Literacy Now

This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in January 2012.

As the child of anthropologists, I learned about origin myths at a very young age. For those whose parents may have been molecular biologists, let me explain that an origin myth is a story developed by a culture to explain how a particular aspect of reality (or reality itself) came into being. Origin myths typically describe the natural world, but they can also be used to describe the social world. I like to think of my book THE CARPENTER’S GIFT as an origin myth.

When I began working on THE CARPENTER’S GIFT, I visited the archive at Rockefeller Center to learn as much as I could about the most famous Christmas tree in the world. I found out that the first tree went up in 1931, while Rockefeller Center was still under construction. It was erected by workers, presumably because they were deeply grateful to have jobs during the depth of the Great Depression. The tree was decorated with strings of cranberries, garlands of paper, and a few shiny tin cans. How that particular tree came to be at the work site and who specifically put it up are details lost to time. But wouldn’t it be fun to know?

Contradicting none of the (few) known facts, THE CARPENTER’S GIFT offers one possible explanation, in which Henry and his out-of-work father give the tree to Frank and the other construction workers on Christmas Eve. Perhaps there are more likely theories, but this story attracted me because it embraced a truth about why people have flocked to the tree in Rockefeller Center these past eighty years, and why Tishman Speyer, the owners of Rockefeller Center, now donate the tree annually to Habitat for Humanity so that lumber milled from its trunk can be used to build a home for a family in need.

I tried to imagine what those workers in 1931 would have been feeling, and I kept coming back to gratitude, especially the kind of gratitude that motivates a person to pay his good fortune forward. The story of THE CARPENTER’S GIFT couldn’t have ended with the erection of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree because Frank and the other workers wouldn’t have let it end there, not without doing something for someone less fortunate than themselves—such as Henry, whom they learn lives with his family in a drafty, dilapidated shack.

As you’ve probably guessed, I actually slipped a second origin myth into the book—one for Habitat itself. The story of how Frank and his friends visit Henry’s family on Christmas morning to help them build a new, decent house evokes my own feelings about the organization—that no matter how much you give, you always get more back.

Screenwriter Randall Wallace, who won an Academy Award for BRAVEHEART, called Habitat “a perpetual-motion miracle,” and I think this chain of giving and receiving is what he had in mind. It takes Henry a little longer than it does Frank to realize this, but eventually he pays “the gift” forward, too, and the miracle moves on.

David Rubel is a nationally recognized author and speaker whose work focuses on making American history accessible to a broad audience. His children's books THE SCHOLASTIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR TIMES and THE SCHOLASTIC ATLAS OF THE UNITED STATES have become grade-school standards, selling more than half a million copies each in multiple editions.



'Tis the Season to Break With Tradition: Reinvent Your Holiday Book List

Putting Books to Work: Selina Alko's DADDY CHRISTMAS AND HANUKKAH MAMA

It is disheartening to read the headlines that permeate the media enlightening us that reading scores in America remain flat—or worse, that no significant improvement has been noted since the ’70s. And yet, those of us in this field know full well that READING is the magical key that opens the door into the mind of any human being; it establishes the fundamentals and foundation for whatever he wants to be—or will be. It is the basis for all learning.

However, English, to kindergartners and first- and second-graders, is a foreign language—as German, Italian or French might be to an adult. Speaking a language is not the key for learning how to read it. During a recent lecture I gave to several dozen graduate speech/audiology students, I asked how many had studied foreign languages. Each had studied one or more but not one stated that he learned it the way he learned English: by first memorizing high-frequency words from lists that also went home for further practice. Some admitted to having had difficulty with learning to read, and some stated that it still was not their favorite thing to do.

Having taught college linguistics some years ago as an offering for teacher recertification, it was exciting to see the sparks when teachers learned intriguing nuggets about this powerful and international language called English. They wanted to know the answers to questions that plague both students and teachers (why is CAT spelled with a C and KITTEN with a K?). They were eager to learn how two vowels could be long in TRAIL, make a wiggly diphthong sound in TAUT, and yet split into two different sounds AND syllables as in TRI-AL and LI-ON.

Teachers love to learn new things, but not all of us learn the same way any more than children do—yet, what is really different about what we are doing in the classroom today that we were not doing in the ’70s? Not much, sadly. Special education has been added, but all too often this is a slowing down and trimming of what goes on in our regular classes.

Remedial teaching, however, means the need to take a different tack.

