An eye cream to revive your teaching of Gatsby?

Just as I was about to close the books on this unprecedented school year, a Facebook ad caught my eye that I immediately screenshotted and forwarded to Audrey. This is not so unusual; we are always on the lookout for text connections that can help teachers enliven their teaching of the most commonly taught texts – especially Mockingbird, A Raisin in the Sun, Speak, and of course Gatsby. But this ad for Gatsby New York Ultimate Reviving Eye Cream was puzzling. In fact, for me, as an English teacher, it was quite provoking.

We have all become accustomed to cookies and algorithms personalizing ads for us. Was I seeing this ad because I’m an English teacher? Because Audrey and I have written and presented about teaching Gatsby? Because I’m an exhausted educator at the end of an endlessly challenging school year whose eyes clearly need reviving? These questions remain unanswered, however, as I remain stuck on my first reaction: Gatsby? Eye cream?

Clicking on the ad took me to the product website where everything about it seemed genuine and oddly devoid of any reference to The Great Gatsby or the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that famously loom over the valley of ashes in Fitzgerald’s novel. That said, the tone of the marketing copy, which promises to restore youthful appearance around the eyes and enable customers to “look more graceful with age,” is reminiscent of the exuberant claims that ads in the 1920s made for various powders and elixirs. And the yearning to reclaim something lost in youth and deemed necessary for future happiness certainly aligns with the novel’s themes.

While reading the website, I couldn’t help wondering what Daisy would make of its exhortations: “Every woman looks her best when she’s happy. … Gatsby eye creams are designed to give you that look of health, vitality, happiness and joy.” Perhaps middle-aged Daisy would seek out such a product? (A marketing email I received from the company was sent by a Daisy Aston?!)

It is intriguing to wonder what students might make of this product and its website as texts to consider alongside Gatsby. We often encourage students to look out for pop culture references to canonical works, in part to prove the relevance of what we teach. A teacher might use Gatsby New York Ultimate Reviving Eye Cream as a model or part of a cluster of such contemporary Gatsby references and give students the opportunity to think critically about the ways in which these references intersect – interestingly, engagingly, oddly – with the novel. Or we might use it as an entry point for comparing the advertising rhetoric of today with that of the 1920s.

Later in the summer, I might flesh this out into an actual lesson, but for now, I’m going to leave it there because, though part of my brain is already racing ahead to think about what new, better things I can do in the fall, the rest of me – including my eyes – needs to rest and let go of a school year that required us to “beat on … ceaselessly.” We hope you are doing the same.

I didn’t buy the cream.

Tell Me Who You Are: Windows and mirrors for our students and ourselves

Thinking of the works we read with our students as “windows and mirrors” has become a popular way of conceptualizing why and how we diversify our curricula, thanks to Emily Style who named the concept in 1988. In “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” she wrote:

… [S]tudents’ educational diet is not balanced if they see themselves in the mirror all the time. Likewise, democracy’s school curriculum is unbalanced if a black student sits in school, year after year, forced to look through the window upon the (validated) experiences of white others while seldom, if ever, having the central mirror held up to the particularities of her or his own experience. Such racial imbalance is harmful as well to white students whose seeing of humanity’s different realities is also profoundly obscured.

Through the work of individual teachers, teachers working collaboratively with colleagues, groups like DisruptTexts and ProjectLit, and professional organizations like NCTE, our curricula are becoming more diverse. In addition, we continue to ask ourselves how we use texts in our classrooms, given the disparate teaching contexts each of us faces, the students we are teaching, and the events of the world swirling around us. 

While we turn to works of fiction and their characters to humanize past, present, and visions of the future, our students still can struggle to connect with stories about times, places, and people that are far off from their own experience or to realize that fictional stories are derived from the experiences of real people. 

As we have found, informational texts can help students connect fiction back to and enrich their understanding of the real world. We experienced this when discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun with Susan’s sophomores. Until we shared with them excerpts from a report by the City of Chicago on acts of violence and harassment toward African-American families who had moved into previously white housing developments in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them believed Hansberry’s play was just a made-up story.

Style’s article is helpful again in understanding this:

In considering how the curriculum functions, it is essential to note the connection between eyesight and insight. … no student acquires knowledge in the abstract; learning is always personal. Furthermore, learning never takes place in a vacuum; it is always contextual.

