Lit Up Page 27

  As I knew at the beginning of my reporting and reading, there is no perfect syllabus, no perfect set of classroom conversations, and certainly no perfect model for how understanding, assurance, and daring should be enlarged in teenagers. Intellectual ability and “emotional intelligence” are built through an innumerable number of small steps. If we think of our own lives, we will remember how gradually, through so many moments, through so many stupidities, errors, and evasions—seeming failures—we moved ahead and got anyplace worth going to. Education is laborious and intermittent. Strength may come in sleep, in dreams, in fantasy. But after children leave their parents’ arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life, and good teachers are still the loving instigators of that miracle.

  APPENDIX 1

  Reading Lists

  SEAN LEON

  The Beacon School, Tenth Grade

  Khalid Hosseini: The Kite Runner (summer)

  William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Minister’s Black Veil”

  Sylvia Plath: “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”

  Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

  George Orwell: “Politics and the English Language,” 1984

  Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist (trans. Alan R. Clarke)

  Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (trans. Hilda Rosner)

  Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five

  Viktor E. Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning (trans. Ilse Lasch)

  Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (trans. Andrew R. McAndrew)

  Jean-Paul Sartre: No Exit (trans. Stuart Gilbert)

  Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (trans. Samuel Beckett)

  JESSICA ZELENSKI

  James Hillhouse High School, Tenth Grade

  Ursula Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”

  Sandra Cisneros: “Woman Hollering Creek”

  Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

  Public Service Announcements

  Time magazine articles

  William Shakespeare: Sonnets

  Kurt Vonnegut: “Harrison Bergeron”

  Ernest Hemingway: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

  Choice of:

  Ishmael Beah: A Long Way Gone

  Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club

  Elie Wiesel: Night (trans. Stella Rodway)

  Khaled Hosseini: A Thousand Splendid Suns

  MARY BETH JORDAN

  Mamaroneck High School, Tenth Grade

  Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle (summer)

  Elie Wiesel: Night

  William Shakespeare: Macbeth

  John Steinbeck: East of Eden

  Kurt Vonnegut: “Harrison Bergeron”

  Alice Walker: “The Flowers”

  John Cheever: “Reunion”

  George Saunders: “Sticks”

  Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, Maxine Kumin

  Choice of:

  George Orwell: 1984

  Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

  And Choice of:

  Stephen King: The Body

  Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner

  Independent Reading Choices

  All year long

  MARY WHITTEMORE

  The Beacon School, Eleventh Grade

  Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex (summer)

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman: Excerpts

  Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

  F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

  Toni Morrison: The Song of Solomon

  Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried

  Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony

  Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  DANIEL GURALNICK

  The Beacon School, Eleventh Grade

  Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birthmark”

  Edgar Allen Poe: “The Cask of Amontillado”

  Mark Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

  Henry James: Daisy Miller

  Stephen Crane: “The Open Boat”

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

  Truman Capote: In Cold Blood

  F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

  Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

  Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

  APPENDIX 2

  Beacon Students’ College List

  When they graduated in 2014, the students of English 10G, Mr. Leon’s class, went to the following colleges and universities:

  Borough of Manhattan Community College

  Boston University

  Clark University

  Cornell University

  CUNY Brooklyn College

  CUNY Hunter College

  CUNY John Jay

  CUNY Queensborough

  Hamilton College

  Hampshire College

  Lawrence University

  Middlebury College

  Mount Holyoke College

  New York University

  Northeastern

  NYC College of Technology

  Occidental College

  Rochester Institute of Technology

  Smith College

  SUNY Albany

  SUNY Binghamton

  SUNY Geneseo

  SUNY New Paltz

  Syracuse University

  University of Hartford

  University of Tampa

  University of Wisconsin

  Vassar College

  Williams College

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This is a work of reporting, reading, and criticism. As I worked on it, I tried to hold to my initial resolve not to read pedagogy, teaching manuals, and other forms of professional education research. This wish turned out to be foolish. At times, out of curiosity and need, I was drawn to the work of educators and psychologists, also to the work of critics, teachers, and journalists, many of them passionate and knowledgeable in ways that I benefited from. I cite here those works that I found most useful.

