Lord of the Flies: An opportunity to talk about hazing, bullying among today's teens

We’ve written about male aggression and Lord of the Flies before, most recently in our newest book, Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text, which offers a scientific article about male fruit fly aggression as a cross-disciplinary connection with Golding’s novel. Another striking and persuasive pairing with Lord of the Flies appeared in The New York Times this week. Writing in the sports section, Juliet Macur commented on recent charges of hazing-related assaults within the football team at Conestoga High School in Pennsylvania.

Macur quotes psychologist Susan Lipkins who argues that “hazing is a sports tradition that has endured for generations … The adults in the room [coaches and administrators] leave the room and let the mayhem ensue.”

Lipkins argues that coaches who leave athletes unattended in the locker room are basically leaving  “the inmates in charge of the asylum” and Macur makes the case that those adults are “only asking for trouble when they leave teenage boys unsupervised because those boys are often testosterone-fueled and power-hungry, a perfect combination for hazing to occur.”

So adolescent (and athletic) boys are basically the equivalent of inmates in an asylum? Without adult supervision, they are inevitably going to engage in violent and brutal behavior?

Surely, adolescents deserve the chance to unpack the assumptions here.

First off, note that Golding’s Lord of the Flies makes a remarkably similar argument. And who can ignore the incredible and shocking similarity between the specific brutality Golding imagines and the hazing incidents Macur describes? Alas.

But is Golding’s novel an endorsement of Macur’s and Lipkins’s argument? Is the criminal and cruel masculine behavior on Golding’s island the inevitable result of lack of adult supervision of teenage boys?

All the boys, after all, do not behave this way, and many clearly do their best to resist.

And what is the role of adults and particularly male adults in shaping the behavior in both these worlds? After all, Macur isn’t talking about a lack of supervision by female coaches (of course the football coaches are always male). Golding pointedly offers us a tantalizing hint at the male modeling children encounter in the world of his novel: the figure of the naval officer, complete with his revolver, who comes to rescue the children at the end of the novel and intriguingly cites R.M. Ballantyne’s imperialist The Coral Island as the reassuring model for the boys’ behavior on the island.

Hmm…

Surely all young adults deserve the opportunity to think about the source of the bad behavior of some of their peers. Suggesting that a lack of adult supervision is the source of (not to say the necessary corrective to) the problem of violent hazing among male athletes offers an image of young men as mindless, animalistic brutes. If I were a young person, I think I would want an opportunity to talk about that.

And talking about that assumption and about the details of Macur’s challenging and horrifying article (and the nasty realities it describes) offers our students an intriguing and compelling connection with Lord of the Flies that surely will make language arts class both more compelling and perhaps more important.

'America's Stacked Deck' and Gatsby's enduring relevance

So, we are delighted that our latest two volumes are in print, Using Informational Text to Teach a Raisin in the Sun and Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text. If you use these or our earlier Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird (2014) and have feedback, please send us a line.

Meanwhile, we are gearing up for our next volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby. Gatsby remains one of those seminal texts of American education, still read, like Mockingbird, by most high school students in the United States.

Do your students love this book? Does Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel still resonate in 2016?

If your answer to the former question is no and you are wavering in your answer to the latter question, think about those informational text connections that can draw out the relevance of this very historically-specific novel set during the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition and layered with now-obscure references to the Black Sox Scandal and bootlegging.

For example, Nicholas Kristof just published an opinion piece in The New York Times called “America’s Stacked Deck,” focused on the ways in which the current political campaigns reflect frustration with what Bernie Sanders calls the “rigged economy.” Kristof’s piece is a great way to make Gatsby relevant for students today.

1.     Kristof talks about the “structural unfairness in America … A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid.”

First of all, what American high school kid doesn’t need to be thinking about this kind of inequity? And how are we going to begin solving this issue if we don’t enlist the great minds of our young people in thinking about it early and often?

