False dichotomy, anyone?

Cannery Row and Writing Skills

We spent a half hour this morning discussing the first sentence of Cannery Row. Once, when Susan was lecturing to nursing home residents in Florida, someone told her that Steinbeck was a bad writer. She used this sentence as an example. Susan (and our group) disagrees, but it's more interesting to delve into why we disagree. Here's the sentence.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing."

I can share our thoughts, but I'm curious to read yours.

(The former Wing Chong grocery store on Cannery Row. Note the subsequent development.)

This afternoon was a tour of Cannery Row, ending with a small party in Doc Rickett's lab while listening to an audio recording of Steinbeck reading The Snake.

(Listening to The Snake in the front room of Doc Rickett's lab)

(Back of Doc Rickett's house. You can see the cement holding tanks in the foreground.And the Intercontinental hotel on the right.)

Tonight is the Cannery Row movie, a 1982 adaptation billed as 'the best love story of the year.' (Did they read the book?) It stars Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. I plan to be entertained.

(Example of the size of an average Monterey sardine.)

The Red Pony and The Red Pony Ranch

I've been too embarrassed to admit it to most of the teachers here, but I hated The Red Pony the first time I read it. For years, I actually thought I hated Steinbeck because of how much I hated The Red Pony. In fact, I chose to share this truth in my application essay, and they still accepted me. Perhaps because Steinbeck later became one of my favorite authors even though I wasn't expecting it. Here's my opening...

In crafting this essay as a response to your “Dear Colleague” letter, it seems only right to begin with Steinbeck. “A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.” Why begin with such a foreboding answer? It is impossible to understand my love of Steinbeck’s work and my respect for his principles without knowing how I felt about Steinbeck during the spring of seventh grade. Allow me to set the scene. There were eighteen in the class, counting my middle-aged English teacher, and twelve of us were suburban preteen girls of the early 1990s. We had just finished Where the Red Fern Grows, a maudlin story about coon hunting, competition, and a boy whose love is unable to save his dogs. It was the first time I hated something I read for English class. We immediately cracked the spine of a book whose cover showed a boy, a horse, and a pasture: The Red Pony. While my adult self recognizes the reasons for teaching these books consecutively, my middle school self did not. I didn’t want to read about drought, a dead horse, or buzzards---lots of buzzards. Suffice to say, this was not the best introduction to Steinbeck. Flash forward two and a half years to the summer before tenth grade. East of Eden was on my list of assigned summer reading. At least The Red Pony was a short, quick read. The fat book with the distinctively “Steinbeck” orange spine was thrown in my backpack before a family vacation to the Bay Area, my first experience visiting anywhere west of Texas. I was awed by the Redwoods on the way to my family’s hotel, then most of the rest of my memories of the trip are lying outside, mountains in the distance, devouring the saga of the Trask family. I was particularly impressed with the character of Lee, and Steinbeck’s facility at using Lee to weave philosophy through the story. I rooted for Samuel’s optimism to pay off for him, and I dreaded the moment when Aron was going to realize that his mother was a prostitute. Even though I’ve always been a prolific reader, it’s the first time I remember paging through a book and taking notes to try to make sure I was understanding it correctly.

I included the East of Eden transformation because you can learn more about why I came to like Steinbeck, but the fact remains that The Red Pony is a dark book. While other teachers were thrilled that we were going to visit ranch from the book, I was ambivalent. I like seeing new places, but was I really interested in a desolate ranch where boys torment animals and horses die? However, (you knew that was coming, didn't you), in rereading The Red Pony for this institute, I was touched by its desperation and poignancy. Reading as a child of Jody's age, I sympathized with him. Or, more accurately, because I didn't sympathize with him, I didn't connect to the story. It's a story of the west, of loneliness, of masculinity, and of nurturing. As an adult, Carl and Billy Buck's competing notions of male nurturing take center stage, and Jody seems like a petulant schoolboy. The sense of loss of childhood by witnessing death and by learning that adults lie to children seems more realistic from the other side of the equation. (By the way, I'm referring to books 1-3 here. Leader of the People is sometimes included in The Red Pony collection, but not always. I think that's a better story all the way around, as it has all of the worldly sadness of The Red Pony but none of the buzzards.) Neither are fun stories to read, but that's not always the point. I understand now why we read it, and I'm glad to have visited the ranch.

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I haven't used Smilebox in years. Let me know if the photos show up on your screen. I can easily find other ways to display them in the future if Smilebox isn't convenient.

