Catchers in the Rye

A few states have decided to make certain kids know how to read well enough before they can go on to the fourth grade.


There will, no doubt, be all sorts of mistakes made by the dozen or so states that are trying to see to it that kids can’t go on to the next grade, if they aren’t reading like they should be, in third grade. There, for sure, will be contrary, heart-tugging local TV news segments about some third grade kid who’s six feet tall and is embarrassed to have to spend another year in third grade, even if he can’t read well enough to be promoted. It’ll be endlessly debated and scrutinized. Critics will say it’s underfunded. Even champions of it will say that. All those things will happen to it that happen to all new initiatives. Sides may be chosen. I hope not. At least, not like they usually are. That’s so boring.

I just heard about it a week or so ago on the PBS News Hour. The story was about Ohio where I used to live. I found myself saying yes to it. Someone seemed to care in the way you want them to about the kids. They wanted to make sure that these third grade kids were not being allowed to go ahead in school if they weren’t ready to go ahead in school. It seemed like adults acting like adults to me. In that frame of mind I started thinking about kids and how they always need good guidance and protection. I thought of this passage from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s where the book gets its title. This is Holden Caulfield:


“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”


Doesn’t that touch on the essence of all schooling? Aren’t we supposed to be making sure that kids learn things from us that keep them from going over the cliff? Doesn’t the culture look to schools to instruct kids so they won’t go over? Give them the tools they’ll need so they’ll stay safe? And don’t parents believe that the schools and the teachers have learned from their schooling and training how to make sure their kids get this instruction? Isn’t it like sending your kid to basketball camp in Connecticut where they’ll get instruction that no parent could possibly give? Isn’t the neighborhood school supposed to have methods, that parents don’t have, to teach the local kids to read? Isn’t that what our taxes go for? And doesn’t New York State spend more on education than any other state?

How come in New York City, so many poor kids read at such a low level? And how come most of them aren’t near ready for college when they graduate, if they even do? There’ve been poor kids forever. Are there no methods courses in college where teachers learn how to teach poor kids to read? Is there no state-of-the-art curriculum or template that shows how to do it? Does anyone bother to tell teachers-in-training, or school-officials-in-training, that teaching their students to read well is the most important thing that schools have to do, especially if the kids come from homes where they didn’t get the head start they need?

What else are schools for? Isn’t reading almost the whole deal? Math and science matter to those kids in the class who get it, but for most of us, school is about reading and using words. (You hear people in England say they went to Oxford and read History or read Law.) There might be a few school plays and a chess club and choir tryouts and the usual team sports, but school is mostly about reading. Much of life is mostly about reading. Tony Kushner could not have written the screenplay for Lincoln if he hadn’t read book after book about Lincoln and the Civil War and Law and Race and Constitutional Amendments. Spielberg had to read a lot of that, too.

Even tweets have to be read. To let a kid go to the next grade in school before he can read well enough to legitimately be going there is to let him edge closer to the edge of the cliff. We need catchers.

You can’t blame teachers for this problem. You can’t blame the board, or the Chancellor even. Oh, maybe you could ask them why they didn’t raise their hand at one of the hundreds of meetings they’ve been to and say, hey, our kids are getting pretty close to the cliff; and nothing I do seems to keep them from it. Maybe someone should have said, why don’t we scrap this syllabus that year after year yields failure and start to focus on teaching these kids to read well.

That’s what I’d do. That’s what I hope results from my sign-holding, that someone says, yeh, that’s it, let’s teach the kids to read; that’ll do the kids more good than what we’re doing now that’s been proven by every statistic and measurement to be a failure. Let’s turn the schools into reading academies. That’s what you always wanted your school to be, isn’t it? A lot of your schooling and mine was bullshit. I’m sure it’s the same today. The teachers then knew it was too; they know it is now. They’d like it done differently too. A change has got to come. Everyone would rather be a catcher.

How long till someone in power sees that?

The Schools of Tomorrow Are Here Already

Free college courses are online and wildly popular

You’ve read or heard about them. College courses that you can take on the Internet. The site you hear most about is called Coursera (coursera.org). It’s a collection of courses taught at five top schools: Stanford, Princeton, Cal Berkeley, Penn, and Michigan. They’re free. People, rich or poor, from anywhere in the world can sign-up.

There are other programs. You can find them online. It’s a great opportunity for people who otherwise couldn’t afford access to such material and stimulation. Articles about the phenomenon have said the number of people who are participating has exceeded all projections. It’s a cool, far-reaching use of technology.

By Their Cover

acityReader gallery of the book world

I used to feel self-conscious using my film camera in bookstores. I was told more than a few times I couldn’t take pictures. Now I’ve got a good little digital camera I can carry in my pants pocket. I can less noticeably snap a shot of some stack of books or some cover that arrests me. I can even page through an art or photo book and get a shot of a beautiful page. I’m compelled, it seems, to take such pictures.

I’m putting them on my blog (acityreader.blogspot.com) and on my Facebook page. Not all at once. One at a time. Some are of store windows. Some inside stores. Some from my apartment, or other places, when it strikes me. It’s not a vanity project. Just a sharing of pictures of books that grabbed me.

