educating alice

Great Chicago Stories is a creative and engaging website full of history for kids.  It is the result of a two-year NEH project at the Chicago History Museum where teachers, museum educators, historians, technologists, professional writers, and a national board of advisors  (I was one) collaborated to create engaging stories, lessons, and units for students in both elementary school and high school.

Nonfiction Matters is Marc Aronson’s brand new blog at SLJ.  As of this writing there are three posts, two (on history in schools) which provoked me to respond in the comments.  Marc is straightforward about his passion for history, a passion I share for reasons similar to his.  Years ago when Marc was on child_lit we’d have a great time arguing about various things. (He tended to argue from the book editor/writer/creator POV while I argued more from the teacher/young reader POV.)  I learned a lot from Marc during this discussions and so I look forward to having an opportunity to discuss things again on his blog.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

I tried a couple of times to watch “The Sopranos” but it was too violent for me. However, I did vaguely attend to the discussion about it, especially as it came to its full-of-unresolved-threads-final this past Sunday. And now I’ve just read Susan Lempke’s take on it, “Tolerance for ambiguity” which made me think of another vague final — Lemony Snicket’s The End. In both cases, the writers purposefully left threads dangling. I haven’t heard too many complaints about the Baudelaires’ story being left too open (but then I am of the opinion that we haven’t heard or read the last of them), but it seems that some (or many) were left gaping at the open-endedness of the final episode of “The Sopranos.”

Interesting. I’ve written about the need to tolerate ambiguity when learning and thinking about history, but hadn’t thought about it so much when thinking about story and fiction. Susan wonders what we will discover next month about Harry Potter. Will threads be left dangling in his story too? Somehow, I think not as Rowling’s series seems to be more traditional than either Chase’s or Snicket’s. But who knows? While Snicket’s ending didn’t surprise me at all, Chases’s seems to have for many. Perhaps there will indeed more ambiguity to tolerate when Harry’s final book appears.

Since I’m a teacher, I’m didactic. And I’ve thought a lot about what that means over the years. I’ve decided that what I do best as a teacher is to express and model my passion for certain topics and so I admire writers who do that successfully in their writing. I write “successfully” because there are many books that exhibit passion, but in a way that makes you feel you are being hit on the head and not in a good way. Greatness is being able to get a grand idea across, one you the writer care about enormously, in a way that gets the reader to care about enormously too.

The above is part of my comment to a post on didacticism at Read Roger that has provoked intense discussion. And because the original commentator had things to say about Octavian Nothing, Tobin Anderson has joined in.

I’m very glad he did because I think Tobin is an excellent example of a writer who is passionate about communicating big ideas in his books, something I think he did brilliantly in Octavian Nothing, less successfully in Feed (I know I’m one of the few who feels this way:). In the former the big ideas are carefully built up through the novel for readers to react and respond to strongly. The characterizations are beautifully delineated, the setting impeccably researched, the plot is tight, and the writing sublime — as a reader I felt I was traveling with someone who was taking me on a wild ride of emotions, provocation, and thought. Feed doesn’t work as well for me — I loved the writing and setting, but by the end felt that the author’s beliefs and passions were breaking through and that I was being preached to.

Writing for children is an imaginative act; writing for children so that they think deeply beyond the book requires a tightrope act that is very, very difficult to pull off. My hat’s off to all who try — it is risky to put yourself out there, to show your passions and beliefs, to strip yourself bare in front of those child readers even as they lose themselves (hopefully) in your story, and to hope that (trite this may be) you’ve made a difference for these future adults whose world this is to become. That’s my kind of didacticism.

My students are finishing their research and beginning to write their stories. At this point I like to refer them to other works of Pilgrim historical fiction, good and bad. Here are three that I find particularly useful:

Kathryn Lasky’s A Journey to a New World
I like this one very much. Lasky has done her research well and I love it when I read some excerpts that the kids recognize information from Mourt’s Relation. The only problem I have with it is that it is a Dear America book and there are kids (not mine) out there who think it is a real diary and that Remember Patience Whipple was an actual Mayflower passenger.

Ann Rinaldi’s The Journal of Jasper Jonathan Pierce
I use this one with my students to show how important it is to really delve into research. You see, many who look into the Pilgrim story become intrigued when they learn that Governor Bradford’s first wife Dorothy died shortly after they arrived, evidently falling off the ship. Unfortunately, an 1869 journalist created out of thin air a story involving a love affair and her suicide, a story that now is carelessly banded about as fact when in fact it is completely bogus and unsupported by any primary source whatsoever. My students and I even checked with the Plimoth Plantation folks to be sure. It seems Rinaldi did not; she uses it in her story — no problem there as it is fiction —- but then in an end note she describe it as one of the fascinating pieces of historical information she discovered during her research. How could she not check into it enough to find out it was a hoax?