English as a second language

Before I left, Ms. Mishkin and Mr. Calleja asked me about English language instruction in Japanese schools. We're spending about 30 hours this week on school visits. Since I don't understand Japanese, there's only so much I can learn from classes conducted in Japanese. (Although, you pay more attention to contextual clues like body language and the responses of the class when you can't just half-listen from the back of the room and get the gist of what's going on.) So far, I've been very impressed with the first two English teachers whose classes I watched. Schools officially begin English instruction in 7th grade, but schools are able to offer English once a week in the elementary grades if they want. The school I visited offered English on a rotation with art and music classes. In the past 10 years, the Japanese ministry of education changed from a rote grammar translation method to more active methods. (The teachers backed up what you observed in the past, Mr. Calleja. Due to this method, students had vastly disparate reading and speaking abilities.) Now, sometimes immersion methods are used, but it's at the discretion of the school. At Iraha Elementary School, one teacher teaches all subjects except the 'special' once a week classes. (The teacher attends these classes with her students; it's not prep time!) In the grade 3 class I observed, the English teacher spoke no Japanese but the classroom teacher sometimes translated when the students were having trouble understanding. The class was playing a fruit, animal, and sport identification game on the day I attended. The students sat in a circle, divided into two teams. About 30 laminated cards with English words and pictures lay in a pile on the floor in front of them. The teacher said, for example, "I'm thinking of a fruit" to prepare them. Then she'd say, "I'm thinking of a strawberry." The students then dove into the pile, hoping to be the first to find the correct picture. This was complete controlled chaos! The person who matched the picture to the item requested got to pin it to the board under her team's name.

At the junior high level, the best class that I observed all day was also the English class. The junior high has at least one master teacher! He doesn't speak any Japanese in the classroom, and he makes the students participate and practice their speaking. When I entered, there were 4 signs on the board. They read, "Q: Who is s/he?" "A: S/he is..." "Q:What does s/he do?" "A: S/he is a..." He'd hold up a picture and another teacher would point to the appropriate sign as he asked them to identify the person as they practiced their vocabulary words. By including people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Beyonce (they responded Cameron Diaz-haha), and Rosa Parks, he also got a little culture and history into the lesson as well. When he held up a photo of George W. Bush, students struggled with his job name. Several shouted "King" and, my favorite, one said "princess," which I guess vocab-wise is close, but it's got an entirely different meaning. This led to an impromtu Q and A session when the teacher asked if I could help. I got asked, "Where do you live?" (Disney is an excellent landmark for this culture!), "Do you like Japanese food?" (most of what I've tried) and "Do you like Chris?" (I then found out that Chris was the teacher's name---I do like Chris.) :) among other questions. Sometimes, the female teacher translated my responses, but most often she pantomimed. Then the class played a "relay race." The student in front (all of the desks in all of the schools were in straight lines!) was given a new card with a famous person and all in the row had to practice the 4 questions from the board by asking one of the questions or responding appropriately. Everytime someone got the English right, he passed the card to the person behind him, repeating questions and answers until the end of the line.

During the class, I was marvelling over Chris's mastery of English. It turns out that he's a Hawaiin native, here on the JET teacher exchange program. His time is split between 5 schools, and he spends two weeks at a time in each. The quieter female teacher I mentioned is actually the students main English teacher. (I briefly saw another JET teacher in the high school. She also had them working in groups and speaking, and was willing to change up her class when a group of English speakers came in willing to talk to her students. I was thinking that JET must have a great training program, but they actually don't train much at all, except Japanese language skills. I'm wondering if the reason that the other teachers and I were so impressed is because these are the "modern Western" ways we're trying to model in our own classrooms.)

Onto high school, which is slightly out of context without a longer post about the day at the school. In short, it is a poorer high-school and has low-to-middle-achieving students. We were given only one period to explore on our own, but one of the two classes we were scheduled to watch was English. This meant that 15 of us, plus the guide, the translator, and the principal, were crammed in the back of a classroom wtih 40 students and one teacher. This isn't an ideal set-up, so we were already a little on edge, especially because the students were completing a worksheet. When the teacher spoke, he read the worksheet aloud, then they practiced the problems. During this time, we started to talk to the students. We were under the impression that he really didn't like that because he called the class back to order and said firmly, "This is my class." A few people got pretty upset. I think he actually meant, "This is my class-class, back to order" because he began calling students to write their answers on the board. He spoke in a mix of Japanese and English, and seemed inflexible in what he wanted to get done during the period. He came to our administrator and teacher meeting in the afternoon, and it appears that we misjudged him. He's actually a very nice man, and he got us copies of the English exam students have to take before university. (Language teachers, it will be at school next Friday.) He apologized that he could not change the schedule more, but said that we had observed a difficult class for the most advanced students. It was an English grammar course, not a speaking course. They were behind in their studies, and he needed to get through some material before the standardized test of English language ability that's part of the university entrance process. Still, I think it's sad that his students were unable to practice their English. Those who did speak to us while we were roaming the aisles spoke only a few words at a time and didn't seem more comfortable speaking than the 7th graders or the elementary students. Perhaps they were shy, or perhaps speaking had to be tossed aside in favor of reading ability for this test.

At the university level, courses refine grammar study and also read (what they defined as) American Literature. This includes A Christmas Carol, Pygmalion, and Tuesdays with Morrie. They practice conversational English in class. Still, the Japanese never admit that they are fluent in English. Even when they can emulate American colloquialisms perfectly, they say, "a little" or "maybe I can help" when you ask if they speak English. The Japanese don't seem eager to practice their English speaking skills, nor do they seem particularly interested in learning English, even people who work in the tourist profession.

Take this post and run with it! Language instruction at young grades, teachers from foreign countries, immersion methods, teaching to the tests---the floor is yours!