Most people are nice when you finally "see" them by Susan Bistrican

The representation of difference in To Kill a Mockingbird may not be one we can wholly relate to today, but it can certainly be related to themes affecting society more presently. I like the ending of this book because it isn’t aligned with pop culture’s formula for a happy ending, especially the culture of adolescents who would be reading this book in high school. In a way, the ending is still “happy” because Jem and Scout are safe, Bob Ewell got what he deserved, and Boo is somewhat welcomed into the rest of society, if only for a moment. But it’s ultimately an indifferent ending--a realistic ending. Tom Robinson was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and died trying to escape because he couldn’t wait on the white person’s notion of a second chance. Scout may have gained some understanding and sympathy for difference, but everyone else was hardly affected. This ending is great because it doesn’t patronize its reader who is intelligent enough to discern reality from fantasy. The ending also teaches empathy and the possibility for chance and tolerance in a way that makes sense, not one where the author waves a magic wand and everything is fixed.

The differences between white people are poignant too, because the book doesn’t merely touch on racial issues but class issues as well. Jem figures out that ordinary people like the Finches don’t like the Cunninghams who don’t like the Ewells who don’t like black people. Scout wonders why the Cunningham-esque jury doesn’t convict Bob Ewell to spite the family they hate. Perhaps it is because black people, by default, were the most despised by default, having the lowest social status according to attitudes of that time. It is interesting that Jem explains why the Finches are better than the Cunninghams: their legacy of literacy. Being able to read and write is what marks the Finches as different and more worthy than the Cunninghams. Literacy is also a status symbol because those who could leave the farms and family businesses had the luxury of learning. People like the Cunninghams and Ewells don’t have that kind of privilege. If I teach this book in my future classroom, racial difference will definitely be one of the themes we discuss, but difference in general is more useful because the concept is timeless. Race issues have not been completely cleared up and I don’t think they ever will to the point where people are wholly understanding and sympathetic to one another, but strides in equality have come a long way since TKAM was written. I think a new issue to focus on is sexuality—namely the problem of homophobia, especially in the instance of bullying. I think the representation of difference in this novel can be related to current issues of difference at the present.

I also have to include a photo of  Scout’s ham costume from the film because it has me in stitches every time I read this book:

From To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Film.

Hahahahahahhaha! Try to see the movie if you haven't. I couldn't find a clip of this scene on YouTube, but it's hilarious.

Teaching the trial by Susan Bistrican

 In my experience as a reader and teacher, the best part of To Kill a Mockingbird is part 2: the trial. When I say “best” I mean the part of the book that people “like” more. In my opinion, whether or not students like certain books or particular parts of books is entirely relevant to the secondary English classroom. Adolescents should be exposed to many different types of texts—canonical, young adult, and otherwise—but it is also important to recognize the texts that resound more with students. I remember liking the trial scene when I was a ninth grader because it seemed to be that part of the book that had the most action. I hated reading about Scout, Jem, and Dill and their fascination with Boo Radley because I wasn’t a little kid, I was 15! Hello, I was grown (in my mind). Honestly, I didn’t care about their misadventures and I didn’t appreciate Lee’s language and character development at the time. Wow, that makes me sound like an ass. In my defense (so the literature gods don’t strike me down), I started to like literature a lot more a year later when I was a sophomore. My point is that I think teachers should recognize when students take a liking to a text or a portion of a text and enhance that experience by taking time to focus some of the unit around it. What I DON'T or expect teachers to do is fashion a unit solely around whether or not students “like” a book because I think it is important for students to experience different kinds of text. Frankly, I think there are some instances when students should endure a text they don’t like. This may be against a lot of the theory out there supporting student-selection in reading materials in order to foster a love of reading. I support student-selected reading when doing book clubs and lit circles, but there’s a time and a place for that. I don’t think an entire  year of reading should be done in book clubs; I think at least a couple of novels should be read as an entire class, including canonical texts. I think this will prepare students for situations where a curriculum is uniform and there is no opportunity for choice in reading materials (i.e., college literature classes). I know not every student will take lit classes or even go to college at all, but I think it’s good experience for a student to learn how to manage an experience where they have less choice—a situation where students use literacy strategies to get through a text they don’t necessarily “like.”

That being said, I think books like TKAM that have sections that are markedly different are an excellent example of the dynamic nature of literature. Maybe you guys don’t agree that part one is more “boring” than part two, but I can’t ignore my reading experience as a teen as well as my teens' experiences in my internship. When I taught TKAM, I was instructed to teach it as my mentor teacher does. In all the years she’s taught TKAM, she’s set up the classroom to look like a courtroom, moving desks and borrowing a podium from the assembly hall. I think the students really liked this part of the book because they got to move around, dress up if they chose, and speak assigned parts. (An example using drama, as Matthew taught us a few weeks ago!) We asked for volunteers at first and then carefully assigned parts to quieter kids, making sure that they read in order to participate, but sometimes giving them lesser roles if they didn’t like public speaking. We also showed parts of the 1962 film as they completed the scenes. We held discussions before the end of each class, focusing some of the conversation on racial injustice. Like Brianna, I am also curious to know how to teach this topic. I don’t think that we taught it that well in my classroom; the mentor teacher touched on it, but I feel like we could have done more. The school was 98% white, according to the student handbook from 2007 (and duh, just taking a look around the room). I had one black student out of 100, and many of the other students would look at him when we discussed race issues. I could totally tell he didn’t feel odd about the subject matter, just uncomfortable that all of his white peers looked in his direction for his opinion. If I teach TKAM again in the future in my OWN classroom, I will do a better job facilitating discussion surrounding the topic of race and the civil rights era.

