Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 2

... continued from part 1.

Our session, “Gatsby, A Raisin in the Sun, and Inequality Today: Nurturing Student Voices About Equity and Justice,” was full of engaged, thoughtful teachers eager to think about how we can use these classic, canonical texts to help students think about equity and justice.

We asked our audience members, using our newest favorite tool, Mentimeter, to share their thoughts about inequality.

We also asked them to consider how often/successfully we were making space for conversation about equity and justice in our classrooms.

Those yellow and green bars reflect those who are often making space, but not always successfully or sometimes doing so. Only a few (3) of our attendees were confident that they were making space often and doing so successfully. 

We aren’t there yet, but, for most of us, we are trying. In an active and energetic session, full of interesting questions, interjections, and comments from the audience, we talked together about making space for these conversations.

We started with our ideas about using Gatsby to think about xenophobia and racism (vis-à-vis the rant from Tom Buchanan about the threat of immigration to the continuance of what he sees as the rightful dominance of the white race). We also talked about using social psychologist Paul Piff’s work in relation to Gatsby to unpack the question of whether money makes people (like Tom) mean, i.e., whether entitlement breeds bullying, greed, and unethical behavior. Finally, we talked about using a report documenting the violence surrounding the desegregation of the Trumbull Park homes in 1953 Chicago to help students connect A Raisin in the Sun to the broader context of violence involved in housing desegregation.

If you missed our presentation and want to see more about these and other ideas, please check out our slides. Our work is also available in our books on Gatsby, Raisin, and Mockingbird from Rowman and Littlefield.

We do this work because, for us, teaching language arts means teaching students to think carefully and critically about how a text works, about the language it uses, and the current and historical resonances of the ideas at play in the text. Our job in the classroom is to help students read and unpack Tom’s white nationalism and male privilege. Our students need to think critically about the ways in which Hansberry’s play is undergirded by a climate of violence, despite the limited references in the text to bombs and the oddly optimistic ending of the play (in contrast to an alternate ending Hansberry had considered, featuring an armed Younger family awaiting violence as they spend their first evening in their new home). 

As always, we are grateful that our audience at NCTE was full of amazing teachers – wanting to think with us. One teacher, for example, shared that he felt empowered by our presentation to continue with his approach to Gatsby as a text about whiteness – a text that can allow students to interrogate who does and does not count as white and the kinds of privileges that accrue to and need to be defended by those with that “status.”

It is invigorating to be a part of a community eager to help students think through the ways in which our world is structured by privilege, educational inequality, educational inequality, voting restrictions, and poverty. 

And yes, we know there are obstacles. Many.

To inspire us to face these obstacles, NCTE featured a thrilling keynote address by the charismatic Chris Emdin, author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Emdin reminded us that that we don’t give voice to students (many NCTE speakers made this important point): “we create the conditions to allow the genius in them to come forth.” He also asked the attendees: “Do you know what an educator is?” Emdin’s answer: “A rebel, a revolutionary, an activist.”

Perhaps.

Certainly, for us as English teachers, many of the writers we teach were rebels, revolutionaries, and activists. They were engaging big ideas and doing so in provocative, interesting ways. That’s why we read them.

And certainly, as teachers, we want to make room for those rebellious, revolutionary, and activist voices in our students. We need our young folks to think critically about the big ideas and help change the problems in our world.

So, perhaps we traffic in a revolutionary world, but that’s simply the nature of our discipline. We aren’t necessarily revolutionaries. We are just doing language arts. For many of us, that’s what we love about it. At least at NCTE, we are in good company with many, many people who share that vision.

Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 1

Over the course of this past week, Audrey had the occasion to have two conversations about the NCTE Annual Convention. Do they ring true for you?

The first conversation was with George Salazar, one of the winners of the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English’s Teachers for the Dream Award, whom Audrey spoke with in her capacity as president of NJCTE. The NJCTE Teacher for the Dream Award affords (in collaboration with NCTE) support for the two winners to attend NCTE. George had asked what to expect at the convention, and Audrey found herself gushing about the opportunity to be in a community of teachers sharing ideas and seeking inspiration. For those able to afford attendance at NCTE (which isn’t everyone), the convention represents a unique opportunity to get outside the bubbles of our classrooms and schools and connect with teachers from every level and every part of the U.S. (and even abroad). We (Audrey and Susan) always leave feeling empowered, invigorated, and excited. Speaking with George and thinking about his plans to attend his first NCTE in Baltimore in 2019, Audrey was reminded of the power of the convention.

Audrey’s second conversation was with Lauren Zucker, a new NJCTE board member and an active member of NCTE. We (Audrey and Lauren) found ourselves commiserating about how the inspiration and excitement of NCTE seems to slip away, in part because of the convention’s timing. Leaving behind our institutions for the convention, only to return for those hurried few days before Thanksgiving, to then turn away for the holidays, we finally return again to our schools in the waning days of November as the crush of the end of the year weighs down on us. Despite whatever planning we attempt, those days away – for NCTE and Thanksgiving – always seem to come back to haunt us: to make us feel overwhelmed, discombobulated, frazzled. It’s hard to hold onto the inspiration and excitement of NCTE, to remember those new ideas we wanted to try, strategies we hoped to employ, tools we were thinking of experimenting with, as we try to catch up and catch our breath.

Surely, the answer to the latter predicament is to take good notes at NCTE and to spend some time during and after the convention writing – putting our thoughts, ambitions, and inspirations onto paper or the computer screen. That way, we can return to them, but at a later date when we have the space to breathe.

So here are some of our thoughts from NCTE 2018:

For us, the convention was an odd and tenuous combination of hope and anxiety – perhaps reflective of the state of our nation. The first session Audrey attended on Friday morning seemed to capture that: “Awakening and Activating Hope in Divisive Times.” 

Even the theme itself of the convention – "Finding Student Voice" – seemed to reflect that conflict: a focus on finding voice seems to admit the loss or absence of voice. How did we come to be in a place where we need to pay attention to finding student voice, especially in the English classroom of all places? How did student voice come to be submerged, repressed, or absent in a discipline all about ideas, voices, and expression?

The issue, even tenuousness, of voice – of free and open debate and discourse – however, is so omnipresent at this moment. We face issues in the media about fake news/truth and our NCTE convention was taking place during the fracas about the revocation by the White House of CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press credentials.

