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Naughty Book Club Opens Its Doors.
(Censors Squeek)
Dear Reader:
This fall, students have been invited to borrow a book from our Naughty Book Club in order to ward off winter fossilization. Our real aim is to prepare students for their diploma exam in January. Or even January 2011. Okay, that's only partially true. Our real aim is to promote reading for pleasure, so that their only exposure to literature this fall is not just on film or TV. And let's face it, the more your kids read, the better they'll do on diploma exams that focus on reading comprehension.
I spend much of my life trying to get young people to read. I don't worry about the bookworms too much; they've already caught on, but what about the other 90% of students? Why aren't they reading and why should they bother? What good would it do them? What would it be like if they couldn't read, if they were illiterate? Reading is code and if you don't get the code, then I'm one up on you or that other country who's competing with your country is one up on you. Not being able to read at all and not reading very quickly or very well are other forms of the same thing: illiteracy.
Have you ever heard of the phrase, “Read or you’ll go extinct.”? Well, I see that phrase on some tired poster at the Alberta Evaluation centre where I mark diploma exams every January and June, and I keep thinking about it, wondering if it could possibly be true. Go extinct? Really? Couldn’t we just watch the movie and wouldn’t we still survive and possibly thrive?
Well, in a nutshell, the answer is a resounding “No” for those students who are writing the reading comprehension English diploma exam in January or June because they’re required to read for three hours straight. And guess when they start getting all the wrong answers? After about an hour of reading, and that’s because they’re not “fit” readers.
I watched our amazing Senior Basketball team play last year and quite frankly, I have to say that one of the many reasons they won over and over again was because they were so fit. The other team would be panting, their tongues hanging out of their mouths while our guys looked like they were ready to play another game. They were quite spunky after a game that would have extinguished my middle-aged body for good. And so of you if you’re writing the multiple choice reading exam: if you’re not fit, you’re flabby, and if you’re a flabby reader, you just won’t last as long. You’ll miss the tiny nuances, the little hints, the nods, the winks, the gestures, the little words, the sentences, the point. It’ll just go right over your head or bounce off your head or under your legs or worse yet, run you through.
Our solution? Get kids to read for pleasure, so we’ve bought a bunch of copies we think they’d be interested in borrowing. (See your neighbourhood English teacher and ask about the Naughty Book Club.) If they finish the book quickly, we’re hoping they'll come by and ask for another one. This should delay our extinction!
Scott Gibson Dodd
English Department Head
What Does It Mean to Become Extinct?
Many years ago, I lived in a tiny apartment building that had a grand total of eight suites in it, all of which were somewhere between 250 square feet and 375 square feet. Frances lived below me in suite number 3. Her story is about as long as her life, some 95 years long - too long to write about here - but when she died and yours truly fulfilled my role as executor of the estate, I started going through her things, trying to decide who would get what. Many previous tenants of that quaint two-storey walk-up helped out and would ask to take certain mementos of her life to remember her by. I decided that I'd keep the funny notebook that I found in her desk: "This pad has been specifically designed for NARROW MINDED people." It was one inch wide and ten inches long.
Frances taught this open minded person a lot about just how narrow-minded I was. The so-called “red necks” are one thing, but it’s people like me who think they’re open when they’re not who are the people you should really be worried about! I used to be scared of her and her meals that she’d warm up for me on the occasional winter evenings: there’d be this shuffle in the hallway, this puff, this raspy knock, and then I’d open the door and there she’d be: half my height; lips bright with lipstick; hair dyed jet black, long and straggly; legs ballooned by gout: you get the idea. But once I got to know her, I’d eventually try that meal she warmed up for me and discover that hey, this food was pretty good! She was not a stereotypically sweet old lady either, however. She was as real as they came and blistered anyone with superlatives whether they deserved it or not sometimes. But she wasn’t narrow-minded, that’s for sure. And she’s not extinct either, because I often think of her. What would she do….
I think of extinction as what wouldn’t fit on that narrow notepad of life, what would normally go in the margins of life. The outsiders. The freaks. The marginialized. In a nutshell,
Frances. So much of literature focuses on difference, whether it be characters like
Francesor whether it be events that we’d prefer left off stage but find themselves front and centre in literature, in a play. In life. I study a book called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini with my students in English 30-1 and in it, readers are confronted with a 12 year old protagonist who is not only a non-practising Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan, but who’s also a bit of a prick. He’s an anti-hero. What’s enlightening about Amir is that he is a part of us because we, too, have made mistakes and search for redemption on the narrow pages of our lives –narrow only if we make it so, however. How we judge characters in a novel –whether we believe them or not; whether we like them or not- is often how we judge people in our lives. If that’s the case, then we need to get pretty good at it or else in an extreme situation, we could become extinct faster than we would have, had we not been such a poor judge of character.
Picasso had it right when he said that “Art is a lie which reveals the truth.” I can’t think of a single painting of his that would fit on
Frances’ narrow notepad and most of his later paintings are pretty out-there. James Baldwin, that African American writer whom everyone loves to quote without mentioning his homosexuality and the part of his writing that makes for pretty challenging homoerotica said, “…[the artist] must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the questions that the answer hides.” We must read the questions in the margins, and we have to get better at it.
We have to realize that there’s a part of us (in, on, by, with, near, from) the margins that we don’t readily admit, and we ignore ourselves and each other at our peril. We will become extinct in our attempts to Hyde the Jeckyll. As for that little notepad that I got from
Frances’ apartment, I’ve learned to blind myself to it, because in the words of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, “Perhaps only in the world of the blind will things be truly what they are.” The margins of life are so much more meaningful than narrow little notepads.
The Globe and Mail articles on the
Top 10 Banned or Challenged Books of the Decade and
The Top 50 Banned or Challenged Books of the Decade
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