What Now?

Reclaiming ownership of my reading life

I've read a lot this spring, but I haven't been that happy with a lot of the reading because I've felt trapped into doing it. But I'm reclaiming ownership of my reading life:

A friend convinced me to join Goodreads in January, and I'm really liking it, not least because it's pushing me to finish books that I would probably just never quite get around to finishing, not because I didn't like the book but because I just got busy and lost energy. So for the most part this has been good for my reading life, but I was feeling burdened by a couple of books that I had lost interest in, but they kept showing up in my "currently reading" page, and I was feeling a bit trapped. And then, last week, I suddenly decided that I could just delete them! Freedom!

My school library did a special program this year, asking people to "read their way around the world." We got a little passport and got stamps in it if we read a book written by an author from each continent. They also included Antarctica and outer space, which obviously could be written by someone from any continent. I got a little obsessed and decided that I had to get all of the available passports. I was going to ditch the project at one point, because I wanted to read what I wanted to read without worrying about where people were from, but then I learned that our new head of school was almost done with her passport, and I somehow got it in my head that I had to finish the whole thing as well so that I would earn her respect. Stupid, but there it is.

Fortunately, I finished the last book I needed last week, and it feels so good to have that burden lifted. Sad that it had become a burden, but that's the way I was experiencing it.

I had to teach Julius Caesar this spring to my 9th-graders, because a performance was coming to town, and we got permission to take the entire freshman class to the play. That was a great reason, and I'm glad we had this opportunity, but I don't really like this play. But now I've finished, and it was a stretch for me to "sell" the play to my students when I don't love it myself. It feels good to be done with it.

I had been invited to join a reading group, and I seriously didn't want to, but I like the woman who invited me, so I went to the first, organizational meeting. And I really liked all the women who came, and I was convincing myself that this would be fun after all. But then it took forever to find a day that everyone could meet, and we wound up settling on May 30, which is the last week of classes, and I.just.can't. And my friend who invited me said that the first novel they chose was just okay. And I have enough reading that I need to do for class that I finally decided to just gracefully bow out of the reading group and read whatever the heck I want.

As summer is beginning to appear tantalizingly on the horizon, I'm becoming really protective of my reading time! I'm going to have lots of books I need to read -- for an NEH seminar (yay!) and for a new course I'm potentially taking on in the fall (yay!) -- and so I'm not going to let anyone tell me what else I need to be reading. It's going to be all Reader's Choice!

Hey, friends

Long time no see! Clearly my "I'm back" of a month ago was premature. It hasn't been a bad autumn at all, just one that has taken all my energy and left me little left over to do anything fun, such as blogging. 

But the good news is that D. got a positive update from the surgeon on Wednesday and is doing well. She started PT this week; taking her to appointments is going to be yet another thing for me to do twice a week, but my experience this summer was that I actually got work/studying done during her appointments, so I think it will be fine. She'll eventually be able to drive herself to appointments, but only once she can go down the front stairs unassisted.

In the meantime, here has been one really good outcome of her surgery: It has led to a restructuring of my personal priorities such that school has receded in importance in my life. I'm not sure how long that will last, but it has felt good to have other things on my mind besides school! This has also meant that I care way less about the inevitable little dramas at school, which has been nice.

My classes are humming along now, which feels great, although I'm completely wiped out on Tuesday and Thursday nights, since I have five classes in a row those days (four in a row on Tuesday mornings, which is pretty brutal).

I'm in a Hebrew study group that's meeting every other Monday night; I think we've dwindled to three die-hards, which is way better than when I was trying to be a cheerleader for folks who weren't into it. But I'm still not in the habit that I should be, of doing 10-15 minutes of study every day. See above re: not much energy.

I'm also only exercising on the weekends, which isn't good. Again, see above re: not much energy, although I know full well that exercising regularly would help my energy levels.

I honestly think that some of my low energy is about this damned election, and I'm hoping that we'll all be more cheerful when we (hopefully) don't have to think about Donald Trump any more.

So that's life at the moment. I've got several things I want to blog about, but first I needed to break through my own blog silence!

Learning Hebrew, redux

I know that I grumped and groaned an awful lot about learning Hebrew in my bat mitzvah class over the past year. Plus, you know, all the tears I shed.

But here I am, diving in again!

I really don't want to lose the Hebrew that I so painstakingly gained, so I talked with the rabbi and then proposed to my mitzvah-mates (a lovely term coined by one of my fellow bat mitzvah folks) that any interested folks could perhaps get together a few times over the summer and read an easy-Hebrew-for-adults storybook. I was amazed that most of the folks in the group said "yes" enthusiastically!

