“A wonderful story of triumph over imperfection, shame, and loss. Large, awkward, learning-disabled Maxwell Kane, whose father is in prison for murdering his mother, and crippled, undersized Kevin are both mocked by their peers; the cruel taunting they endure is all too realistic and believable. The boys establish a friendship-and a partnership. Kevin defends them with his intelligence, while Max is his friend’s “legs,” affording him a chance to participate in the larger world. Inspired by tales of King Arthur, they become knights fighting for good and true causes….The author writes with empathy, honoring the possibilities of even peripheral characters; Kevin and Max are memorable and luminous.”

For the past three years, my eighth graders have found it engaging, entertaining and moving. Here are ten reasons why you should consider reading it to your seventh or eighth grade class:

1. The main characters are seventh graders going into eighth grade, and they’re portrayed like realistic junior high kids.
2. Both characters are social outsiders, which does two important things: a) it gives the social outsiders in your own class someone to identify with; b) more importantly, it helps the rest of the kids in the class be more accepting of the differences of others.
3. There is a strong pro-reading anti-TV message to the story that doesn’t come off preachy, corny or phony.
4. The novel shows that a person’s value does not come from what they can do or not do, but from their very being.
5. The book constantly makes reference to Arthurian legends, always a popular subject with 8th graders.
6. Both boys and girls find the story compelling, from the adventurous antics and kidnapping subplot to concern over the treatment of those with disabilities.
7. The chapters are short enough to read at the beginning of class without cutting into the period too much.
8. With only 23 chapters, the book can be read in about a month.
9. Kevin is a loveable geek, and there aren’t enough loveable geeks in fiction
10. Finally, there are at least a half a dozen ways the book can be incorporated into literature, reading or religion class; a few examples:
    • As an exploration of what writing fiction is – Kevin often talks about the power of remembering, and the control a person has over what he or she remembers
    • As an example of how writing can be therapeutic – Max writes the story to get over the traumatic events of that year
    • As a discussion-starter for how to treat people with differences – Both Max and Kevin struggle with being different, and the book offers hope to those who feel left out

In a gesture of great generosity, Rodman Philbrick has made available at no charge a version of Freak the Mighty as a one- or two-act play. To get a copy of the play as a pdf, visit Mr. Philbrick’s website and follow the directions you find there. While you’re at the site, be sure to look at the teacher’s guide.

I also highly recommend the movie adaption, The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone, Kieran Culkin, Gillian Anderson, and James Gandolfini. Even the soundtrack is incredible, with the title song performed by Sting. Be sure to preview the movie before showing it due to some swear words and few “birdies” flying, if you know what I mean.

[Cross posted at Catholic School Chronicle]

Mortimer Adler on the Cover of Time Magazine, March 17, 1952

I firmly believe that Mortimer Adler is one of the most misunderstood and neglected thinkers of the last one hundred years. Often labeled elitist and Eurocentric, people often confuse his views on education with people like Allen Bloom and Ed Hirsch, who advocate a kind of cultural literacy as a key component of education. On the contrary, I believe Adler’s views on educational reform are deeply democratic and innovative. He was recommending changes to the educational system decades before other more trendy names were found for them. The concepts behind educational buzz words like “critical thinking,” “literature circles,” “project-based learning,” and “inquiry learning” are found throughout Adler’s writings.

Unfortunately for today’s schools, Adler’s work is often buried behind a prejudicial wall of misunderstanding, based on an incomplete and inaccurate picture of what Adler stood for. Adler is often invoked by homeschoolers (another misunderstood group), great books programs and private academies, leading to the false impression that his work is somehow arch-conservative, perennialist or exclusive. To be clear, while I consider Adler one of my intellectual heroes, I don’t agree with everything he proposed, and he sometimes comes across as arrogant. But I think many of his ideas are so important they deserve to be considered by everyone interested in educational reform.

To that end, I’d like to periodically share some of his ideas in his own words, with my occasional comments. Ideally, I’d love to get a conversation going about the reforms he suggests. So please feel free to drop in and leave comments whenever he or I touch a nerve.