The remarkable array of voices collected by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi in their 2019 collection, Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity, can provide just such personal context for a wide range of works, both fiction and nonfiction. Following their graduation from high school(!), Guo and Vulchi traveled the United States, starting in Anchorage, Alaska, in July 2017, and completing their journey in Charlottesville, Virginia, in February 2018. Along the way, they interviewed more than 500 people and recorded their stories in their own words. Bound together, these stories, each with a photograph of its teller, present a beautiful encyclopedia of the people of the United States, featuring unique experiences, histories, and perspectives that many readers – both adults and students – will not have heard before and/or will recognize themselves in.

Particular excerpts readily lend themselves to connections with texts frequently taught in ELA classrooms. Butler, a man from Montgomery, Alabama, tells the story of his mother, Aurelia Browder, who was the lead plaintiff in the federal court case that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and legally ended desegregation. This story would provide valuable context for students reading Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice; while Guo and Vulchi’s interview with present-day students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, provides powerful connections with Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir Warriors Don’t Cry. 

Louise from Seattle tells of being interned with her family, and all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, just six months before she was supposed to graduate from high school. While she shares her experience of the concentration camps, she also talks about her life afterward and how she feels about being an American now. Louise’s story is an obvious complement to Farewell to Manzanar. The story of Claudette, a rising chef from Chula Vista, California, meanwhile, provides a real-life role-model similar to the heroine of Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High.

Tell Me Who You Are provides a wealth of windows and mirrors that allow readers to see aspects of ourselves in others and to see how each of our identities shapes our views and experiences of the world. Each story is short, usually 2-3 pages, so it can be easily accessed once a week or so, allowing students to meet new people and consider their way of living in the world. This collection is also a very human and accessible illustration of intersectionality, a concept Guo and Vulchi return to frequently as they narrate their journey as two young BIPOC women talking to people all around the United States. (The website of CHOOSE, the racial literacy organization they founded, also provides a rich array of resources, including profiles of teachers and K-12 lesson plans across all disciplines.)

Finally, as we began writing this, we shared in the widespread tributes to Beverly Clearly, who passed away this week, at the age of 104. In her honor, let us continue to give our students opportunities to read stories they can see themselves in, to encourage them to “embrace their too much-ness,” and to write the books that they want to read. And let’s continue to create the ELA classrooms we and our students need and want.

Reparations and A Raisin in the Sun

Over this last year, we’ve watched as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the many forms of inequity that shape the lives of our students. Looking back, we find strength and hope in the new things we’ve learned with our students and the emerging efforts to redress historic wrongs.

This past week brought news that the City of Evanston, Illinois, approved a first round of reparations for Black residents who have suffered the effects of housing discrimination. This effort is believed to be the first of its kind enacted in the U.S.

As reported by the Washington Post, qualified Black residents can apply for housing grants up to $25,000 to be used for down payments on a home, mortgage payments, or home repairs or upgrades. This measure follows research conducted by a city subcommittee that documented discriminatory practices toward Black residents, including past rules that limited where Black residents could live in Evanston. The report, for example, showed that despite the existence of a fair housing law passed in 1968, “as late as 1985, real estate agents continued to steer Black renters and home buyers to a section of town where they were the majority.” While some welcome the city initiative, even those within the community who support the idea of reparations do not necessarily agree with the approach adopted in Evanston. The Washington Post article does a great job of providing detail about the Evanston measure and its history as well as contextualizing it within the broader discussion of reparations occurring around the U.S.

Given Evanston’s proximity to Chicago, this development is particularly relevant to discussion of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. The Younger family faces just such discrimination when Mrs. Younger buys a home in a White neighborhood on the Far South Side of Chicago in the years following World War II. The events of the play are based on Hansberry’s father’s unsuccessful attempt to do the same, an effort that ultimately went to the Supreme Court. Our volume Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun provides text clusters on housing discrimination past and present that can help you and your students understand both the context of A Raisin in the Sun and Evanston’s attempt to redress the effects of this legacy.

In addition to the many news articles written about this historic measure, the City’s website provides extensive information about the effort, which has been in the works since 2019. Informational texts include: answers to frequently asked questions, links to municipal resolutions and reports, and videos of an Evanston town hall meeting and a presentation on the “State of Housing in Black America,” in which the history of restrictive covenants and federal redlining and their long-lasting impacts are discussed. This wealth of informational texts provides a variety of options for you and your students to draw from in making sense of A Raisin in the Sun, making connections with history, and considering historical inequities and reparations in your own locality.