We ourselves had a tiny taste of this issue of voice and free discourse. Just prior to NCTE, we presented at the New Jersey Education Association’s convention a session called “Teaching Inequality to Encourage Students to Speak about Justice,” which was in keeping with the social justice theme of the convention.

As we previously wrote about here, our session was called out as part of an editorial against the NJEA convention published on the NJ101.5 website by Jeff Deminski.

There we are, from 9:45-11:15, talking about teaching inequality and justice. Thankfully, we were not called out by name or institution. And we are both employed with relative security. But is this kind of public condemnation for doing the work of our profession as educators what we all have to look forward to in the future?

Are these the times we face? Deminiski’s critique - why not just teach language arts? – is underwritten by a threat (you aren’t entitled to your voice) about the legitimacy of our work (you aren’t doing the real work of the discipline). These sorts of threats have serious consequences in our current climate, and they diminish all our voices.

Amid these undercurrents, the NCTE convention was, as usual, a soothing balm, a calming oasis, and an energizing infusion. More about that in part 2 ...

The important work of teaching inequality, encouraging students to speak about justice at NJEA

We were privileged to offer a session this year at NJEA, the teacher’s convention in Atlantic City sponsored by the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA). This was our second time presenting at NJEA, and once again we found the educators to be incredibly engaged and committed to their fields and to professional development.

This year, in keeping with the theme of the convention, we offered “Teaching Inequality to Encourage Students to Speak about Justice.” 

We opened the session with a survey/word cloud generated by our latest favorite tool, Mentimeter. 

When we asked our attendees, however, how successful they felt they were in creating space for conversation about inequality and justice in our classrooms, the responses were less sanguine.

And why? 

Clearly our attendees were well aware of the obstacles: lack of resources in our schools, administrative or institutional obstacles, push-back from different constituencies, and most importantly student emotions. The latter point – registered in the words “student emotions,” “triggering trauma,” and “offending” – illustrates the difficulty we face in doing this kind of work. Conversations about inequality that are not conducted with skill and empathy can do more damage.

Yet these conversations, we contend, are more important now than ever. We always stress the important of foregrounding purpose in the language arts classroom. Students need to know why we are reading and discussing these particular texts and ideas. As Cris Tovani notes (2000), it is all too common that without a clear purpose for reading, even relatively diligent and well-intentioned students learn to “fake-read” early on, as she did, and are able to get by doing so all the way through high school (4-5). Unless we foreground the big ideas and essential questions we hope to address in relation to the text (Wiggins & McTighe 2014; Burke 2010), students are likely to have little sense of the purpose of their reading. And if we are going to harness student engagement, our purpose needs to be authentically and creatively connected to the students’ lives and interests.

So while making explicit our purpose has always ungirded our teaching practice, linking that purpose to discussion of difficult issues – like inequality and justice - seems more important now than ever. If students don't learn how to engage in thoughtful, evidence-based, civil discussions in a classroom full of peers with whom they have to relate on a regular basis, then the only place they are likely to see or hear discourse about such issues is via cable news, social media, or 2nd or 3rd hand from family or friends. Our media universe is full of people talking or shouting past each other without engaging in evidence-based, civil discussion. We need to find ways to make our classrooms a different, safe space, where students can practice engaging in difficult but critical conversations (Chadwick 2016) about the troubling world we live in.

In our session, we talked with our attendees about ways to do that work: with intellectual rigor and civility.

Interestingly, in a first for us, our session was called out for opprobrium in the broader media universe. As part of an editorial for the NJ101.5 website, Jeff Deminski made his case against the benefits of the NJEA Convention.

And our session was caught in Deminski’s net. He wrote:

There we are, from 9:45-11:15, talking about teaching inequality and justice. Why not just teach language arts, Deminski’s asks. We are! 

The math teachers are also just teaching math, but they are doing so by amplifying student interest in Moana in order to engage students in math. I suppose the math teachers could teach math without any context or application – as simple numbers. But why would we want that? How would we expect students to succeed given that pedagogical approach?

And what would it even mean to just teach language arts? Our session explored teaching ideas and strategies for The Great Gatsby. This is a classic text of the English curriculum, beloved by teachers and students for decades. It is also a text centrally concerned with inequality and justice. Gatsby opens with a rant from the wealthy white bully Tom Buchanan about the threat of immigration to the continuance of what he sees as the rightful dominance of the white race. Tom cites a prominent white nationalist from the 20s, Lothrop Stoddard to justify his ideas. Teaching language arts means teaching students to think carefully and critically about how a text works and about its language and ideas. We need to read Tom’s words closely and then think critically about how they function in relation to the novel. Hence our session.

We also need to recognize that in 2018, teaching language arts, even with canonical texts like Gatsby, is more and more difficult. We live, as our attendees noted, in a world structured by inequality – by privilege, educational inequality, educational inequality, voting restrictions, and poverty. Even when we are teaching traditional canonical texts, addressing issues of inequality and justice requires more skill and care than ever.

Our attendees were well aware of the obstacles we all face in doing this work well. For us, this session offered something new: a superficial and wholly uninformed dismissal of our work from a random opinion writer. Not nice. But both the dedication of the teachers in our session and this bit of negativity reinvigorate us to continue this work – onward to Houston for NCTE and CEL!

Finding purpose and politics in Gatsby at PCTELA18

It was very early and very dark when we began our journey to Harrisburg, PA, to present at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English annual conference, #PCTELA18. Audrey had been to the national affiliate meeting for NCTE, where leaders of all the affiliates gather and share ideas and resources, and met some of the dynamic PCTELA board members, and we were very excited to get to hear the amazing A.S. King speak, so we knew it would be worth the trip.

It sounded good at the time, but when we had to get up at 4am and drive through NJ and PA in the dark, we began to question why we were doing this! As always, we started to feel energized as we arrived at the conference and left feeling inspired and ready to take on the world (if a little tired). Isn’t that what’s so great about NCTE and the affiliates – how they harness and focus our energies and remind us of the amazing community of educators to which we belong.

We presented our latest incarnation of our work, entitled for this forum, Gatsby: 1925 or 2018?