Plus, Gatsby is all about this issue of educational inequity. Who, within the novel, gets to go to Yale? Why do you think they get to go there? Does the phrase “dumb rich kid” resonate about any character? (Hint: one who went to Yale!) And why do you think Gatsby spent only five months at Oxford, despite the opportunity for education in Europe offered by the Armistice? Could his experience reflect on the struggles of many under-represented students today at elite institutions? (Have a student interested in this question? Point him/her to Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace!) How does educational privilege underwrite the trajectory of the different characters in Gatsby?

2.    Kristof also talks about how “when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to … scapegoats.”

Kristof is talking about refugees. But who are the scapegoats in Gatsby? How are different outsiders within the novel sacrificed to shore up the economic and social status quo? How does Tom Buchanan’s power depend on the takedown of Gatsby? Who else in the novel is forfeited to the needs of the elite? Why, given what he’s witnessed, do you think the young protagonist Nick Carraway is “haunted” by the East and chooses “to come back home”? What do you think this choice reflects about Fitzgerald’s view of the American privileged class?

3.     Kristof cites some experiments in social psychology: one player in a Monopoly game begins with more money than others; that wealthy player not only generally wins but he/she “lords it over others and even grabs more pretzels from the communal bowl.”

This experiment encapsulates a beautiful explanation of the problem of entitlement, a critical concept for adolescents of every social background to grapple with. Who, within Gatsby, grabs more pretzels? How does this Monopoly experiment explain that entitled behavior? In what ways have these different characters been granted a leg up in comparison with others? And crucially, who, in the novel, is punished for taking more pretzels and who is allowed to grab away without any punishment?

A text like Gatsby should be read by most high school students, but if we don’t draw out the issues of entitlement, inequality, and scapegoating central to the text, we’ll have missed our moment to talk with the next generation about the central issues of our time.

Present-day housing discrimination and A Raisin in the Sun

This Feb. 20 New York Times article shows that discriminatory
challenges to homeownership persist even today.

In our just published volume, Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), we offer a unit based around the essential question: How Difficult Would It Really Have Been for the Youngers to Buy a Home in Clybourne Park?

This question is critical to understanding Lorraine Hansberry’s play. Without a sense of the barriers to home ownership for African-American families like the Youngers, students can’t fully appreciate the tremendous challenges and risks Mama faces in purchasing a house in Clybourne Park.

Think Walter’s liquor store venture was the most risky investment in the play? Far from it.

Mr. Lindner’s offensive offer to buy out the family on behalf of the neighborhood association is clearly the most innocuous possible outcome of Mama’s purchase.

Through several different informational texts, we offer students the opportunity to think through the other likely outcomes of Mama’s decision.

First and foremost, the Youngers would have surely faced violence in Clybourne Park. This idea is articulated in the play by the neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, who speculates that the Youngers will end up in the newspaper: “NEGROES INVADE CLYBOURNE PARK -- BOMBED.”

The play doesn’t actually touch on the legal and economic challenges a low-income African-American family like the Youngers would have encountered. Would their homeownership have been prevented by a restrictive covenant like the one Hansberry’s father faced – preventing ownership by African-American families (or by Jews and Asians)?

Or would the Youngers have lost their home and all of their investment funds to the greedy, discriminatory practices of the real estate industry? This outcome seems the most likely.

Beryl Satter’s Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, which we excerpt in our book, outlines a practice called contract selling. Greedy speculators would sell homes to African-American families “on contract.” Because redlining meant African-American families could not access regular mortgages, people like the Youngers were forced into these contract sales. And the terms of the contracts were unbelievably exploitative. Miss one contract payment, for example, and the family would often lose the house and all they had invested in the property (any down payment as well as whatever additional payments they had made toward fulfilling the contract). Unlike with a mortgage, contract sellers could simply repossess the house. And these unscrupulous financiers often did just that, pocketing the family’s investment and then turning around, flipping the house, and ensnaring another unsuspecting or vulnerable family.

