shelley's ozymandias: an appreciation

Jim Burke's EC Ning ran a contest last February challenging English teachers to think of a single work of literature--a novel or poem or whatever--they would teach if they could teach only one.  Entrants to the contest were asked to write 2000 word essays defending their choice of "the only [book] in the world."  Since it's not clear at this point if this contest will ever reach a conclusion, I'm taken the opportunity to post my own entry, on Shelley's Ozymandias, to this quite compelling topic.  Here it is:

Reading, Passion, and Decay:  an appreciation of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is a singularly appropriate choice for a curriculum devoted to “the only book in the world.”  It is a poem that is itself about human achievements, and what does and does not remain behind once the illuminating glow of their initial creation has long since faded away.

Since its publication in the Examiner in January of 1818, however, Shelley’s poem has become so frequently anthologized, so familiar and beloved by readers, that the startling originality of its construction and the boldness of its assertions can easily be overlooked.  It will be the purpose of this essay to argue for the seminal value of this remarkable poem by demonstrating some of the ways it achieves its cumulative power and resonance.  This essay will go on to suggest, however, that in demonstrating the eventual demise of our most imposing architectural works, Shelley is simultaneously casting doubt on whether our greatest literary works are capable, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet #65 would have us hope, of holding time’s “swift foot back” with the “miracle” of their “black ink.”

First, the poem, from the Oxford University edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said:  “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

What strikes the reader immediately is how suddenly and abruptly he or she is introduced to this strange “traveller,” and how powerfully this traveler’s tale takes over the poem.  After the first two words of the second line, everything that follows is exactly and solely what the traveler tells the narrator.  The effect of this economical entry into the poem is to make it seem as if the traveler is declaiming directly not only to the narrator, but also to the reader, and the urgency of the tale he tells is greatly heightened in consequence.

And why should a reader not feel this urgency, given the arresting nature of the image from the desert with which we are presented?  Two gigantic “legs of stone,” supporting nothing, rise up from otherwise barren surroundings.  A shattered stone head, once part of this imposing colossus, lies “half-sunk” on the sand nearby.  And those words!  On the pedestal supporting those “trunkless legs,” we read the defiant challenge of the once proud king:  “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”  And we do look, of course through the eyes of the traveler, and what we see is that  “nothing beside remains.”

To pay attention, however, solely to the traveler’s vivid image of “that colossal wreck,” and of the “decay” that now surrounds it, is to miss the crucial and quite unexpected force and importance of the poem’s second quatrain.  In reading this poem for the first time, one might expect the “turn” in the second quatrain to focus on Ozymandias’s cruelty and heartlessness as a ruler.  In fact the statue was originally accompanied by relief sculptures that did just this, depicting “mutilated captives being led away by the king after battle,” according to Diodorus Siculus, the first century Greek traveler whose account Shelley draws on for his poem (see Kenneth Neill Cameron’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, pg. 497). Rather than using the second quatrain to sustain and deepen our focus on the king, however, Shelley takes us in an unexpected new direction, asking us to consider the crucially important role of the sculptor.  It is only because the sculptor was so skilled at “reading” the king’s “passions,” the poem indicates, that he was able to represent these passions so skillfully and forcefully in the statue’s “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” and “sneer of cold command.” Perhaps even more remarkably, the sculptor was able to depict these passions in such a lifelike way that they “survive” in the mind of the traveler, even though the king whose heart “fed” these passions, along with the  monuments he hoped would preserve his name, have long since passed away.  And based simply on what the poem relates, the sculptor’s skill is of such an high order that these passions are alive to the traveler even though they are represented solely by a colossal sculpted mouth, since the remaining portion of the king’s “visage” is presumably either “half sunk” or “shattered.”

This focus on the role of the sculptor in showing such preternatural skill in “mocking” the king’s passions will occupy the second half of this essay, since it is this focus that lifts the poem from a memento mori to earthly power to a more profound questioning of the lasting nature of any achievement, whether “written” in stone or words.

One of the most important effects of turning the reader’s attention from the king to the sculptor in the second quatrain is make the reader question the authorship of the words on the statue’s pedestal.  Because we have just been told that the king’s passions “yet survive” for the traveler because the sculptor “read” them and depicted them so skillfully and forcefully, the reader is artfully and persuasively led to carry this sense of artistic acumen “forward” and to think of the words on the pedestal as also created by the sculptor.  The likelihood that one would read the words as self-consciously created with an attention to their verbal resonance, moreover, would have been more apparent to Shelley’s contemporaries than to today’s readers.  Shelley’s contemporaries would have recalled that the following words were recorded by Diodorus Siculus (or more likely translated for him by an Egyptian guide, since he would not have been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics): “King of Kings am I, Osymandyas.  If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works” (see Timothy Webb’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems for an observation on how this inscription had become familiar enough to Shelley’s contemporaries to have become “an historical commonplace,” p.194). 

For those contemporaries who followed the good-natured competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, whose parallel sonnet on Ozymandias appeared three weeks later in the same periodical (see Treasury of English Sonnets. Ed. from the Original Sources with Notes and Illustrations, by David M. Main, 1881, as cited in the quite helpful Wikipedia article on this poem), the contrast would have been even more apparent.  In Smith the inscription on the pedestal is rendered in the following lines:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone

Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:

“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone

“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand.”

It’s difficult to imagine a Londoner opening The Examiner on February 1, 1818 and reading these rather wooden lines without a smile at their unintentional humor.  Conversely, however, the “stamp” that Shelley’s sculptor gave to these initially “lifeless” lines, and by association the contribution of Shelley the poet to the resonance of these lines, would become that much more apparent in the insistent cadences of:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

But the more important question to ask, of course, is why the poet should direct our attention so insistently to the “words,” and perhaps to the sculptor’s role in giving them “life,” as opposed to the architectural “works” that were intended to produce a sense of “despair” in the mighty king’s would-be rivals.

The beginning of an answer to this question, I believe, lies in another “turn” on the reader’s expectations offered earlier in the poem.  The actual look on the faces of the statues of Ozymandias (Rameses II) portrayed in the popular Description of the East (1743) by Robert Pococke (see John Rodenbeck’s impressively researched but somewhat pedantic and curmudgeonly January 2004 article “Travelers from an antique land: Shelley's inspiration for ‘Ozymandias’" in http://www.thefreelibrary.com) was nothing at all like the realistic depiction so vividly described in the poem.  The illustrations of the “king of kings” in Pococke’s book, portrayed in various stages of disintegration, all had the expression of serene benevolence so familiar to today’s student of nineteenth dynasty Egyptian sculpture.  So why might Shelley have wished to present his readers, most of whom would have known that a colossal statue of Rameses was at that very moment on its way from Egypt to England, with such a different type of artistic achievement than the one they would soon observe in the British Museum?

One answer to this puzzle can be found in the way Shelley portrays the nature of the sculptor’s art.  He “stamps” the passions of the king on the otherwise “lifeless” stone, and does so with such a careful “reading” of the king’s character, such passion on his own part, that the reality of king’s hubristic emotions “survive” the passage of over twelve hundred years.  While the nature of such an artistic achievement is not at all consonant with Egyptian sculpture as it was practiced thirteen centuries before the Christian era, it is quite consonant with another sort of artistic achievement that would have been much closer to home for English readers, as well as being quite close to Shelley’s own deepest sympathies.  This artistic achievement would have been the plays of William Shakespeare in general, and the histories and tragedies in particular.  These are the works in which one could find the passions of monarchs “stamped” on the “lifeless things” of a book’s pages, and towards which one could turn for assurance that an individual of genius could create something of great power and significance, something that could perhaps “yet survive” the cruel ravages of time.  It should perhaps come as no surprise, therefore, that Mary Shelley recounts in her journal that during the final months of 1817, when Shelley composed “Ozymandias,” he was also reading Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello (see David Lee Clark’s “Shelley and Shakespeare,” PMLA, Vol. 54, No. 1, March 1939, pp. 261-287).