We opened our presentation with our newest favorite tech tool, Mentimeter. We asked our audience the following: When you think of Gatsby, what words come to mind? Mentimeter did the rest, in real time; how awesome!

We chuckled over “overrated,” bemoaned the “green light” (Audrey’s bugaboo), and noted the presence of “economic inequality,” “privilege,” and “wealth.”

From there, and invoking the conference theme, “The Stories of Our Lives,” we launched into our discussion of how The Great Gatsby, a text written and set in the 1920s and taught regularly in many, many English classrooms, can be taught as a topical, relevant text that interrogates fundamental issues -- past, present, and future -- about our culture and beliefs. We explored key issues in Gatsby – white supremacy and nationalism, the difficulties of economic mobility, economic inequality, anti-Semitism, and the social psychology of privilege and entitlement – and tried to unpack how to use this canonical text to create space for difficult, critical conversations.

For us, it was fascinating to talk pedagogy with PCTELA members who self-identified as people teaching in the big red state of PA. For both of us, teaching in urban Northern New Jersey, the politics are enormously different. The energy and engagement in the room was palpable; several people interjected mid-session with questions and comments (a presenter’s greatest delight!). 

We thought some of the concerns our audience raised and our views on them worth sharing, as we know that teachers across the country, particularly in the redder pockets of our nation, are grappling with how to navigate a tricky political landscape while still ensuring that our classrooms are spaces for:

1. critical thinking about big issues that matter (and not just the green light!);

2. students to think through and contextualize the drama of our particular moment through the context of literature;

3. difficult conversations.

For example, one person at PCTELA asked us whether we were worried about injecting politics into the classroom when, for example, we focus on the white nationalism and economic inequality in Gatsby. Another asked whether we include opposing viewpoints. Still another asked about whether we worried that students would just give us back what we want to hear. These are legitimate, challenging concerns that are worth careful consideration.

Our strategy is two-fold.

First, we try to think about our work as focused on extracting the politics out of the text(s), rather than injecting our politics. Of course, we focus on things we care about. And so our extraction, our focus, is of necessity going to change based on time and place. Trump, Kavanaugh, Roseanne (some of the connections that have recently caught our attention) produce our interest in how the text navigates white nationalism, fear of non-white immigrants, white male privilege, and the anger and entitlement of those in positions of power.

Reading Gatsby in 2018 is and should be different from reading Gatsby in 1950. Isn’t that, after all, the beauty of literature? Audrey likes to think that if anything makes a text worthy of canonical status, it is that text’s capacity to generate conversation and merit scrutiny in different times and places. (But then again, that may be a function of the reader and an altogether different conversation.) 

That said, no one in 2018 can underestimate the trepidation teachers (and students too) feel about these difficult conversations. Yet, as one of our PCTELA audience members asserted, based on his experience teaching at a wealthy, all-male private school with what he described as a mostly Republican student body, young people are eager to talk about these things. If we open the door and ground our discussion in Gatsby and companion texts like excerpts from Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, (inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Goddard), or social psychologist Paul Piff’s “Does Money Make You Mean,” an engaging TED Talk about behavioral experiments involving games of monopoly, driving habits, and more, we create space for dialogue in our classroom. 

We don’t have to be explicit in discussing Trump or Kavanaugh; for a variety of reasons, we may not be comfortable doing so. But we can frame our discussions of Gatsby and extract the politics from Fitzgerald’s text, so that students have the space and language to think and talk about the big issues that they are seeing all around them. That’s our hope based on our experience, albeit in a very different environment.

After our talk, we had the amazing privilege to hear contemporary young adult author A.S. King address PCTELA. Wow! Her remarks about the importance of young adult literature resonated so strongly with us. King talked about how she couldn’t connect with the four novels (!) she was assigned in the entirety of her high school experience. The Scarlett Letter, she noted, seemed to contain all sorts of issues that should have been meaningful to her, but the Puritans, she admitted, “were a real buzz-kill.” And so she skipped Hawthorne.

S.E. Hinton was another story, for King. (And later, unaccountably, The Satanic Verses.)

Her broader point was that contemporary young adult literature has such an important place in our curriculum, particularly as it keeps young readers reading. King noted sardonically those gatekeepers who say that they don’t believe in contemporary young adult literature and retorted, “it’s not like fairies; it exists.” Indeed. And the passion that so many young readers have for this literature only serves to underscore the importance of our finding ways to make ALL the texts we teach meaningful, relevant, and purposeful for our students. 

Our work is cut out for us, especially for those who teach in schools where the curriculum is still dominated by mostly canonical and somewhat inaccessible texts, like Gatsby. But as we tried to show in our presentation, it is precisely Gatsby’s staid canonicity that makes it so full of insurgent and subversive possibilities. This is the work we love, and that so many English teachers do so creatively, ambitiously, and thoughtfully.

So, all in all, an inspiring and impressive PCTELA conference. We left invigorated, and on the way home stopped in Hershey for a tour of Chocolate World (Susan’s first time). Sweet!

The Atlantic: How Gatsby explains Trump

If you have been following our work on Gatsby, you know we are interested in the ways in which Fitzgerald’s novel is eerily resonant with many of the issues we are facing at this moment: anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and general xenophobia, economic inequality, white nationalist anxiety, and more. Time and again we are intrigued and amazed at the ways in which Fitzgerald’s 1925 text anticipates and reflects the issues of our current historical moment (which may be to say that these issues continue to appear and reappear across time).

In any case, we were thrilled to read Rosa Inocencio Smith’s recent, brilliant piece in The Atlantic, which addresses many of the issues with which we have been grappling. In “How The Great Gatsby Explains Trump,” Smith reads the novel as “a surprisingly apt primer on the [current] president of the United States.”

In her accessible and engagingly written (and highly teachable) article, Smith explores both the superficial and deep connections between Tom Buchanan and Trump and argues that Gatsby, as a story about power under threat, can be read as a “warning” of how power “can render truth irrelevant.”

As Smith details, all the main characters in Gatsby, not just Tom, use their wealth and power to assert a kind of deceitful privilege in the world. Jordan cheats at golf. Nick buys a financial practice to start a new life, leaving the Midwest and a “tangle” of a relationship behind. Daisy, with her “voice full of money,” rarely, as Smith notes, “says anything she means.” As Nick notes, it’s almost as if Daisy and Tom belong to a “distinguished secret society,” in which power, not truth, is the real currency.