So today one of my mitzvah-mates and I and the rabbi had a little field trip to our local Jewish bookstore to select the book for the group. We settled on a book of Jewish parables. Each of the stories is 2-4 pages long, which will give us a frequent sense of accomplishment. I've already figured out that the first story features a blind man, so I think I'm doing well.

We also needed a Hebrew-English dictionary, of course. My rabbi recommends the Oxford, but the type was too small for me, so I got the Bantam, which is his second choice. I'm now going to have to spend time singing the aleph-bet song, since it turns out that, just as in English, one actually has to remember the order of the letters in order to use a dictionary!

And then, just because we're go-getters, we also bought a much more expensive book that is a language self-study course for English speakers who are traveling to Israel. Hebrew & Israel First Steps has lots of vocabulary and grammar, and each chapter is about a different place in Israel, so there's interesting content as well. It's modern Hebrew, as you'd expect, which means it begins by including all of the vowels but then gradually drops them away. I've been studying my Hebrew vocabulary without vowels for the last two or three weeks, and I'm sort of excited to push myself in this way.

It's perhaps weird that I'm so jazzed about studying Hebrew this summer when I was literally weeping over it last summer, but here is the difference, self-aggrandizing though it may be: The bar/bat mitzvah group's Hebrew teacher was a wonderfully generous woman who was doing the whole thing out of the goodness of her heart but isn't an especially good teacher and who kind of wanted to show off her own Hebrew skills. This summer, on the other hand, I am the de facto leader of this little unofficial group, and I feel confident that I can create a more positive learning climate in which we're all working at our own pace and ability and supporting one another. We shall see if that claim actually bears out.

My move in the game of "Humiliation"

So, you know that game of "Humiliation" that David Lodge invented, in which English academics confess the canonical works that they've never read?

Well, here's my confession: I've actually never read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, sure, I successfully answered a question on it during my comprehensive exams.

I even discussed it in a discursive footnote in my dissertation.

But neither of those things means I've actually read it!

But my colleague who's been teaching AP English Language for the last couple of years included the novel in her course and said it went really well. And next year I'm going back to AP Lang (which is seriously my favorite course, so I'm so happy to be returning to it!). And I'm always looking to give myself a challenge.

So I took a deep breath and put The Grapes of Wrath on my syllabus for next year. My desk copy has now arrived. So all that's left to do is, you know, actually crack it open and read it this summer.

I'm both looking forward to it and also kind of dreading it, in that way that books that one's avoided for decades become larger than life.

Is there a name for this?

You know when you need to use two different prepositions because you have a pair of overlapping prepositional phrases with the same object? As in "hope for and denial of intimacy"? Or "thinking about and wishing for something or other"?

What's that construction called? Anyone know?

 

What else I'm not reading, at least for now: Pedagogy

I went on a bit of a pedagogy-reading kick last spring and summer, and I totally enjoyed it. With colleagues, I read and talked about Grant J. Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design and Ron Ritchhart's Creating Cultures of Thinking. Also, in preparation for the week-long seminar I took on race and inclusion and independent schools, I did a lot of reading about the development of racial identity, especially Beverly Daniel Tatum's Can We Talk About Race? and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Plus, my 9th-grade English teachers and I got together over the summer and significantly revamped a major component of our shared course, and in doing so revamped a bunch of other parts of the course as well.

And this was all good, and I'm glad for the reading and the experiences.

Also, I'm exhausted. I changed things about my teaching and my courses, and I added some new components, and I feel really good about these changes. But it's been lots of work.

So one of the things I did for myself when I didn't get the academic dean position was to promise myself that I could take things a little easier. Today I returned yet another pedagogy book to the library, unread, and it was quite a relief.

Here's the thing: I'm a really good teacher. That doesn't mean I can't be better, and I think it's the responsibility of all teachers to keep honing their craft. But that doesn't mean I need to be doing this honing constantly; rather, I'd like to have seasons of such professional development, and other seasons in which those ideas take root. And, if we keep going with this new metaphor, maybe even other times when I'm letting my craft lie fallow for a bit.

So I'm declaring that this spring -- and maybe this summer and next year as well -- as a time for not continuing to push myself pedagogically but rather letting myself relax into and absorb the changes I've already made. I feel myself unwind even writing those words.

(Sorry for the conglomeration of mixed metaphors in this post. I'm way too lazy to go back and make them all cohere.)

What I'm reading and not reading

What I've read lately:

Book #4: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice -- I love Charles Todd! This one was a Bess Crawford mystery; she's a nurse in WWI. It was okay, but I really like Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries better. They're set immediately post-WWI, and Rutledge returns to Scotland Yard trying to keep his PTSD a secret. 

Book #5: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half -- Love, love this. I was a devoted fan of Brosh's blog by the same name, and I'd been meaning to read her book for ages. So funny and sad and raw and honest.