In contrast to this hopeful view of the lasting nature of the literary achievement of England’s most accomplished and revered writer, however, stands Shelley’s own deep skepticism as expressed through this poem.  Just as the words on the pedestal that initially sound so absolute and resonant to the reader are now swept entirely away, only knowable through the recollections of a first century Greek writer, so “Ozymandias” as a whole puts in question the subtly assertive claim of Shakespeare’s Sonnet #65 that the “wreckful siege of batt’ring days” will destroy the narrator’s love for his young man “unless this miracle have might/That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”  In fact the ending lines of Shelley’s poem seem to cry out for such a direct comparison.  In the choice of vocabulary for the lines “Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare” there appears to be a rather deliberate evocation of Sonnet #65’s “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea . . . Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays.”  Sadly for the reader of Shelley’s poem, however, and perhaps more generally those of us who hope there might be lasting power in our most significant works of literature, there is no “unless” at the end of Shelley’s poem.  No miracle.  No might.  What we have is only the “lone and level sands” which stretch to the limits of our despairing imaginations.

learning from ray bradbury

The participants in our 2010 Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute met last Saturday for our spring semester follow-up meeting.  There were a number of somber comments on the discouraging national climate regarding teachers' competence, the challenges that some in the group had faced recently from their principals, and the recent defunding of the National Writing Project.  I thought it an appropriate moment to recall a blog entry I'd written back in July of 2006, when the participants in that summer institute were just about to disband.  Here's what I read to the group:


Learning from Ray Bradbury

Leah and others in the summer institute are greatly amused that I wear my sunglasses around my neck each and every day of the summer institute, the earpieces hooked together with a dark green Croakies strap.

"Like, ah, at any moment the sun might burst through the fluorescent lighting of our fourth floor classroom?" Leah looks as if she wants to ask.

Little do they know that I keep my sunglasses at the ready as an homage to our friend Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury has bracketed our summer, beginning with Karen Winchester’s use of "All Summer in a Day" on day two of our participant presentations and ending with Nicola Kennedy's request that we read  "The Long Rain" in anticipation of becoming Venusians on the final day of participant presentations.

This was accidental but fortuitous, since Bradbury's stories are about nothing so much as the difficulty of remembering the sun in times of deep, heavy, continuous rain.

Karen Winchester had us do an interesting exercise with "All Summer in a Day." She told us, first, to select one of the symbols we found in the opening paragraphs of the story, and to write down, quickly, the attributes of this symbol. I chose Bradbury's description of the sun as a "coin large enough to buy the world," listing its attributes "monumental," "memorable," "god-like," "overpowering" and "extraordinary." We then selected one of the characters in the story and described that character's attributes. I selected Margot, describing her as "timid," "shy," "an old photograph whitened away," and "ghost-like."

But here's where the activity got interesting. "Now, how would you link the symbol and the character you've selected," Karen asked. "What one sentence would connect the two?"

After some thought, I wrote "Margot held a secret within her: a coin large enough to buy the world." When Karen next asked us to expand our paragraphs into short essays, I wrote:

"Margot has a huge secret within her, a knowledge of a coin large enough to buy the world. This secret is too much for her increasingly frail body to contain. It separates her from her fellow classmates, makes her feel alone and even uncertain whether her knowledge is real or just imagined. Margot's recollection of the sun is like the knowledge we all carry of a world before our birth, a prelapsarian world of expansive plenitude, a world where we were part of a larger whole. It is this prelapsarian knowledge, and the confidence in this knowledge, that the other children--Margot's postlapsarian classmates--must snuff out."

While this seemed a wholly new perception to me at the time, an unexpectedly new way of looking at Margot in particular and "All Summer in as Day" in general, in hindsight it seems to have uncannily foreshadowed the great lesson that Bradbury was, as it were, trying his best to tell us all summer.

"You will have days of educational sunshine in the summer institute,” he was telling us. “You will have many of them; it will seem at times to you as if these days will never end."

"But be wary. These days will end. The joy and camaraderie and great good humor you have shared together these past four weeks will fade, leaving behind only the fleeting smile, the brief nod of the head in pleasant recollection."

"You will experience your return to school in the fall as Margot experienced her exile to Venus: incessant and unrelenting rain, the drum and gush of water, the crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they will seem to you like tidal waves."

"Your fellow teachers will belittle you when you try to tell them what it felt like to be in the sun. 'You're lying,' they will tell you. 'Such a place does not exist. You're making it up.'"

"So follow Nicola and Karen's advice, and follow it now: remember exactly what being in the sun of the summer institute felt like, what it looked like, what it sounded and tasted like. While some of you will doubt, and some will find it too painful to recall, collectively you can remember; and you will."

The challenge of thinking about worldwide poverty

I'm presently living in the central highlands of Mexico and participating, for a fall semester sabbatical leave from San Jose State, in an intensive Spanish language/homestay program. Our teacher this past month (our third in the language program) asked us to write short compositions each night on topics of significance that she assigned for us. The experience was illuminating for me. I found I could write these short compositions in Spanish (see below), and that their very shortness forced me to write with a sort of vignette-like concision. Here's one I wrote during the next to final week in the program. I'll copy and paste it first in English and then in Spanish. The topic given to us serves as the title of this blog posting. Enjoy!

I'll start with a confession. The reason I did not write this composition yesterday was not just that I did not wake up in time for my alarm clock. It was also the subject itself: it made me feel very apprehensive.

While I do not fully understand why I'm so apprehensive about this issue, I'm pretty clear about some of the reasons, so I'll start with them.

Imagine a 20 year old young man who receives a summer scholarship to teach English in Hong Kong. The scholarship for the plane trip from Boston to Hong Kong includes the opportunity to visit some cities along the way. This young twenty year old decides to visit the cities of Delhi and New Delhi as part of his trip to Hong Kong.

He arrives in New Delhi in mid-June. The air is so moist and the temperature so hot that it’s difficult to breathe. He is staying at a youth hostel in New Delhi to save money, and the hostel has no air conditioning.

He remembers lying in bed at night and feeling the pressure on his chest from the heat and humidity. "Unless I consciously will myself to breathe in and out,” he remembers telling himself in the middle of the night, “I will stop breathing and I will die.”

The next day, traveling by bus and walking to see the Taj Mahal in Delhi, the young man's experience was even more memorable.

It was still hard to keep breathing in the heat and humidity, but now he saw the elderly on the side of the road that had lost the strength to keep going. These elders were lying beside the road. It was clear that they were about to die. "I am only one step away from these ancients," he remembers thinking to himself. "If I decide to give up and lie by the side of the road, I will die. I will be forgotten. I will vanish without a trace."

I was that young man. Even after all these years, I can not forget my sense of closeness to those elderly poor in India, dying by the side the road.

What is the value of my "western" sense of individual importance? Am I not, at a deep and important level, only one step away from those elderly Indian poor?

These are the questions that haunt me when I think about the problem of world-wide poverty. Maybe all we are closer than we like to think to those elderly poor in India. Perhaps our desire to eradicate poverty is just an example of western pride, unable to cope with the essential insignificance of humans as individuals.

Jonathan Lovell

October 2010

El desafío de pensar sobre la pobreza en todo el mundo

Voy a comenzar con una confesión. La razón por la que no escribí esta composición de ayer no fue simplemente que no me desperté a tiempo por mi reloj despertador. También era que el tema en sí, me hacía sentir muy aprensivo.

No entiendo completamente por qué estoy tan aprensivo acerca de este tema. Estoy bastante claro acerca de algunas de las razones, sin embargo, por lo que voy a empezar con ellas.

Imagine que un niño de veinte años recibió una beca de verano para enseñar Inglés en Hong Kong. La beca para el viaje de avión desde Boston a Hong Kong incluye la oportunidad de visitar algunas ciudades a lo largo del camino. Este joven de veinte años de edad decidió visitar las ciudades de Delhi y Nueva Delhi como parte de su viaje a Hong Kong.

Cuando llegó a Nueva Delhi a mediados de junio, el aire era tan húmedo y la temperatura tan caliente que le resultaba difícil respirar. Él se alojaba en el albergue juvenil de Nueva Delhi para ahorrar dinero, y el albergue no tenía aire acondicionado.

Recuerda acostado en su cama durante la noche y sentir en su pecho la presión a la baja del calor y la humedad. "Sin me fuerza de voluntar, de manera consciente, la respiración y aspiración, iba a dejar de respirar y podría morir", recuerda haber me dicho a mi mismo en medio de la noche.

Al día siguiente, viajar en autobús o caminando para ver el Taj Mahal en Delhi, la experiencia del joven fue aún más memorable.

Era tan difícil seguir respirando en el calor y la humedad, pero ahora veía las personas mayores por el lado de la carretera que tenía la fuerza para seguir adelante. Estos ancianos se habían acostado al lado de la carretera. Vi que estaban a punto de morir. "Yo estaba tan sólo un paso de esta gente mayor", él pensó. "Si me decidiera a dormir a un lado de la carretera, yo también moriria. Yo también quiero querría olvidado. Nadie se daría cuenta."

Yo era ese joven. Incluso después de todos estos años, no me puedo quitar de la mente mi sentido de la cercanía a los ancianos pobres de la India, muriendo al lado de la carretera. ¿Cuál es el valor de mi "occidental" sentido de mi importancia individual, si lo soy, a un nivel profundo e importante, tan sólo un paso de estos ancianos pobres?