Carol Otis Hurst and Rebecca Otis’s A Killing in Plimoth Colony .
The historical information is accurate, but there is a running element of anachronism that keeps this book from succeeding. The characters speak in modern idiomatic language, just with thou’s and thee’s. Early on there is a scene where a little girl has a hurt bird she wants as a pet. John Billington helps the bird and the little girl comments after he leaves that she loves him. Pets were not the norm at that time, much less for children (something I’ve looked into because my students tend to want to put them in their stories), and the idea that a child would talk of “loving” an unrelated adult because he took care of her pet? That is modern usage, not 17th century.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes, it is history.

I’m one of those who read and learned a great deal from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Originally published in 1970 as NON FICTION, I read it many years later when I began looking for ways to go beyond the textbook in my teaching of American history. (I eventually abandoned the textbook entirely, but that is another story — told in my book Far Away and Long Ago: Young Historians in the Classroom.) Nonfiction. I read the book trusting that what I read was true.

Yes, it is fiction.

At least so it seems is the case with HBO’s version of the book. According to the New York Times article “Classic Book About America’s Indians Gains a Few Flourishes as a Film.” a new character was added to the center of the story.

“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.

Yes, it matters.

Poor maligned history. There is such a prejudice against you. That you aren’t good enough. That you need to be touched up somehow. That you need fixing or you will be ignored.  In this case, by those who are assumed not to know or care about you.  Especially, it seems, when the history is about a minority group that the majority group is presumed to otherwise lack sufficient interest in.

The HBO film hasn’t aired yet. It will be interesting to see the response once it does.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I spend much of the year with my fourth grade students studying historical fiction; at the end they create their own works of historical fiction about the Pilgrims. I’ve written about how we begin, especially their work with primary sources. To motivate them to get the basic facts we did a Pilgrim Jeopardy game and now are on to the really fun part — the kids have created composite main characters and are “interviewing” them. That is, they are using the same questions they used for their fall immigration oral history interviews to create an imaginary interview with their composite Mayflower passenger.It is amazing how just about all the questions still work. (The only ones that don’t are those asking about how they learned English and about their progress in citizenship.) And they make great research questions. The kids have to really dig deep to figure out how their characters would describe their old countries (England or Holland in the early 1600s). They use books written for children and adults, primary sources, and some excellent web sites.

The absolute best research source for them is our trip to Plimoth Plantation. The folks there do a brilliant job of recreating the settlement as accurately as they can based on the material available. In fact, our whole unit is the result of my meeting someone from Plimoth long ago who told me about the place and sparked my imagination. The rest is….as they say…history! And so tomorrow Dalton’s whole fourth grade is off for their two day trip back in time. At the moment the kids are far more considered about the long bus trip and we teachers about the weather (doesn’t look good for Friday), but I guarantee that we will all come back in awe once again of the whole experience.

We will go first to the Mayflower 2, a recreation of the original ship which is populated by actors playing passengers as if it were April 1621. We’ll stop by the teeny weeny Plymouth Rock and then walk through the actual location of the original settlement to Burial Hill. I love doing this because the kids really can see exactly why they chose the spot. We then go to the Plantation for a colonial dinner and various activities (writing with quills, colonial games, dressing like a Pilgrims, etc) before bed (sleeping bags in their perfectly okay classrooms — we don’t sleep in the Village itself).

The next morning we go to the 1627 Pilgrim Village which is always just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! My kids are so ready for this. They have questions related to their research all ready to go! The actors are always wowed by our students, they know so much and have such great questions. We also go to the Wampanoag Homesite which the kids love.

Then back on the bus, more videos, and home before dark. An exhausting and exciting two days always. And the following Monday — the kids will be ready to dive into those imaginary interviews bring all to them all the research they did while away.

Imagination is critical when it comes to considering the past. The best historical writers, it seems to me, are those who can cull together the facts, think hard about them, and then managed to present them to us in an engaging, thought-provoking, and honest way.

When it comes to writing and learning about the past, biography is one way to go. But it is fraught with problems too. Biographer Nigel Hamilton, in his article “Life Studies,” argues that biography has been sadly overlooked in the academy.

