorders. They do not have physical heart disease. They do have a disease of the feeling human heart. The author, a female English teacher at West Point, who obviously has a close relationship with the institution and its students, reveals much of what it is like to attend West Point—the rituals, the language, the culture of the military. Many of these details make fascinating reading.
Her subject, English, is out of keeping with the rest of the military training that makes up the cadets’ day. But the cadets’ interaction with the literature and the films to which she exposes them, is thoughtful, relating their lives and careers to the ideas of what they read and view. And it is a wide and varied range of literature and film that she uses.
In the last chapter she reflects on how young the cadets are and the contrast with what waits for them after they graduate. But she has helped them to think about life and war through her reading literature with them.
Quote: “My ongoing conversations with students, some of which began when men and women who are now lieutenants and captains were plebes, reveal the ways in which literature helps them to understand their own increasingly complicated lives.”

Travels with Charley (In Search of America). John Steinbeck.
Why read it? I found out when I read the novel East of Eden, that John Steinbeck likes to philosophize and he does it well. He does it by the sentence. Brief. Concise. To the point. That makes Travels with Charley, a travelogue, the perfect vehicle for Steinbeck who can cross America and comment on what he finds: the people, the speech, the unforgettable characters and scenes. I thought of some other “travelogues” as I was reading it: Lolita (a novel by Nabokov) and On the Road (Kerouac). Both of those books conveyed impressions of Americans and American culture at a particular time.
For three-fourths of the book, I enjoyed the narrative of Steinbeck’s experience, his impressions and reflections. But it ends with the South—and then the book turns nasty. It’s the South I discovered when I made a trip across the country at approximately the same time as Steinbeck (1962), in 1960, the South that hates blacks with a vehemence and rage that stunned me and stunned Steinbeck, too.
Steinbeck offers a few ideas that are thought-provoking. Otherwise, the narrative isn’t deep. But it is entertaining—until he reaches the South. He says he is not drawing conclusions about the nature of the people in the South. But it is hard not to. A very disturbing finish to an otherwise idyllic trip across America.
Quote: “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

Books and Ideas (36)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

The God That Failed. Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer.
Why read it? The accounts in this book are by idealists who thought Communism would create a classless society to replace a capitalist society built on social class, greed and competition, a society that created poverty, inhumanity and injustice for the lowest class, the proletariat, the poorest people in society. Some of these men joined the Communist Party. Others were considering it. All were disillusioned by the actual experience in the Communist Party and in the Soviet Union.
Three topics addressed by these writers were the Communist theory of “truth,” the Communist theory of art, and the Communists’ primary method of achieving their ends by using any means necessary.
The classless society would have an interregnum called the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” that would “wither away” to produce a classless society. The men in this book concluded that such a dictatorship would never wither away because, as Stephen Spender, one of the six authors in the book said, the Communist dictatorship in Russia and in the Communist Party consisted of too much power in the hands of too few people. People like Stalin do not ”wither away.”
The writers in this book were too accustomed to freedom, the freedom to interpret reality as they saw it and the freedom to criticize. The Communist Party wanted nothing to do with criticism.
Quote: “The highest mark of culture is the ability to live in peace with persons who are different from ourselves.”
Quote: “Although I never have agreed with the views of such as Aldous Huxley that all power corrupts, I think that power is only saved from corruption if it is humanized with humility. Without humility, power is turned to persecutions and executions….”
Quote: “The freedom of art speaks to the individuality of each human being.”

Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann.
Why read it? Novel. The study of how a middle-class prosperous family of businessmen declines in prosperity: the origin, causes and progression of decadence in the family, a transformation of the male heirs from the hard-headed spirit of business and reality to the spirit of escape from the world into beauty through art.
Thomas Buddenbrook’s career is the history of everyman, from youthful energy, to hard-working businessman, to community servant, to enervated, dejected, dispirited, conscious of failure in life, old age. The code of the Buddenbrooks is to do one’s duty to the family and to sacrifice one’s individual happiness to the prosperity of the family.
Quote. Nietzsche: “Every good book that is written against life is still an enticement to life.”
Quote: “…a study of the psychology of decadence.”
Quote: “But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things [the ocean] because he is weary from the chaos within.”
Quote: “God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness. I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith.”