Book #6: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead -- the first of the Roderick Alleyn mysteries. I had a momentary inspiration to delve into the classic Queens of Crime -- Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham. This mystery was okay but not fabulous, but worth reading more to see if the series picks up. I read some of these when I was young, but the only one I remember is one in which a performance of Macbeth goes horribly badly when, at the end of the play, the actor Macbeth's head really does get cut off and put on a pole.

What I've ditched only partially read:

I decided that, since I'm not going to be academic dean, I didn't have to finish reading Jim Knight's Instructional Coaching. A fine book, but I'm not going to be an instructional coach, so I returned it to the library as a sign of my realigned priorities.

I was continuing with the Ngaio Marsh project and started reading Death in Ecstasy ... and wow, Marsh really hates gay men. I've read a lot of 19th- and early 20th-century novels that have the prejudices of their time (indeed, without such books I wouldn't have had a dissertation!), but the sheer disgust in the tone of this novel is too unpleasant for me to continue. Color me not surprised to then learn that Marsh never married and had female "companions" throughout her life. Protesting too much, hmmm? Anyway, after a few chapters, I decided that there was no point in getting through all of that vileness just for a mystery novel, so I ditched it.

I also had checked out Dorothy Sayers's Nine Tailors and started reading it. I generally like Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but this one has as its central conceit the ringing of church bells, which is described in such technical language that it's really quite tedious. Plus, in the first few chapters there have already been two maps, one a blueprint of the church and one a map of the village, and I know from experience that any mystery that relies on maps so that one tries to figure out who could make it from one building to another in how much time is just no fun for me. I haven't entirely made up my mind to ditch it, but I'm pretty close.

Today is the first day of spring break, so I'm determined to read only books that make me happy! (with the exception of Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, which will be super depressing but must be read because I assigned it to my AP Lit students)

Book #3: Ashley Weaver, Murder at Brightwell

This is a fun, fluffy mystery novel, set among the wealthy in 1930s Britain. The protagonist has a philandering husband whom she's still in love with, sort of, and that was a nice twist on the genre.

My error was in forgetting how fluffy books should be read -- all in one fell swoop, in a delightfully decadent day of lying in bed and inhaling a book whole.

Instead, I read a chapter or two each night at bedtime for a week, and by the end, I didn't really care who had done it; I just wanted the darned book done. 

So this is a half-hearted review, but the problem is not with the fluffy mystery itself -- I'm all in favor of a fluffy mystery! -- but with my lackluster reading of it.

And that is the last book review for a while, because now I return to the big stack of books that are teetering by my bedside, none of them even close to being finished. And we're heading into the last two weeks of the trimester, which means that I'll log a lot of grading hours and very few reading hours.

Book #2: Marjorie Munsterberg, Writing About Art

The second book sort of fell into my lap when an art history teacher friend asked me to take a look at the book and see if it might work well for her AP Art History course. I wound up doing more than "taking a look" but rather reading the whole thing, in large part because I've never read anything about how to write about art and was interested in learning more.

In lieu of a proper review on this blog, here's a portion of the email I sent to her:

Short version: I like Marjorie Munsterberg's Writing About Art! I read it cover to cover this weekend (while avoiding the grading I need to do, naturally). And certainly it's priced right, unlike some very expensive books I saw on Amazon about writing about art. ...

 

Munsterberg's points about writing in her Introduction -- about the paragraph as the organizing unit of an essay, etc. -- completely square with what students are learning in every year of English course. ... I disagree with her about the value of Strunk & White as a writing guide (she likes it; I don't), but it makes no real difference in this book.

 

From what I've seen with your assignments, her emphasis on visual description and stylistic analysis as two major forms of writing about art would work well with what you do in AP Art History. ... I also found interesting her inclusion of some of her own assignments at the end, although these may be less interesting to you since they probably are similar to what you do.

 

I particularly like her inclusion of student examples of different types of essays, and I LOVE her careful revision of the first two essays (81-98). I could imagine as a great class plan giving the students in class the first unrevised sample essay and discussing it and then having them read through her analysis and revision for homework that night. The one thing I don't like about her revisions is that she likes opening lines such as "This paper will be a visual description of ..." or "For this paper I will focus on ...," which I really dislike. But maybe these are fine in art history? ...

One thing that I like about Munsterberg's assignments and that she focuses on in the book (especially in the "Visual Analysis" section) is the difference between SEEING something and KNOWING it because you read it on the museum placard, etc. (5). I notice that her assignments say "NO RESEARCH" for the visual and stylistic analysis essays and that she insists on one's citing any source for any piece of information that one can't SEE from the piece itself. In your students' essays that I read, many of them were clearly relying on the museum information or other sources and struggling with relying on their own SEEING, which I imagine is the perennial struggle for beginning art history students.

