Silencing Mockingbirds

Reading is resistance

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I was in my classroom, and it must have been second or third hour because I remember I was hungry — we hadn’t had lunch yet, and I was running too late that morning to grab breakfast. I was reading a short chapter from To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my 8th graders.

Most liked it so far.

My Principal walked in for an observation and noticed we were reading a novel, and then proceeded to walk right back out…he stood at the door for a second and told me to visit his office after school.

If you think being summoned to the Principal’s office as a child is terrifying, you should be summoned as a teacher.

A shiver went down my spine.

I finished the school day.

My students already knew Scout and Jem and felt a certain way about Atticus. Calpurnia is nearly always beloved by young readers.

Most readers have a weird feeling from the start about Mayella, and the foreshadowing about Tom Robinson gives students a sense that something is likely to go terribly wrong.

Boo Radley is creepy and scary until he is not. My students loved his character.

I decided to go straight to my administrator’s office after my last class. There was no reason to put it off, and my anxiety would not let me think about anything until I knew why I was summoned and what I had done to deserve to be called down.

When I walked into his office, he didn’t appear to be mad or upset or in any kind of foul mood. He was smiling. He also didn’t ask me to close the door to his office.

If you know, you know.

He told me he just wanted to schedule another time for an observation. I told him he could have stayed that morning, but I could arrange another time. I asked him why he left my classroom when he realized we were reading in class. He told me something I have never forgotten:

“I want to observe your classroom when the kids are doing something.”

I am positive my mouth hung open at this statement.

I enjoyed teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to middle schoolers.

I know there has been talk for decades about revising the literary canon we teach students, and I know there are other books that can teach the same themes about classism and racism and justice, but I do love that most of us have the common language of To Kill a Mockingbird.

When someone refers to a man as an “Atticus figure” we all know what that means.

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Atticus Finch via Harper Lee

We recognize the archetype. We know Atticus.

We share a common understanding of the novel, and that means a lot to a society…especially one that has moved away from storytelling and into a digital landscape full of fake accounts and biased “news” and bots created to confuse and disorientate while an authoritarian regime tries to steal the levers of power and communication.

It’s important to read, but very important to read fiction. It’s important to have a canon of literature we read as a society to remember and act on our shared values and morals and hopes.

We need that now more than ever.

When my Principal told me he wanted to come back to my room to observe my teaching when we were “doing something,” I immediately spoke up.

We were doing something. We were reading and discussing the novel. The kids were engaged and learning and actively working on empathy. This was one of the best ways an administrator could assess my abilities as a teacher — to observe my class doing the difficult work of analysis and language processing. To observe them discussing themes and symbols and archetypes.

To watch them discover the love of literature in real time.

He disagreed. And then he went further:

“Do you think students need to read an entire novel to get the gist of the book? Can you assign excerpts instead? Should you be teaching an entire novel right before the MAP test?”

There it is.

The Missouri Assessment Program is a standardized test that Missouri students take in grades 3-8. My students would have been taking the test in a few weeks. It was the last time they would take it, and it assessed the ability of my students and reflected on my school. MAP scores also indirectly impact school funding.

You can see why a school administrator would be anxious about MAP scores.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t just teach summaries or excerpts. I couldn’t boil the novel down to quotes. I couldn’t cheat my students. I couldn’t bear for them to lack the understanding and the truths of the novel.

So I taught the entire novel. And my Principal didn’t stop me, but he wasn’t happy with me.

I didn’t care.

Harper Lee. Photograph by Donald Uhrbrock. The LIFE Images Collection.

That interaction was almost two decades ago…and things aren’t any better. Students can graduate high school without ever reading an entire book. I could show you studies, but you don’t need them because you know this is true.

Teachers have been sounding the alarm for decades.

We told anyone who would listen that boiling learning down to a multiple-choice question assessment at the end of each year would lead to teaching to the test. That teachers would feel forced to teach test-taking strategies rather than teaching life strategies through a shared human existence.

That reading would not be pleasurable if the only thing that mattered was skimming excerpts of great literature to find the main idea and report back to a computer grading their scantrons.

My god.

No Child Left Behind? No…every child is left without the reading skills to understand the world around them.

I could cry for humanity.

We have missed the point. We have lost the plot.

We let lawmakers create lesson plans. It was a mistake.

The good news is that we don’t have to accept this illiterate fate. We can read fiction and we can discuss fiction and we can draw truths from fiction. We can still read anything we want and we should do just that.

We can join or create reading groups. We can attend school board meetings to ask that teachers be allowed to teach full texts and demand boards approve entire novels in the curriculum. We can support teachers doing the work.

We can support our libraries and frequent them. We can use our shared language to fight the fascism currently seated in power.

We talk a lot about resistance under the current regime. Reading is resistance.

We should do more of it.

~Jess