For Smith, the key warning in Gatsby is not simply Tom’s “carelessness about truth and consequences,” but the ways in which that carelessness infects and is mirrored in so many of the other characters in the novel. Tom, then, like Trump, exposes the “gaps in America’s ideal of itself – the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities.” The disconnect in Gatsby between truth and power is underscored in the injustice of the novel’s closing: Nick can only shake Tom’s hand and muse that “There was nothing I could say except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”

Closely linked to Smith’s discussion of power and privilege in Gatsby and Trump is a fascinating discussion by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, “The Angry White Male Caucus.” Krugman argues that Trump’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s white male anger represents a “sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly-privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change.” Doesn’t this toxic mix of privilege and anger also sound like Tom, a man of immense wealth who is unaccountably worried about the colored races taking over the world and who, in the course of the novel, comes to face his worst nightmare when he discovers that Mr. Nobody from Nowhere is sleeping with his wife?

Krugman places Kavanaugh’s (and Trump’s white male anger) squarely in the context of privilege, arguing that both men exemplify the “hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including behavior toward women.” Krugman suggests that that this kind of privilege is in fact under siege in the increasingly diverse United States and that “nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially … the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”

Of course, Gatsby makes clear that Tom is not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. Gatsby, in the end, does not represent any threat to Tom; even the prize, Daisy, returns to her rightful position with Mr. Somebody. The status quo is maintained, albeit unsettlingly, within Gatsby, although the novel registers both the threat to and the rage of its Trumpian Tom.

Those of us who teach in places where candid and open discussion of the current political scene is possible are lucky to be able to teach Gatsby in a moment where its relevance can infuse our teaching with the kind of purpose that is so critical in the classroom. The connections between Gatsby and Trump underscore for us and our students why this text matters and how it enables critically important conversations. Smith’s article, for example, illustrates exactly how pertinent and revealing careful literary analysis can be beyond the English classroom.

For those of us for whom such explicit discussions would be more dangerous (and we know that ours is a difficult moment for academic freedom), it is worth remembering the vital work of opening up space in the classroom for conversations vis-à-vis the very traditional and canonical Gatsby about power, truth, privilege and xenophobia. Even when we don’t link these issues explicitly with Trump or Kavanaugh as part of our classroom conversations, our thoughtful attention to the issues of power and its abuses in Gatsby can serve as a catalyst, provoking and allowing students to make their own connections in their writing or in their private conversations outside the classroom.

And while it may seem risky to engage in such difficult discussions in our classrooms, as we discussed with the dedicated teachers we met at the NJCTE Fall Conference last weekend, it is far scarier to allow our students to leave our classrooms without having the opportunity to learn how to engage in the kinds of  thoughtful, critical conversations that our democracy hinges upon. If you share the same concerns and happen to be in Pennsylvania on October 19, please join us at PCTELA to continue this conversation.

Another source for Gatsby's "this man Goddard"

If you’ve been following our work on Gatsby, you are probably already well aware of how often we write about Lothrop Stoddard, whose ideas are parroted by Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan as the work of “this man Goddard.”

Goddard was Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote about the threat of the “colored races” to the white world and white world supremacy. In his 1920 text, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which Tom mis-cites as “The Rise of The Colored Empires,” Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the devastation of “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” Tom rephrases Stoddard’s ideas: “if we don’t look out, the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby.

We find the Stoddard text critical and compelling, not just in terms of understanding Gatsby but also in relation to the heightened rhetoric around immigration and nativism that has emerged under the Trump presidency. Using Stoddard excerpts, in connection with a discussion of Tom’s discussion of the “Goddard,” allows an entry-point for these historically-specific ideas about white nationalism in the classroom (with or without explicit connection to the contemporary Trump context).

Imagine our surprise and intellectual delight to discover there is even more to be made of Fitzgerald’s “Goddard.”

It turns out, as we learned recently from a delightful blog from Museum Hack (a great organization that you should check out if you don’t already know about them), that there was also a prominent Goddard in the early 20th century who, like Lothrop Stoddard, was focused on the dangers of immigrants. Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist, was an intelligence researcher, who coined the term “moron” in order to categorize with more scientific precision those he considered cognitively disabled. Hmm. (Note – “moron” is no longer a scientifically precise or acceptable medical term.)

In 1913, Goddard conducted tests of immigrants at Ellis Island. He studied Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and Russians. His findings, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” published in a journal called The Journal of Delinquency and accessible online, outline the tests he performed and his conclusions: “that half of such a group of immigrants [is] feeble-minded.” While noting the seeming impossibility of his findings, he explains that this group “is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration … we are now getting the poorest of each race.”

And the poorest of each race are more likely to be feeble-minded? Apparently.

For Goddard, the question is how best to treat these immigrants. He concludes: “Morons as a class, if taken early and trained carefully and so kept from becoming vicious and criminal, could be successfully employed if the employer understands them . . . .”

Still, Goddard worries about the children of these morons, who will, as he concedes, be Americans. And so he ponders, “Shall we exclude the moron immigrants because they are likely to have moron children who will become troublesome citizens?”

As Joella Straley writes on National Public Radio’s Code Switch, the year after Goddard presented his findings, deportation numbers for “feeble-mindedness” doubled.

We have yet to uncover any evidence that Fitzgerald was aware of Henry H. Goddard and his eugenicist work, but the re-naming of Stoddard as Goddard is surely no coincidence.

Regardless, a brief perusal of a few paragraphs of Goddard’s work, such as an excerpt from “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” can serve to underscore the anti-immigrant xenophobia of the world of Gatsby and the ways in which Tom (and Nick’s) racism and anti-Semitism form part of a broader landscape of nativism. An excerpt from Henry Goddard, then, could be easily put into dialogue with Gatsby and, using the discussion and writing prompts and multimedia links provided in our unit on Stoddard, even more deeply complicate ours and our students’ understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

Revamp your Lord of the Flies unit with Prasad's Damselfly

If you are teaching William Golding’s Lord of the Flies this year, consider including Chandra Prasad’s debut YA novel Damselfly as one of the texts in your unit. Yes, we usually talk about using informational text to teach literature, but at the heart of our work is putting texts in dialogue and asking what voices or perspectives are missing from canonical works and common interpretations of them.