This story of contract selling is one of many hidden histories that underlie Hansberry’s text and belie the hint of a happy ending at the end of Raisin. In all likelihood, a family like the Youngers would have been caught short one month, and their entire investment would have been forfeit.

Think this practice is something from the deep, dark American past? It isn’t.

Just this week The New York Times offered a front-page story, “High-Risk Deals on Shabby Homes Ensnare Buyers,” that makes clear that this kind of unsavory practice is thriving at this very moment throughout the U.S. In Akron, Ohio (the focus of the article), and elsewhere, “deep-pocketed investors” have bought up many of the derelict houses produced by the recent housing collapse. These same financiers in turn offer these homes to vulnerable buyers, sometimes for “four times the price” of the initial sale. And because the mortgage industry has retreated from high-risk sales, vulnerable buyers can only afford to buy these homes “on an installment plan, with a high-interest, long-term loan called a contract for deed.”

As Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson write in The Times, these transactions “can become a money trap that ends with a quick eviction by the seller, who can flip the home again.” Déjà vu.

Are your students struggling to see why a play like Raisin matters?

Use this fascinating article in The Times or pull the piece together with the other texts we offer in Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun to unpack for students both what an enormous challenge it would have been for Mama to buy and actually hold onto that house in Clybourne Park and how greedy financiers then and now continue to exploit vulnerable home buyers who are trying to grab hold of that ultimate symbol of the American dream: a home of one’s own.

Better yet, collaborate with a social studies or financial literacy teacher so that your students can think through the ways in which home ownership in America has and continues to be the site of troubling and persistent economic exploitation.

Not sure how to get started on this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration? Check out our Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

Let us know how it goes!

A note on the passing of Harper Lee

Along with the rest of the world, we mourn the passing of Harper Lee. What she has given to all of us through To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is immeasurable and will endure. 

We know that readers around the globe will continue to grapple with her complex and challenging vision of race, class, and injustice in American society for generations to come.

Like so many, we owe Harper Lee an enormous debt both as readers and as educators. But personally, we also feel obligated to thank her for the work we have been able to do and the rich conversations we have been so fortunate to have with teachers across the country about Mockingbird over the past few years. Our packed session at NCTE in November, along with Susan Groenke and Robert Prickett, on “Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in (Not-So) Post-Racial Times” was a thrilling testament to both the enduring relevance of Lee’s landmark novel and to teachers’ continued dedication to engaging students in the critical conversations that both Mockingbird and Watchman inspire.

Thank you, Harper Lee, for inspiring and challenging us all.

Day 2 at NCTE: Critical Encounters with Non-Fiction

Maybe our favorite session at NCTE this year (okay, besides our own excellent session) was “Critical Encounters with Non-Fiction: A Literature Lover’s Approach” with Deborah Appleman, Carol Jago, and Rachel Malchow-Lloyd.

If you missed the session or are curious, here are the slides.

Some stand-out moments:

Appleman:

• You need to find the sweet spot of proximal development – texts that are challenging but not too challenging.
• Use visuals to provide entry to informational texts. We so agree on this one.
• Find the narrative thread in non-fiction.
• Use jigsaw technique to offer different perspectives (critical lenses) on an informational text or to cover different sections.
• Decontextualized close reading is necessary (Common Core) but not sufficient for complex text.

Malchow-Lloyd:

• Think of intertextuality and text bouquets as you bring multiple texts into conversation. (Don’t you just love the image of text bouquets!)
• Look for moments to contemporarize – to bring in texts that allow for a contemporary perspective

Finally, Appleman drove home the importance of non-fiction: “Knowledge is the lens through which we view ourselves and our world.”

But how do we offer students this knowledge when so much of what we read is fiction? Carol Jago noted that only 10% of classroom libraries is composed of non-fiction. And that includes a lot of material on dinosaurs and baby animals. This needs to change.

