Jeff Nunakowa, who teaches English at Princeton University writes:
Joseph Riener has written a record of his many years as a passionate and talented Teacher-Scholar. The result is an extraordinary compendium: it is partly a guide to the array of literary works that Riener has taught, an array that reaches across centuries, countries and cultures. It is partly a guide to teachers on how to survive the depredations of the current U.S. educational system with their minds and hearts intact. And in all its parts, it is a testament to the enduring power of an intellectual committed to inspiring the minds of the future.
Teach Me How to Work and Keep Me Kind: The Possibilities of Literature and Composition in an American High School, Volume 1
The book discusses the content of the classes I taught. I explain my decisions about curriculum and presentation. Despite much educational discourse these days being devoted to the form of teaching, my book talks of the actual texts and what I said about them. In this manner, the two volumes argue both for trust in an individual teacher finding their own voice in the classroom and for the values of a liberal education. They aim to inspire other teachers to develop their own approach.
I discuss methods to improve the writing ability of students. At my school, the only requirement of students to enter an AP English class was their willingness to do more homework. “If you stick with me and this class,” I told my students on the first day, “I can assure you that you’ll know a lot more about literature and how to analyze it, and your essay writing will be much better.” My book intends to show teachers what may be possible in an AP English class.
Teach Me How to Work and Keep Me Kind, focuses on American literature and the short essay. It was the course taught to juniors at my school. Students read a novel a month, typical ones like Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes Were Watching God, along with Cider House Rules, Ceremony, and Native Son. There were many short stories, from Hawthorne and Melville, Ray Carver and Ron Carlson, poems from Frost, Eliot, Kunitz (the title is from his poem “Father and Son”), Langston Hughes, Stephen Dunn. Students read and discussed nonfiction essays from Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, Adam Gopnik and J.K. Rowling.
Teach Me.. TABLE OF CONTENTS for Volume 1
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 FIRST FOUR CLASSES “Tiger Face” by Stephen Dunn, “The Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost, “Practice Makes Perfect – But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection” by Dan Willingham; “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of the Imagination” by J.K. Rowling
CHAPTER 2 SOME INITIAL REMARKS ABOUT ESSAY WRITING
CHAPTER 3 FIFTH AND SIXTH CLASSES “Keith” and other stories, by Ron Carlson; “The Cost Conundrum” by Atul Gawande
CHAPTER 4 THE FIRST NOVEL: Cider House Rules by John Irving
CHAPTER 5 FIRST NONFICTION BOOK Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
CHAPTER 6 FIRST REAL PIECE OF ANALYSIS “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
CHAPTER 7 A MODERN WOMAN Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
CHAPTER 8 ADDING MALCOLM GLADWELL TO THE MIX “The Talent Myth” and “Million-Dollar Murray” by Malcolm Gladwell, available at Gladwell.com
CHAPTER 9 HENRY JAMES AND A WEE BIT OF QUEER THEORY “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James
CHAPTER 10 HABEAS CORPUS DOESN’T MEAN MUCH UNTIL THEY PUT THE HANDCUFFS ON YOU “Do You Want Your Kid to Disappear?” by Nadya Labi
CHAPTER 11 EMBRACING HOLDEN Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
CHAPTER 12 REMARKS ON COMMON CORE WRITING STANDARDS
CHAPTER 13 THE AMERICAN HEART IN ITS DARKNESS: RACISM IN LITERATURE AND LIFE “The Big American Crime” an essay in The New York Review of Books by Edmund Morgan, poem s by Phillis Wheatley, “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville
CHAPTER 14 SPENDING AWHILE WITH HUCK AND JIM The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
CHAPTER 15 ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TEACHING ANYONE TO WRITE
CHAPTER 16 POETS AND SOME OF THEIR POEMS poems by Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Stanley Kunitz
CHAPTER 17 A FORAY INTO THEORY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The Ghost Map, The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson
CHAPTER 18 HEROES, THE TRUTH, AND THE DANGER TO US ALL consideration of some people talked about in Speak Truth to Power, Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World, by Kerry Kennedy, photographs by Eddie Adams, edited by Nan Richardson; “Examined Life” by Malcolm Gladwell; selections from Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, Malcolm Gladwell’s review of the book, and a Jared Diamond review of other books
CHAPTER 19 HAPPY ENDING: MOVING AWAY FROM THE CANON The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
CHAPTER 20 LIVING WITH THE UNLIVEABLE The Center Cannot Hold, My Journey Through Madness, by Elyn Saks
CHAPTER 21 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR STUDENT WRITING
CHAPTER 22 HOW EVIL HARMS THE PARTICIPANT “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
CHAPTER 23 THE POWER OF YOUTH AND LOVE The House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
CHAPTER 24 A JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS readings: “An Anatomy of Melacholy”, Andrew Solomon;a selection from Night Falls Fast, Understanding Suicide, by Kay Redfield Jamison; “Bartleby the Scrivner” by Herman Melville
CHAPTER 25 HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER The Checklist Manifesto, How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande
CHAPTER 26 WHAT DOES MODERN MEAN? “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
APPENDIX 1 LETTERS TO DCPS TEACHER EVALUATOR
APPENDIX 2 SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RECENT REVISION OF HUCK FINN
APPENDIX 3 READINGS THAT GUIDED MY THINKING ABOUT THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN BY MARK TWAIN
APPENDIX 4 ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS for AP Juniors
APPENDIX 5 FREQUENT ESSAY COMMENTS
APPENDIX 6 SYLLABUS FOR JUNIOR AP ENGLISH
APPENDIX 7 VARIOUS SPEECHES: Academic Triage; Homecoming Dance; In Defense of Teaching
APPENDIX 8 IN DEFENSE OF EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
APPENDIX 9 SKETCH OF THE SCHOOL COMMUNITY
APPENDIX 10 SOME WORKS PUT ASIDE