In our volume on cross-disciplinary collaboration, we present a unit based on an excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and a New York Times science article on the study of aggression in male fruit flies. Our goal with that unit is to support students in using scientific knowledge to critically evaluate what Golding depicts in his novel and to develop their understanding of aggression and violence in the present day.

That said, like many other readers, we have some issues with Lord of the Flies, particularly its exclusive focus on very privileged white English boys. Indeed, when we wrote about the abovementioned texts in a piece for the New York Times Learning Network, we included links to additional pieces on bullying and aggression among girls that teachers and students could use to expand their discussion of such timely themes.

Prasad’s Damselfly is an engaging present-day take on Golding’s premise, particularly because it eschews the easy artifice of switching the gender of a single-sex group of teens stranded on a remote island in the Pacific to female (as an upcoming and already widely criticized film adaptation of Lord of the Flies – written and directed by two men – is planned to do – and as Libba Bray’s YA novel Beauty Queens more imaginatively has done).

Instead Damselfly intersects with and updates Golding’s plot, presenting a mixed-gender, mixed-race, yet still privileged 21^st-century group of American teenagers, the members of an elite private school’s fencing team, who had been on their way to a tournament in Japan when their plane crashed. After washing up on various parts of the island (implied to be the same island Golding’s boys crashed on), the survivors work together to build and acquire what they need to survive, but the social dynamics of their previous life and threats from an unseen fellow inhabitant of the island start to unravel their initially united resolve.  

Prasad’s novel is in some ways more engaging than Golding’s because she complicates the relationships between the teens by providing more backstory about them, particularly the Indian-American narrator Samantha and her best friend Mel, who is white. While Samantha attends the elite Drake Rosemont and even plays on its fencing team, she does so only via a scholarship she won partly to help diversify the school’s student body, after applying to the boarding school to escape the dysfunction and abuse at home that she hides even from Mel.

While readers might expect a battle of the sexes to be the primary source of conflict among the group, the most significant tensions fall along lines of race and class. That said, timeless teenage anxieties over popularity, peer pressure, and attractiveness are definitely at play in the conflicts that underscore this engaging novel. But one of the most affecting aspects of Damselfly is an update Prasad makes to the Lord of the Flies character Simon in Anne Marie whose survival struggle on the island is also dramatically complicated by mental illness.

As these power struggles play out, Prasad’s characters express ideas and opinions about each other that will provide ample fuel for students’ discussions about race, gender, class, disability, and how these identities and differences factor into the dynamics of their own families and communities, as well as our society as a whole.

Teachers could incorporate Damselfly into a Lord of the Flies unit in a variety of ways. Excerpts from corresponding parts of each novel could be placed in direct dialogue with each other. Or, after a teacher-led study of Lord of the Flies, groups of students could take the lead in teaching Damselfly, Beauty Queens or one of the film adaptations of Golding’s novel and then critically comparing each version.

Adding something into our curriculum often sparks anxiety about having enough time. But creating a cluster of texts around a canonical work that you love or that you are required to teach can reinvigorate both teacher and student interest in a novel like Lord of the Flies and create a rich learning experience about timely themes that warrants and produces extended discussion and exploration.

Using informational text to revamp, disrupt, and recharge your curriculum

Though we always welcome time to relax and recharge over the summer, our energy for the new school year starts revving up come August. If you're thinking about revamping your curriculum and maybe even disrupting some of the texts (#DisruptTexts) you've traditionally taught or inherited, our Using Informational Text series can help. (Disclaimer: We do not intend to claim credit for the great conversation started by @TriciaEbarvia this summer; we are simply offering resources to help teachers engage in this important work.)

Our newest volume on The Great Gatsby offers classroom-ready units featuring nonfiction excerpts that support critical conversations with students around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's 1920s novel, which seems more relevant than ever in our present political and cultural climate. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and guided reading and discussion prompts, support student inquiry into essential questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Buchanan Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" If you'd like a preview of how to put present-day issues in dialogue with Gatsby, check out our recent blog posts on both the difficulties and enduring relevance of Fitzgerald’s classic novel.

Similarly, our volume on To Kill a Mockingbird presents units that examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout, question whether Atticus is a hero, and help your students think critically about the characters and the complex world Harper Lee depicts (and even teach them to "read against" canonical works like Mockingbird).

If you are teaching A Raisin in the Sun, the second volume in our series will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play. In it, you will find ready-to-use units on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, the politics of African-American women’s hair, and more.

If you are looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy, check out Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from Lord of the Flies.

If you are thinking about how to revamp your curriculum in general, our website and blog feature resources and strategies for finding great informational texts that relate to any literary work you may be teaching and using them successfully in your classroom. We also offer ideas for teaching key vocabulary in meaningful and engaging ways and using multimedia together with written informational texts. Check out our sample units based on Mockingbird for models.

If you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. If you are in the NJ/PA area, we look forward to seeing you at NJCTE in September, PCTELA in October, or NJEA in November. Otherwise, we hope to see you at NCTE and CEL in Houston!

We hope our resources will help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students. If you use any of our materials, please send us your feedback. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on Goodreads or Amazon. Thank you again for your interest and support!

Contextualizing Trump and Tom Buchanan's anti-immigrant sentiments

During an interview with British newspaper The Sun while visiting England in July, Donald Trump made the following comments about immigration:

“Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame,” Trump said. “I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way.

“So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad,” he continued. “I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”

Once again, Donald Trump is rehearsing the idea that white civilization is about to collapse and that “millions and millions” are coming to Europe (and the United States) to take over (and destroy) the culture. These are the ideas that Lothrop Stoddard offered in 1920, warning of the threat to the white world and white world supremacy. In his The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the damage to “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” (Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby.)

Tom Buchanan is the mouthpiece in The Great Gatsby of these white nationalist sentiments. He spouts Stoddard’s nativist racist ideas (although he calls Stoddard by the name Goddard).

But it’s worth noting, as part of a study of Fitzgerald’s novel and of Trump’s recent remarks, that the identity of the undesirables is not and has never been wholly stable. Stoddard’s comment about Nordics is worth unpacking along with the complex racial identities of the characters within Gatsby. Many of the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel appear to students today as white, but whiteness in 1920 did not mean what it means today. Fitzgerald populates the characters at the margins of Gatsby with a range of non-Nordics, who would not have been considered white or desirable in this period.

