by Lucy S.
I'm going to leave up last month's post one more month. But Sean and Ryan are writing me something this time about their own thoughts about our readings all this time, so I will add that up here soon.
Sunday afternoon, and we've just finished Brother, I'm Dying by the great Haitian-American author, Edwidge Danticat. We've been reading a chapter a day for some time now, but today, I read the fourth to the last chapter, and we all wanted to go on. I kept reading, and we knew the only thing to do was to see it through. I started to cry on some parts, just intermittently. After the last words, when I closed the book, Sean said with strong feeling, "God! That's so sad!" Ryan said it was up there with the great ones, with Animal's People and other great ones, and Sean said, "Yeah!" and I nodded. I said, "Do you realize how few people your age have read that and all of the books and poems and other readings on our list?" "Yeah..." they both said, nodding, not placating me, but meaning it. I said, "So maybe you really have had a great education." Sean said, "Yeah, think of all of them - this one, Animal's People, The Shock Doctrine, The Moral Underground..." I said, "Go on this blog sometimes and look at the list, and let yourself think about each of the readings as your eyes take them in, and think about how much time each one represents, and how much you actually know from all those readings."
They have read other things, of course, but these are the ones we've read together that we could remember when I began listing these readings. And the ones that matter. There are far more movies, too, but I haven't tried to think much about making that longer. What I most care about are the books we read together. We don't even talk about them that much after each day's reading. But they bind us together, our travels through these books together.
I've been all over the place in my thoughts about homeschooling and public schools. In recent years, I've doubted my choices at times, thinking of them as maybe a retreat from the institutions that we should instead be struggling in - though there is ample evidence that working-class and poverty-class kids don't tend to fare too well in them, by and large. They tend to perpetuate the same class inequalities. But I am tired of thinking about it in those terms, tired of trying to arrive at a perfect answer. I only know that I've given my kids a moral education, reading these books to them, talking about the book a little during the readings, referring back to them, building in my kids a deep well of understanding, a way of seeing a larger picture of this world. They don't get falsely cheery interpretations that are meant to make them see their society and government as advancing further and further into some brightening light of benevolent progress. And yet they never become jaded in their responses to our readings. They're always moved.
Sean and Ryan told me I should read Brother, I'm Dying with my class, and I said, "I am! This coming semester!" They said they think the students will love it. I hope so. I hope they'll all actually even do all the readings. Sometimes I wonder if they'd get more out of their education if we all just sat and read together and talked about the readings afterward, and we cared more about their moral or ethical development than about producing another worker to take another spot in - the students hope - the professional-managerial class. But that's a topic for another post. Right now, I'm feeling thankful to my kids (all of them) for teaching me how to teach before I ever went back to school.
Books
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I'm Dying.
Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron-Mills
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas. Utopia
Nix, Garth. Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People
Skye, Obert. Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Short Stories and Essays
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Cleary, Kate M. "Feet of Clay."
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "Crazy for this Democracy."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Hurston, Zora Neale. "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience."
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Poetry
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Berry, Wendell, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston. "Mother to Son."
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Moore, Marianne. "Poetry."
Morales, Aurora Levins. "Child of the America."
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Are All the Break-ups in Your Poems Real?"
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee."Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Kottayam Morning."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Movies
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Man of La Mancha"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
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