The Human Stain
Twenty-five weeks in the program on the day Coleman came to sit in on Reading Recovery, and though Carmen had made progress, it wasn't much. He remembered how she had struggled with the word "your" in the illustrated storybook from which she was reading aloud - scratching with her fingers around her eyes, squeezing and balling up the midriff of her shirt, twisting her legs onto the rung of her kiddie-sized chair, slowly but surely working her behind farther and farther off the seat of the chair p and was still unable to recognize "your" or to sound it out. "This is March, Dad, Twenty-five weeks. It's a long time to be having trouble with 'your.' It's a long time to be confusing 'couldn't' with 'climbed,' but at this point I'll settle for 'your.' It's supposed to be twenty weeks in the program and out. She's been to kindergarten - she should have learned some basic sight words. But when I showed her a list of words back in September - and by then she was entering first grade - she said, "What are these?' She didn't even know what words were. And the letters: h she didn't know, j she didn't know, she confused u for c. You see how she did that, it's visually similar, but she still has something of the problem twenty-five weeks later. The m and the w, The i and the l. The g and the d. Still problems for her. It's all a problem for her." "You're pretty dejected about Carmen," he said. "Well, every day for half an hour? That's a lot of instruction. That's a lot of work. She's supposed to read at home, but at home there's a sixteen-year-old sister who just had a baby, and the parents forget or don't care. The parents are immigrants, they're second-language learners, they don't find it easy reading to their children in English, though Carmen never got read to even in Spanish. And this is what I deal with day in and day out. Just seeing if a child can manipulate a book - I give it to them, a book like this one, with a big colorful illustration beneath the title, and I say, 'Show me the front of the book.' Some kids know, but most don't. Print doesn't mean anything to them. And," she said, smiling with exhaustion and nowhere near as enticingly as Carmen, "my kids supposedly aren't learning-disabled. Carmen doesn't look at the words while I'm reading. She doesn't care. And that's why you're wiped out at the end of the day. Other teachers have difficult tasks, I know, but at the end of a day of Carmen after Carmen after Carmen, you come home emotionally drained. By then I can't read. I can't even get on the phone. I eat something and go to bed. I do like these kids. I love these kids. But it's worse than draining - it's killing."
So I told her about the spooks business, told her that whole story then, and when I was finished she shook her head and said, straight out, "I don't believe I've ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an institution of higher learning. It sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance. To persecute a college professor, whoever he is, whatever color he might be, to insult him, to dishonor him, to rob him of his authority and his dignity and his prestige for something as stupid and as trivial as that. I am my father's daughter, Mr. Zuckerman, the daughter of a father who was a stickler for words, and with every passing day, the words that I hear spoken strike me as less an less of a description of what things really are. Sounds from what you've told me that anything is possible in a college today. Sounds like people there forgot what it is to teach. Sounds like what they do is something closer to buffoonery. Every time has its reactionary authorities, and here at Athena they are apparently riding high. One has to be terribly frightened of every word one uses? What ever haoppned to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America? In my childhood, as in yours, it was recommended that each student who graduated from high school in New Jersey get at graduation two things: a diploma and a copy of the Constitution. Do you recall that? You had to take a year of American history and a semester of economics - as, of course, you have to no longer: 'have to' is just gone out of the curriculum. At graduation it was traditional in many of our schools in those days for the principal to hand you your diploma and somebody else to give you a copy of the Constitution of the United States. So few people today have a reasonably clear understanding of the Constitution of the United States. But here in America, as far as I can see, its just getting more foolish by the hour. All these colleges starting these remedial programs to teach kids what they should have learned in the ninth grade. In East Orange Hifh they stopped long ago reading the old classics. They haven't even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it. Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it's a black author or it's a white author? I'm impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in FEbruary and concentration study on that to milk that's just about to go sour. You can still drink it, but it just doesn't taste right. If you're going to study and find out about Matthew Henson, then it seems to me that you do Matthew Henson when you do other explorers."
I have been waiting to read this book for a long time and I must say it was well worth the wait. I absolutely loved Human Stain and plan on reading more of Philip Roth, his fantastic writing, and his memorable characters. I don't normally excerpt two parts but these are both so good, that I couldn't help it. |