Watch and Ward. Henry James.
Why read it? Novel. Why read Henry James? For many reasons. His subtle expression of the intricacies of relationships is revealing of how people think and feel in relation to others. His character studies reveal the complexity of personality. He throws off ideas and memorable words almost as afterthoughts. One will find many a mot juste in his novels. And he works mainly with the relationships of unsubtle, honest and straightforward Americans against the subtle devious, cultured Europeans. However, Watch and Ward deals only with America and is an early novel.
The idea behind the novel is bizarre. Roger Lawrence adopts a little girl and brings her up to be his perfect wife. Only he doesn’t tell her that that has been his reason until she is fully grown and then she rebels. Two young men who have courted her turn out to be complete jerks and she finally realizes that Roger is the only man she knows who has a heart and, it is assumed, she marries him.

Books and Ideas (35)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë.
Why read it? Novel. Somewhere I read that Emily Brontë disliked the controlled emotion and manners of Jane Austen’s novels, and set out to show that life is about passion. I do not know if this is true, but Wuthering Heights is certainly the opposite of the novels of Jane Austen. Wuthering Heights is about raw emotion, cruelty, vengeance and misanthropy. It is about anger, unbroken anger at the world and all the human beings in it. But it is also about a love that is passionate and unforgettable. Quite a mix.
Quote. Matthew Arnold: “For passion, vehemence and grief, she [Emily Brontë] has no equal since Byron.” Wuthering Heights was written a year before Emily Brontë died at age 29.
Quote. Heathcliff: “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction.”
Quote: “For himself, he grew desperate; his sorrow was of that kind that will not lament; he neither wept nor prayed; he cursed and defied; execrated God and man….”
Quote. Catherine: “…he’s [Heathcliff] more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire.”

The Years of the Forest. Helen Hoover.
Why read it? Reminiscent of Thoreau, wife and husband, writer and illustrator, live in the Minnesota woods. It was no vacation. The conditions were primitive. But she and her husband were able to be independent, to work out their destiny without being dependent on anyone or any thing. They had to make their own decisions. They knew the animals with whom they had a close relationship as individuals, not just as wildlife. They learned to live with nature, not to control it.
Quote: “To us the efforts of man to ‘conquer nature’ and so prove himself greater than the unity of which he is a part or superior to the forces that created him, seem not only dangerous and presumptuous, but stupid and silly.”
True love—the story of Mr. And Mrs. Twit, two injured juncos. When Mr. Twit recovered and was able to fly with the other birds, he did so. The Hoovers cared for Mrs. Twit with her injured wing over the winter. When spring came, the juncos returned, but one bird stayed apart—Mr. Twit. Mrs. Twit joyously joined him and they flew away together.
Quote: “I had already learned how to tell temperature by the feel of snow under my boots—soft and compressible around twenty degrees, crunching at zero, squeaking at ten to twenty below, crackling like small firecrackers at thirty below and colder.”
Quote: “First, we had not thought we were any more important than the flora and fauna around us; second, we had tried to leave as little trace of our passing over the earth’s surface as was possible.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert M. Pirsig.
Why read it? The author set out on a motorcycle vacation trip from Minnesota to California with his estranged teen-age son, Chris. It is actually a trip that retraces his career as a college teacher of writing before a mental breakdown. The ghost of “Phaedrus,” the person he was before his breakdown, is ever present. He is attempting to reconstruct what he was before his breakdown.
Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition rather than through faith and devotion; practiced mainly in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Also called Zen Buddhism.
Quote: “Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class. Curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and lave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it is really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a large and frightening vacuum.”
Quote: “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”
Quote: “What the hell is quality?”

Books and Ideas (34)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

The Wonder Book for Boys and Girls. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Why read it? Hawthorne displays the story teller’s art. While his writing style is ornate, his tales of the ancient myths sound as if they have been told in a summer meadow and in other comfortable settings with the children gathered round. Hawthorne intended to make the ancient classical myths presentable to children, but maybe adults need to rise to the wonder of children to appreciate the myths fully. Eustace Bright is Hawthorne’s composer and story teller. The myths that Eustace retells are “The Gorgon’s Head” (Medusa); “The Golden Touch” (Midas); “The Paradise of Children” (Pandora’s box); Hercules and “The Three Golden Apples”; “The Miraculous Pitcher” (Philemon and Baucis); “The Chimera” (Bellerophon and Pegasus). Enjoy.
Quote: “But some people have what we may call the ‘leaden touch,’ and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon!”
Quote: “…a good little boy, who was always making particular inquiries about the precise height of giants and the littleness of fairies, how big was Marygold, and how much did she weigh after she was turned to gold?”
Quote: “Eustace Bright told the legend of Bellerophon with as much fervor and animation as if he had really been taking a gallop on the winged horse; at the conclusion, he was gratified to discern, by the glowing countenances of his auditors, how greatly they had been interested.”

