Portfolio of Class Activities

This is a class-by-class display of the activities we engaged in

Sprezzatura - touchstones - and the danger of relying on yesterday to teach tomorrow.

The article which we read, Touchstones as sprezzatura: the significance of attachment to teacher literary formation, covers the attachment that teachers, and all people more broadly, will have to certain pieces of literature. Those pieces of literature will in turn act at touchstones, or the fundamental tools with which one measures quality. In this case, it is the quality of subsequent pieces of literature and their value as educational tools in teaching students.

The article analyzes the particular case of a teacher who uses a book about an island of cannibals as a literary teaching tool. On the face of it simply based on that description I feel that most people should be able to understand the racist undertones - and overtones - that such a story might possess and the myriad ways in which it could be a problem without even getting deeper into the narrative structures of the story. But this book was foundational to the teacher's love of reading. They didn't see it as being problematic, but rather as simply being a great way to make children fall in love with reading.

I've been listening to some of my old songs recently, and there is a line in one of them called Play Pretend that I feel applies here: "hindsight's rose-coloured, blessing yesterdays". Memory is selective, and we tend to vividly retain those events which gave us extreme emotions more than the mundane. This means that every problem we had was far worse than any problem someone could have now, but it also means that every good thing then was better than the good things we have now. It also means that the good things we had were amazing and perfect and non-problematic since the happiness we got from them was less mundane than any issues we have been aware of.

Enter the touchstones. The pictures I have included are of three books from my literary past which fit the definition. The first is Clifford's ABC. An innocent book where a red dog name Clifford and his tiny human Emily help teach you to read. What could possibly be wrong with that? "Nothing," I thought, as I purchased the book for a project last semester. I of course reread every book I brought just in case, and lo and behold E is for...oh no, that's a slur. It's only then that I also remembered my mother telling me that the word I learned from this book was offensive and not to be repeated in her home. All I remembered at first was how much I liked the red dog books when I was in kindergarten and first grade.

The next two I had far more luck with. The middle picture is the cover of the first book in the Animorphs series by the same author who would eventually write The One and Only Ivan. It is not something I would give to younger children, but certainly starting in fifth grade it can be appropriate. I didn't reread 50+ books plus a couple full-length novels and a few other materials to verify that the series is still appropriate, but I did watch over six hours of videos analyzing the series. Ultimately it is a story about war, but unlike every single piece of media about the military and war that is usually available from shows to movies to the actual news, this series does not treat its audience as idiots, doesn't portray soldiers as good people, makes the entire thing morally grey at best and severely traumatizing and confusing at worst. It is brutally honest in a way that few things are and allows you to cheer for the protagonists while still refusing to ever let you see them as anything but morally flawed.

The last one is just a cute book for children about animals finding the homes that can care for their specific needs. I suppose there is a message in there about the fact that needing your own space and your own things is not a slight against others with whom you might currently share space. It has a good moral lesson I suppose, but overall I was just very happy to see that there are no racial stereotypes integrated into the artwork, and that I will still be able to comfortably read this treasure to my future children.