  Allington, Richard L. What Really Matters Is Fluency. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008.

  Alter, Robert. The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

  Bellow, Saul. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994.

  Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

  Bruni, Frank. “Read, Kids, Read.” New York Times, May 12, 2014.

  Common Sense Media. “Children, Teens, and Reading.” May 12, 2014, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/children-teens-and-reading.

  Dickstein, Morris. “Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture.” Raritan, Spring 1999. Reprinted in John F. Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Fadiman, Anne. At Large and at Small. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

  Fernald, Anne, Virginia A. Marchman, Adriana Weisleder. “SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at 18 Months.” Developmental Science, March 2013.

  Finnegan, William. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. New York: Random House, 1998.

  Freedman, Samuel G. Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

  Gallagher, Kelly. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2009.

  Gardner, Howard. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

  Gladwell, Malcolm. “Most Likely to Succeed.” New Yorker, December 15, 2008.

  Gopnik, Adam. “The Information.” New Yorker, February 14, 2011.

  Green, Elizabeth. Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone
). New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

  Hacker, Andrew. “The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent.” New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015.

  Heckman, James. Giving Kids a Fair Chance. Boston: MIT Press, 2013.

  Hardwick, Elizabeth. American Fictions. New York: Random House, 1999.

  Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. Baltimore: Brookes, 1995.

  Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

  Kidder, Tracy. Among Schoolchildren. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

  Kittle, Penny. Book Love: Developing Strength, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2013.

  Konnikova, Maria. “Being a Better Online Reader.” New Yorker, July 16, 2014 (interview with Maryanne Wolf).

  Kristof, Nicholas. “Do Politicians Love Kids?” New York Times, November 19, 2014.

  ______. “Starved for Wisdom.” New York Times, April 16, 2015.

  Lesser, Wendy. Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. New York: Picador, 2014.

  Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man (trans. Stuart Woolf). New York: Little, Brown, 1991. Also available in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Volume I. New York: Liveright, 2015.

  ______. The Drowned and the Saved (trans. Raymond Rosenthal). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Also available in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Volume III (trans. Michael Moore). New York: Liveright, 2015.

  Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003.

  National Endowment for the Arts. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. Washington, DC: 2007, http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf.

  OECD iLibrary. The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence. OECD Publishing, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264229945-en.

  Packer, George. “Cheap Words.” New Yorker, February 17, 2014.

  Patchett, Ann. “Triumph of the Readers,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2009.

  Patterson, Leonardo, and Ethan Fosse (eds.). The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

  Pew Research. “A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013.” http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/.

  ______. “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015.” http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/.

  Quenqua, Douglas. “Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time?” New York Times, October 12, 2014.

  Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

  ______. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

  Rich, Motoko. “Study Finds Reading to Children of All Ages Grooms Them to Read on Their Own.” New York Times, January 8, 2015.

  Richtel, Matt. “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Action.” New York Times, November 21, 2010.

  Rosenwald, Michael S. “Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Scanning and Skimming, Researchers Say.” Washington Post, April 6, 2014 (interview with Maryanne Wolf).

  Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Current, 2013.

  Sanneh, Kelefa. “Don’t Be Like That.” New Yorker, February 9, 2015.

  Smith, Zadie. “Love, Actually.” Guardian, October 31, 2003.

  Strauss, Valerie. “Author Works to Prevent Reading’s ‘Death Spiral.’” Washington Post, March 24, 2008.

  Talbot, Margaret. “Talking Cure.” New Yorker, January 12, 2015.

  Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture. New York: Viking, 1965.

  ______. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

  Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

  Turner, Kristen Hawley, and Troy Hicks. Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World. Urbana, IL: National Council of the Teachers of English, 2015.

  Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

  Wieseltier, Leon. “Among the Disrupted.” New York Times, January 7, 2015.

  Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

  Zakaria, Fareed. In Defense of a Liberal Education. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was a difficult undertaking, and I am grateful for the ardent support of Steve Rubin, president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company, and for the unfailing judgment and skill of Gillian Blake, Holt’s editor in chief. Gillian read the manuscript at every stage; I benefited greatly from her many suggestions, her sense of drama and detail. Gillian’s assistant, Eleanor Embry, provided needed help at key moments. Chris O’Connell, senior production editor, saw the manuscript through its many stages to completion.