Esta es la pregunta que me atormenta cuando pienso en el problema de la pobreza en todo el mundo. Tal vez todos estamos más cerca de lo que nos gusta pensar a los ancianos pobres de la India. Tal vez nuestro deseo de erradicar la pobreza es sólo un ejemplo del orgullo occidental, incapaz de hacer frente a la escasa importancia esencial de cualquier individuo.

Jonathan Lovell

Octubre 2010

writing and revelation

My older daughter Stephanie recently moved from Long Island to Berkeley to work as a Kaiser doctor in the departments of emergency medicine in Vallejo and Vacaville. She and her husband Mike are presently staying in the ground floor apartment of my ex-wife's home in Berkeley -- an apartment I helped to build shortly after we moved to Berkeley 27 years ago, in 1982.

Mike, a carpenter and general contractor, is working on an enlargement of the apartment in exchange for the rent: a sweat equity deal of sorts that seems to be working out reasonably well. But there are issues. A big one has been what to do with the accumulated debris of 28 years of marriage and six moves. All those cardboard boxes in the basement! Some of them unopened since 1976, when my ex-wife Margaretta and I moved from East Haven to New Haven as I was completing my fourth year of graduate studies at Yale University.

A compromise had been reached, I'd learned. Steph and Mike would tackle the job bird by bird. They'd open a few boxes, examine the contents, consult with Margaretta, decide what to keep, what to discard, and what to recycle, then move on to the next few boxes.

One of these initial boxes, however, was opened, closed, and put aside. Its moving label read "Home Office. Books. His." Steph called me to ask if I might pick up the box as part of my upcoming trip to bring my "lobster pod" to Alameda Island. Why not?

After I'd dropped off my boat at Soren Hansen's Woodcraft shop, and we'd had lunch at the Little House Café around the corner from Soren's boatbuilding operation, we headed up towards the Berkeley hills to retrieve my box. Mike, mindful of my weak lower back, hefted the box into the back of my car. I'd had no occasion, therefore, to examine its contents until later that afternoon, when I arrived back in San Jose and brought the box into our living room.

The first items surprised and amused me: the subfusc gown -- a black vest really -- that I wore as a graduate student at Oxford when attending tutorials, a cute picture of me at about age five, a somewhat disorienting picture of my dad at a younger age, looking for all the world like a young girl, a college T-shirt, and my college BA diploma.

Then came the books. As soon as I saw the top one I knew exactly what they were. The red cover with the words "poems," "ballads" and "sonnets"; and as one opened the cover, the oval lithograph of the poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with his large expanse of forehead, short beard and mustache, left hand holding a felt hat tipped provocatively "open" to the viewer, right clutching his dun colored vest, and deeply inset dark eyes looking menacingly out at me.

I was back, almost instantly, to New Haven in the summer of 1979. Rossetti's "Poems, Ballads and Sonnets" were sitting on the high drafting table I used for a desk, and I was reading over a chapter of my dissertation that I'd written the previous summer. Even with my kindest critical eye, I could tell it was painfully convoluted and overwrought: a prime example of what Oxford's Dame Helen Gardner called the "lemon squeezer" school of literary interpretation.

The house was quiet. Stephanie and her mother were abroad on a research trip to Paris and Venice. My younger daughter Holly was at a summer kindergarten program just a few blocks north from our New Haven home.

My feeling in looking over my work of the previous summer, and reading over the poems that would serve as the focus of my next chapter, was of overwhelming nausea. As a poet and as a man, Rossetti was difficult to like. He was self-absorbed, obsessive, demanding of others' attention, given to long bouts of depression. His poetry seemed to me to reflect these qualities; it had a hot-house quality to it that I found particularly distasteful, requiring a degree of willingness to be drawn into the poet's lushly overwrought interiors. I did not wish to be drawn further into this world, either by Rossetti's poems or by his equally lush and overwrought paintings. So what in the world was I doing writing a dissertation on the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti?

What compounded my problems were the consequences of not finishing my dissertation. I'd just finished my second year on the faculty at Teachers College (Columbia University's graduate school of education) and I loved what I was doing in the related fields of English Education and Composition Studies. If I did not finish my dissertation this summer, or at the very least make significant progress on it, I could say goodbye to my Teachers College position, and for all I knew any future at all in higher education.

These problems were of course further complicated by my back and forth movement over the past two years between teaching English Education classes at Teachers College during the school year, then returning each summer to the very different set of questions and problems posed by my dark-eyed poet/painter. How could I possibly find something worth writing about in the works of this little known Victorian artist, when my heart was increasingly drawn to the compelling issues faced by teachers at the secondary and college levels in the field of English Education?

My day-to-day strategy for coping with my sense of distress was simple and satisfying. As soon as I completed a page of writing, I'd go out and shoot hoops in our backyard. I was getting some work done, very slowly, and my shooting percentage was certainly improving, but I could not help but feel the hoops were slowly gaining the upper hand.

I was spending one hot and muggy summer morning gazing out at my backyard, thinking that perhaps this morning the hoops should precede the writing, when I chanced to pick up a book I'd read, rather cursorily, a number of years earlier. It was a study of Shelley's mythmaking, written by one of my teachers at Yale, Harold Bloom. It had grown out of his own dissertation on this subject, also completed at Yale University. For some reason the passage that caught my eye was a discussion of Shelley's "To a Skylark." I was familiar with its opening stanzas, as it was a favorite with anthologists of my parent's generation:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

It's vitally important, Bloom argued, to pay attention to the fact that the distance between the poet-narrator and the skylark is dramatically increasing with each successive stanza. In fact the bird has already soared so high before the poem begins that the poet can no longer see it, but only hear the "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" with which it sings. With each succeeding stanza, therefore, the poet must refine his capacity to hear, must re-train his ear to detect, the ever-receding melodies of the bird's unpremeditated song. To put it simply, the ceaseless soaring of the skylark is inextricably linked, for the poet, to the appeal of its "full hearted" song.

And to put my own response to Bloom's argument equally simply: I'd never thought of looking at the role of the poet, or more generally of voice and inspiration, in quite this way. That we start by hearing an already distant air, and as we strain to hear its glad-hearted melodies, it is already growing getting more and more distant from us, soaring away from us we labor to hear its song. The speed of that skylark's flight, and the fact that it was flying upwards and away from the poet, even as the poet was attempting to capture and remember its song, presented a riveting and arresting picture for me of what Shelley was up to in many of his poems.

And then I realized, quite suddenly and with a degree of comprehension that I find difficult to account for even today, that this was what Rossetti was up to in virtually all of his.

It was a single moment, really, and of course I went on to write and re-write many subsequent pages and chapters, and to shoot many hoops, before I completed my dissertation the following summer. But it's as if I'd been given a gift, wholly unlooked for and in a sense wholly undeserved. As a result of this gift, I was able to see everything that in my previous study of my menacing-looking poet-painter had been vexing and harassing in an entirely new light. I experienced the writing of my final chapters as something pleasurable, something I looked forward to, something that I knew I could do with integrity and even with occasional insight.

So what might we make of this story of writing and revelation, of perseverance well beyond the bounds of logic or probable success? I would suggest the following moral. That what we experience when we write is quite like listening for the full-throated, glad-hearted sound of that skylark. As I've discovered from co-directing a great many summer institutes, and being a full participant in two, we start by hearing only the dimmest echoes of our colleagues' and our own voices. But with a day-by-day training of our ears, and a growing faith that each of our colleagues, as well as ourselves, does indeed have a voice to be heard, we begin to hear them. And it's this very faith that helps to transform the hesitant whispers of those initial days into the full-throated howl of the final days of a summer institute.

As Shelley reminds us in the concluding lines of his poem, what we learn over the days and weeks of the summer institute is that our colleagues, like the skylark, will "teach [us] half the gladness" that their "brain[s] must know." And that with this knowledge and heart, such "harmonious madness" from our own "lips [will] flow," the world will "listen then," just as we are "listening . . . now."

responses to TKAM workshop

As those who attended the workshop I just gave with Jay Richards at the NCTE Conference will know, I'm attaching here, as promised, the responses of the K-College teachers who attended the Summer O8 Invitational Summer Institute of the San Jose Area Writing Project. The entire collection of vignettes that I use for this workshop (on Dill Harris, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson) can be found by visiting my entry entitled "TKAM at NCTE in NYC." Our Writng Project Tech Liaison also tells me that we an post Jay's PowerPoint on our SJAWP website and then I'll be able to link to it on this blog. So stay tuned. Now here are the responses:

Responses of the participants in ISI 08 to TKAM workshop

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for a very interesting lesson this morning. Trying to develop a character analysis in ten minutes was frustrating, even frantic, and I’m not surprised that high school students resent that activity. Still, after reflecting on the experience and “walking in students’ shoes,” I had perspectives on their experiences that I hadn’t expected to encounter.

