Synchonized Literacy

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Some days there is fascinating synchronicity among events.  Today was one of those days.

Yesterday was, of course, Veterans Day.  My kids had the day off but I did not, and to make matters more complicated, Amy is at a conference in Florence, so I had to drag both kids to my classes on Tuesday afternoon. 

I instructed both kids to bring things to do.  They both brought art and books, so many I had to give them each a canvas bag to carry them in.  (I ended up lugging around Elsa’s bag).  Elsa brought along the second book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Cormac had a couple of books on Minecraft and a copy of Wings of Fire:  The Lost Heir, book two of a dragon series published by Scholastic that he’s really into now.  But he also had a copy of Donna Jo Napoli’s The King of Mulberry Street, a work of historical fiction that he’s reading in a book group in his sixth grade Reading class at school.

Cormac’s homework for the long weekend had been to read twenty pages a day of The King of Mulberry Street and to annotate each chapter with questions and observations on post-it notes.  This is the kind of assignment that should be easy for him but he’ll blow off because he just wants to read, so I sat down with him and modeled the kinds of observations I might make and put on notes, and then I had him do this independently for the next chapter.  That worked pretty well and he was able to complete the assignment without any more fuss.

And this is where the synchronicity kicks in.  It just so happened that today I spent the day doing writing workshop PD at Bennet Academy in Manchester, which is a stand-alone sixth grade school.  I worked with all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade English/Language Arts teachers, and one of the pieces I used as a mentor text was Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” which is the poem that is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Now I didn’t select this poem for any reason having to do with Veterans Day but simply because I wanted to use a well known contemporary (relatively speaking) example of a Petrarchan sonnet.  But of course once I introduced this poem, discussion among the teachers turned not to the form but to the content.  Turns out that NPR had aired a story on Veterans Day about the Common Core and fifth grade students reading “The New Colossus.”  You can read or listen to it here:  NPR CCSS New Colossus.  Part of the NPR story was about whether or not this poem was too hard for fifth graders—which it turned out not to be.

Anyway, tonight I read more with Cormac, same as this weekend—me modeling my reading of a chapter and then him reading the next one on his own.  And wouldn’t you know that the chapter I read aloud tonight from The King of Mulberry Street had the Statue of Liberty in it.  The main character, a seven-year-old Jewish stowaway on board a ship from Italy, gets thrown overboard in New York’s harbor, and when he surfaces he sees the statue.

All excited, I dragged Cormac to the computer and pulled up a version of Lazarus’ poem for him to read.  I asked if he understood the reference to  “the brazen giant of Greek fame,” and he immediately knew that referred to the Colossus of Rhodes, and he even figured out that the ‘old’ Colossus was a symbol of war and that the new Colossus whose “mild eyes” welcomed immigrants was meant to be in complete contrast.  He even got the reference to Prometheus in the line about “imprisoned lightning.”  He said, “Oh, because Prometheus brought men warmth and light, just like Liberty is supposed to do for the “huddled masses!”

That got him all excited, and Elsa too.  Soon we three were at the computer looking at Google maps images of the Statue and they were asking questions about my Italian great-grandmother who came over at the age of thirteen and my Irish great-grandmother who came over at the age of nine—both alone on board ships.  We all marveled that children so young (Cormac is eleven and Elsa is almost eight) could make such journeys alone.

And after the kids were asleep, I marveled at the way a book and a poem and workshop and a holiday and a little family history all crashed together in one wonderfully bizarrely synchronous moment.