To that end, Jago offered a wonderful survey of some great non-fiction titles. Here are some we jotted down as quickly as we could:

• Moonbird by Phillip Hoose (author of Claudette Colvin) on climate change
• Tommy: The Gun that Changed America by Karen Blumenthal about the automatic weapon developed too late for WWI
• Fatal Fever: Tracking Down Typhoid Mary by Gail Jarrow
• Invisible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure by Jim Murphy and Alison Blank
• Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum
• Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dimitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad – by the amazingly versatile M. T. Anderson
• Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of the 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free by Hector Tobar

These titles can serve as independent reading, but we also need to find ways to include bits and pieces, whenever we can, in connection with our anchor literary texts to add color (our metaphor) to our text bouquets. Tobar’s volume would likely be a valuable addition to a discussion of Lord of the Flies paired with the story of the Chilean miners. The possibilities of interesting connections with these high quality, timely, and engaging informational texts are vast.

And, as Carol Jago pointed out, just as it’s okay to jigsaw and excerpt when we work with these informational texts, it’s also okay to do so sometimes with our literary anchor texts.

We want to build our students’ reading stamina, but building wonderful bouquets out of the intertextual connections of a variety of fictional and informational complex texts will create the robust learning and deep-thinking students we most want.

Thanks for this great session! We can’t wait to get ourselves and our students reading!

Day 1 at NCTE Minneapolis (where it’s very cold)

Getting ready for our packed session on "Teaching To
Kill a Mockingbird in (Not-So) Post-Racial Times"

We arrived bright and early in the morning from New Jersey. One of our first highlights was Brian Sweeney’s discussion of how his high school journalism student was able to turn a quirk in the New York City sexual education policy (teachers could talk about condoms but not actually show them) into a breaking story about policy change that was picked up by national media. Sweeney’s talk was part of a panel about writing forms beyond the essay and student agency. It was an inspiring way to begin our NCTE.

Next, we presented our work on informational text and Mockingbird. The panel, Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in (Not So) Post-Racial Times was the brainchild of Susan Groenke (thanks to her for that!). We were thrilled to talk to an informed and lively audience about ways to think about Calpurnia and Lula vis-à-vis an audio interview of Dorothy Bolden, who worked as a domestic for 41 years and founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, and excerpts from “Growing Up White,” featuring the reflections of white women who grew up in the 1930s South, like Scout, on the nannies and sharecroppers of their childhoods. If you missed our presentation, our slides are available on our website, as is the unit we focused on, “What Does Scout Really Know About Calpurnia?”

Robert Prickett followed us, with wonderful examples of graphic novels featuring African-American characters and history. We can’t wait to read Jennifer's Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl and the many others. Our favorite takeaway from his talk: use just a few panels from these various text to fill in context, make connections, and enrich your classroom discussion of Mockingbird.

Next, Stacy Reece and Susan Groenke talked about their research on pre-service teachers and the teaching of Mockingbird. Their qualitative research on how these students had been taught to read and think about Harper Lee’s novel – Atticus as hero, for example – was so compelling, especially given how universally the students talked about the erasure of race in their experience of the novel in high school.

Their next task was to help these pre-service teachers design lesson plans that would foreground an anti-racist pedagogy. What was so striking about this work was how challenging it was for these young teachers to imagine this work. All new teachers worry about how to handle conflict in the classroom; inviting a politically challenging discussion of race into your classroom is no small feat for a new teacher. But if we don’t help these teachers to think about this work now, when will we? We need our new teachers to take on these challenges; we can ill afford another generation of students who read Mockingbird as an unqualified tale of white heroism.

Thanks also to a great audience for their feedback. There’s no question that Mockingbird remains a problematic text today. Yet we know it remains one of those universally taught texts, so our challenge is to teach it well in combination with other texts that allow our students to have the difficult and informed conversations about race that we need to have in our classrooms.

Finally, we closed our day at a session entitled, “Responding to College Readiness,” featuring Audrey’s colleague, Caroline Wilkinson, along with Susannah Kilbourne and Hollye Wright. This highly interactive session allowed for great discussion of the vexed and vexing topic of college readiness. We did not, as one disappointed audience member noted, leave with the “answers” as to what constitutes college readiness and how to achieve it. But we did take away a sense of the importance of continuing conversations about the academic and non-academic skills necessary for success in college, the academic and non-academic obstacles (particularly poverty), and the difficulty of ensuring real access and opportunity for so many first generation students.