For one, I felt admiration for high school students, and not necessarily honors, who tackle such tasks routinely. True, they want to succeed and pleasing a teacher is primarily how they try, but writing on command is a daunting task and still they take it on. I also felt great empathy and respect for English Language Learners who wrestle such tasks to the ground in efforts to succeed. I imagine the staggering difficulties that ELLs, especially those newly arrived, have in trying to understand the character of someone like Mayella Ewell let alone writing about it. Still, they try.

Tragically, aliteracy often begins in second-grade when young children are forced through lock-step pacing calendars, benchmark exams and stories not of their choosing or interest. Children who read successfully often choose not to because they associate reading with tests. Still, at the core, I believe that both elementary and high school students are asking the same essential question: “Why should I care about this story and/or character? (aside from trying to get the teacher off my back!) Today’s role play helped to answer that question as I asked, “Why should I care about Mayella Ewell? I don’t like what she does, and she wouldn’t be my friend!”

Strangely, shockingly during the role play I fell into her character very easily. What we shared was not entirely clear, and I certainly didn’t agree with her, but I knew her well. What a surprise that was! Still, making that connection with Mayella helped me to grow both as a reader and a person. “What is in all people is in me,” it has been said. Role play in particular enables children, young and old, to use what they know very well--social relationships-to access the characters and ideas of the stories or novels. The various combined activities give students avenues to access the ideas that will help them grow.

One last recollection. Years ago in an evening credential class, it was my task to teach Nancy Atwell’s In the Middle. To do that, I had brought in a box of books of YA literature to replicate Atwell’s “dinner party” approach to reading workshop. Suddenly, these groggy teachers came alive! Eyes gleaming as they excitedly riffled through pages of beloved books long forgotten, they furtively asked to borrow “their favorite books” to read over the week. (I’ve since come to learn that many teachers are aliterate.) Atwell addresses the issues of aliteracy as middle/high school students are consumed by innumerable issues that keep them from reading. Still, teachers had not forgotten the books that made them feel alive. This is all to say that children WANT to read. They just don’t know why. Application of lessons such as today’s help them see. Thank you for some great strategies! Constance Bruinsma-Kelly

Dear Jonathan:

Thank you for a wonderful workshop. I feel that engaging students with visual and auditory aids to enhance their reading experience, and in turn making them write well is a great idea. We always emphasize the importance of “show; don’t tell” in our classroom, and this is a perfect example. I will certainly be using this technique on a more advanced level in my English Composition courses next semester.

My character is Mayella, and since I read To Kill a Mocking Bird a long time ago, I have to rely on the excerpt and my instincts to write my initial response or character analysis. Mayella seems to be a typical teenager at first. She is poor but has an aesthetic sense that she cultivates. Caring for the geraniums shows her softer side. Mayella also comes across as a vulnerable but outspoken girl. She speaks her mind but is just an insecure little girl inside. Mayella is loyal to her father who has a hold on her. She is scared of him and to cover her fear, she is angry and furious.

This is as far as I got on the first attempt. After having worked my way through the workshop, I gained further insight into Mayella’s character. She is not just any teenager. At age nineteen, she is an extremely complex human being. She has to take care of her siblings and live in fear of her abusive, tee totaling father. Love and tenderness are sorely lacking in her life. I agree that there is a flaw in her personality. She has no integrity and she lies to frame Tom, a good and kind hearted man. Can we really understand what is going on in her mind? What are her values and morals? Is she raised with any? How can we be righteous and pass judgment on her?

Beneath the hard exterior, we see some level of tenderness in Mayella. She looks after her “red geraniums.” They are “cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson.” Mayella loves her geraniums and nurtures them because they do not want anything in return. This is one aspect of her personality. In the courtroom, we see a distraught Mayella. She is vulnerable and insecure inside. She responds to Atticus’s questions with outbursts and eventually silence. She knows the consequence of incriminating Tom, but is willing to take that chance because she is pressured by society. In the end, she saves herself. Can we blame her for that? Mayella is selfish; she sacrifices Tom to save face, but her behavior is nothing but a true reflection of human nature at its darkest. Roohi Vora

Dr. Lovell,

It’s been a number of years since I’ve read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson’s character exudes kindness, gentleness, even tenderheartedness and he’s simply a fascinating character to study. I couldn’t help compare his daily reality of victimization and marginalization to that of most Afghan women. The latter is fresh on my mind after having reread The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. Both Tom and Afghan women have limited value in the eyes of their communities and have little or no voice. To speak up would mean certain punishment and perhaps death.

I found the first reading of the TR excerpt to be similar to that of reading a poem for the first time. For me, the first reading reintroduced the character and each of the subsequent activities added a deeper level of understanding. Interestingly, the most helpful activity was listening to the audiotape as it made the sections of dialogue, in particular, more real. I can see how helpful this creative process of adding layers of understanding would be to my students. Trish Murray

Dear Jonathan,

Today's workshop had a cumulative effect on my characterization comprehension. I'm one of those students who wasn't against reading a selection and responding in paragraph form, nor was I one hundred percent for the timed writing/comprehension assignment. I certainly was willing to try the assignment, trusting that the outcome would be interesting or perhaps it would be a lesson on how I could improve. I was right on both predictions of the result.

My initial paragraph was a quick-write without much depth. It truly was a description matching the paragraph of Dill's personality. Digging deeper, to write about Dill, wasn't possible. In fact it wasn't possible until I had discussed the possibilities of the character, designed metaphor symbols, drawn them and participated in the role play. I learned that Dill was a deeply designed character, rich with metaphoric qualities. As a learner, I am primarily visual. I need to attach metaphors to most literary analyses in order to deeply understand. This approach to learning would match Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theories.

Here are my pre and post writings that reflect the above explanations:

Pre-write: Dill, a summer visitor, to Maycomb was from Mississippi. He brought with him a sensitive approach to dealing with people. His family provided the necessary things he needed, yet he felt emotionally neglected by his parents. His self image was projected as a shy, humble individual. As he had not been nurtured, he projected an overly sensitive approach to his interaction with people, even complete strangers. Generally speaking, his personality seemed puzzling to his closes friend Scout.

Post-write (continuing from the above): Dill could be metaphorically represented as a bird with a broken wing wearing a purple heart halo, crying. Symbolically Dill's broke bird wing represents his ill-equipped approach to flight through life. The purple heart shows the embattled sensitivity due to his neglectful background. The tears reflect his sensitive cry for fairness toward people. Dill is not aware of the cultural black versus white prejudices that exist during his lifetime. He seems to act, naively, as the conscience of right versus wrong. Perhaps his own lack of family nurturing created a searching, longing for a feeling of acceptance. It could be that his sensitivity radar crosses all lines of racial social etiquette at the height of black/white racism. his character represents the needed balance of characterization within the plot. Thanks for an insightful look into characterization. I truly enjoyed it! Julie Jenkins

Hi Jonathsn,

In response to the HW prompts, here are my thoughts after your workshop. In the pre-writng activity, I pegged Tom as a sitting duck, a target, a victim of circumstance due to the setting of the novel. I tried to process and write all of the information fast, as we were restricted on time. After participating in the several activities leading up to the post write, I really began to see that Tom's geneoristy, kindeness, and honesty is what ironically hurt him. How dare a black man feel sorry for a poor, white girl! It was his humanity which worked against him.