As far as my YA book is coming along, it’s...coming along. Admittedly, I’ve been surveying other YA books at the same time, so I haven’t finished the one I selected initially. But in Crazy by Han Nolan, a 15 year-old boy, is dealing with his father’s institutionalization after he tries to kill him. Jason copes by “talking” to 4 people in his head, the reader being the 5^th. I don’t think Jason himself has some sort of schizoaffective disorder, I think it’s merely a coping mechanism. So far, one of his teachers recognizes his odd behavior: he dates his assignments during the time that his mother died, he writes “captain” as “cap’n.” His teacher goes berserk, which is odd because it’s not that big of a deal, and refers him to the school psychologist. There, Jason is included in a group therapy session where he is expected to share his feelings—something Jason isn’t accustomed to doing.

English pedagogy in TKAM by Susan Bistrican

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.

Emphasis on the reader by Susan Bistrican

Rosenblatt (1995) p. vii-117

Marshall (2000)

Wolk (2010)

I recently encountered reader response theory this past summer in a theory class over in the English department. It was interesting to see the words reader and response together, as I had been brought up mostly in the school of New Criticism in middle school and high school where engaging in the affective fallacy was like breaking the law. The teachers may have asked me to write a personal reaction here and there in journals, but they were mostly concerned with whether or not I gleaned the “one true meaning” and could rehash it on paper. Rosenblatt (1995) discusses that teachers traditionally ask students to demonstrate their understanding of a text through paraphrasing and answering questions regarding the form, plot, characters, and so on. I knew it wouldn’t be until college that I’d encounter more useful lenses and modes of reading and finally get away from the vapid end-of-the-chapter reading questions. But even then there wasn’t much emphasis placed on the significance of the reader and her reactions. Barthes discusses how the death of the author is the birth of the reader, but that is as close as I was able to get as far as academic discourses on readers go. Psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, post-colonialism—while all of these lenses brought something important to a reading of a text, it seemed as if every identity was significant except the actual reader’s! It wasn’t until I took that summer theory course that I was finally acquainted with reader response theory. Iser, Jauss, and Rita Felski were incredibly fascinating and I always kept in mind what I could take from these theorists and bring to my own teaching philosophy. However, these theories weren’t as accessible as Rosenblatt’s in regard to application. Rosenblatt takes critical theory and makes it relevant to current pedagogy in the secondary and undergraduate classrooms. She posits that a reader and a text exist in a transaction: “a to-and-fro spiral in which each is continually being affected by what the other has contributed” (p. 26). She makes the distinction between transaction andinteraction, the latter being a term that literary theorists use that describes a more limiting reading process.

Rosenblatt also heavily emphasizes the English teacher’s responsibility to cultivate students’ cultural literacy and development as citizens by acquiring moderate knowledge of the social sciences herself. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that English teachers are more than just reading and writing teachers; they are teachers of the “human condition” insofar that they possess the unique opportunity to expose their students to a variety of human situations. “Is not the substance of literature everything that human beings have thought or felt or created?” (p. 5)—this statement captures my very first thought as I decided to pursue a career in teaching. But Rosenblatt is quick to mention that though literature opens up a world of possibilities in meaning and form thus there is no single, “true” interpretation of a text, reader-response is not a chaotic, pluralistic endeavor. Rosenblatt is not condoning an “anything goes” approach to literature and interpretation. Rather, she describes reader response as a highly meticulous operation that starts out with spontaneity and develops into a “critical awareness” and “a keener and more adequate perception of the potentialities of the text” (p. 73). The English academy and the education academy may be apples and oranges at times, but I strive to acquire some sort of understanding between the two. Suffice to say, Rosenblatt helped guide my understanding of reading and doing theory by applying  reader response directly to the English classroom.

I appreciate Marshall (2000) because it delves into the history and research of reader response theory in various traditions of thought. For me, the resounding part of the article was the discussion of the empirical tradition and how text in particular shapes a reader’s response. As a burgeoning educator, I’ve always heard about how imperative it is to get multicultural literature into the classroom and have included this in my teaching philosophy. Marshall’s discussion of the research on the effects of multicultural literature on readers’ beliefs, values, and social attitudes reinforces my understanding of its importance specifically in the lives of adolescent readers.

Wolk (2010) about had me on my feet exclaiming, “Yes!” when he discusses how adhering to the status quo of literacy will not produce life-long readers. Students have come to loathe reading because schools have (inadvertently?) rendered it a chore. Wolk notes that students have learned to play the “school game,” as they read just enough to get by. If we allow students to read just enough to get by, we as teachers produce lazy, irresponsible citizens who “hate reading and see education as irrelevant” (p. 10). Wolk posits that in order to get students to read, they must be granted agency in the selection of reading materials. This seems like such a simple idea—make a variety of books available and students will read—yet schools continue to limit students to one text chosen by the teacher (or whoever is in charge of the curriculum). The counterargument of introducing young adult literature and other student-selected titles into the classroom is that these reading materials aren’t “smart” enough or it’s an attack on the canon and the “classics.” Wolk responds that teachers are responsible for assessing the needs of their students in order to offer them reading materials that are relevant and appropriate for their age and development. I prefer a wide range of books, including those in the canon. However, I think it is important to allow students to choose their own reading materials from time to time, as this practice strengthens their reading skills and fosters intrinsic motivation.