By Bill Croke on 6.16.09 @ 6:07AM
There was a time when high school students were taught to love
literature.
I was at the public library the other day and eavesdropped on a
conversation at the front desk between a woman librarian and a
junior high school-aged boy. I was privy to the transaction that
was his renewal of the due dates of three books:
Monsters, Hatchet, and Guitar for
Dummies. I'm sorry to say that I'm ignorant of the authors
of these tomes. Don't get me wrong, I think that when kids read
anything it's better than not reading at all; so I don't begrudge
the young man his taste in what is likely horror fiction; and I
certainly applaud his self-taught musical interests. But as the
old cliché goes: times have changed.
When I attended Our Lady Queen of Peace grammar school in West
Milford, New Jersey, some forty-odd years ago, the Franciscan
nuns subscribed to a paperback book club called "Scholastic Book
Services," where students could buy paperback books for 50 or 75
cents. Every few months the new list came from the publishing
company, and we put in our orders and turned over the few bucks
of our hard earned newspaper route, lawn-mowing, or babysitting
money that would get us multiple titles.
A couple of weeks later the janitors dropped off the shipped
boxes at each classroom, cut them open, and the nuns covered
their large desks with tall stacks of shiny, new paperbacks: Mark
Twain, Washington Irving, the Brontës, Harper Lee, Jack London,
Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, James
Fenimore Cooper and Daniel Defoe.
Sisters Bridget or Alberta or Gemma (there were a number of them
doing this in different classrooms) removed the packing list and
consulted their own record as to who ordered what, and drafted a
couple of the brighter teacher's-pet-type girls to assist them in
distributing books. The rest of us got on a line that snaked to
the back of the classroom. There was no fooling around on line;
after all, this was Catholic school. As we passed the desk the
list of our individual purchases was read, and we picked copies
of the appropriate titles from the tall stacks.
There was definitely a literary divide between boys and girls
books. The guys preferred adventure fiction such as The Call
of the Wild and The Last of the Mohicans; the gals
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or To Kill a
Mockingbird, all those with sympathetic female characters.
There were also big stacks of The Diary of Anne Frank:
most of the girls had a copy; none of the boys did. The boys read
and traded The Red Badge of Courage and Treasure
Island, or anything else about war, Indians and pirates. And
about the closest we got to erotic stimulation was the scene in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom kisses Becky
Thatcher's "ruby-red lips".
A couple of years later when I went on to John S. Burke Catholic
High School in Goshen, New York, we had a summer reading list. We
had to read four out of six listed books (again, paperbacks that
were ordered) and in September were tested on them for 25% of our
first English grade.
That summer before freshman year I remember reading John
Steinbeck's The Red Pony, Kipling's Captains
Courageous, Hiroshima by John Hersey, and a
swashbuckling historical novel about the French Revolution with
the odd title The Scarlet Pimpernel, and by a woman with
the aristocratic-sounding name: The Baroness Orczy. I didn't know
who the Baroness was, but I recall a couple of rainy days when I
was certainly engrossed in her novel.
Also at Burke Catholic High School I had a tenth grade history
teacher named Sister Margaret Phillips. This was 1970, and
post-Vatican II. The nuns of the high school (unlike my grammar
school nuns) had made the transition to the "new habits" that we
are familiar with today. They were also permitted to wear high
heels. Sister Margaret was tall and statuesque to begin with, and
in those heels she was about 6'2'' or 6'3'', as tall as an NBA
point guard.
She enjoyed enthusiastically reading aloud to the class as we
followed along in the text, an anthology of selections from
antiquity. She boomed out the speeches of Cato or Cicero. The
Commentaries of Julius Caesar were a favorite. "Listen to
this, boys and girls!" she commanded, as she strode before the
class, holding the open book in her left hand, gesturing wildly
with her right, and those heels clicking the floor: "The men of
the 7th legion were unnerved by these tactics, and it was
just at the right moment that Caesar came to their rescue. At his
approach the enemy halted and the soldiers recovered from their
alarm…" I doubt that Sister Margaret Phillips would have thought
much of Monsters, Hatchet, or Guitar for
Dummies.
As I scan my shelves, I can spot a handful of dog-eared survivors
of those years. The Call of the Wild and that thin copy
of The Red Pony with a list price of 75 cents. Another
of those ancient page-yellowed paperbacks is one more Jack London
book, a collection with the kid-grabbing title of Stories of
the North (50 cents). Maybe tonight before it finally falls
apart I'll reread for the twentieth or thirtieth time London's
best short story: "To Build a Fire." I'm not much of an optimist,
but I think that if I choose to have that pleasure, I will again.
And again.
topics:
Education, Reading