All in all, a great day at NCTE, as usual.

Start your school year with success and informational text

We know many of you are already planning exciting new lessons and units, while some of you are already back in the classroom. Either way, our resources can help you start your new school year with success.

IF YOU ARE TEACHING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and wrestling with how to make sense of it alongside Go Set a Watchman, the first volume in our series, Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird, can help. Our classroom-ready units on the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout and whether Atticus is a hero will help your students think critically about the characters and the complex world of Maycomb that Harper Lee presents in both novels.

IF YOU ARE TEACHING A RAISIN IN THE SUN, the second volume in our series will be available in October and can be pre-ordered now. After the events in Ferguson and Baltimore, this summer’s Supreme Court decision, and recent studies on the persistence of housing discrimination, Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play is more relevant than ever. Our forthcoming book includes 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. In the meantime, check out our post on the New York Times Learning Network or this New York Times article on housing discrimination in Ferguson.

IF YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT HOW TO REVAMP YOUR CURRICULUM, check out our website and our blog for strategies for finding great informational texts and for setting your students up for successful engagement with them. We also offer ideas for teaching key vocabulary in meaningful and engaging ways and how to use multimedia together with written informational texts in the classroom. Check out our sample units based on Mockingbird, as well as our “Text to Text” feature on Lord of the Flies on the New York Times Learning Network, for models.

IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO COLLABORATE WITH YOUR CONTENT-AREA COLLEAGUES to develop your students’ disciplinary literacy skills, read our blog posts on collaboration and share our strategies for using high-interest informational texts with a teacher with whom you’d like to work. Our materials can provide the basis for rewarding collaboration among members of your PLC and/or grade-level teams.

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 a range of hour-long and day-long workshops for both English and content area teachers. If you are in northern New Jersey, join us at Barnes & Noble in Clifton on October 14, from 4pm-6pm. If you are in Illinois, we hope to see you at IATE in October. Otherwise, you can also find us at NCTE and CEL in Minneapolis in November.

We hope our resources will be helpful to you in getting ready for the new school year. As always, we welcome your feedback!

PRAISE FOR USING INFORMATIONAL TEXT TO TEACH A RAISIN IN THE SUN:
This text takes all the intricacies of the Common Core State Standards and packages them neatly into a format that actually works in a real classroom. With a strong focus on vocabulary building, challenging non-fiction pieces, and digital media to which our secondary students can connect, these units turn A Raisin in the Sun into a cultural, political, analytical learning experience--without taking away the literature. —Meaghan W. Freeman, middle- and high-school English teacher, Willsboro Central School, New York

A reader's understanding of a text is only as comprehensive as the previous experience he or she brings to it. What, then, happens, when the landscape of a reader's life doesn't provide sufficient context? If you feel the impulse to shrug your shoulders and sigh, squelch it. Fisch and Chenelle have created a series of relevant formative activities and assessments to prime the pump for student inquiry. No more flying blind or feeling trapped within the four corners of a text -- students can engage in literature study through a research-informed, "real-world" lens. —Oona Abrams, ELA Teacher, Chatham High School, New Jersey

PRAISE FOR USING INFORMATIONAL TEXT TO TEACH TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD:
Propelled by rich, probing questions, this book invites teachers and students to explore a classic text with fresh eyes. The authors’ approach fosters a disposition for deeper reading and will inspire a sense of wonder in your students. —Carol Jago, long time English teacher and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English

Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird is the resource I’ve been waiting for! Teachers don’t have nearly enough time to research informational texts to go along with every unit they teach; therefore this book is going to be perfect for the teacher who wants to take her lessons to the next level. I can’t wait to use these lessons in my classroom. —Amanda DeAngelo, high school English teacher, Secaucus High School