ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH
ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH 
Artist: Wayne Beckner, Title: Birds in Flight, Medium: acrylic on canvas
By
Roy F. Fox,
University
of Missouri-ColumbiaAlone
in those hours, I created a world of my own self-expression. I sang loudly in
operatic voices, my reedy swellings filling the great acoustic voids of the
empty house. I talked to my dog, to our paintings, to myself. I read aloud,
dramatically, and in monotone: I
would say the same sentence one time for every word in the sentence, each time
emphasizing a different word to see what difference it would make in meaning. I
sat before the television, repeating dialogue of the talk show hosts, the
newscasters, the PBS painting instructors--trying to say their own words before
they said them, trying to predict what they might say, what they might think. I
watched Mr. Rogers without the sound, supplying my own explanation soundtrack
for tours of dairy farms and goldfish aquariums.
Tom,
the college student writer above, wrote this response in answer to the prompt:
Chronicle your personal and social uses of language as a means of empowerment.
If we're lucky, like Tom, we can learn to harness our everyday uses of language
to empower ourselves. As he observes later in this paper, after his parents went
through a traumatic divorce, he became a latchkey kid, "dutifully going
home each day, only to spend hours in a family home devoid of family." He
found that he could use words to ward off loneliness and fear: with words came
strength and independence. Whether we're aware of it or not, we all use language
to gain authority and independence--to increase our belief in our own abilities
to act and hence to control our own lives. This is the golden purpose and
promise of language. These are the uses of language that count most. English
teachers, especially, spend their lives trying to convince others of this simple
truth, even though we often do not articulate it clearly. When teachers do
explain this purpose, we often do so mainly by merely telling our students that
language is crucial to shaping reality. However, we need to show
and not tell this to students; we need to lead them to experience it for
themselves. Students need to gain a consciousness,
an awareness that their own words and silences can not just reflect reality, but
also shape it, even create it. The papers that students write for the assignment
I will describe demonstrate the degree to which they are embarking on this
awareness.
The
study of language—especially how it can influence students’ growth,
identity, and (I know it’s a cliché) “language empowerment”—are often
overlooked in English/Language Arts classes. After 34 years as an Educator, I
wish I could explain why American education largely ignores the teaching and
learning of “language empowerment”--the most basic and most critical topic
in language instruction. Nothing remotely linked to the types of language power
explored in this essay appears on state tests, such as the “MAP” or Missouri
Assessment Program.” Nor do they appear on nation-wide tests, such as the ACT
or SAT. Indeed, the closest test topic on such exams is reading comprehension,
usually measured in narrowed and prescriptive ways, and we know “Language
Empowerment” will never be a high priority in No Child Left Behind circles.
Nonetheless, it remains one of the most elemental, important functions of
language to impart to future English teachers, to all teachers.
One
main reason for this absence, of course, is that language empowerment is
difficult, if not impossible, to measure. And, as many of us often observe,
“if it isn’t on the test, it doesn’t count”--it doesn’t drive teaching
and learning. In
However,
the more complex reason for ignoring an issue so intrinsic to rational
instruction and humane values resides, ironically, is the thick yet often
invisible cultural fog created by the sheer abundance of language and other
symbols—not only print, but electronic communication, such as television,
Internet, radio, advertising, blogging, YouTubing, emailing, and cell-phoning.
Added to this sheer blizzard of symbols is what we now euphemistically call
“spin,” or the constant manipulation of symbols for purposes of persuasion,
often under the guise of “entertainment.” Spin used to be known as
“propaganda,” and later, as, “Doublespeak.” Spin-meisters regulate the
frequency and number of messages, as well as their content and the types of
media in which they are conveyed. For example, if
To
me, propaganda is best thought of as “foreground” and “background” or
“figure against field.” One should ask, “What occupies the foreground and
what resides in the background?” Foreground and background change, but not
regularly or predictably. Conventional wisdom would say that our sheer abundance
of information or “fog” noted above, such as emailing and cell-phoning,
serves as today’s background, while our foreground is comprised of spun or
orchestrated messages from dominant corporate/government sources. However, I
believe just the opposite explains today’s state of amnesia and Alzheimer’s.