To begin with, people often think that because Adler advocated great books programs that he is just another advocate of the “dead white male” approach to literature, whereby reading a limited set of writings gives us the truths of the universe. But as he explains below in his introduction to Reforming Education, this is not his idea of reading great books at all:

Some basic truths are to be found in the great books, but many more errors will also be found there, because a plurality of errors is always to be found for every single truth. One way of discovering this is to detect the contradictions that can be found in the books of every great author. Being human works, they are seldom free from contradictions. Skill in reading and thinking is required to find them. But, given that skill, finding contradictions in a book puts one on the highroad in the pursuit of truth. The truth must lie on one or the other side of every contradiction. It is there for us to detect when we are able to resolve the contradiction in favor of one side or the other….

The difference between [Leo] Strauss’ method of reading and and teaching the great books and the method that [Robert] Hutchins and I had adopted…lies in the distinction between a doctrinal and a dialectical approach. The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a particular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering the special secret of an author’s intentions. This method may have some merit in the graduate school where students aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and colleges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth.

A “dialectical approach” where the aim is “learning to think and the pursuit of truth.” In reading classrooms across America something very similar to this is done under the title “Literature Circles.” If more teachers read Adler’s ideas of how to conduct a seminar with students, the level of thinking in literature circles would skyrocket. In any case, I think it’s clear that Adler is less interested in a cultural language that everyone speaks than he is interested in true dialogue about important ideas. Of course, some people will deny his assumption that objective truth exists at all, but perhaps that’s something we can take up at a later date. At this point, I’m simply interested in clarifying what Adler’s intentions were in promoting the use of great books in education.

Some might wonder what Adler means by “great books.” In an entertaining essay called “The Great Books of 2066” Adler lists seven characteristics:

1. Great books are original communications. Their authors are communicating what they themselves have discovered, not repeating what they have learned by reading the books of other men.
2. Great books have intellectual amplitude; each draws light from and throws light on a large number and variety of ideas, all of them basic.
3. Great books are universally relevant and always contemporary; that is, they deal with the common problems of thought and action that confront men in every age and every clime.
4. Great books are the only books that may be deemed indispensable, every one of them, to a genuine, sound liberal education.
5. Great books are the only books that never have to be written again — that do so well what they set out to do that they cannot be improved upon. (For this simple but penetrating statement about the nature of a great book, I am grateful to my friend Carl Van Doren.)
6. Great books are inexhaustible; they are indefinitely reread-able, each time with additional profit; understandable to some degree on the first reading, they continue to deepen our understanding every time we reread them, and we can never exhaust their power to enlighten us; no matter how many times we read them, there is always more for us to understand.
7. Great books are addressed to human beings, not to some special group of students, scholars or experts; they are seldom written by professors and, if they are, they are never written exclusively for professors.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on Mortimer Adler and/or his ideas, especially as they relate to teaching.

Cross-posted at One Catholic Life.

Eyercize is a free online tool that may be able to help struggling readers increase their reading rate. The following screencast demonstrates some of Eyercize’s basic functions:

They had a little professional help, but what a great idea! Leave a comment if you know of similar videos promoting reading and I’ll update this post by embedding them below.

Here are a couple of great resources to help you introduce this epic to your students:

Dante’s Inferno – A Virtual Tour of Hell

The World of Dante

Don’t let its age fool you–Dante’s Inferno is still one of the most captivating, readable, and thought-provoking works of literature in the world. Its division into relatively short cantos make it easy to use as a read-aloud. I started reading it once to a group of eighth graders with the intention of giving them a taste of it, but they wouldn’t let me stop until I had finished the entire Inferno. Students from that class still come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed it, and how vivid it is in their minds still.

But don’t take my word for it–try it yourself.

The ten volume Gateway to the Great Books was published in 1963 by Britannica, and was designed to be a sort of literary boot camp to prepare readers to read the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. The Gateway collection includes short fiction and essays by authors like Emerson, Hawthorne, DeFoe, Kipling, Voltaire, Lincoln, Pliny, Tacitus, Hume, and Chekhov. The works are divided into categories like imaginative literature, critical essays, society, natural science, and philosophy.