As I reflect on the sequence of events, I felt that you started with a broad topic and really narrowed in or "zoomed in", helping us to truly focus on the character. (It all comes back to zoom!) We did an initial read and then wrote about our character. It was rushed, very broad, and I really wasn't sure wanted you wanted. Do I integrate and use blended quotes? Was this a test for me to use what we had previously learned? The Cumulative Graphic Organizer, started to focus our attention on the dynamics of the courtroom scene. This also helped us to look at the other key players in the scene. The character received a face, a voice, and became human. Next, moving into our character groups, we really started to hone in on this character that we read about and watched in the film. As we discussed our central symbol and various personal symbols, I learned that this is an individual with only a kind heart who has nothing bad to say about Mayella and answers honestly while trying not to hurt her feelings or calling her a blatant liar. He has accepted his place in society. During the gallery walk, we had a further chance to get into the skin of Tom as we shared our poster and listened to the perspectives of the other Tom group. We were analyzing him from the outside in. During the role play, we literally got into the character's skin. It was a good way to test our knowledge and share with our peers. I felt more empathy for Tom as I became him. I thought like him; heck I even tried to talk like him. After listening to the vignettes, we were able to do a partial second read of Tom, where I caught things I glossed over the first time. By the post write, I felt that I truly understood this character. He was an abstract painting from afar, but as I "zoomed in", I was able to see the brush strokes, the writer's ink which created the essence of Tom. See you tomorrow. Tara Holcomb

Dear Jonathan,

Today I learned that Mayella Ewell, my character of study from To Kill a Mockingbird, was no lady. She was a victim, a fighter, a survivor, and a bully. Abused, impoverished, and trapped by her role as a woman and the oldest child in the bleakest of scenarios, she scrounges for what little power she can seize within her existence. Mayella’s world is loaded with injustice and abuse. What coping skills could she know for survival? In her loneliness and helplessness, she chooses her victim, Tom Robinson, to project onto her own inner turmoil. Living in the deep South before the Civil Rights Movement, an isolated black man is an easy target for Mayella to use psychologically for working through her own loneliness and sexuality, her feelings of helplessness in a dire situation, and her fear of an abusive father. Tom becomes her scapegoat, her relief. When he is there, she feels powerful over someone.
And why should she care what happens to him? No one seems to care what happens to her! In the trial, she screams out in desperation and anger, wanting someone to care more about her than the black man. Her ego desperately needs to pull rank. To her it doesn’t matter if it isn’t fair. Since when has she seen any justice given to her? This neglected, broken girl is starving for recognition that she matters, that she is not the same as the trash that she lives in. She is the vulnerable geranium in the garbage dump and there is hope in her if only someone, anyone would take the time to care for her. Tom is the only one who takes that time, so in her desperation, she takes advantage of his vulnerability, publicly humiliates him, falsely accuses him of her own sins, and feels justified in her anger.
During this workshop time, I learned that I can learn almost anything in almost any modality. However, if I am given the opportunity to learn in every modality, the knowledge acquired becomes engrained. I also learned that I get frustrated with a common learning attitude of “just do what’s required,” and the excuse, “I can’t do that, I wasn’t born with the talent.” It makes me want to scream, “well, you might be able to if you just took the time to practice it!” I take great pride in my work, and I rarely do anything half-ass. I wasn’t born with talent, only potential. The only time I do something half-ass is when something major interferes. I can’t even relate to keeping things casual and simple. Seems lazy, bland, and offensive to me, like the people involved aren’t worth the time or effort. I’m driven, and I care. I want the whole experience without missing a beat. The whole sha-bang. And I think that generally people don’t try hard enough. There is nothing I respect more than a learner who tries hard and has a positive attitude. I don’t know why.
Yet, I generally don’t voice that opinion, because I also think it’s rude and offensive. But that’s often the way I feel inside. That drive makes me want to take charge and do assignments individually. Realistically, most work in life requires a team. So I have a whole set of inner mantras that I tell myself during group work so that I refrain from monopolizing activities, overwhelming others, or the worst, having someone think that I am better than someone else, a show-off, or hoggish. I hate those assumptions and accusations! I’m just trying my best, and that’s all. I’m not trying to make anyone else feel bad or intimidated or competed against or overwhelmed or miffed in any way. I’m really a nice person, and as a learner, I’m an intense, passionate, voracious tiger. Just know that about me. Thanks for asking, Laura Cain

Dear Dr. Lovell,

I really love Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and I really enjoyed your workshop today. My assigned character was Dill Harris and when I started I wrote a half a page response that was very “scientific.” I took Dill and explained all the aspects of his personality and character that I gathered from the passages you assigned, but the response did not elicit much empathy for him.

I really think the activity with the posters and the role play activity is a fabulous method for students (and teachers!) to gain further insights into the characters being studied and to help us gain more empathy for the character we've been assigned. I really felt far more compassionate toward Dill after completing the sequence of activities that you had us go through. I know it’s because the activities had me metaphorically walk in Dill's shoes, as Atticus Finch tells Scout near the beginning of the novel. My second attempt at a character response was more than double the length of my first and it was far more empathetic and in depth and I am proud of it!

I know that I am a learner who appreciates both visual and audio cues and also appreciates the occasional kinesthetic activity to get me moving around, which was provided when we did the poster and gallery walk. I had seen your presentation previously when I was your student in the Methods class for the credential program, and I want you to know that I use your cumulative graphic organizer when I teach TKAM and it really helps to set up the courtroom scene for the students and I want to thank you for that excellent idea. Thank you for your presentation! It was even better the second time around :-) Sincerely, Jeanette Craff

Dear Jonathan,

My first take on Dill was extremely limited because I was putting up the metaphor posters, the non-linguistic representations, made by previous workshop participants. So I skimmed the text excerpts very rapidly. I did manage to link some attributes of Dill’s dreaminess with my own vibrant inner life as a kid. I got his sensitivity as well as his story-telling acumen.

What changed my understanding the most, however, consisted in two things. The first was the very articulate conversations my team group made over what central metaphor to create for our poster. I felt as if I were meeting a real person, unlike the bits of information that were strewn in my head from a quick-read and an attempt to summon memory from other workshop experiences. We had, alas, little visual of Dill from the movie. . I could relate to the childhood journey into fantasy when the parents and home life aren’t connected with the child.

The second piece that brought Dill more to life in my understanding was the tidbit that Jonathan explained about the author, Harper Lee, having used Truman Capote (whom she knew in childhood and as an adult author) to create the character of Dill. Such an enigmatic character – Dill the curiosity—became my acquaintance when I remembered the movie “Capote” I saw several years ago. My understanding of Dill shifted from my own southern upbringing experience of the racism to the quandary Truman presents in his autobiographical film. “Ah haa!” I thought. I’d say he’s a genuine eccentric, not just a curiosity. In any case, the boy Dill in TKAM became more accessible to me as a result.

So, do I really I learn more from movies and visual arts than reading? Maybe. Maybe it is the combination that is so effective. I observed how much more acutely-formed my own images were while listening to the reader on tape. Her phrasing and intonation was beautiful. I am reminded of the true power of a good read aloud.

Thank you for the carefully crafted, explicit roles and tasks for us. You already know how impressed I am with cumulative graphic organizers, and today, I realized I could actually do a literature experience like this with fifth graders, with the right novel. Laura Brown

Dear Jonathan,

I really enjoyed your presentation today. I think I really missed discussing a character in a classroom setting, with me as a student. It reminded me of the MA years when, pencil in hand (a habit I still have), I would read closely and carefully, trying to understand the characters in the fictional works we were assigned. Today, with your help and the help of my colleagues, I had the opportunity to discover Dill. The first things I noticed when reading the excerpt from Harper Lee's novel were his otherness, his vulnerability, his acute need for a family and for friends, and also the richness of his interior life. Working in groups and constructing the poster got us all closer to the character and made us speculate about his role. We felt quite satisfied with the results of our twenty minute contest with pens, pencils, markers and erasers, and gladly shared our finished visual symbol character poster with our other Dill group. Having us listen to a reading of the excerpt was, I think, a very useful technique. The narrator was successful in creating a certain atmosphere that may be difficult to perceive at a first glance. The stress she placed on certain words when describing Dill, the change in accent when Dill speaks with Jem and Scout, Dill's faltering voice when questioned about his father, all made the text come alive, drawing the reader into the story. I think the role play was not my forte, but it was a useful exercise in that it made me try to see the world through his eyes, and ultimately understand him better. Thank you for a really great workshop! Sincerely, Oana Melnic

Dear Jonathan,

When I read Mayella initially, my first thoughts were that she was extremely poor, defensive, and had a sense of despair. She also had a chip on her shoulder, yet as I read the excerpts I felt that this “chip” was warranted. Her family life was full of hardship. She had an alcoholic father, who probably beat her and raped her, a man that has robbed her of basic parental gifts (love, compassion, protection, guidance, etc.). She had no friends and I thought a part of her viewed Tom as a friend. She liked that someone in the world actually cared for her and subsequently took care of her, even if it was her who asked him to complete various odd jobs around her home. The slop jars holding the “brilliant red geraniums” appeared to be a symbol of hope, amongst all the garbage there was something of value. In my initial character analysis, I wrote that these were a symbol of the vulnerability in the character. After all they were the only thing of beauty in a yard full of random collectibles. These were a small positive gleam of hope and the one thing that she could truly call all her own.

The beginning activity was terrifying for me. A timed reading and writing assignment: was I back in high school taking standardized tests? Did I step into a time machine? Would I be in the blue birds or red robins? Being a product of an At Risk study done in the 1980s, I have developed serious test anxiety, which had lain dormant for the last 2 years until today.

After going through your workshop, Mayella became more alive. She was not just some poor defensive girl: she had strength and courage. While she might not have protected Tom, she continued to live in an environment that was rotting her internally and hurting her physically. It was interesting to hear my group’s perception of her because while we had all read the same material, our personal schemes affected our view of the material. The text-to-self drawings are a strategy I plan on using during the school year.