The Writer’s Chapbook. George Plimpton, Ed.
Why read it? A chapbook is a short book with short entries. The Writer’s Chapbook is a book by writers on writing. The topics include the following: What is a writer? How to write a novel. Why poems are difficult to read. How writers write. And the characteristics of good writing. If you write as part of your profession or responsibilities or even if you are simply interested in writing, the ideas in this book will give you opportunity to reflect on the process and product of writing.
Quote: What are the characteristics of good writing? Robertson Davies: “…the ability to keep people wanting more. You cannot stop reading any of the great Russians.”
Quote: Henry Miller: “I’m always looking for the author who can lift me out of myself.”
Quote: Walker Percy: “But something keeps—or fails to keep—the reader reading the next sentence.”
Quote: Hemingway: “So that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seems actually to have happened; very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.”

Who Wakes the Groundhog? Ronald Rood.
Why read it? From reading this book, I realize how unobservant I am about life around me. This book is packed with interesting facts about insects, birds and animals. The question in the title is about how life in nature experiences the seasons. If one studies nature, the seasons are not clearly marked as they are on the calendar. A complex set of circumstances often has to occur for insect, bird and animal life to flourish. The seasons flow from one to the other with some flora and fauna who are early and some who are laggard. The champion season jumper is the Arctic tern who spends his time at both poles and who rarely sees the sunset.
Quote: “It was one of those splendid days when the crunch of the snowshoes and the joy of living were all anyone would ever wish.”
Quote: “Like the rest of his woodland neighbors, he had little respect for the calendar anyway.”

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. Malcolm Cowley.
Why read it? What can ordinary writers learn from the comments by writers on their writing? The book begins with six and one-half pages of questions the interviewers asked the writers whom they interviewed. The list of questions is of value in itself for future interviewers of writers.
Quote. F. Mauriac: “The novel has lost its purpose.”
Quote. Joyce Carey. “A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.”
Quote. William Faulkner: “Art has no concern with peace and contentment.”
Quote. Simenon: “Readers want a novel to probe their own troubles.”

Books and Ideas (33)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Underworld. Don DeLillo.
Why read it? Novel. When I worked as a K-12 language arts supervisor, I encountered a question from a parent that I did not answer satisfactorily. She asked me, “Why is all the literature we study in the secondary schools so depressing?” I gave her the standard answer of course: even when concerned with tragedy, literature affirms life. That answer did not satisfy her. Well, this novel is another in the “Depressing School of Literature.” And yet, it affirms life. It defines the people in the “Underworld,” the bottom of the social ladder, as depressed, helpless, hopeless and having no control of their lives. It’s an attitude that puts people in the dregs of society.
Quote: “The serenity of immense design is missing from her life.”

The Western Canon. Harold Bloom.
Why read it? Steve Jobs of Apple, Inc., is widely quoted as saying that “Nobody reads anymore.” That may be an exaggeration, but I think it is probably true that not many people read serious books anymore. And maybe never did except under duress in our schools and colleges. Bloom suggests that the goal in our schools and colleges today is no longer intellectual excellence, but achieving social harmony and remedying historical injustice. Bloom explores the problem of no longer reading serious books, the books enumerated in the Western Canon, “what has been preserved out of what has been written.”
Why do people read? According to Bloom, people don’t read for “easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.” “Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.” And I infer from Bloom’s remarks that reading the books of the Canon is a search for ideas, the purpose of this blog.
What is Bloom saying? Literature does not exist to alter individuals or society; that the Canon displays a complex view of humanity; that people read to enlarge their lonely existence by understanding the complexity of motivation and point of view in the world, but without didacticism and moralizing.
Quote: Samuel Johnson had a passion for consciousness; wanted more life right to the end of his life.”
Quote: “[Jane] Austen’s major heroines had an inner freedom that could not be repressed.”
Quote: “Whitman tried to live as if life were a perpetual morning.”
Quote: “What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies’ where Batman comics…theme parks, television, movies and rock [and rap and text messaging? RayS] will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.”