The “gray, scrawny Italian child setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track” and the “young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps,” for example, stand at a distance from Daisy and her beautiful “white girlhood.” So too does the Jewish Wolfsheim, whose undesirability is marked both by his profession in the novel as a gangster but also by his racialization – his big nose and his hairiness marking his Otherness.

And of course, a central moment in the text, when Nick meditates on the idea that “Anything can happen … anything at all …. Even Gatsby could happen” is undercut by its juxtaposition with Nick’s ghoulishly racialized description of “a limousine … driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl … the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.”

Even Gatsby, who changes his name, is racially nebulous. Tom’s accusations against Gatsby are not about the affair per se but about Gatsby’s undesirability. Gatsby is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” In the next breath, Tom compares the affair to “intermarriage between black and white.” And while Jordan assures Tom (and the reader?) that “We’re all white here,” the unnamed epithet, the “obscene word,” left on a piece of brick at Gatsby’s house hints that perhaps Jordan was wrong.

Gatsby, after all, is a novel that meditates on exactly Trump’s fears. White culture, a culture of outsized wealth, privilege, entitlement, and abuse, seems under siege to Tom. And perhaps he is right. Gatsby is able to infiltrate Tom’s world, however briefly, and capture Daisy, the icon of white womanhood.

It’s worth reminding ourselves and our students, however, that few of us are the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times. Many of us would not have been considered by Jordan and her peers to be white in 1920.

The Greek Michaelis and the Italian child, alongside the African-American men and woman in the limousine, are part of the long history of immigrants and slaves who have come to the United States and shaped and reshaped the changing culture of our nation -- and in a positive way!

Given that the vast majority of our students are not descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times and instead are a part of the millions and millions who have moved around our globe and reshaped and reinvigorated our cultures both in Europe and the United States, we owe it to our students to help them contextualize Trump’s and Tom’s rhetoric, to understand its implications for the past and the present, and to speak out.

Gatsby, Buchanan, and racial paranoia past and present

As most of us turn away from our classrooms, the difficult and troubling resonances with The Great Gatsby, that consummate American novel, continue to come, fast and furious.

This week, it’s New York Times columnist Charles Blow, in “White Extinction Anxiety,” commenting on how Trump’s broader border policy, leaving aside the odiousness of family separation, reflects a panic about “a loss of white primacy.” Blow places Trump’s concerns within the context of Pat Buchanan longstanding ideas about the threats to whiteness, reflected in Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower (2011), his latest blog posts, and his comments on Laura Ingraham’s show.

Here’s a brief snippet from Buchanan’s blog:

The existential question . . . remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?…. We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide. 

If Europe does not act, its future is predictable. 

The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet.

Africans taking over the planet: We aren’t in Wakanda.

The idea that white civilization is about to collapse and that Africans are about to take over the world isn’t new. Lothrop Stoddard offered the same idea in 1920, using the very same flood tide imagery to warn of the threats to the white world. In his The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Stoddard prophesizes: “Here is the truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life and death.” (Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby.)

Like Buchanan, Stoddard worried that both Europe and America, the white homelands, were threatened by “oblivion in the dark ocean” of immigrants from “the colored world.” Stoddard warns, “If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald picked up on Stoddard’s nativist racial paranoia and placed these noxious ideas in the mouth of his arrogant, abusive, philandering, millionaire, Tom Buchanan. Tom argues the point, “violently”:

Civilization’s going to pieces . . . . Have you read “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by this man Goddard? . . . Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out of these other races will have control of things.

Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator, dismisses Tom as “pathetic” in this moment. We might be tempted to dismiss Stoddard and his ideological progeny, Buchanan, as equally pathetic.

But can we afford Nick’s complacency?

Instead, we suggest that teachers of Gatsby seize this moment, both in our broader culture and in Fitzgerald’s uncannily timeless and prescient novel, to explore the racial paranoia and its bizarre coexistence with extreme power and privilege. September and Gatsby are right around the corner. Seize the moment to plan for what Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich calls “the real, and yes, uncomfortable and unpredictable work of teaching and learning.” These difficult but important classroom conversations will make your reading of a 1925 novel more relevant and revealing.

Roseanne Barr and The Great Gatsby? Absolutely!

What could have provoked Roseanne, at this particular moment, to offer her racist comments about Valerie Jarrett? Roseanne, after all, would have seemed to have been at the top of the world. Her eponymous show was rated the third most popular on network television and had been picked up for another season. She should have been at the top of the world, right?

And yet she chose to lash out at Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Obama. Jarrett is not currently in a position of particular power. Obama is not in office. How, at this moment, was Jarrett a threat? Why would Jarrett have merited attack? Why did Roseanne need to bully someone and what made Jarrett a worthy target?

Certainly, the simple answer is that Roseanne’s outburst reflects a kind of commonplace racism. The odd juxtaposition of “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes” in Roseanne’s tweet suggests a kind of knee-jerk and thoughtless targeting and conjoining of Muslims and African-Americans. 

But leaving that base and grotesque racism aside for a moment (as it has received a wellspring of deserved attention from a range of commentators), it’s enlightening to turn to Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel in relation to Roseanne.

The opening chapter of Gatsby offers some surprising answers to the question of why someone in power might be gratuitously cruel. As we read the opening pages of Gatsby, we meet Tom Buchanan, who, like Roseanne, would seem to be on top of his world. 

He is wealthy and powerful, although unlike Roseanne, he was born to this position of power. We learn about his background: Yale. Tom has a heroic football background, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,” and enormous family wealth. When our narrator, Nick, meets Tom, it is at Tom’s “even more elaborate than I expected” house.

Yet with all this acclaim, money, and power, Tom is cruel. He has “a rather hard mouth,” “arrogant eyes,” and “a cruel body.”

Like Roseanne, the object of Tom’s cruelty in chapter 1 of Gatsby is people of color. For reasons that are never explained by Fitzgerald, Tom is obsessed by “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by Goddard (in real life Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy) and the idea that “if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.” 