All the activities, TKAM movie, active group work with the graphic organizer, listening to the book on tape; I realized once again that I truly am a visual and auditory learner. Actually, I think all three learning styles (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) are important in my learning; hence I try to incorporate them into my lessons. The series of activities (movie, poster, role play) all served their purpose of “getting to know” the character, which assisted me in my post-analysis writing. Using a variety of mediums to engage us “the students” reminded me that I need to stay on my toes when it comes to engaging my students. After experiencing these workshops, I realize this has been the missing link in my professional development. Super Saturdays here I come! Breanne Romano

Dear Jonathan,

I have read To Kill A Mockingbird approximately 30 times. Of course we focus on Mayella and Tom, but I've never focused that much on Dill. After really discussing who this little boy is, what struck me was how much Dill is the conscience of the town, how much perspective he lends to the text, and how he is the only impartial observer in the book. I also never thought about why Dill might not be touched so much by the institutionalized racism that touches all the other Maycombians. (Even Scout, who should know better, is numb to the bad treatment of Tom by Mr. Gilmer). It came out in the role playing when I was playing Dill that one of the reasons for this is that he is so immersed in the fantasy world that he escapes to, that reality doesn't affect him like it does others.

The role playing was something that I've never really done myself, but our role playing really worked. In fact, I was actually getting uncomfortable when the person who was playing Tom was grilling Mayella and I was getting defensive when Tom was asking me what I was so upset about because I had a way better life than he or Mayella did. I guess the most important thing that I took away from that is that I need to keep an open mind about different ways that I can learn. I always look for ways to diversify for my students, but when it comes to my own learning, I tend to only stick to what I think works. I'm definitely a believer in role playing now. Dawn Nelson

Jonathan,

I think you need to know some background about me. I am embarrassed to admit it, and I am not sure if I should really tell you this information, I never read To Kill a Mockingbird. What a tragedy. I have seen the movie several times, does that count? And while I am being honest, I also think that in high school I may have been one of the aliterate students. I read the required text, but I never read more than I needed. It was not until my adult life that I realized that I loved to read. Okay, don't spread the news, I am not proud to admit it.

Though the eyes of a new reader to the book: when you began today I was completely turned off to just reading and then responding. I could do it, yet the response was labored and dry. I felt like after we saw the video clip that I was especially tuned into my character. This idea was brilliant to me. Show a bit of the movie, who would have thought. WOW! After this I really understood the character. I learned from this experience and from the collaboration of others. When we did the posters and talked about what picture we would do in the middle, the character became clearer. I reluctantly did the role play. I explained to my group that usually when role play comes it is my cue to use the bathroom. Well I will admit it, the role playing was very powerful. I dreaded the whole 5 minutes I was in the hot seat. After all the activities my second draft was 100% better than the first. I could relate to my character in a far deeper way than I could in the beginning.

I was especially impressed by the way you front loaded the book. I have always just began with a picture walk or maybe just a quick tell of what the story was about. The way that you front loaded the book was also a way to get the students excited about the book and understand the characters. I bet this strategy leads the students to want to know what happens next. It made me want to read the book. It also helps those students that have a hard time making mental images as they read. I can't wait to use these ideas in my readers workshop. I was also thinking that these same strategies can be used for my read alouds, such as James and the Giant Peach. I really think that the 2nd graders would enjoy making the posters and maybe role playing, we will see how brave I get. I also may tweak the ideas and use them for book groups and complex group instruction. Thank you for the ideas. Amy Ayalla

Jonathan,

First, I have to admit that I have not read the examples at the back of the packet. I find that often, I am an imitator, rather than an original thinker, and I would like to present you with a genuine me.

Mayella as a character has always angered me. I have always accepted that she is he unfortunate victim of an unfair dealing of life's cards. It has always seemed to me that, despite her situation, she is supposed to be the hope for her siblings. Her ability to read and write, her ability to cope, should be the way to save her family from itself. As the oldest, she should have felt the responsibility to her siblings that I feel: nothing is asking too much. Mayella seemed to me to lack what I consider a natural "mother bear" instinct toward the Ewell brood. For this, I have always privately condemned her.

After your seminar today, I am able to see Mayella in a new light. During the gallery walk, I quietly held my peace. No one likes someone who dislikes Mayella. I wasn't until the role play that I felt blind-sided by compassion. In answering questions from a very thoughtful Tom (played by Melanie) I became Mayella. I was quiet. I didn't want to answer the questions, though I knew the answers. The answers said that I was going along with my father because it was the only way to protect my siblings. Like the slop pots that hold the geraniums, I had to be degraded and dirty to allow my siblings the chance to flourish.

I will not bother typing my final draft here, but in rereading the opening for Mayella, I came upon a whole new approach to my essay. Harper Lee includes so many words that evoke a prisoner, finally presenting Mayella as the prisoner with the last words of the passage -- her care of the geraniums and her siblings. I was stunned that I have missed it for so many years, including the 2 that I taught the book!

As an individual who functions through emotion first, and rationale second, this experience with Mayella has fundamentally changed the way I will approach literature with my students. In the course of our race towards the CST, we often forget that what matters the most is the connection between readers and characters. To have empathy. To share their joys and sorrows in such a way that, while reading like Luther, alone and silent, we laugh out loud and reach for our Kleenex to stop the tears. Exercises like the ones presented today gave me new ways to connect my students to literature in the same ways that I do! Thank you for your passion, your wisdom, and your inspiration. Authentically yours, Brandy Appling-Jensen

Dear Jonathan,

I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation on To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it was the second time around. Although I had listened to and participated in this well-planned and executed workshop in your methods class, I found new insights and usable techniques in your presentation. It does grow on one. Now that I'm out of middle school and heading towards high school, I might actually get to teach TKAM (but of course the learning from your workshop can apply to introducing any literature we might assign to --what was it?-- aliterate student populations.

As evidence of my learning today, I've typed up below and am sending you my analysis (redux) of "my" character from TKAM, Tom Robinson. Despite Nancy and Laura's frequent admonishments to "save all your drafts," I did not save that first pathetic "timed" attempt from the beginning of the workshop. At any rate, reading this new and improved version should reveal much of what I learned from the workshop, and also what I hope to do to "re-mediate" students needing more effective verbal/visual introductions to required (and desirable) texts.

"Tom's Character" (post-workshop Enlightenment Version)

Tom the dignified African-American. Tom the tireless worker. Tom the dedicated husband and family man. Tom the object of a confused, oppressed white girl's desire. Tom the accused rapist. Tom the victim of prejudice and injustice. Tom the symbol of the potential-and pitfalls- of the American dream.

At this point in our exploration of the novel TKAM, Tom is all of these things, and more. We saw over ten different representations of this deceptively simple man drawn on our group posters. We also discovered that Tom the character does not exist in isolation, and chameleon-like, he changes as viewed and experienced by other people, as revealed in our role play exercise. For on thing, he represents the injustice and irrationality that makes Dill feel sick. He is also both a magnet for poor, lonely Mayella and the cause of her subsequent deceit and self-abasement. These layers upon layers of all the characters, and especially Tom, were made painfully clear in the video segment of the trial scene from the novel. The audio tape we listened revealed even more about Tom: he had run afoul of the law once before, but was punished more severely than a co-lawbreaker simply because he couldn't pay his way out of trouble. Tom is a such a paradox: both his own best friend and worst enemy. His overall goodness and honesty, his naivete about the world in which he lives, have landed him in this court of law, falsely accused, and apparently doomed.

If not for the color of his skin, and his circumstances living in a repressive small Southern town, or if he had ignored his good heart and walked on by Mayella's house that day (and the many before it), he might be a teacher sitting among us today. Tom Robinson could also be the CEO of a multi-natonal corporation. He might even be running for president of the United States. Instead, in this novel, he is trapped in a witness chair in a hostile courtroom, sweating as he tries to tell his side of the story, and listening to everyone except Atticus turn all his words against him. His fate appears sealed, and it is not a good one. He is an outsider that not even any of the town's other outsiders are capable of saving. But without all of these other insider and outsider presences in the courtroom, and their individual stories and interactions, Tom would not be a real character we can empathize with or learn from. That is what we learned from this lesson, and what will keep us reading, because we know what is going on, and we care what happens to people like Tom. Thanks again, Barbara Saxton

Jonathan -

Okay, it's 6:20 AM and I'm just beginning to write this. I'm sorry. As you remember, I've seen this presentation before, but I still had a good time walking through the steps. Since I saw it the first time in Methods, I've used the overhead/audio reading when I could borrow the audio from Sharon Leach. I find that the students, especially my slower readers, react to pre-recorded audio well because it takes the burden of making meaning of the complex sentences and all of the phrasing. Cissy Spacek'S already done the chunking for them, so there's nothing left for them to do but listen and create a visual in their heads. I'm surprised every year by how many kids can't or don't get visual images in their minds as they read, and I know that this strategy is one that allows them to do so more readily.