Most any language entails five linguistic facets in order for one to learn it: phonology, morphology, etymology, orthography, and philology. But in English, the largest language in the world (more than a million words), changes occur daily, and it is mind-boggling to consider the many variances that are updated approximately every six years in our dictionaries. To buy a new dictionary and compare it with “old faithful” sitting on a shelf somewhere in our home or classroom will elicit shock. (Go on. Do it.)

photo: alexbrn via photopin cc

For example, as a child, I rode to school on a “buss” (“bus” was chipped off the Latin word “omnibus” and my “buss” now simply means a kiss). When I got stung, I got a big “whelp,” but today, that would be a young animal/child or the pre-teen version of the interjection “well.”

Once our class got underway, it was stimulating to hear the questions: Why do we hear a “d” in WATER, METAL, and SWEETISH/SWEDISH? Why does TU work just fine in TUNE and TUG, but “sneezes” in CENTURY, TARANTULA, NATURE? Why does METER sound sensible, but when put into the word SPEEDOMETER, it sounds so different? How can I tell when to “sound” the G as a /guh/ sound versus a /jjj/ or a C as an S or a K?

Great questions! All answerable!

One of the most “fun” pronunciation and spelling oddities I have ever encountered is WHEN to spell with a C versus a K, or how to know the hard sound of G in GAS versus the soft sound in GERMS. (C and G were both called “gamma” by the Greeks and, thus, follow the same rule.) That is great for those of us who teach.

Write down the six (yes, six) vowels in lower-case form: a e i o u y.

Note that the a, o, and u are nice and chubby in appearance while the e, i, and y are formed by first making a straight (stick) stroke. When trying to remember whether or not to spell a word with a C or a K, use C when followed by a “chubby” (or round) vowel or a consonant as in CAT, COAT, CUT, CRIB, CATTLE, SCOTCH. But, if one wants to retain the hard sound of C (K) when using a stick vowel (e, i, or y), the “stick-consonant” K must be used as in KITTEN, KISS, KEEN, KETTLE, SKETCH; otherwise, the “stick” vowels turn C into an S sound as in ICE, CITY, FANCY.

This wonderful rule will let one down so few times that it is not worth trying to memorize the multitude of C/K words. It is interesting to note that C is the only letter in the alphabet that has no sound of its own; it borrows from S or K.

G, on the other hand, has a hard sound that it makes in MOST words that have a ROUND vowel or consonant following, such as GAS, GOAT, GUM, GRASS, while the “stick” vowels allow the G to become the soft J sound as in GERMS, GIANT, and GYM.

Learning why the ARR makes an air sound in SPARROW but an R sound in SPARRING is helpful for spelling rules; learning why we cannot hear SCIENCE in conscience or SIGN in signal is also helpful for unlocking unknown words. We also have to know why there is a T or a sound before CH in BATCH, ITCH, BENCH, and INCH, but none in BEACH, TEACH, and LEECH.

How I wish I had known so many of these language goodies when I was in elementary school and not had to wait until graduate school to learn the majority of them! Including speech science and audiology in my training certainly made the English language the most exciting one on the planet for me.

A fun exercise for teachers and young students alike is the task of spelling the alphabet. Unlike America, where it seems to be a pre-requisite to reading success to know the alphabet in order, in foreign countries where a command of English is often the indicator of an educated individual, frequently the naming of the alphabet is the last thing learned. However, it is necessary in order to spell anything aloud or to be able to alphabetize. Think about it. Spell H, Y, C, G, J—aich, wie (why), see, jee, jay.

Students, too, love learning oddities about their language. The more engaged they become in its forms and complexities, the more likely they are to increase and develop yet more skills.

Teaching reading to students beginning at age four all the way into adulthood is my life’s work, and I consider it the most exciting of all vocations. How could I not? Is there anything more exciting or self-fulfilling than looking for a previously struggling student who is now hiding in a closet reading a book instead of doing his homework?

Sadly, like fog (to borrow an image from the Carl Sandburg poem of the same name), illiteracy “sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches…” and keeps moving “in” instead of moving “on.”

Teaching, by definition, means imparting knowledge. Anything memorized can be forgotten; anything that is learned and internalized sticks with us more readily. As our educational standing on the global scene steadily slips, it is still true that we, as teachers, hold the key to bringing us back to NUMBER ONE; we just need more reinforcements.

Betty G. Price is a reading remediation therapist with Professional Reading Services in Roanoke, Virginia. She has also taught in the classroom, conducted seminars and workshops, worked for the Virginia Department of Education on special projects, and provided linguistics for teacher training at college level for those seeking recertification credits. She is the co-author (with Dr. Claude Cauolle, professor emeritus, Hollins University) of SEE ME READ, a large, comic-cartoon laps book for preschoolers (ages 3- to 5).

[The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the International Reading Association or its Board of Directors.]