Is it really right, then, that we should still refuse to teach the history, theory, and practice of biography, in all its media, at our colleges, given that real-life depiction has become so central to our Western way of life? By studying the nature, art, craft, agendas, genres, rules, ethics, research methods, and the different media approaches to biography, we can improve our appreciation of a significant aspect of our civilization — and encourage better, more honest, more insightful, and more learned biographical works.

I would go further — I mean, why limit this to higher education? Kids are as eager to learn about real people as adults and they need to examine this form of history-telling as they do other forms. Telling other people’s stories, as fiction or not, is something we are doing and seeing all the time. We read them and view them on television and in film; examining more closely how biographies are researched and created seems a worthy educational endeavor at all ages.

Such studies with younger children would, I think, help them when they encounter fictionalized accounts of real people and events. My 4th graders still grapple with this topic. Even now, despite frequent examination of the issue, my students still struggle to figure out what is real and what is made up in the books they read. For example, I will soon be reading to them some of Katherine Lasky’s Dear America title, A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple in order to show them how the author used the same primary sources they are using to write it. Invariably, a few weeks later there will be children who will want to use the book not only as a model for their own stories, but as source material as well. I mean, they can tell me the book is fiction, but evidently deep down they still view it as a reliable source about the past; I suspect that some, no matter what I say, will continue to think of Patience as real as Governor Bradford. (For more on such confusions see my 2005 Educational Leadership article “The Pilgrim Maid and the Indian Chief.” )

In fact, I think the study of biography is critical just as I think deep and close study of historiography is critical. Being always just a tad skeptical, a tad suspicious is important. We shouldn’t just accept without thought the information in those Biography Channel shows, in docudramas, in books. Anything that helps kids and adults consider critically what they are taking in is all to the good in my opinion.

Today most of the kids finished their illustrations for Mourt’s Relation using Connie and Peter Roops’ Pilgrim Voices as a source. This is a terrific book for kids which combines parts of Mourt’s Relation with William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. The illustrations by Shelley Pritchett are excellent; they are clearly carefully researched and a great help to the children as they do their own.  After completing the illustrations, the kids scanned them onto our computer server, and then uploaded them onto (into?) individual blog posts.  Please go to our class blog where you will find links to the indvidual student blogs (on the right) and can go see these fantastic illustrations (says their slightly prejudiced teacher:).

Having examined immigration from many angles since September, our fourth graders recently embarked on their final unit of the year — writing a work of historical fiction about those iconic American immigrants, the Pilgrims. It always ends up everyone’s favorite unit of the year— delving deep into all the great material available about these oft mythologized folks, having to figure out how to separate fact from fiction, getting to read really old stuff, and going back in time to Plimoth Plantation — it is fascinating indeed. Additionally, it gives the children a chance to synthesize all they have learned in the course of the year about immigration, about researching the past, about historical thinking, about reading critically, and about writing — in this case, historical fiction.

Currently, just as all good writers of history do (fiction or nonfiction), the children are immersing themselves in the world of those Mayflower passengers — reading a wide variety of primary and secondary sources to garner as much information as possible prior to writing their own works of fiction. Next month, when they are ready to begin writing, they will use what they already know about historical fiction — for we have considered the genre carefully throughout the year in preparation for this unit. In particular they will now have to consider “What makes a good work of historical fiction?” as it applies to themselves as writers.

By now, a few weeks into the unit, my students have read several books for children on the Pilgrims to get an overview, produced maps and time lines to help ground them in time and place, and are now doing one of my favorite activities of all — reading a few pages of Mourt’s Relation. One of the seminal primary sources of the Pilgrims, it was published in 1622 (in London presumably as a sort of advertisement to encourage more to come) and offers readers direct contact with those long ago people, complete with long winding sentences, nonstandard spelling, and a fascinating sense of what things were like for them on that ship and afterwards. I’ve written an article about how to do this with kids and much more in my books on history, in case anyone reading this wants to do it too.

For this lesson, I found a copy of Mourt’s with the original spelling and the kids and I translate it together. They adore the unconventional spelling and having to figure out what things mean (since dictionaries aren’t useful as today’s definitions are often not the same as those of 1622). We create a key and use it to read the first few pages. To give you a taste, here are a couple of pages from this week’s work. (We did this for the first time on the Smartboard so our annotating is a bit clumsy, I’m afraid, and not as clear as when we did it on regular paper. I did the very messy first page while the second one was penned by the far neater learning specialist who works with me several periods a week.)