Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax (斧子) for the frozen sea inside us. ”I once shared this sentence with a class
of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice
and Men. When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy,
a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one
girl asked, as she got out of her chair to take a closer look. “I am,” I told
her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the
tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of
teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with
imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are
parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent
neighborhoods. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible
logic—the giving way of dreams to fate (命运).
For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading
enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of
students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my
headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had
transferred out of a selective high school—one that often attracts the
literary-minded children of Manhattan’s upper classes—into a less competitive
setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt
uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital”
could help students like her develop better in high school, where they would
unavoidably meet, perhaps for the first time, students who came from homes lined
with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph. Ds.
Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read:
Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The
students didn’t always read from the expected point of view. About The
Red Pony, one student said, “it’s about being a man, it’s about manliness.”I
had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I
heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies (独白) read as
raps (说唱), but both made sense; The interpretations
were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went
on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was
that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical
view was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year,
former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their first
year in college as a result of the classes.
Year after year, however, we are increasing the number
of practice tests. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex
texts, not for emotional punch (碰撞) but for
text complexity. Yet, we cannot enrich (充实) the minds
of our students by testing them on texts that ignore their hearts. We are
teaching them that words do not amaze but confuse. We may succeed in raising
test scores, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative
and that it belongs to them.
1.The underlined words in Paragraph 1 probably mean
that a book helps to __________.
A.realize our
dreams B.give support
to our life
C.smooth away
difficulties D.awake our
emotions
2.Why were the students able to understand the novel
Of Mice and Men?
A.Because they
spent much time reading it.
B.Because they
had read the novel before.
C.Because they
came from a public school.
D.Because they
had similar life experiences.
3.The girl left the selective high school possibly
because__________.
A.she was a
literary-minded girl B.her parents
were immigrants
C.she couldn’t fit in with her class D.her father
was then in prison
4.To the author’s surprise, the students read the
novels__________.
A.creatively B.passively C.repeatedly D.carelessly
5.The author writes the passage mainly to__________.
A.introduce
classic works of literature
B.advocate(倡导) teaching literature to touch the heart
C.argue for
equality among high school students
D.defend the
current testing system