Teaching Graphemes: Your Mileage May Vary as Much as the Pronunciation

Engage: In Other Words

Twenty-five years ago, on my first day of seventh grade, I walked into my assigned English class to discover a strange sight. A middle-aged man with thinning blond hair was sitting behind the teacher’s desk puffing away on a piece of chalk. Immediately two things were clear to me: 1) He was dying for a smoke, and 2) He wasn’t bothering to hide this from a roomful of seventh graders. This made him the most interesting teacher I’d had all day.

All day long, I’d been meeting my teachers—some were strict, others more laidback—but all of them seemed generally colorless the way most adults seem to kids. It was impossible to imagine any of them feeling the heights of anger or despair I felt daily over my parents’ ongoing divorce, of feeling powerless or alone or different. But this man smoking his chalk seemed like maybe, just maybe, he could understand.

His name was Mr. Hubner and he would be my English teacher for both seventh and ninth grades. He would introduce me to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, to James Baldwin and the blues, to Holden Caulfield and Hamlet. He would be the first openly gay adult in my life. He was also openly sarcastic (mostly at the expense of lazy students), openly grumpy (he was constantly trying to quit smoking) and openly critical (not only of our essays, which he picked apart in class, but of the books we were assigned to read).

But when he taught his favorite writers, the ones whose photos he enshrined on the back wall of his classroom, he gave the sense that he was sharing something deeply personal, something that could stem the flood of alienation and pain that came with growing up.

There are teachers who teach you how to read, and then there are teachers who teach you how to find yourself through reading. It was no coincidence that I was in Mr. Hubner’s class when I decided to become a writer. It was ninth grade and my parents’ divorce was finally reaching its bitter end. I had stopped talking to my father and had moments when I fantasized about being dead. In the midst of this, Mr. Hubner assigned us a lengthy report on an artist of our choosing. At first, I figured I would pick John Steinbeck, my favorite writer, whose dust bowl novels reflected my own bleak mood. But Mr. Hubner, who preferred the Southern novelists, nudged me toward Flannery O’Connor instead.

photo: pdoyen via photopin cc

I still remember writing that report, the tower of O’Connor themed books stacked up beside my old Macintosh, the photos of peacocks (O’Connor’s favorite animal), which I assembled to decorate the cover. As it turned out, O’Connor was a wonderful antidote to adolescent misery. She was deeply eccentric and undeniably tragic (she would die at age 39 of lupus) but unapologetic and sharp-tongued. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd,” she wrote. “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

In short, she felt very much like a fellow traveler. As I meticulously wrote that report, I realized that my life too—the difficult parts, especially—wasn’t meaningless. It was material.

What a writer, especially a young one, needs most is an appreciative audience. Mr. Hubner could be critical and grumpy but his praise, when it came, was genuine and effusive. Long before I ever received a positive review as a novelist, I still remember the heart-thumping thrill I felt when Mr. Hubner returned that Flannery O’Connor report. The A-plus on the back wasn’t just a grade; it was a validation. I was a writer. And I was going to be okay.

Katherine Marsh is the author of JEPP, WHO DEFIED THE STARS (Hyperion, October 2012). An only child, she spent a lot of her youth reading, trading stories with her grandmother who had run a bar in New York, and listening to her mother's frequent astrological predictions. After surviving high school and graduating from Yale, Katherine spent a decade as a magazine journalist, including as a reporter for ROLLING STONE and an editor at THE NEW REPUBLIC. Her first book, THE NIGHT TOURIST, won an Edgar Allen Poe Award for mystery writing, and was followed by the sequel THE TWILIGHT PRISONER. Katherine lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and two children. Find out more about Katherine at: www.katherinemarsh.com or follow her on Twitter: @MarshKatherine.



In Other Words: It Was Written by Somebody

Engage: In Other Words Guest Blog Posts

This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in March 2012.

If you ask a group of kids about their heroes, you’ll get responses ranging from Uncle Bob, to Tom Brady, to Batman, to Taylor Swift, and, yes, to Chuck Norris. I know this because I’ve asked this question at more than a hundred schools across the United States over the past year.

After I listen to the usual mix of family members, athletes, actors, and comic book icons, I follow up with a different question: What makes someone a hero?

The students usually do a good job on this one. They talk about helping others, being brave, inspiring people, being a leader, and saving lives. Sometimes they joke around about capes and tights, but in general, they get it.

Personally, I boil it down to this: Heroes do what they believe is right even when it’s hard.

Fantasy literature does a wonderful job examining heroes. Ancient tales gave us daring figures like Odysseus, Achilles, and Beowulf who survived quests, fought wars, and slew monsters. In modern fantasy, we sometimes discover less likely heroes, including peace-loving hobbits, children transported to other worlds, and boy wizards.

