Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Poor Elijah is a traditionalist. It took him years to accept miniature light bulbs on his Christmas tree, and the cash he drops in the Salvation Army kettle is as much charity as it is guilty penance for entering a mall. He prefers big bulbs like they had in Bethlehem and small shops like Mrs. Cratchit stopped at on her way home Christmas Eve.My friend’s source for all things Scrooge isn’t Mr. Dickens’ book. It’s the 1951 movie, available on DVD in black and white with an accompanying colorized update. Take a wild guess which version Poor Elijah watches.
Being an English teacher like Poor Elijah, I feel a little sheepish recommending a movie when there’s a perfectly good book my students could be reading. At the same time, I realize that films are a worthwhile addition to storytelling, the same way novels once joined drama and poetry as a legitimate genre. After all, we call them novels because once upon a time they were “new.”
Twenty-first century types would argue that the literacy paradigm has shifted and that I haven’t shifted enough to keep up with it. That’s why they’re comfortable with what they call “graphic novels.” It’s also why I’m comfortable calling them comic books.
One enlightened study presented to the National Council of Teachers of English concluded that senior honors students were better off reading the graphic novel version of “Beowulf” because the actual epic poem “isn’t worth the extra reading time.”
Any teacher who thinks that reading the actual poem and the comic book are equivalent literary experiences has no business teaching “Beowulf” or anything else, including comic books.
The fact is comic book versions of “Beowulf” and “Hamlet” have been around since I was a student. They were called Classic Comics, and they were on the rack next to Superman and Archie. Some students read them for fun, others read them to cheat, but nobody confused them with reading the actual classics.
That’s not the only paradigm that’s shifting at school. We’re now considered therapeutic settings where the needs, delusions and “dysregulations” of disruptive, dangerous, often profoundly disturbed students take precedence over all the other children’s rights to an education and a safe school.
We raise our academic standards on paper even as we’re compelled by policies and pressured by politics to lower them in reality. We crow about “standards-based” grading, as if teachers will miraculously agree about what “proficient” means any more than we now agree about what a B means. Our “objective” scoring rubrics rest on the fiction that teachers can distinguish with precision between sentences that “wander” and those that “meander.”
Language arts reformers disdain spelling, grammar and punctuation as “tangential” skills. Students can’t receive zeroes even if they don’t hand anything in. Advanced placement is less advanced, and everybody takes algebra, even if it isn’t really algebra anymore.
Arrogance isn’t strength. Bravado isn’t confidence. Recklessness isn’t courage. Vainglory isn’t valor. Pandering isn’t compassion. Lies aren’t truth.
We extend the school day in the name of strengthening family life. We flood our classrooms with laptops, and send them home each night, even as we warn that students spend too much time staring at video screens.
Experts prescribe “standing desks” at school on the grounds that students can’t sit still and need more exercise. Meanwhile, the same experts report that the same students don’t get enough exercise at home because they spend too much time sitting, often playing videogames in front of the laptops we give them.
The paradigm is shifting, too, in the wider world. Bullying I wouldn’t accept in my eighth grade homeroom takes up residence in the White House. Lie replaces lie before the ink dries. Fake news is our gospel, our wisdom is a tweet, and our “friends” are silicon strangers.
Two centuries ago young Ebenezer Scrooge worked for Mr. Fezziwig. The world was changing then, too. Mr. Fezziwig was offered a last chance to sell out at a profit before he’d be forced out by the new paradigm of his day. He chose instead to preserve the way of life he knew and loved. “No,” he explained, “I’ll have to be loyal to the old ways and die out with them if needs must.”
Don’t feel sorry for old Fezziwig. Don’t look down your nose at him either. He isn’t too nostalgic to change, or too afraid. He’d just rather fight to preserve the good he knows, even if he’s destined to lose in the end.
Today as then, rejecting change doesn’t mean you’re afraid of change. It means you see the value in what already is. It means you can see the loss you’re about to suffer, the loss we’re about to suffer – the loss we’re already suffering.
Everything that’s new isn’t good, any more than everything that’s old is bad. Change itself is neutral.
I have no illusions about how far short of perfect the world has always fallen, even at those times I remember most fondly. I’m acutely aware of how far short I myself have fallen. I recognize that human history moves in one direction only. That forward progress through time, however, doesn’t mean that human life always gets better. Sometimes it gets worse.
Last month we held an election. We will bear the consequences of that political choice. But the choice we made went beyond politics. We chose a species of character.
Acts of Congress can be repealed. Court decisions can be reversed. But the character we applaud and exalt takes root in our children. It becomes their paradigm, their way of life.
Is what we witness strutting on our national stage the character whose character we want for our children?
Heroes don’t endlessly recite their victories. They don’t boast or gloat. They aren’t vindictive.
A moral man blushes when he’s been wrong.
Arrogance isn’t strength. Bravado isn’t confidence. Recklessness isn’t courage. Vainglory isn’t valor. Pandering isn’t compassion. Lies aren’t truth.
Humility is a virtue. Narcissism is a curse.
Have we as a people lost our ability to recognize the difference? Pray we have not.
Pray, too, we’ll find the wisdom and courage, all politics and parties aside, to preserve, protect and defend the hallmarks of character that really are our way of life.
In hope and with best wishes – from Poor Elijah and me.
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