Although I normally feel like a hot shot whenever someone uses TKAM for their presentation (I've read it so many times, I've read so many teacher articles about it, I've seen so many lesson plans about it), I still learn things about the characters each time. I think I did have Mayella last time, and I did this time, too, but that doesn't mean I didn't deepen my understanding of her. I knew all of the things that we talked about Mayella during the presentation, but I don't remember the sheer hopelessness of things without saying it out loud.

I'm not going to share my writing with you either pre or post because, frankly, it's terrible. It's been a long time since I've written a response to lit, and that's something I've taken away from all of these presentations. Although I often write an opening paragraph or follow along with the students privately, I guess I need to carve out time to complete my own homework. Another way to build empathy. Debbie Navratil

Jonathan,

I enjoyed your workshop today (or now yesterday as I've stayed up all night indulging my perfectionist tendencies in the finalization of my workshop presentation and am just now getting to sending you this e-mail). I particularly like the term "aliterate" - it describes those uninterested students perfectly. I could definitely see how the interactive activities you presented could help engage those students. I was certainly engaged during the activities. I thought the opening exercise was a great illustration of how our students probably feel most of the time during timed writing or in-class essays. I know I felt I had some ideas by the end of the time but was just truly beginning to develop them when you said "time's up". However, I might have had an advantage since I've read and taught To Kill a Mockingbird and so knew the context of the passages. From just those passages, I concluded that Tom is not formally educated but observant and intelligent and that he is patient, kind, and modest. I particularly focused on the dialogue and Scout's phrase "soft black velvet" in my analysis.

Watching the courtroom scene and then having to create a visual representation of Tom just relying on that courtroom scene made me realize that the actor who played Tom Robinson was able to communicate Tom's character and emotions more clearly than Scout's naive narration in the text (at least in my opinion) and so the movie could truly help students come to a deep understanding of Tom's character before they picked up the book. Tom's tears and controlled, polite speech seemed particularly effective. However, I can also see that this activity could be problematic if an actor's or director's interpretation is not supported by the actual text. I suppose you could warn students about the difference and then they would be primed to look for it when reading - which could produce a different sort of motivation.

I found that then creating the visual representation for Tom was a more powerful activity than I realized. Just having to come up with and then justify a symbol made me aware of inferences I hadn't realized I'd made about Tom and helped me articulate those inferences. I chose a golden retriever as my symbol because I believe Tom is loyal, kind, eager to help others, and do the right thing, and positive and understanding in the face of misfortune (like a golden retriever). Also, like a golden retriever, Tom is viewed by others as less than human or less than other humans despite his admirable characteristics. I realized after I created the symbol that it could really become a powerful reminder of Tom's characteristics. Now, every time I think of Tom Robinson, that golden retriever picture pops up in my mind. I can see how this activity would give students something to hold onto as they read the text (at least if their brain works like mine and latches on to visuals).

I found the role-playing more uncomfortable but also helpful in forcing me to articulate my inferences about the character. In my second attempt to write about Tom Robinson, I found I had much more to say and that much of my analysis now referred to the actor's actions in the movie rather than the text I initially read. I expanded my analysis and came up with the statement "he has been literally and figuratively crippled by a racist society yet remains compassionate and kind". I found my second analysis focusing more on Tom's kindness and compassion rather than less emotional aspects such as level of education - indicating that I felt more connected to and invested in the character now. I can see how a student who felt similarly emotionally invested would now want to read the book to follow "their" character. Through this exercise I rediscovered the power visuals, and especially visual symbols, hold for me (something I knew about myself but had somewhat forgotten). I also realized that despite having read the book before, I could still become more attached to a character - a sign of great literature.

I particularly thought the reminder about the saved vs. the damned was helpful. In teaching honors English, I tend to fall into the trap of teaching my students how to be part of the saved (since after all, that's how they're probably going to be treated in college, right?) rather than consistently expanding their understanding through more kinesthetic or visual exercises such as the ones you modeled. I will definitely try to include more such visual activities in my lessons in the future as I experienced first hand how effective they are. Thank you for a great presentation. Hopefully, I can live up to the example. Best, Brook Wallace

Hi Jonathan,

So I am embarrassed to say that I forgot to respond to your presentation last week and that I am equally mortified to be turning my response in late. Perhaps I can make it up to you by sharing how much I really enjoyed your lesson. First off, I have to tell you that I love how you explain the history of so many of the terms and strategies that we have in education, I am continuously learning from you these juicy tidbits of information and hope that I can remember them. The cumulative graphic organizer was great and I love the incorporation of the video. The role playing was very valuable to me as a student and as a teacher. It really made me think through who the character was and helped me prep myself for the character sketch that followed. I know that I will use the cumulative graphic organizer and I will be using the role playing more often as well. Thank you for setting such a high standard for us (I might not have said this if I'd written this on Thursday night before I gave my own presentation! ) Your presentation was so well informed and well rounded and I thoroughly enjoyed my learning experience. Thanks again. Sarah Thistlethwaite

ncte 08 presentation

Here's the material I promised to post from my Nov 21 presentation at NCTE in San Antonio:

Rethinking 'Old School' Practices: Fostering a Love of Books in an Age of Technology
Friday, Nov 21, 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
NCTE 98th Annual Convention in San Antonio, TX
"From Martin Luther to Walt Disney: engaging aliterate secondary level students with what they read"

A presentation by Jonathan H. Lovell

Professor of English & Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project
San Jose State University
San Jose, California

Agenda

3:05 - 3:05 participants read vignette focusing on Dill Harris from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and write the opening sentences of a character analysis essay
3:05 - 3:15 J Lovell reads essay on Martin Luther and Walt Disney as teachers of reading
3:15 - 3:20 J Lovell provides demonstration of "cumulative graphic organizer" [his own invention!] as a pre-reading strategy, focusing on courtroom scene from film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (henceforth TKAM)
3:20 – 3:25 participants view visual symbol posters of Dill Harris character on the overhead, then discuss with a partner what they now understand about their character
3:25 – 3:30 J Lovell discusses use of role play activity, with Dill, Mayella & Tom in mixed character groups, with one character in the "hot seat" and the other two asking questions of that character
3:30 - 3:35 participants listen to vignette of Dill from audio version of TKAM, while large print version of this vignette is displayed on the overhead projector screen
3:35 - 3:40 participants discuss what they learned about Dill Harris by experiencing this sequence of activities

Dill Harris

Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be pending every summer in Maycomb from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse sometimes," said Jem. "Ever seen anything good?"

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning of respect. "Tell it to us," he said.

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck-fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show sounded better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: "You ain't said anything about him."

"I haven't got one."

"Is he dead?"

"No . . . "

"Then if he's not dead you got one, haven't you?"

Dill blushed and Jem told me to hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and found acceptable.


Martin Luther and Walt Disney as Teachers of Reading

Because part of my job at San Jose State is to serve as a university supervisor of beginning teachers of English, I've spent a great deal of time over the past 22 years observing students in classrooms at the middle and high school levels reading and responding to what they read. Often, as I observe these classrooms, it seems to me that teachers are behaving as if the Lutheran revolution is the only game in town. You know the general story: Luther directly challenged the whole notion of the purpose of reading and who should be allowed to learn to read. Prior to the Lutheran revolution, readers of texts were largely monks and priests, while the rest of the population acted primarily as listeners to the Biblical narratives told by this priestly class. These readings were frequently supplemented by visual versions of these same tales, often depicted as frescoes on nearby church walls.

Luther changed all that. "You must be a reader yourself if you are ever to understand your true relationship to God," he proclaimed. Even more somberly for today's students, he suggested that if you could not understand what you read, you were meant to be damned. Damned eternally. Oh my.

As a student growing up in the late 50's, I was a child of Sputnik. Surprisingly, the sudden and quite unanticipated launching of this orbital satellite had the effect on American education of driving us back to the basics of the Lutheran revolution. Shortly after the Soviets launched sputnik in the fall of 1957, American students' reading comprehension began to be tested both systematically and frequently. Depending on one's comprehension level, one was placed in either higher or lower level classes: "saved" or "damned."