That is, our current self-absorption in entertaining electronic symbols is
really our foreground, the dominant “figure,” against our current background
of war and mass profiteering. This may best explain how something so crucial as
language empowerment is seldom on anyone’s radar. What is missing in this
discussion of foreground and background is the “self,” the real self--not
the one that is absorbed through the distractions of electronic entertainment.
The “real self” is the one that is empowered—the one that knows and uses
his or her own language strengths, to cut through the layers of dense fog.
For
my own small part, I try to communicate this concept by immersing undergraduate
English teaching majors in how very different people use language as a means of
verbally shaping reality to improve their lives--namely, Maya Angelou and
Russell Baker. I invite students to read two autobiographies, Angelou’s I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Baker's Growing
Up. These books closely describe how two very different people--a southern
black woman and an eastern white man--use language. Nearly everything that
happens in these books shows Angelou and Baker using language to gain control
over their world as they struggle to grow up and be free, and students don't
have to dig very hard or for very long. They will eventually write reflective
papers which compare Angelou's and Baker's uses of language with their own,
based upon two main types of language use.
Angelou
and Baker demonstrate personal uses of language in several ways, but I ask
students to focus on two major uses of language. The first one is language used
for purposes of power—using words in
positive ways to control or to provide strength for ourselves and others--as Tom
did, alone at home, at the beginning of this essay. Using language for power
also means using it to create alternative realities, to spin webs of
possibilities, to alter the “real” world, including those times when we need
to escape what life has dealt us. The second use is language as a form of bondage--using
words to limit or control our own or others' access to personal, political, or
social growth.
After
students have read these two autobiographies, or are well into their reading, I
first want them to understand how Angelou and Baker use language to gain
independence and autonomy—to gain power over their own lives, in a sense creating
their own lives via language. When Baker served as a copywriter at The
Baltimore Sun newspaper, he was successful but soon realized he was cranking
out tedious, unimaginative work assignments. He was not allowed to engage in
expressing himself freely and longed for something more. He therefore began
writing a novel in his spare time after work. His novel did not succeed, and he
glibly refers to it as a three-month, 70,000 word project, which improved his
typing skills. What is not stated in Growing
Up—and what students need to learn—is that, even though Baker’s early
novel failed and he returned to his humdrum copywriting, his novel-writing
nonetheless laid the foundation for his later, highly successful foray into
autobiography or creative nonfiction. Baker used language to “try on” a
different reality, one that he eventually made fit.
Angelou
vividly demonstrates how she uses language as power when she details what she wished
had occurred, not what really happened. When Angelou was a small child and sick
with a toothache, her grandmother took her to a white dentist. He refuses to
treat the young girl, saying, “Id rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth,
than in a nigger’s” (160). Angelou next fiercely details how her grandmother
rebukes the dentist, knocking him firmly into his place: “Her tongue had
thinned and the words rolled off well enunciated . . . like little claps of
thunder” (161). Upon first
reading, most students believe this is what happened, but later realize that
this is only a scenario of what Angelou desperately wanted
to happen. Angelou, through language, creates an alternative scenario, escaping
truth too hard to bear. At the time and in the end, this scenario bore a greater
truth than did actuality. It helped to shape and to define Maya Angelou’s work
and life.
Tom,
the student quoted at the beginning of this essay, further demonstrates how he
and his mother employed language as a means of power, which helped them to
survive, after his parents’ divorce:
Here, alone in the house, words became my playmate, my partner, my
sibling, my parent. When my mother came home, haggard and worn from her
unflattering life as a secretary, I was there, practiced and idling. My voice,
so excited and experienced, became the companion of her own hollow evenings. We
read poetry, played word games, and talked about daydreams, about her childhood,
about affording a washing machine. I talked and she talked; both of us, talking,
escaping as best we could the desperation of our situation—fleeing as quickly
as possible from the swallowing silence which testified to the absence of
family. We were prisoners in that house and in that shell of a family, but we
were freedmen in the world of words. We needed escape, and we created it through
language. Words will never be any more powerful for me than they were then.
