i did have a chance at last to speak to a representative of this Major Textbook Company … had a little bone to pick … have had it for quite a few years …

you see there’s this scrap of a passage from Ben Franklin’s autobiography … the part where he tries to make himself morally perfect … he lists twelve desirable virtues and briefly describes each … but when we get to CHASTITY there’s no description … just a big white blank space …

when i asked my class this year why there was nothing printed there, they said something like, “Well, Franklin knew that everybody knows what chastity is, so there was no need,” they said “Well, maybe he was kind of shy about that.”

i, of course, had to tell them that Franklin had written something but that someone had taken it out … of course, i read to them what had been left out:

Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

and we had that conversation … the conversation that someone somewhere doesn’t think students should have in english class …

ok … so i pointed all of this out to the representative of this Major Textbook Company … he gave me his card, said he’ll look into it, said i should email him in a few days (& i will) (because i’ve been really curious and cynical about this for years & to finally approach an answer .. corporate though it may be …is about all that i can bear) … i’ll let you know how it turns out

have i seen the future? are any of us in it?

no … that’s too whatever … it was this …

our english department met today with representatives of a Major Textbook Company … not one … not two … not three … but FOUR representatives of a Major Textbook Company … bearing mountains of hernia-inducing tomes, a big box of cookies, and something else in a box on each desk …

they want our business … (more precisely, to continue with our business, since we presently use their old now-out-of-print series) and they presented us with a whizzbang tour of their current literature series … it was all kind of overwhelming for an end-of-day meeting … but this is what i made of it:

the focus was on 1) organization of the texts and 2) technological elements of the new series and 3) integration of all elements of their series (lit - grammar/comp - and tech)

i’ll focus on my course area: the american lit text

1) the book contains most of the same selections as the present text … it has been adapted to the specs (the look & structure) of their new series … this is what bugs me now and has been bugging me for some years: the reading selections seem to be drowning in a sea of pedagogical peripherals … they seem to be barely holding their own against a phalanx of literary analysis exercises, writing “workshops,” vocabulary development, and grammar add-ons … oh, the good old questions at the end of the reading are still there … but they seem to have spawned some god-awful mutant offspring … need i say that i’ve never found these “teaching” aids of any use … the books seem designed to be teacher-proof … i can imagine that if some schools or districts require departments to be on the same page on the same day doing the same things then this textbook would be a great help …

and they are very expensive …and they are VERY heavy …

2) the technology elements involve

a) a “completely customizable” test bank,
b) online submission and scoring of student writing (with immediate feedback - take that, you slacker teacher!),
c) a dvd of Actual Living Writers talking about their work,
d) an option for students to have full access to an electronic copy of their complete text …

all of this is fine … will i ever use it? not likely … the problem? … i don’t know .. this is just too much … and it doesn’t feel very congruent with my approach to teaching … for one thing, i almost never give the kind of tests the test bank offers … another thing: i took the essay scorer for a test drive & recieved such useful feedback (under “Audience and Purpose”) as: While a position may be stated, either it is unclear OR undeveloped … hell, i coulda writ that … and i’da been more SPECIFIC.

i don’t know … this is just me rambling here … i’m not in charge of anything … and i bear no ill-will toward any of my colleagues who feel differently about these things … i will not stand in their way … but i don’t like this stuff … my students don’t need all these bells & whistles … my students need constant close encounters with all kinds of real literature … real literature in real books … who has ever fallen in love with thoreau’s work by reading the scraps of passages these texts provide (smothered in gorgeous big color shots of walden pond)? who?

seems to me that these anthologies make things “easy” for teachers while they reduce “reading” to the blandest & most forgetable of experiences … a brief text by some famous writer hemmed in on all sides by the very visible gears of this pedagogical machinery … where’s the love?

students need to read and think and speak and write about real writing real books … the raw stuff … what is all this other? i just don’t get it.