Love & Literacy

A Practical Guide to Finding the Magic in Literature (Grades 5-12)

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, Stephen Chiger

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781119751656
• eBook ISBN: 9781119751663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

When our students enter middle and high school, the saying goes that they stop learning to read and start reading to learn. Then why is literacy still a struggle for so many of our students? The reality is that elementary school isn't designed to prepare students for Othello and Song of Solomon: so what do we do?

Love and Literacy steps into the classrooms of extraordinary teachers who have guided students to the highest levels of literacy. There is magic in their teaching, but that magic is replicable. It starts with a simple premise: kids fall in love with texts when they understand them, and that understanding comes from the right knowledge and/or the right strategy at the right time.

Love and Literacy dissects the moves of successful teachers and schools and leaves you with the tools to make these your own:

• Research-based best practices in facilitating discourse, building curriculum, guiding student comprehension and analysis, creating a class culture where literacy thrives, and more
• Video clips of middle and high school teachers implementing these practices
• An online, print-ready Reading and Writing Handbook that places every tool at your fingertips to implement effectively
• Discussion questions for your own professional learning or book study group

Great reading is more than just liking books: it's having the knowledge, skill, and desire to experience any text in all its fullness. Love and Literacy guides you to create environments where students can build the will and wherewithal to truly fall in love with literacy.

Part 1
What's My Dream for Kids?

INTRODUCTION

A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

—Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison published her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. The novel chronicles the life of Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl whose obsession with white beauty leads to tragedy. Take a moment to dive into this excerpt from the novel's “Winter” section. What would the average student take away from this passage?

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Excerpt—The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

By the time this winter had stiffened itself into a hateful knot that nothing could loosen, something did loosen it, or rather someone. A someone who splintered the knot into silver threads that tangled us, netted us, made us long for the dull chafe of the previous boredom.

This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of the white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. Patent-leather shoes with buckles, a cheaper version of which we got only at Easter and which had disintegrated by the end of May. Fluffy sweaters the color of lemon drops tucked into skirts with pleats so orderly they astounded us. Brightly colored knee socks with white borders, a brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur, and a matching muff. There was a hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.

Source: Toni Morrison, 1970 / Penguin Random House.

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Most students would pick up on Morrison's vivid description of Maureen Pearl and the speaker's resentment over Maureen's relative wealth and perceived attractiveness. Students might also broadly catch Morrison's use of metaphor or at least appreciate that she's doing something with figurative language. In the end, they might settle on a reading like “Maureen is the rich, new girl, and everyone is jealous of her.”

If they only did that, they'd be missing so much.

This scene, for example, takes place in 1941, well before the Civil Rights movement, and the passage simmers with racial tension even in the absence of white characters. Claudia, the Black narrator, describes Maureen's complexion as “high-yellow,” an offensive and outdated term used to describe Black people with lighter skin complexions. Without background knowledge on colorism, students may miss the meaning of this term and its larger social implications in 1940s America. Lighter-skinned Black people were often of mixed racial ancestry and their closer proximity to whiteness gave them privileged standing in a society stratified by race. The narrator's rage at Maureen's luxurious clothing and green eyes becomes much more nuanced once we know that lighter-skinned Black people were often wealthier and deemed more attractive than darker-skinned Black people.

And then there's the matter of Maureen's hairstyle. Morrison describes the two braids as “lynch ropes,” and this troubling description gives us much to mine. Here are a few potential readings:

• Maureen, although Black, is able to adopt some elements of white beauty standards by wearing a popular hairstyle of the time. However, by linking the hairstyle to racial violence, Morrison suggests these standards can be viewed as a type of threat to other characters.
• The lynch ropes that hang figuratively (and literally) about Maureen's neck remind readers that the threat doesn't simply come from her but also toward her. That is, both she and the narrator are under the sway of the cruel power she wields.
• The lynch ropes may allude to a poem by Jean Toomer, an early twentieth-century multiracial poet and writer. (Morrison was likely familiar with his work.) His poem describes a popular white hairstyle as “braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher's rope” and its violent imagery suggests the real danger that Maureen poses.¹

If we think of understanding literature as a journey, this depth of analysis is the destination many of us aim for when we teach. But how do we take students from “Maureen is the new, rich girl and the narrator is jealous” to “Morrison uses Maureen to embody exploitive, racialized classism and the attendant colorism”? And what would it take to help students read that way?

Recall Beth's students in the introduction to this book: their rich discussion of The Handmaid's Tale was the product of their deep understan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Online Content
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About Uncommon Schools
• Introduction: The Call to Love
• Part 1: What's My Dream for Kids?
• Part 2: What Will I See When Students “Get It”?
• Part 3: What Will I Hear When Students “Get It”?
• Part 4 How Do I Build It?
• Closing: The Call to Love
• Discussion Guide
• Index
• End User License Agreement