While
these uses of language should be explicitly “taught,” preferably by leading
students to them, not lecturing about them, students must lastly consider that,
by most reckoning, these uses of language are not obscure or “high-falutin’”
in any way—that they are indeed, common, everyday functions. If students are
more consciously aware of them, then they will more likely understand use
language wisely.
Angelou
and Baker's books vividly show language operating as a form of bondage, such as
when we name and label everything (a natural impulse), and when words elude
us---those times when language will not or can not be present. Even as a
youngster, Angelou could not help but notice the mismatch between how something
was labeled and what it really was. When the sheriff told her family that
"the boys"--the local Ku Klux Klan--would be around to see them,
Angelou bristles:
The
"boys"? Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes
off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on
Saturday. Boys? It seemed that youth
had never happened to them. Boys?
No, rather men who were
covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or learning (14).
Another
example of controlling by labeling that occurs in Angelou’s work is when a
room full of white people laugh when Angelou's grandmother is referred to as,
"Mrs. Henderson," since "Mrs" was a label reserved only for
white women. Also, a white employer changed Angelou's name from
"Marguerite" to "Mary," and Angelou laments every black
person's "hellish fear of 'being called out of his name'" (91).
Baker's
memoir lulls readers into believing that language use seems less far less
important in his case than in Angelou's. However, verbal manipulation figures
just as prominently in his growing up as it does in Angelou's flight from
poverty--especially labeling. At an early age, after the death of his father,
Baker was anointed by his mother as, "the man of the family" who had
to "make something of himself." Such
simple but controlling phrases were repeatedly drummed into his psyche by his
mother. Baker wastes no time in drawing the line that we must draw in order to
grow up: "Lord, how I hated
those words" (8). The
restrained Baker also lets us see how, as a boy, he learned to "read"
labels and hence character:
I
noticed that they referred to Uncle Hal as "the Colonel" and sometimes
called him "Colonel" instead of Hal.
I also noticed that while my mother and Aunt Pat seemed excited by the
Colonel's talk, Uncle Allen ate his macaroni and cheese as calmly as ever and
didn't seem much moved by the festive spirit infecting the rest of us … Now
and then Uncle Allen tried to extract certain dull business information about
the lumber deal, but Uncle Hal . . . brushed aside these questions with a wave
of the hand. I could see that business on Uncle Hal's scale of operations was
far beyond Uncle Allen's understanding (103).
Later,
Baker speculates how his mother will respond to the name of his future wife:
"Even her name--Mimi--seemed unsuitable. 'Good women' were not Mimi, Fifi,
or Lulu. 'Good women' were Betty and
Mary and Gladys and Lucy and Elizabeth" (234).
My previous students also understand full well the power of labeling as
this one demonstrates:
In
dealing with his own children, my father was ignorant of the effect of his
remarks. If someone came home with a
report card full of B's, his comment wasn't to do better, but rather a nod of
agreement and ever-lasting judgment: "Mmm, you're average. You're not going
to be an A student or anything” … Just
as Baker asks his mother for help with his homework, himself knowing the answer
but wanting to watch her struggle, so my father would use language as a power
tool to define and remind us of our limitations.
Getting ready to go out to dinner, it wasn't unusual for us to come out
all dressed and polished, and for
him to say to one of my sisters in front of everyone, "Beth, you're
still having that weight problem." Real nice to a fifteen year-old girl. My
heart would sink and I would feel nauseous anytime he slapped one us with those
all too familiar digging remarks. By belittling and undermining his children, he
has created feelings of inadequacies that have followed us throughout our lives.
This
student's curt characterization of her father's use of language as a "power
tool" buzzing through her self esteem contrasts with the following
student's metaphor, which clarifies how "verbal battering" can evolve
over a period of years:
I
don't remember the earliest words. I know they were avuncular and indulgent,
verbal pats on the head that were somehow were loving and approving even while
they questioned my maturity and intelligence. It felt like love, and the advice
that soon began felt like having someone take care of me.
