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Reloading the canon

Captain GreyI once heard a lec­ture about the estab­lish­ment of the lit­er­ary canon, those books which become the accept­ed mile­stones of lit­er­a­ture. The lec­tur­er went on to sug­gest that the pri­ma­ry way this hap­pens is because these books—whatever the reason—become anchored in school cur­ric­u­la. Good exam­ples of this might be Mac­beth or To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. This is not to ques­tion such works’ intrin­sic lit­er­ary mer­it but to think what hap­pens when such sin­gu­lar titles become embed­ded in schools.

It can hap­pen this way.

Many years ago, when my eldest son (he is in his late for­ties now) was in fourth grade, I gave a copy of my book Cap­tain Grey to his young teacher. The book, my first work of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, had just been pub­lished. The teacher liked it so much he read it to his class. He told me how much his stu­dents enjoyed it.

Twen­ty years lat­er my son had a reunion at that school and asked me to come along. Lo and behold, the same teacher was still there, still teach­ing fourth grade. Gray­er, balder to be sure, but still enthu­si­as­tic. “Avi!” he exclaimed when he saw me. “Remem­ber that book you gave me, Cap­tain Grey?  I still read it to my class every year. My kids love it! It’s the one book I use to teach his­tor­i­cal fiction.”

There are a num­ber of ways of look­ing at this. First, delight that he liked the book so much. Delight that his stu­dents enjoyed it. That said, in the inter­ven­ing years I had writ­ten some thir­ty oth­er books and, frankly, some bet­ter than that first work of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. I would be very sur­prised if this teacher paid any atten­tion to them. He had a book of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and his stu­dents enjoyed it. He was done.

Indeed, some­times teach­ers (schools) buy a set of books—a par­tic­u­lar title by a par­tic­u­lar author. Hav­ing that set, there is no felt need to pur­chas­es anther set by the same author. They have her/his work, regard­less if that writer goes on to cre­ate some­thing bet­ter, dif­fer­ent, more chal­leng­ing. It can mean that the very suc­cess of one book can lead, in this con­text, to the fail­ure of anoth­er book—regardless of merit.

The canon, if you allow me, needs to be reloaded now and again.

3 thoughts on “Reloading the canon”

  1. Thank you for this insight­ful post! Great to read that you are sug­gest­ing reload­ing the canon now and again. When I was a new class­room teacher, there were some on our grade lev­el team who would pull out the same units, the same books, and the same teach­ing ideas from year to year. They had their stand­bys and used what they were famil­iar with, regard­less of whether the units, books, and teach­ing ideas were still rel­e­vant. Those same teach­ers had a dif­fi­cult time when new­bies would come in and would want to use dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als or would come up with their own units. The best advice I received regard­ing teach­ing was to always do both: inte­grate new, rel­e­vant mate­ri­als, the­mat­ic units, and teach­ing meth­ods with the tried and true. I was hired in 1990, when Whole Lan­guage was all the rage. My wise coop­er­at­ing teacher had sug­gest­ed to me dur­ing my stu­dent teach­ing semes­ter in 89–90 that in lieu of pitch­ing every­thing relat­ed to phon­ics and phone­mic aware­ness through direct, tar­get­ed instruc­tion, to instead think of adding in Whole Lan­guage so that the new bal­ances with the tried and true. She said that in her thir­ty years of teach­ing, that she saw what amount­ed to a pen­du­lum with trends in education…so to just pitch every­thing out and start all from scratch might not be a good choice…but to stick with the old and nev­er intro­duce new­er, more rel­e­vant mate­ri­als was just as imbalanced.
    So I took her advice and kept some of what seemed to work from the Phon­ics camp and then, inte­grat­ed new, lit­er­a­ture based Whole Language.
    Think that key inno­va­tors in edu­ca­tion seem to get that edu­ca­tors should always look to see what can be tweaked and what is still rel­e­vant to students.
    Walt Dis­ney did that as well in the areas of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion. He was con­stant­ly work­ing on keep­ing his theme parks rel­e­vant and fresh by inte­grat­ing new attrac­tions into what he had already cre­at­ed and get­ting rid of what was pos­si­bly out­dat­ed. When my boys go to Dis­ney, they no longer get to ride 50,000 Leagues Under the Sea At Mag­ic King­dom like I did in the 70s and 80s, but now, they get to ride Test Track at EPCOT which was not even a pos­si­bil­i­ty as an attrac­tion back a few decades earlier.
    Teach­ers, Library Media Spe­cial­ists, and par­ents should do the same with their book col­lec­tions, both for them­selves and for their children.

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