 

She also has a separate assignment for a research paper. I don't know if that's something you have your students do in AP Art History, but I like her treatment of the research process. (And she has a nuanced approach to the value of Wikipedia [67], which I appreciate.) Her preferred citation style is Chicago; if you're having your students use MLA, that's something to note.

 

A question that I have after reading this and would love to talk with you about sometime: What's the line between art history/analysis and art appreciation? I tell my students that their goal is to analyze rather than compliment an author, and when we do discuss how well an author has done something (as we just did with the epilogues for Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I and many readers think are weak and should have been left out), I am very clear with them that we're doing something quite different in those moments -- evaluating rather than analyzing. But some of the professional art historians Munsterberg quotes approvingly are essentially analyzing why something is good, and in one of her revisions of a student essay, she allows to stand the student's phrase about an "awesome sunset." (I would have immediately asked, "What do you mean by awesome? Do you mean vivid? Then say that instead.") This question isn't so much about this book as it is about the field of art history that I'd love to know more about.

 Plus, for my own purposes, three quotes that I wanted to write down to come back to later. The first is from Munsterberg herself, the next two from art historians she quotes:

"In effect, writing a visual description consists of two separate acts of translation. The first transforms a visual experience into a verbal one and the second turns a private experience into one that can be communicated to someone else" (4).

Leo Steinberg, writing about Michelangelo's Last Judgment: "Where a copy is manifestly at odds with its model, it not only leads me to see what the copyist missed but what I hadn't noticed. Ours is by nature a pejorative eye, better adapted to registering a mismatch than agreement. The discrepancies that lead to the eye in comparing replicas with their ostensible models are jolts to one's visual sloth" (34).

 John Barrell in The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840: "We should ask ourselves whether we do not still, in the ways we admire Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Constable, identify with the interests of their customers [who purchased these pictures] and against the poor they portray" (44).

Book #1: Debby Irving, Waking Up White

As I mentioned the other day, in the last year or so I've become worse and worse about actually finishing books. I check out and buy tons of books, and then I don't read them. Or, rather, I start them and then pile them up beside my bed until the stack gets too high and falls over. Then I return them to the library or put them on a bookshelf. And the cycle continues with new books.

I'm totally fine with ditching books partway through if I'm not liking them, but that's not the situation here. It's more like I don't seem to have the intellectual wherewithal or the discipline to pay attention to keep going. I want to change that pattern I've fallen into. So I'm going to blog about each book I finish this year, in hopes that this will prompt me to finish more of them. (And books I'm teaching don't count.)

So here's Book #1: Debby Irving, Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Cambridge: Elephant Room Press, 2014).

Debby Irving is a self-described New England WASP who started figuring out how white privilege works at the age of 50. This book is memoir-ish in that she talks about her various awakenings and mistakes along the way to a greater understanding of structural racism. She's not an amazing writer, but it's an engaging book, and she has questions at the end of each chapter to help folks who are on their own journey toward understanding. She's especially good on the phenomenon of well-meaning white people.

This book has gotten an unusual amount of attention for a self-published book. I first heard about it last summer at the diversity workshop I went to, and Debby Irving seems to have become a fixture at various conferences and workshops for independent schools and diversity. I'm not entirely sure why -- she doesn't seem connected with independent schools at all -- and maybe she has a broader reach that I don't know about. I think some churches and synagogues are reading it as well. The book is very popular right now in at least the small corner of the world I inhabit.

Anyway, I accidentally sort of started a reading-about-race group of faculty & staff at FGS this year, and we decided to read Irving's book this winter. Irving is either on the lecture circuit right now or at least was going to be in our area doing a talk, and so several folks were interested in reading it. About 20 adults at FGS got the book (generously paid for out of the Multicultural Coordinator's budget), and about 12 gathered to have a conversation about it. And I had been asked to facilitate that conversation -- the reason that I'd actually finished this book instead of letting it languish in the pile with the other half-read books!

I didn't learn all that much from reading it, but then again I've been thinking about and studying race for a pretty long time. (Race and racism in America played a vital role in my dissertation.) But some of the folks in the group learned A LOT, so that right there says something important about this book. She's also really understanding of the fear of saying something stupid that keeps white people silent, which I know for a fact had been dogging some folks in the group. So I think that this book can be wonderful for groups of white people (which this self-selected group of FGS adults was) who want to push through that fear and develop greater cultural competence. I'm thinking of recommending it to my synagogue, which is having a series of conversations about race this year.

Finally, it would have done both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders a world of good to have read Debby Irving's book before Thursday night's debate!