For me, the logical culmination of this system came in my senior year of college. I was taking a class in the modern British novel by a Professor I greatly admired. All of us "saved" students in English were sitting in the first two rows of the small lecture hall, laughing at the professor's jokes and nudging each other as we pointed to passages we'd underlined in our texts and comments we'd written in the margins. I chanced to turn around one day to look at the back of the room. There, on the far side of the back row, hunched down in his chair, was one of my classmates -- a good friend and a fellow member of my residential hall. He was looking rather desperate, peering over the top of his book, clearly hoping the professor would not notice him. I knew this particular classmate was extremely bright. In fact, he later went on to Oxford University and then Harvard Law School. What sort of system could lead to his conviction that he was not among the saved, at least as far as reading of works of modern British literature was concerned?

But that was the consequence, I later came to realize, of identifying those with different academic aptitudes early in an educational system, then nurturing these talented individuals at the expense of those not "meant" to be saved. The cluster of the saved, of course, got smaller and smaller as one rose up through the educational ranks. Eventually, in English studies, it became a matter of fewer and fewer people talking more and more loudly to one another.

In my third year of graduate school in English, as I was observing this process of increasing selectivity taking place, and wondering when I would be the next to be pushed off the plank, I was asked to take over the leadership of an undergraduate seminar made up of English majors who had a different take on the purpose and value of the study of English. These were students who were planning to enter post-BA credential programs in the state of Connecticut. Since I'd taught 10th and 12th grade at a private school in Delaware prior to beginning my graduate studies, I was asked to become the seminar leader for this group of undergraduates. And as it turned out, the questions they were asking fascinated me: how should the field of English be re-defined when it became the one field of study required of all students in each year of their public schooling? As significantly, how should this field of study be understood when one's students are there by law rather than choice?

And here's where Walt Disney came in. What if we decided to look at how kids understood "texts" when they were good at it? Wouldn't this give us a different perspective? What purpose was served, after all, by observing kids suffering through the ever-more-selective reading programs whose primary effect was to increase the disparity between "good readers" and "poor readers" in each successive year? Since I was leading this seminar as an adjunct to a Children's Literature course for which I was serving as a TA, it seemed sensible to define reading as a matter of making sense of texts that were both visual and verbal. Isn't that what any good elementary teacher taught day in day out: stories in which the illustrations gave the reader as much information as the words?

In pursuing this line of inquiry, we learned that prior to Disney's creation of the first 90 minute full length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937, it was widely assumed that "talking animated cartoons" could only sustain the attention of the average child for about ten minutes. Sound familiar? Disney and his animators challenged this conventional thinking, asking themselves what might make children want to sustain their attention for longer periods of time. Telling a good story was obviously a key ingredient (hence the choice of Snow White), but so was the appeal to our universal delight in sound, song, movement and a bit of irreverence (hence the Seven Dwarfs). By drawing on these attributes of what made kids variously talented and smart, might the supposed "shortness" of kids' attention spans be significantly stretched? As we all know today, Disney and his animators proved the skeptics wrong. Kids could pay attention to what they were viewing for a good deal longer than 10 minutes. It was all a matter of knowing in advance what might interest and engage their attention, then incorporating these elements systematically and consistently into this uniquely modern version of visual and verbal "story telling." Were it not for the launching of Sputnik, perhaps this Disney "vision" of kids as diversely talented readers and viewers might even have prevailed in American education. Sadly, however, this vision of the later 1930's gradually faded as school once again became more academic, rigorous, and relentlessly selective. And so it is today.

In today's presentation, however, I'll return you briefly to the world of Disney and introduce you to an approach to reading comprehension that draws on the many ways both kids and adults are uniquely talented. After starting with the most traditional of exercises -- reading a short passage from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird describing Dill Harris and writing about that passage -- we'll approach at this same text through a variety of different media, using a technique that John Elkins and Allan Luke have called "re/mediating adolescent literacies." I'll only be able to give the briefest of overviews of the sequence of exercises I've developed over the years to help students and teachers rethink "old school" practices in reading and responding to traditional texts. If you would like to gain a fuller understanding of the practices I will be introducing you to over the next several minutes, however, as well as to read the responses of a group of K-college Writing Project teachers who experienced this sequence of execises this summer, I invite you to visit my blog by googling "jonathan's edutalk" and reading what I've posted on my entries of 11-20-08.

Materials and Methods Used in this Workshop

Graphic organizers used to prepare students for reading or viewing a verbal or visual text

Graphic organizers are one of the most effective ways to introduce students to a verbal or visual text that they are about to read. Good books for helping teachers do this at the secondary level are Jim Burke’s Tools for Thought: Helping All Students Read, Write, Speak, and Think (Heinemann, 2002) and Fran Claggett and Joan Brown’s Drawing Your Own Conclusions: Graphic Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Heinemann, 1997). For elementary level teachers, I’d recommend Elaine McEwan’s Teach Them ALL to Read: Catching the Kids Who Fall Through the Cracks (SAGE, 2002), Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis’s Strategies that Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding (Stenhouse, 2000), and Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Susan Zimmermann (Heinemann, 1997).

I use a 'cumulative graphic organizer' as a pre-reading strategy in this workshop, anticipating that participants will be able to make better sense of the courtroom segment in general, and Dill's role in this segment in particular, if they are ‘pre-introduced’ to this part of the TKAM narrative through the use of a graphic organizer. Student-generated graphic organizers are also terrific ways for kids of all ages to represent what they have already read or seen, and to exhibit this knowledge to their classmates. I also like the idea of using overhead transparencies to portray strong central images, or metaphors that characterize segments of a narrative, and then "embellishing" these central images with successive "layers" of meaning.

Video versions of narrative texts

I’m always on the lookout for good video versions of novels and plays, either for classroom use or for use in workshops for teachers. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, however, that I do not know how to dub selections from a DVD version of a novel onto a new DVD. I therefore just select a segment of the film I’m focusing on for my workshop, or use the "select scene" on the DVD player, to move from one segment to the next.

What I think is important about the use of visual narratives in general is to regard the video version of the work you are reading as equal in importance to the print version. In other words, regard both versions as two interestingly different renditions, two "re/mediations," to use the clever term that Professor Donna Alvermann borrows from the research of John Elkins and Allan Luke,1 of the same "deep story." Don’t treat the video version as a way to make the experience of reading the story or play more palatable, but rather as a chance to discover the compellingly different ways that great stories can be told. I also think that it’s a good idea to realize that for our students digital media provide their primary way of understanding and responding to stories, while most teachers tend to regard print narratives as the "higher" form of story telling.

Visual Symbol Posters based on characters in a story

Visual symbol posters are especially effective as a way to lead students "into" the characters of a story they are about to read, but they can also be used as either a "through" or "beyond" exercise, capturing what readers or groups of readers are learning about their characters.

What’s exciting about these visual symbol posters is how much they teach the students, as they are creating these posters and talking together, about the characters they are describing, and how stunning they can be when posted on the classroom wall for all to see. Gallery walks are especially effective as a means of exhibiting these artworks to the class as a whole.

Role Playing of Characters

Having small groups of three participants role play different characters, as with the characters of Dill Harris & Mayella Ewell & Tom Robinson, has the advantage of lowering the apprehension that participants might feel if asked to sit in a "hot seat" before the class as a whole, role playing a single character. Similar in power and effectiveness to the use of guided imagery, role playing also has a similar danger: it can become so engrossing that students forget these are fictional characters they are representing. It is therefore a good strategy, when asking your students to engage in role-playing, to set clear guidelines for your students as both role-players and question askers. It’s also important to debrief them carefully and sensitively afterwards. That being said, I know of no more powerful means of helping aliterate readers (those students who can read but chose not to) to become engaged in what they read than the "paired" exercises of creating visual symbol posters and then role playing their character.

Audio Versions of Novels

There are several excellent recorded book companies now making recorded books for both children and young adults, and I've been pleased to observe that several adopted textbook series include recorded versions of their narrative texts as well. If you do not want to spend the money to purchase a recorded version of a book, however, you can often find these versions in your local public library, often in the section for the hearing impaired.

Dubbing selections from your recorded book for use in your classroom

Prepare to take some time if you wish to follow my practice in the final segment of my workshop, but to be rewarded with a tape that you can use for many years to come. I start by listening to the recorded version of a novel or play while I’m driving, making a mental note of which selections I think will work well for “into,” “through,” and “beyond” exercises. For my Mockingbird selections, I was thinking about providing middle adolescent readers with a “window” into the three characters I’d chosen to focus on prior to their reading of this novel.

After selecting and making a mental note of my selections from the audio version of a novel or play, I then begin the process of locating and recording them in the order in which I intend to play them in the classroom. Once I’ve located each segment, I dub this selection to a fresh audiotape, so that the resulting new tape is one that I can play in a classroom. The bad news is that this process takes time: the good news is that once one has made one of these tapes, one can use it over and over again.

1 Alvermann, Donna, "Seeing Themselves as Capable and Engaged Readers: Adolescents and Re/Mediated Instruction," Learning Point Associates, Naperville, IL 2003