The example textual lineage was a teacher's post on the Teaching Tolerance website. Emily's entire world changed when she read The Color Purple as a young adult. Other books that changed the trajectory of her life included The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told by Alex Haley and The Miracle Worker. These all inspired Emily to become a teacher and focus on social justice and diversity in her role as an educator. Later, after teaching for several years, she read Herbert Kohl's I Won't Learn From You: And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment and Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The latter of those appears to have been especially important to her because "[m]y well intentioned, liberal-progressive efforts had the potential to unknowingly enact culturally specific rules and codes that undermined those efforts an disempowered my students." That part of her textual lineage stuck out because I wrote something very similar recently.
Implicitly, the hidden curriculum promotes specific kinds of behaviors which, if we're being honest with ourselves, are white. Young children sometimes don't do well in group environments. They want to play and "act out" and do things kids do. Kids who lack self control are often referred for special education testing. They don't get recommended for talented and gifted programs. Kids who don't speak English as a primary language suffer similarly. It's an easy connection from strong behavioral preferences in collaborative learning classrooms to the school-to-prison pipeline.The format of Emily's textual lineage flows from early reading through to her professional life. I suppose I should try to do something of the same here.
The earliest book I can solidly remember is How Much is a Million?. David Schwartz's book is full of lovely illustrations which give a visual to the ever growing numbers that eventually add up to a million. As a kindergartener, I was inspired by this book to attempt counting to one million, despite the book's assurances that I would die first. And so, one day during nap time, I took my usual place on the floor by the emergency exit back door of Sister Dougherty's double-wide classroom and tried to count to one million. People who know me know my math skills are sorely lacking. It was no different when I was five. As I reached one hundred, my concept of numbers reached its limit and I began counting by one hundreds: one hundred... two hundred... three hundred... I began counting by thousands when I reached one thousand. After that my memory gets a bit hazy. Clearly I didn't understand there were many numbers in between one and two hundred or one and two thousand. I probably didn't know what came after ten thousand either. After going home that day, I looked up some of the large numbers in How Much is a Million and discovered, in part, my error. I did not try to count to a million ever again. I don't know how this fits into my textual lineage.
Around that same age, my dad would read books to me every night. He typically worked long hours so that was some of the only time I got to have with him after he came home and it's a very treasured memory for me. In particular I can remember him reading Jurassic Park to me. The exact details of the book are somewhat muddled for me as I have seen the movie quite a few times but never read the book for myself. What I do remember is how much I let my imagination run wild and I think it was the genesis of my love of science fiction. I still have notebooks with drawings of dinosaurs in them from that age. I also know the exact date of the first time I watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones because I also have drawings from my first grade notebook jammed in between handwriting lessons. Later in my childhood, I tried to read every Star Wars novel that I could find. I kept a wealth of trivia in my head about Admiral Daala, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Wedge Antilles. Later on I read Dune. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of The Rings trilogy. My textual lineage, then, is one in which I enjoy using my imagination and enjoy books which have a unique and well built world.
It's also notable that I don't have any memory of books I read for school. None. I can't think of a single one. I've spent two days trying to think about specific teachers and classes but I don't recall a single book. I'm sure I read books. I can even remember being bored in class and reading through the literature textbook but I don't remember reading anything. Midsummer Night's Dream maybe. I think that was 10th grade. Or no? Was it Julius Caesar? I know I never read Macbeth until I decided it'd be good to know one of the most famous Shakespeare plays. That was just before teaching it to 10th graders a few years ago. But that's too late. College is much clearer and I remember a lot of my reading at that time. High school and earlier, however, I remember nothing that I was assigned to read.
It's probably not a coincidence that I was really getting into non-fiction at that time. Being on the debate team meant I was constantly following current events and analysing them for use in competitive arguments. I didn't learn about philosophy, religion, politics, or economics from English class, history class, or any other class. I learned from seeking information to use to win. I can't emphasize enough how powerful this drive was. I'd spend late nights on the internet (AOL dialup) prowling through newspapers and magazines and whatever else I could find. I began reading some early bloggers. Then the material would get synthesized into arcane argumentative structures for use in debate competition. Thinking back on it, this too was fantasy. The way debate trained me to think and talk about the real world did not have much relationship to reality. Sinister forces constantly threatened the very existence of humanity. I would routinely deploy long chains of argumentation to prove that adding a single cent to the budget deficit would trigger global thermonuclear war. Drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Preserve? Nuclear war. Passing No Child Left Behind? Nuclear war. In debate, winning an argument often came down to proving who had the worst worst case scenario.
So what does this say about my textual lineage? I'm still not sure. I can't point to any books outside of my childhood that changed my world. I didn't read some book and decide I wanted to be a teacher. I never read a book that changed who I was internally. I've not ever felt empowered by a book but that probably isn't odd given that I'm just about the most empowered kind of person in America, a rich white man. All I ever wanted from my reading was a different world to be in. I wanted to go away for a while. Even my non-fiction was in service of a fantasy world informed by the same kinds of apocalypses found in Tolkien and Herbert. Later on I'd have video games fill in some of that territory. I'm firmly in the games-as-literature camp and I probably ought to mention that in class. In college I read voraciously and enjoyed it. Even then, I think I was reading to build arguments (I loved literary criticism, for example). If any book sticks out from college, it's Edward Said's Orientalism. Again, this is a critical and argumentative text. It picks apart culture and literature to examine the way the west constructed an eastern other in service of its own ends.
I suppose that my textual lineage comes in two parts. On one hand there is a love of the imaginary and of fantasy worlds. On the other is a love of debate and criticism of the world around me. I'm simultaneously deeply cynical and intensely idealistic. Let's see how that flies in class!
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