At this early stage, there were suggestions about housework and child
care, clothing choices ("Are you really going to wear that
tonight?"), all indicating my husband's certainty that I was incompetent in
even the simplest activities of my daily life, but fairly nicely.
The advice I remember most clearly always started with, "Don't talk
about . . . ." Several years
later, this became, "Keep your mouth shut tonight. I don't want to be
embarrassed by your stupidity." By
that time, the accumulation of all these words had caused me to doubt my ability
to do anything more complicated than breathe.
I couldn't stand up to him because my opinion was wrong by his
definition.
These
uses of language, these definitions and labels, have the opposite effects of
empowerment.
Students
might think that if we avoid language, we might free ourselves. But silence--the
withholding, failure, or absence of language--can also imprison us. Baker's
family reached a low point during the Depression and was forced to go "on
the dole" and accept cans of government food. There were no labels on these
cans; they were "ostentatiously absent," telling the whole world the
plight of Baker's family. Even this
seemingly insignificant lack of language temporarily imprisoned Baker and his
family in shame. When Bailey,
Angelou's brother, leaves home after conflicts with their mother, Angelou visits
him, and for the first time, language fails them both: "The unsaid words
pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and
crowded the room to uneasiness" (224).
Angelou's
most stunning instance of language as bondage occurs when Mr. Freeman, a friend
of Angelou's mother, verbally manipulates the eight year-old Angelou into
remaining silent about his sexually abusing and raping her:
"If you ever tell anybody what we did, I'll have to kill
Bailey" (62). Mr. Freeman's use of the inclusive "we" makes the
child share the responsibility for his raping her, while his use of the word,
"have," tells Angelou that there are no alternatives in the matter.
Because the young Angelou carried this weight of responsibility for protecting
her brother, and because Mr. Freeman was soon after killed, Angelo silences
herself for weeks. “If I
talked to anyone else that person might die too. Just my breath, carrying my
words out, might poison people and they'd curl up and die like the black fat
slugs that only pretended. I had
to stop talking” (73). Angelou's self-imposed silence did not free her
from the scourge of rape but only sealed her in it.
Some students, too, experience wordlessness and find themselves, for a
time, in an invisible prison. Tom describes one such experience:
On
the last day of November in 1976, later in the afternoon, my mother made my
brother and I sit down on our living room couch, and crying, she told us that my
father, who had been "gone on business" for three days, had abandoned
us and that he would not be coming back. The three of us sat there in silence.
The sun set, but no one rose to turn on the lights.
We just sat there, staring out the picture window, listening to the
winter wind and to my mother's crying. I was angered, surprised, and afraid, but
there were no words from my mother or brother in comfort; there was only the
silence--the yawning, shared silence. We three sat late into the night in the
silent darkness: three minds racing,
three hearts breaking, and no words to hold our emotions. Many things were
different after that night. I
was trapped by language and went beyond words, all in one experience.
Understanding
Angelou's and Baker's uses of language as both empowerment and bondage provide a
framework for students to make sense out of their own most meaningful language
experiences. Students become more conscious of the ups and downs of
language--that it's an instrument of imagination, power, and bondage; that
language and silence have dual natures--that one person's empowerment can be
another's enslavement.
Tom,
the young man whose words appear in this piece, was lucky to have found ways to
empower himself through language. The really good news is that he became an
English teacher. Most students rarely make these discoveries and learn from
them. In the discussion of information foreground and background, this is
exactly what is missing—the real, language and symbol-mediated self.
This is why language empowerment, maybe more than ever before, has to be
our top priority. We cannot rely on students becoming empowered through osmosis,
as we have in the past assumed students to do, through their reading of
literature, because students no longer read much literature. Instead, language
power has to be taught directly, as I have tried to demonstrate here, in one
meager example. If we teach for language empowerment, in whatever ways, it will
constantly remind us that language enables the caged birds within us to grow up
and break out. Such birds can naturally fly from place to place, helping us to
reconnect and redefine our backgrounds and foregrounds.