To be clear, Tom, at the very top of the food chain, is worried that his kind are in danger of being utterly submerged by people of color. What? Why?

Why the paranoia and cruelty, why the insecurity and gratuitous vitriol from someone at the pinnacle of power? Why Tom? Why Roseanne?

Two units in our new volume on Gatsby may help you explore these timely questions. First, excerpts from Stoddard and Kenneth L. Roberts elaborate on the anxiety about whiteness and power expressed by Tom and other characters in the novel. Second, Paul Piff’s “Does money make you mean?” discusses a series of fascinating social psychology experiments that explore how wealth, power, and privilege breed greed, a diminution of empathy, and unethical behavior. 

Such discussions may seem like a detour from your usual reading of Gatsby, but they offer an important opportunity to help your students use their critical thinking to make insightful connections between the past and the present and better understand the impacts of the various cultural and political discourses across the range of media – from Fitzgerald’s novel to social media – they encounter on a daily basis.

Jesmyn Ward on Gatsby's tricky vision of hope for young readers

Jesmyn Ward, the brilliant author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, has written an introduction to a new Scribner edition of Gatsby. We haven’t yet gotten our hands on the new edition, but an essay version of Ward’s introduction appeared in the New York Times in April 2018. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful meditation on Gatsby, an essay certainly worth teaching and meditating on at length. Ward offers us a model reading of Fitzgerald: careful, nuanced reflections in her own incandescent writing style.

It is striking, however, to note how Ward describes her own early reading experience with Gatsby. She writes of reading the novel as a teenager:

We read it when we are bewildered and delighted at our changing bodies, flush with burgeoning sexuality, heady with the certainty of our ascendancy, the prospect of our future greatness shining off in the distance like a great green star. 

It is easy for young people to see themselves in Gatsby. His earnestness is familiar. His ambition, twinned with desperation, resonates with any teenager who wants to journey off to college or move states away for work, in a bid to escape youthful boundaries.

…. he believed that if he worked hard enough, he could remake himself. He could ascend to a different social class, a class where life seemed to be an enchanted necklace, each moment a pearl on an endless string. It seems to be a universal sentiment of youth: the belief that, given the luxury of time and focus, one can become anything.

Ward offers us here a vision of Gatsby as full of hope. This is Gatsby as the embodiment of the American Dream – full of possibilities. Gatsby, as the ambitious young man, whose aspirations and hard work enable his economic and social mobility.

The novel, however, also carries with it a darker underside. After all, we only meet Gatsby after we have been introduced to the rich and powerful: Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and even Nick. None of them are ambitious youthful strivers. They have each, in their way, been born with silver spoons in their mouths. No striving is required. Nick, the least among them, is himself a legacy at Yale, the son of three generations of “prominent, well-to-do people.” He graduated in 1915 and went to war, from which he came back “restless.” It isn’t until 1922 that he comes to New York to “learn the bond business,” financed in this enterprise by his father and supported by aunts and uncles “as if they were choosing a prep school for me.”

In other words, by the time we meet the striving Gatsby, we have already been well acquainted with the world of the entitled rich, for whom hard work seems entirely unnecessary and the luxuries of time and leisure seem to abound.

For some readers, then, Gatsby seems to be a novel about the impossibility of ascendancy and future greatness for those not born to social privilege. The wealthy within the novel are vastly ahead and inhabit an entirely separate space, engaging begrudgingly with the marginal characters at the margins of their world: the “gray, scrawny Italian child … along the railroad track” or the “gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller” selling puppies.

Tom’s affair with Myrtle only underscores the impermeable boundaries between the elite in Gatsby and everyone else. She may think Tom is going to leave Daisy for her, but she is as clueless about her powerlessness in her relationship to Tom as she is about the “puppies of indeterminate breed.” Tom, however, has no trouble discerning that the puppy is “no police dog.” 

The novel, in other words, can joke about the gray man’s resemblance to the uber-wealthy John D. Rockefeller and about ersatz police dogs because those in power have no difficulty identifying and excluding interlopers.

Ward writes of how easy it is for young people to see themselves in Gatsby. Surely the opposite is also true. If young people see themselves in Gatsby, they may also see how Gatsby’s failure is marked right from the beginning of the novel. They may read Gatsby as a novel that scorns their ambition and tramples their dreams of ascendancy. Perhaps this duality underscores how difficult this novel can be to teach.

Before we even meet Gatsby, we learn about an impenetrable world of the heady, wealthy elite. And then, as we meet Gatsby and see the evidence of his wealth – his fancy house, his elaborate parties, we also immediately hear rumors about his “dim” background. 

Gatsby is not a man with a Yale legacy and an easily understood family past. The idea that he is a fraud is introduced immediately in the novel.

For young people, then, it’s possible to read the novel not as an invitation to aspiration but as a warning. Don’t be ambitious; don’t think you can work hard and succeed. The only access those outside of the elite have to wealth and power is through crime. It’s a rigged system. 

Strive for education and go to an elite college like St. Olaf’s and you’ll be reminded of your place by being tasked to work as a janitor; you won’t last a month. Attend Oxford as a war veteran? You won’t really be able to earn a degree or credibility. Befriend a wealthy patron like Dan Cody? The legal system is set up in ways you won’t understand to be sure that you never inherit any legacy.

And what of Jewish readers and readers of color who encounter the racism and anti-Semitism within Gatsby? As Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us, a compelling reimagining of Gatsby, explains her experience: “However swept up and away I may be, I can’t help but fear that the door of the book will suddenly close in my face by excluding or demeaning people of color, women, the poor. . . . it hurts to find yourself on the outside, the butt of the joke.”

Ward argues compellingly that Gatsby endures “generation after generation” because it offers “new revelations, new insights” at every reading. So true. But for young readers, at that pivotal moment in their lives, full of youthful ambition but also youthful insecurity, Gatsby is a tricky and potentially devastating text to encounter.

Perhaps above all else, Gatsby reminds us of the power of narrative: to shape youthful ambition, buoy young readers, and embolden new voices. As teachers of this consummate American novel, our work is tricky. But we can all be heartened at how Gatsby has continued to serve as an inspiration to young people, including to contemporary writers like Watts and Ward, to take ownership of their own narratives and find their own greatness. 