‘He was never a scholar, but he learned to decipher writing on a page, and it helped him to get along in the world.’

I Read The News Today. Oh Boy.

More depressing numbers about how we’re failing in our duty to our kids.

Some mornings I buy a Daily News, along with the Times which I get every day and can’t imagine why everybody doesn’t. Tuesday’s News had a two-page spread with a strong headline that said: CAN’T HACK COLLEGE. There was a large stock photo of high school kids in class. It was a bogus photo. They looked more like suburban kids than New York kids. Under the big headline it read: 71% of city kids not campus-ready.

You’re not shocked to read that. Are you? You should be, of course. But you just know by now that that’s the way it is here. You’ve seen such numbers before. It’s like reading again about cars running red lights here. As if you didn’t know. It’s an outrage you’re somehow supposed to accept.

I’ve seen so many articles like this over the years, here and when I lived in Cleveland. Seen so many bad numbers about city kids, that I’d be shocked if I read something different. That’s crazy that we’ve come to expect such failure. If your kids are in the system, you must be concerned, and angry. I’m concerned, and angry too. That’s why I hold my sign. That less than 30% of the city’s high school graduates are ready for the next grade is a cynical reality you’re supposed to accept here. But how can you accept that?

Are they saying that city kids can’t learn? Is that what they’re really saying? Year after year. Without really saying it? Are they saying they’ve tried everything, and nothing they’ve tried can make it better? What else could they be telling us in 2012 when it’s a given that college is more important than ever? Are we supposed to accept it that 71% of the city’s kids aren’t being prepared well enough in 12 years for the next grade? That means they couldn’t really do their high school work.

The city’s kids, of course, must not know how to read well enough. You’ve seen the depressing numbers about reading too. They’re just as bad. How could they not be? Those are the real numbers the school officials need to concern themselves with. It’s why the students are not college-ready. Too many are not even 8th grade-ready. Yes, we all know that there are sociological, and therefore psychological, reasons why reading is not easy for so many of the kids. We’ve known that at least as long as I’ve been reading about it, which is a long time. When are they going to get at that? When are they going to re-fashion the curriculum to focus on reading above everything else? It’s the key to all of it. Without the ability to read well, school is a waste of time. Why waste the kids’ time that way? Why not teach every school kid to read well?

There’s a resistance here to doing that, to focusing on reading above everything else. The ‘system’ doesn’t want to do that. Even New York-style do-gooders resist accepting that as the only real solution. I wonder why. I think about that a lot. The only reason I’ve come up with to explain their resistance is that for them to admit that the reading scores are that bad and to say we have to basically start from scratch for many of these kids, your kids, is something they don’t want to say. Any more than the Mets owner wants to say that the Mets have to essentially start over.

But, like the Mets, the numbers don’t lie. 71% failure. That sounds like something you think you’d read about happening in Borat’s muddy village. Not in New York City.

I say, they have to admit their failure. I say, they can’t go on like they’ve been going on. That would be a start. These kids have to learn to read. There’s nothing more important for the schools to do. They have to get English majors to teach these kids. They have to recruit top-rate English majors from good colleges. In this economy especially, such graduates could be convinced to do it. They’ve all probably thought about teaching. They might love to do it in New York City. It might even be a dream job, if the curriculum were re-tooled to honor reading, above everything.

I get mad thinking about the bad numbers. Last night I was re-reading the first few pages of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. I’ve read those pages countless times over forty years. I go to them when I feel like I’m crazy for worrying so much about things, crazy maybe for holding my sign. Here’s the first page:

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers. He carried this valise from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts. Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets—it was his abandoned marriage bed—or in the hammock covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

That Was Some Year

Out of necessity came a quick fix

The year I taught here a dozen years ago, I sucked at discipline. It was a Catholic high school for mostly poor boys from all over town. I was between editing jobs and I said yeah I’ll do it when the head of the English department asked me to take over for a guy who couldn’t control the class. This was October.

I loved the kids. They loved me. I knew as much about basketball as they did. But they still took advantage of me. They’d sleep, screw around. I have no instincts for discipline. They knew.

I tried to get their attention by finding good stuff for them to read. Most of them needed to learn to read a lot better than they did. I brought in stacks of paperbacks and magazines and loaded mail bins with them. It was the classroom I’d have wanted when I was their age. It worked, I think. Sometimes.

A Room Of One’s Own

An independent bookstore is

a place you should have in your life

I’ve said to someone that the reason I moved to New York was that you could walk to Irish bars and independent bookstores. It’s true. I’m not just saying that for affect. I didn’t move here for the people. I always knew where to find people.

The bookstore in the photo is Three Lives in the West Village. I go there mostly. It’s important to have a bookstore where you’re a regular. Why Amazon? You don’t really need that. You could go to a store and get the book, or order it there. They’ll call you when it’s in or email you. That’s a connection. Like going to your local to have a pint.

Go to your local bookstore for gifts this year.