What’s in a Word? Mario Pei.
Why read it? Many people love to read about words. They play daily word games in the newspaper. The stories of words and of the English language are fascinating. And books on words are just plain fun to read. Pei gives the reader a basic course in the history of the English language. He also deals with some fundamental issues: the nature of language, speech vs. writing and the role of grammar in learning language. Fascinating.
Quote: “But there is a deeper reason for preferring the cultivated language…. The same word…will carry the same meaning to all who use it…. This community of meaning leads to a community of understanding and a better possibility of effective collaboration.”
Quote: “It is an interesting fact that the critics of prescriptive grammar are its most faithful followers. They may advocate extending equality to substandard usages in theory, but they actively discriminate against them in practice.”
Quote: “Every word tells a story….”

The Writer’s Book. Helen Hull, Ed.
Why read it? An anthology of thoughts on writing—and reading—by a variety of writers. If you are interested in how real writers write, you will enjoy this book.
Quote. Pearl Buck: “People want to read about themselves, not the writer.”
Quote. Thomas Mann: “Everything great has come in spite of affliction, pain, poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion and many other obstructions.”
Quote. John Hersey: “Novelists can make people feel as if they participated in the events of the novel.”

Books and Ideas (32)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy.
Why read it? In War and Peace, Tolstoy alternated literary forms, using fiction to tell his story of the maturing of Pierre Bezukhov, Andre Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova during the Napoleonic campaigns in Russia, and essays in which he discusses the ironies and absurdity of war. In other words, two battles are the essence of this novel: the personal and social battles in fiction; the military battle in essays. The story covers roughly the years between 1805 and 1820, centering on the invasion of Russia by Napoleon’s army in 1812 and the Russian resistance to the invader.
No summary can capture the scope of this novel with over five hundred characters and ideas about life and death and the military. When you have finished reading it, you have struggled with Pierre to understand and accept life; you have faced the confusion of warfare and accepted life and death with Andre Bolkonsky; you have flirted with life with Natasha and begun to realize that she must accept responsibility for her words and actions. And with Tolstoy, you have ridiculed the notion that leaders’ own personal ambitions should doom the mass of the citizens to die for such absurd causes.
Quote: “It is only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken….”
Quote: “Just as in a dream everything may be unreal, incoherent, and contradictory except the feeling behind the dream.”

Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II. Thomas Childers.
Why read it? This book is a remarkable piece of writing. You are truly “there” to watch these men in all of their training and their missions over Germany. Childers, an historian, uses the letters from the crew’s family to re-create vividly their lives and times. He uses the techniques of fiction, but the details are historically true. The ironies of war are dramatically presented. When I gave a copy of the book to my brother-in-law, a pilot in the Navy, he could not put it down and read it within a single evening. The book is that compelling.
Quote from a review written by Art Carey of the Philadelphia Inquirer: “His [Thomas Childers’] mother’s brother, Howard Goodner, was a dashing basketball player who won a scholarship to Western Kentucky University. He was a radio operator aboard the last U.S. bomber shot down over Germany. The telegram informing the family that he was missing in action arrived on VE Day.”
Quote from Thomas Childers, the author: “I never knew my uncle, but here I am still thinking about him and writing about him.”

The Way of All Flesh. Samuel Butler.
Why read it? Novel. Butler does well in reproducing the thoughts of a young child viewing the adult world. Through three generations, sons in the family Pontifex lived in fear of their fathers and then treated their sons in the same way. The novel is about Ernest’s progress from thinking about, but being afraid to say, what is wrong in the world, to having the freedom and ability to say/write what he is thinking. Ernest progresses from fear and dependence while growing up to independence as an adult.
An attack on the stereotypical family and the abuse of children by their parents. This abuse is both physical and emotional. Do all sons hate/dislike their fathers? Communication between father and sons is the problem. Neither understands the other. Neither know the other. What I most enjoyed about this book was Butler’s satiric comments on almost every subject.
Quote: "One great reason why clergymen’s households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home….”
Quote: “Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you will have occasion for this or that knowledge or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better….”