educating alice

Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell writes about “The Power of Narrative in History” after attending an event at the Massachusetts Historical Society featuring Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,  author of the remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning work of history,  A Midwife’s Tale that was also made into a film shown on PBS. (n.b. I highly recommend this site where the midwife’s diary itself is online, annotated, and commented upon.)

I really liked Bell’s discussion on how differently fictional writers and historians consider the idea of narrative, particularly “heroic narrative.”

Ulrich felt that the Midwife’s Tale filmmakers were in danger of creating a fictional narrative for Martha Ballard that, while it might please viewers, wasn’t supported by the historical documentation. She was even willing to leave the project over that issue. The creative team was able to adapt, and the resulting film is both very affecting and historically grounded.

And does it have a heroic narrative? At this point I piped up from the audience to argue that the Midwife’s Tale movie does offer such a narrative—not about Ballard, but about Ulrich. While the movie shows several vignettes from Ballard’s life, the storyline that runs through it and fuels it is the historian’s investigation of the midwife’s diary. An individual sets out on a quest (to learn what that document can reveal), faces obstacles, devises strategies, makes breakthroughs, and achieves acclaim.

While I think this is an interesting idea, I’m not sure that I like it.  Shouldn’t the focus stay on the history told?  — on one woman’s diary to get a sense of her life in her time?  To make the story about the historian getting the story turns it into something completely different.

I have to think further about this, but I think this relates to my reservations with teachers using historical fiction to stimulate interest in history. As Ulrich felt so strongly (strongly enough to consider pulling out of the film project according to Bell), history is not necessarily heroic.  The historical story may be very different from a fictional telling, but just as interesting and moving.

I only watched a small part of HBO’s John Adams mini-series, but I have been following J.Bell’s posts about it at Boston 1775.  (Bell is probably better known here for his blog Oz and Ends.)  I’m fascinated because again we are dealing with the complex issue of how best to tell history.  When is the telling true and when is it fiction?   How much of each do we need so that audiences today can relate?  Fascinating stuff.  And here is more (with a quote from Bell): Historically accurate TV? A revolutionary idea. - The Boston Globe

Excellent piece in the current New Yorker by Jill Lepore on “Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history”: Just the Facts, Ma’Am: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker.
Highly recommended.

They are at it again. Teens are all going to hell in a hand-basket. According to today’s New York Times, a “Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions.”

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.

But guess what? According to historian Sam Wineburg in his sensible article, “Crazy for History” (Journal of American History, March 2004) there were comparable results when Texan students were tested in 1915-1916:

Across the board, results disappointed. Students recognized 1492 but not 1776; they identified Thomas Jefferson but often confused him with Jefferson Davis; they uprooted the Articles of Confederation from the eighteenth century and plunked them down in the Confederacy; and they stared quizzically at 1846, the beginning of the U.S.-Mexico war, unaware of its place in Texas history. Nearly all students recognized Sam Houston as the father of the Texas republic but had him marching triumphantly into Mexico City , not vanquishing Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

Please read Wineberg’s article, Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn’s History on Trial:Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, Roy Rozenweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past for more about this perennial issue.

And, please, those who are worried — calm down. It was ever thus.

Our classroom theme for the year is immigration. We begin by discussing the children’s own metaphoric migration from a small lower school to our very large middle and high school building. We move out to oral histories — they interview people they know about their own experiences coming to America. Along the way we see movies, go places (Ellis Island, Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Walking Tour, Museum of Chinese in America), read works of historical fiction, and more. (This year, for example, we had a wonderful time with Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.)

We then move back to the time of forced immigration from Africa, the time of slavery in America. Because of my two years in Sierra Leone, I like to do a lot with the African connection. And because the captives were mostly Mende and because they went home to Africa, I love teaching the Amistad story. In fact, I’ve been working on a book for children about Sarah Magru Kinson, one of four children on the ship. Last year I put it on a blog for my students to read; this year I made it available to the other fourth grade classes. It has been wonderful to get their feedback. Here is this year’s introduction for my class. Here, here, here, and here are some of their posts about the story.

After reading and writing about the story, I showed the children a series of poems about enslavement and/or the Amistad.  I then showed them the poem the class wrote last year with Natasha Trethewey and invited them to write their own.  These will be integrated into collages like these from last year and posted on their blogs.   Their poems are wonderful and I can’t wait to see them completed!

I’m also incredibly touched and moved by the emails I’m getting from the children in other classes.  I have to thank Laura Amy Schlitz for making me brave enough to give the story to them. Last year I felt skittish about even letting my own class read it, but now that I know that Laura wrote her plays for students in her school originally I somehow felt much more relaxed about my work being used in my school.

Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or “banalization”—that we face today.

This is Tony Judt (a very controversial scholar, if you don’t already know) on “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe” in The New York Review of Books.” Provocative and worthwhile reading.

“Writing about the Holocaust for the next generation is as important as it is difficult,” writes Nicolette Jones in her Telegraph piece,  “How shall we tell the children?.”

Most of the books mentioned in the piece seem for older children (e.g. The Book Thief that was published as adult title in Australia) and I’m kind of okay with most of them. However, I’ve yet to be convinced that this is a topic that younger children (e.g. 4th grade and under) need to know about. I’m the child of Holocaust survivors, by the way; read this post of mine if you want to know more of my opinions on this: The Holocaust and Young Children.

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.

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.