Like everyone else, I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird before. I first read it as a ninth grader and didn’t like it too much and then as a student teacher observing my mentor teacher. She scaffolded my teaching experience very well, as she first taught the majority of TKAM herself, co-taught a historical research paper with me, and then allowed me to teach Death of a Salesman by myself. Since I didn't have any say in how she taught TKAM (because she didn't hand the class to me at that point in time) I was frustrated when she stuck to a very traditional model when teaching the novel. That being said, I like TKAM, but I don’t love it. I might be able to fall in love with it this time around since we’re taking a different approach to reading with reader response instead of the transactional approach that both my ninth grade English teacher and my mentor teacher took. Sorry to sound bitter since most of you are expressing the utmost adoration for the novel, but I think my experience goes to show that when literature is taught in one way--a traditional, transactional way--it can negatively affect students and produce within them a disregard and sour attitude toward reading.
That being said, I can’t ignore the second chapter where Scout goes to school for the first time. The teacher tells her that her father needs to stop teaching her because he’s doing it wrong. I don’t remember my ninth grade teacher and my mentor teacher discussing this small section of the book, but it is entirely relevant to us as preservice and beginning teachers. The book is set sometime in the 1930s when choice theory and the traditional model were on the scene and John Dewey tried to balance these approaches with his experience model. Why does Lee allude to the Dewey Decimal System? I guess I’m ignorant to that allusion. But it obviously made me think of John Dewey and his response to choice and the traditional method which leads me to believe that Ms. Caroline was adhering to the traditional method? I don’t know, because a traditional, industrialized model wouldn’t be something “new” a beginning teacher would have learned in college at that time. According to my reading of the history of English as a subject, English shifted to being taught democratically and teachers had a more humane quality instead of an automated one. In Changing Our Minds by Miles Myers, Dewey’s ideas for an experienced-based curriculum were supported by NCTE, but they got pushed out of focus toward the 1940s and schools stuck to the decoding and analytic literacy model. This model defined reading as “decoding and analysis of parts” thus requiring students “to be able to understand the materials they had not seen or heard before” (p. 86). This sounds a lot like Ms. Caroline’s philosophy, as she asks Scout to tell Atticus to stop teaching her how to read; she needed to come to reading with a “fresh mind” (Lee, p. 21). Scout is frustrated by this because she claims that Atticus didn’t teacher her how to read, she acquired the skill by watching him read and followed along with his finger running under the text.
This example of education in TKAM goes to show that a knowledge and implementation of multiple pedagogical philosophies is important in the primary and secondary classrooms. Dewey taught us that adopting one extreme over the other (traditional vs. choice) or settling on a weird hybrid of both is detrimental to education. A reformed philosophy should be adopted (the experience model), a philosophy in which Rosenblatt bases most of her reader response pedagogy. Though Dewey doesn’t believe in combining an array of philosophies into once perceived “neat” philosophy, I’m sure he’d agree that implementing multiple models is better than adhering strictly to one model—even if it is loose like choice theory. This section of TKAMresounded deeply with me as an educator, as it’s a commentary on Lee’s part of the frustrations of student, particularly in the disciplines of reading and writing in school.
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