Angelou,
Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Baker,
Russell. Growing Up.
“Gore
Vidal on Media and Society.” TheRealNews.com. Accessed
Maya
Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and Russell Baker’s Growing Up are richly textured examples of the
roles that language plays in life, as we grow up, develop relationships with
parents and others, learn what we want and value in life, and discover who we
are. In both books, language
operates in at least two main ways:
1.
As a means of power--a way to control ourselves and others.
We gain power by using language directly to manipulate others, and we
gain power by using language as our primary tool for thinking and learning. This
includes language as a key to
imagination, to a "nonreality" visited for the sheer fun of it,
or because we need to "escape" reality in order to survive in a world
which seems, at the time, too painful to bear.
2.
As a form of bondage, which limits or restricts our access to
personal, political, or economic growth.
Directions:
In this paper, synthesize Angelou's, Baker's, and your own uses of
language. Focus upon one or both of
the roles above. You're also
encouraged, of course, to develop your synthesis in other ways that may be more
interesting or relevant for you; if you're unsure about an idea, please see me.
·
Illustrate each of your points with a summary, paraphrase, or
direct quote from each of the texts. Sometimes,
two illustrations may be necessary. Since
there are so many to choose from, selecting just the right one is
important.
·
Illustrate your own experience with direct quotes from your own
experience (as precisely as you can recall them).
Also use letters, cards, documents produced for school or work, etc.
·
Clearly connect all illustrations and examples to whatever point
you're making about the role of language. Explain
how each specific illustration embodies whatever role of language you're
illuminating.
·
Can you recall an instance of language use when you stopped and
thought while you were in the midst of talking?
What happened? How did you reframe or restructure your language and/or
the situation? To what degree did
Angelou and Baker engage in such "reflection-in-action"?
The
usual requirements apply: title your
paper; use subheadings; double-spaced, 7-9 pages; one-inch margins all around.
Following
are some other suggestions to help focus your discussion.
These suggestions assume that you'll employ Angelou, Baker, and your own
experience, as you consider 1-3 of the roles noted above.
1.
What are the roles of "fresh" and "stale" language?
Angelou is a wellspring of striking metaphor, while Baker explores
platitudes and cliches.
2.
What are the roles of "language models"--the influential people
around us? Angelou had Momma's quiet
solemnity, Bailey's humor, Mrs. Flower's precision and elegance, and the craft
of Daddy Clidell's con-men friends. Baker
had the aphorisms of his mother and his Morrisonville kinsfolks, Oluf's gentle
voice in his letters, Aunt Pat's swearing, Uncle Harold's tall tales, Uncle
Hal's manipulation, and a stream of all-night coffee-filled family conversations
in the kitchen.
3.
How do Angelou and Baker think? As
artists, inventors, naturalists, or anthropologists (see Kirby and Kuykendall)?
Which two roles do they seem most at home with?
How do they employ language to these ends?
4.
In both books, language sometimes fails.
When and under what circumstances do words have little or no effect? Why?
5.
In both books, there are episodes when people are not particularly
adept at language and expression--they may be considered illiterate or
inarticulate, yet they succeed. How
and why?
6.
How would you describe Angelou's and Baker's "voices"?
Do they change for various audiences and purposes?
When, how, and why? Do you
detect "long-term" changes in their voices--changes due to the passage
of time (maturity)?
7.
How does Hayakawa's "map/territory" analogy apply to Angelou's,
Baker's, and your own language? How
do they cope with discrepancies between the map and the territory?
8.
How have you, Angelou, and Baker used language to "move" from
two-valued to multi-valued orientations?
9.
How does a person's socio-economic status affect his or her language?
10.
What are the functions (good, bad, and in-between) of names and the act
of naming?
11.
How does popular culture, especially self-selected reading, movies, and music,
affect our language, and consequently, who we are and who we think we are?