  The entire project might never have come off without the canny advocacy and editorial suggestions of my agent and friend, Kathy Robbins. Much thanks as well to Kathy’s reader, Rachelle Bergstein. My wife, Susan Rieger, participated in the shaping and detail of the book in every way. Gilad Edelman gave invaluable aid in New Haven. I would also like to thank Paul Bass (editor) and Melissa Bailey (reporter) at the New Haven Independent.

  Jonathan Cole, John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University, contributed stern and friendly advice, fueled by his extensive knowledge of education in this country. Carol Sanger came up with the main title, for which much thanks. At the New Yorker, David Remnick, Henry Finder, Hilton Als, and Kelefa Sanneh gave needed advice. Peter Blauner, Jane Booth, Joel Doerfler, Daniel Okrent, and Cathleen Schine read part or all of the manuscript and made helpful comments. James Shapiro fired me up and also read parts of the manuscript. Sam Abrams, as I relate in the introduction, approached me on the street; the book was born in that moment. In many conversations afterward, Sam, now director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, offered his inexhaustible knowledge of primary and secondary education.

  At the Beacon School, principal Ruth Lacey and assistant principal Harry Streep opened up the school’s classrooms and halls and answered my many questions. I am grateful to Beacon English teachers Mary Whittemore and Daniel Guralnick, who allowed me to sit in their English classes, and especially grateful to Sean Leon, who instructed me (as well as the students of English 10G) through a long school year. Beacon’s students bore my inquisitive gaze, answered inquiries in the hallways and the lunchroom, and generously gave their opinions and feelings about many things. I would also like to acknowledge the help of teachers Dale Lally, Brian Letiecq, and Sarah Fink and librarian Ann Hanin.

  The James Hillhouse High School also opened its doors and classrooms. I am indebted to principal Kermit Carolina, who welcomed me in, and to Jessica Zelenski, who provided many moments of passionate teaching, warmth, and decency. Her students in Period 3 English were interested in my interest in them, and answered my many questions about their lives and experiences. I would also like to thank teachers Ben Nelkin and Kevin Barbaro, librarian Mary McMullen Jones, and assistant principal John Nguyen for providing necessary information.

  Principal Elizabeth Clain, at Mamaroneck High School, fervently expounded the school’s reading initiative and introduced me to Robert Shaps, superintendent of schools in the Mamaroneck School District, and to Annie Ward, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the district, both of whom clarified many issues related to the initiative. Margaret Groninger, head of the English Department, and Mary Beth Jordan, both tenth-grade teachers, allowed me into their classrooms and shared their enthusiasm for Mamaroneck’s experiment. My thanks go to all of them and to Mamaroneck’s students.


  INDEX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abrams, Samuel

  Education and the Commercial Mindset

  Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain)

  Alchemist, The (Coelho)

  Allen, Woody

  “All Little Colored Children Should Play the Harmonica” (Patchett)

  Alone Together (Turkle)

  Angelou, Maya

  Animal Farm (Orwell)

  Antigone (Sophocles)

  Arendt, Hannah

  Eichmann in Jerusalem

  The Origins of Totalitarianism

  Aristotle

  As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)

  Atonement (McEwan)

  Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale

  Augustine, St.

  Austen, Jane

  Pride and Prejudice

  Awakening, The (Chopin)

  Bacon, Francis

  Barthes, Roland

  Bass, Paul

  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Chua)

  Beah, Ishmael

  A Long Way Gone

  Beasts of the Southern Wild (movie)

  Beckett, Samuel

  Waiting for Godot

  Bell Jar, The (Plath)

  Bellow, Saul

  Herzog

  Bible

  Bissonnette (Matt) and Mauer (Kevin), No Easy Day

  Book Love (Kittle)

  Booth, Coe, Tyrell

  Born on the Fourth of July (movie)

  Borowitz, Andy