I have always loved heroic stories. I’m drawn to larger-than-life adventures, and I’m seldom more moved than when a hero risks life and limb because of strong convictions. Whether we’re talking about Frodo and Sam enduring grueling hardships because they love the Shire and need to save it, Harry Potter going to face Voldemort even though he knows it will cost him his life, or William Wallace holding true to his convictions while being tortured, I can’t help but be moved by people who care so deeply about something that they’re willing to sacrifice everything.

Since I write fantasy, and since fantasy offers the opportunity to portray heroes, and since I’m fascinated by heroes, I wanted to write a series that would explore heroism in a fresh way. I particularly wanted to consider how somebody can be a hero in a world that has grown cynical about heroes.

When I was a kid, I had heroes similar to the students I speak with now. Some of my heroes were fictional, like Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. That bled over into admiring the actors who portrayed them. My dad has always liked the Dodgers, so I idolized players like Steve Garvey and Ron Cey. Also, my Grandpa “Cyclone” Davis was a World War II pilot who fought in the Pacific Theater. He was one of the few pilots who got off the ground on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he helped escort the Japanese when they surrendered at the end of the war. Hearing his war stories would leave me amazed and thoughtful.

Some of our traditional American heroes have been athletes, actors, and politicians. I had boyhood heroes who fit into those categories. Maybe times changed, or maybe as I got older I saw more clearly, but thanks in large measure to the seemingly endless scandals reported in the media, many athletes, actors, and politicians stopped seeming like hero material to me. My grandpa never let me down, but some of my other heroes did.

I believe our world has grown somewhat cynical about heroes. We understand the potential disparity between public and private personas. We question motives. We doubt intentions. We’ve been burned by people we’ve admired turning out to be less noble than we might have hoped or imagined.

Sometimes I wonder how anyone can be a hero in a world like ours. What can I do if I’d like to examine this concept, but I don’t want to point fingers, because I realize that nobody is perfect, including me? One option would be to explore the concept in a fantasy story.

Fantasy need not be synonymous with nonsense. In a fantasy story, we don’t have to completely abandon reality—we can just change some of the rules. At times, fantasy can serve as a useful way to look at real world problems from a safe distance.

This is largely why I wrote Beyonders. I imagined a world called Lyrian, where an emperor has been systematically getting rid of the heroes. Not by killing them. If he kills the heroes, he’ll turn them into martyrs, which could inspire others to rise up. Instead this emperor wants to break the heroes. He wants to buy them off. He wants them to betray their ideals. He wants to turn them into sell-outs. He wants them to look and feel like failures, so others will think twice before opposing him. He wants to kill the idea of heroism.

I imagined a world where people had good reason to doubt their heroes, a world where few aspired to heroism anymore. The first book in the Beyonders trilogy is fittingly called A WORLD WITHOUT HEROES.

My next step was to bring some potential heroes to this world. I chose a pair of young teenagers from our world, Jason and Rachel. At first they are reluctant heroes. They have to care about Lyrian before they would be willing to sacrifice to help save it. As the story progresses, they end up on a path where they must learn to become heroes. They also help inspire some of Lyrian’s broken heroes to come out of retirement.

Those broken heroes are among the characters that most interest me. Some have been physically broken. Others betrayed their ideals. As we watch them trying to regain their dignity, we get to look at heroism from some interesting perspectives.

More than anything, I want Beyonders to take readers on a fun ride. I spend a lot of my time telling students that reading can be fun, and my books need to back up that claim or I’ll look like a big liar. But for my intellect, a big part of the enjoyment of writing Beyonders has involved considering heroes and heroism in some new ways. In the first Beyonders book, we see Jason and Rachel learning to become heroes as they interact with some of Lyrian’s broken heroes. In Book Two, we watch Jason and Rachel become fully invested in Lyrian, and some of the broken heroes unite in a rebellion. And in Book Three, we get to see some of that heroic sacrifice that I love so much.

Stories can help us make sense of our lives. Social situations are routinely portrayed in stories, including books, television, and movies. Such stories influence our attitudes and opinions. We get examples of stupidity, intelligence, obnoxiousness, wit, cruelty, humor, and so forth, which help us to recognize such things in our daily living.

I don’t mean to suggest that my books will give anyone a complete understanding of heroism. I hope that in Beyonders, teachers, students, and parents can find meaningful examples of different kinds of heroes making tough choices as they face a variety of interesting hardships. If that suffices to fuel some useful thinking and discussion, I’d consider the effort a success!

Brandon Mull is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Beyonders and Fablehaven series, as well as THE CANDY SHOP WAR. He resides in Utah, in a happy little valley near the mouth of a canyon with his wife and four kids. Brandon’s greatest regret is that he has but one life to give for Gondor. Find out more about him and his books at www.brandonmull.com.