A little summer Gatsby reading: Corrigan's So We Read On

If you teach The Great Gatsby, put Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On onto your summer reading list. It’s chatty and fun, full of all sorts of tidbits and details about Fitzgerald, sources and context for the novel, the initial publication and reception of the text, and the ways in which Gatsby made it into the literary canon and our many classrooms.

This is a compelling and refreshing read, not a stuffy academic treatise; Corrigan is thoroughly honest and highly engaging about her own relationship to Gatsby. She writes in the very first paragraph about how, as a high-school senior, she thought it “was a boring novel about rich people” (3). Susan didn’t fully appreciate Gatsby until college after being roundly unimpressed by it in high school, and Audrey still sometimes finds Fitzgerald’s text a frustratingly claustrophobic examination of a narrow slice of society.

So We Read On is that rare and charming combination: both scholarly and totally fan-girly in its adult enthusiasm for Gatsby. Corrigan gushes that The Great Gatsby is “the Great American Novel, if there is such an animal” (8) and “as perfect as a novel can be” (9). And she worries about how students are and are not reading Fitzgerald’s work: “It’s not the green light, stupid; it’s Gatsby’s reaching for it that’s the crucial all-American symbol of the novel” (5).

This latter comment, of course, is in alignment with our visions. Like Corrigan, we think students need to be thinking about big ideas and essential questions when they read literature, and our volumes on using informational text, including our latest on Gatsby, are designed to help teachers guide their students away from the small questions about the green light and onto the bigger questions about what all these symbols – the green light, the mongrel dog, the gray child – illustrate about the vision of America and American possibility offered by and thwarted within the novel.

What is probably most infectious about Corrigan’s volume is her humility as an always-eager reader and thinker about Gatsby. For example, despite the fact that she has taught Gatsby at Georgetown year after year, Corrigan describes asking a group of students at her alma mater high school in Queens about why Daisy cries when she sees Gatsby’s pile of shirts. Corrigan admits, “I often ask classes that question because I’m never sure what that scene means” (293). And then she writes, with admiration of the answer a student offers:

A dark-haired girl raises her hand and says something I’ve never thought of: “She cries because she sees that Gatsby is just like Tom now. The poor boy she loved is gone. He’s rich like Tom, so he’s changed.” Her comment stops class discussion in its tracks for a few minutes because it feels so emotionally smart. I’ve never thought of Gatsby “becoming” like Tom. I’m not sure if she’s right but I love that this novel, like all great novels, spawns endless sharp interpretation. (293)

So read Corrigan this summer, if you haven’t already, and embrace some of the tantalizing ideas and writing and discussion prompts her text offers. Here are just four that we gleaned:

1. “The Great Gatsby is America’s greatest novel about class. In fact, it’s the only one of its canonical peers (Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, Beloved) that foregrounds class instead of race” (16). Do you agree? How do the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and racist moments in Gatsby connect with its broader narrative of class?

2. Corrigan describes giving a “contrarian talk” with the title “The Great Gatsby: Just How American Is This Great American Novel?” What do you think she means? In what ways, for you, is this novel distinctly American? What narrative of America does it offer? How compelling is that narrative in our current historical moment?

3. Corrigan tells us that Fitzgerald struggled with the title and when the novel was in production called it “Trimalchio,” after a character in the first-century Roman work Satyricon, by Petronius. She explains that Trimalchio “is a freed slave who’s climbed up the ladder of Roman society through hard work” (201). What do you think of “Trimalchio” as a title instead of Gatsby? Corrigan also informs us that Fitzgerald wasn’t “fond of `The Great Gatsby’ because he said that Gatsby wasn’t really great” (201). Do you think Fitzgerald was right to be skeptical about the title of his novel? Do you agree with Fitzgerald that Gatsby isn’t really great? Why or why not? Can you think of a better title?

4. Corrigan writes that Fitzgerald was “aiming for a big statement about America” (300). She notes that “So many immigrants had poured into America via New York City by the early 1920s. . . . Fitzgerald was a man of his time; he was nervous about those alien hordes, but he also understood their yearning. Could America deliver on its promises?” (301). What answer do you think Fitzgerald offers to this question at the end of Gatsby? Do you see echoes today in Gatsby’s nervousness about “alien hordes”? Do you think America today is delivering on its promises?

Asking more of pairing nonfiction with literature

In the March 2018 edition of English Journal, Ameer Sohrawardy offers a compelling article about the use of nonfiction in connection with Julius Caesar. Sohrawardy writes about using a piece of political commentary written by Andrew McGill about West Virginia coal miners and the election of Donald Trump. Sohrawardy reflects on how the discussion that followed, in a class comprised primarily of Clinton supporters, “rehearsed many of the dyadic frameworks” of the election, oversimplifying frameworks that were “already being questioned by political analysts” (64).

This exercise, it strikes us, reflects the dangers of using nonfiction simply to find (and perhaps exploit) relevance in literature. Sohrawardy notes that her students were willing and able to extend their analysis of McGill’s piece to Caesar, making interesting connections, but they couldn’t see the limitations of the analogy. Their reading of McGill, in other words, enabled them to discuss Caesar in the context of the Trump election, but that discussion didn’t productively complicate their reading of either the election or the play.

Relevance is critical, and we do want our students to make interesting connections between our world and the literary texts we ask them to read. But Sohrawardy is right to ask for more from this kind of contextualizing reading.

Next, Sohrawardy asked the students to read excerpts from Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009). This text, as Sohrawardy explains, focuses on the dislocation and diminution of manual competencies in a fragmented and alienating 21st century economy. More importantly, the class discussion of Crawford’s work enabled Sohrawardy’s students to rethink the election, McGill’s ideas about the election, and Shakespeare’s investigation of the discontent among the Roman citizens.

Most compellingly, Sohrawardy writes that the readings “had begun to attune us … to listen” to the “fleeting, fugitive voices in our own time” (66). These are the skills we want to cultivate in the humanities: the ability to find and think through more context, to hear unexpected voices and ideas, and to rethink our preconceptions.

So, the lesson from Sohrawardy is clear: when we seek out a nonfiction reading to pair with a literary text, we need to be careful. Relevance is great for engagement. But we can’t stop there. Our pairings should help our students and ourselves continue to find the unexpected, even in texts like Caesar that we’ve read time and again.