To get back into the habit of reading, this morning I chose Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” I’ve never ready anything by Woolf before, and I was immediately drawn in to her prose. I don’t wish to write a full review here, but I will say that her essay is definitely don’t-miss reading for all literature teachers, and would be worth teaching to advanced junior high students or high school students. For a little more information on Woolf’s essay you can read Danielle’s reaction at A Work in Progress.

I’ll leave you with two quotes that stuck with me after I finished the essay this morning:

 Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.

And,

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly on imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Guidelines include:

1. Read the whole book.
2. Decide how much time you will spend.
3. Have a strategy.
4. Read actively.
5. Read it three times.
6. Read the parts with the highest information content first.
7. Mark the book.
8. Know the author(s)
9. Know the intellectual context.
10. Use your unconscious mind.

See the full article at The Study Smorgasborg.

For more on how to read for self-improvement, download my free ebook, ROMAN Reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life Through Literature.

Paraphrasing is one of the most important skills we can teach junior high and high school students. Often they want to rush into interpreting and reacting to a text even before they know what it means. We teachers sometimes suffer from the delusion that since a student can read the words on the page, he or she understands what’s been read. But that’s not always true.

Take this quote by H.L. Wayland, for instance: “Universal suffrage without universal education would be a curse.” Each year I ask my eighth graders to paraphrase it, and inevitably four or five students confuse the word suffrage with suffering and write about how education is necessary to end pain in the world. The students thought they understood the idea, but they ended up misinterpreting it. Paraphrasing helps students to unpack complex, pithy ideas, and it compels them to grapple with defining words that we assume we understand.  For instance, in he Wayland quote above, students need to explain the word education.  What is education?  Education, like the words freedom, love and justice, is not easy to define, though we use the term all the time.  Paraphrasing requires that students “unpack” these kinds of words.

The Suitcase Metaphor

I like to tell my students that paraphrasing is like unpacking a suitcase. I don’t remember where I first heard the metaphor, but it goes like this: A thoughtful, profound quote is like a packed suitcase. The important ideas contained within the quote are like clothes that have been folded and pressed so that they’re easier to take with you. A quote is easy to remember, just as a suitcase is easy to carry. But you can’t wear clothes that are packed in a suitcase. You have to unpack the suitcase in order to use them. In the same way, you need to unpack the words and ideas in a profound quote before you can understand them.

Conclusion

You might try giving your students quotes to paraphrase this year. I think you’ll be surprised by how difficult it is for them, and how often they misinterpret what they read. Each year my students tell me how hard it was to paraphrase, but how much it helped them to improve as readers.

There are thousands of profound quotes for students to paraphrase; here are a few that deal with the value of books and reading:

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” – Henry David Thoreau

“The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.” – Thomas Carlyle

“To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” – Edmund Burke

“He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.” – Roland Barthes

“Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” – Francis Bacon

“Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.” – Mortimer Adler

“Everything we read stimulates our mind to think, and what we think determines what we desire, and desires are the seedbed of our actions. Given this iron law of human nature–from reading to thinking, to desiring, to acting–we are shaping our destiny by the ideas we choose to have enter our minds through print.” – Fr. John Hardon, S.J.

“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” Clifton Fadiman

“The adventurous student will always study the classics…For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man. They are the only oracles which are not decayed.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Books must be read as reservedly and deliberately as they were written.” – Henry David Thoreau

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not represented on canvas or marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.” – Clifton Fadiman

“The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone—more that 99 percent of them—will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading.” – Mortimer Adler

“It’s not how many books you get through, it’s how many books get through you.” – Mortimer J. Adler

“Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which others have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.” – Jesse Lee Bennett

• Literature Circle Rubric – If you have your students gather in small groups to discuss the books their reading, have them self-evaluate using this rubric.  It can also be easily adapted to other classes.
• Sustaind Silent Reading Rubric – This tool lets students know exactly what you expect from them when they’re given time to read silently in class.  It’s fairly generic, and can be customized as you like.
• Reading Portfolio Rubric – My students have 3-ring binders in which they keep their notes, handouts, reading logs, and texts we’re studying.  I use this rubric to assess their binder once or twice a quarter.

If you have any questions about using the rubrics, or if you have suggestions to improve them, please leave a comment.