The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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fictional character whose life echoed her own. But things changed for her with this new novel, and once she got into it she couldn’t put the book down. She gave the book a rating of five stars, the highest number possible. Elizabeth was starting to feel differently about reading. She was beginning to realize that she could be a girl who enjoyed books.
“I'm the only one in my family who likes school,” Elizabeth remarked one February afternoon in my afterschool class for the girls.
Once she knew what her heart wanted, Elizabeth was not a girl to be easily deterred.
But in Elizabeth's regular language arts classroom, another kind of change was stirring. Earlier that year the girls had spent up to an hour each day reading books that I helped acquire for their morning instruction. Now reading literature had been overshadowed by practice sessions for the end-of-grade test. In March, the students would take their yearly proficiency test; fourth grade was a benchmark year. Everything seemed to ride this one performance. Teachers would be judged on the results. Students would be deemed proficient or not, though no one seemed sure what this would mean in terms of retention. One thing was known: Failure to achieve a proficient score in reading would result in a recommendation for remedial summer school classes. None of the girls wanted to have the dreaded letter sent home.
Boredom was a feeling that Elizabeth knew well, but now her boredom seemed tethered to an even stronger feeling: anger. One morning in late February, Elizabeth sat fuming over the latest practice test. The theme for the morning's run-through was Johnny Appleseed, a topic that could just as easily have been plucked out of one of my schoolgirl workbooks. The story was stupid, Elizabeth felt. The students in her class had been given a reading selection about Johnny Appleseed. First they had been asked to compose a journal entry, “Your Day as Johnny Appleseed.” Now they were being asked to write a factual report based on the reading selection.
“This is boring,” Elizabeth said as she confronted the paper in front of her. “This sucks,” she added, her rage threatening to unhinge her. She found the whole thing maddening, but the exercise was still casting its shadows of uncertainty. Her worst fears were confirmed when she got her paper back, red-inked with the ominous words: Not Passing. Elizabeth exploded. She wrote STUPID in bold, oversized letters, leaving her own mark on the idiot report. Inwardly, she was beginning to have doubts that she could make it through the needle's eye of the March test.
In January 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act had been signed, cementing the effects of an accountability movement that was already sweeping through public schools across America. Nothing in the bill spoke to the role of literature in the teaching of reading. In fact, the language of NCLB made testing, not curriculum, the new mantra of education. “Measurement is the gateway to success,” said President George W. Bush, of the bill he made a centerpiece of national educational reform. The narrowing of the curriculum was an unintended consequence, the effect of trying to reduce complex and imaginative thinking about books to a single-shot test with multiple–choice answers. Teachers in the poorer schools found themselves scrambling to get their students to bubble in the right choices, something that came naturally to students who had grown up with parents talking to them about books. Students such as Elizabeth were novices; they had more trouble figuring out the language game of the test. What Elizabeth truly needed was guidance in the basic process of finding herself in books that featured richly developed characters and literary themes. But this kind of teaching was becoming harder and harder to justify, because it was difficult to quantify in scientific terms.
“There's something wrong with me” was Elizabeth's understanding of the whole testing business.
A paradox was starting to reveal itself to me, and it had to do with the ways that reading was swept into the currents of the accountability movement. The rhetoric of the accountability movement in public schools was all about change. But from what I could see from my vantage point as a teacher, little had changed since my days in a school serving the children of North Carolina factory workers and farmers. The accountability movement had frozen into place the same inequalities that shaped my experiences in school. If anything, students like Elizabeth, those who could most benefit from reading novels and talking about literature, were now even more unlikely ever to get that kind of rich liberal arts education. For her, the pervasive focus on test preparation was squeezing out a nascent love for books and learning that could have helped her achieve the success that everyone wanted. It was not fair to Elizabeth, who had taken the first quivering steps toward becoming a real reader. So when summer came, I was even more determined to help her find her way into a work of fiction about a girl's life. It didn't occur to me that she had already found herself in a book, and that it wasn't my book—or my kind of book.
Again and again in the evenings of that summer, confused and exhausted after the day of teaching, I returned to the question of why Elizabeth, Alicia, Blair, and so many of my girls were so much in love with their stories of ghosts and horror. A small literary movement was occurring in my summer class, in subtle ways that, when added together, created a collective feeling for books. Adriana's mother still had the copy of Pet Sematary that her Grandma Fay had lent her, just before she died. On a slow, warm night that summer, Adriana had watched the movie with her mother—for the third time. Elizabeth got to watch the occasional scary movie in her crowded living room, after she helped put the youngest to bed. Blair sat up late into the night, listening to her half sister read from the Stephen King books she bought at Walmart. Adriana felt certain that the basement of her apartment building was haunted. A girl had been raped down there. And Alicia was sure that there was a real ghost in her grandmother's house, for the young man who had once lived there had shot himself.
The young girls in my reading class were not alone. Horror fiction had become rampant in popular culture, so much so that parents and teachers had begun to voice concern about the images of maiming and psychopathic mayhem flooding the popular book and movie market. These movies—Final Destination, The House of 1,000 Corpses, Slash, 13 Ghosts—were geared to a ravenous audience of horror fans, many of them still in their teens. Such trends had led to a flurry of writing about the subject by literary and film critics, cultural scholars, and even psychoanalysts.
One explanation offered for the feeling that my girls experienced when reading scary books is the notion of a psychic safety valve. Fans of horror and ghost stories can experience a thrilling read, and yet know that in the end they will be safe. This can be cathartic—like screaming bloody murder on a roller coaster ride, then walking off with tears of laughter streaming down your face.
But this wasn't the only explanation for the strange appeal of horror. Every reader of fiction searches for the threads that can connect her inner life to the landscape she inherits. And these threads of connections need not be real—or not something you can see or touch in the everyday world. Fiction's special appeal is that it can take us out of this world and help us connect with what can only be seen through the imagination's inner eye. Part of the beauty of ghost stories was that they were not real. Crazy, weird, and Elizabeth's favorite word, boring—this is how my students felt about reading a realistic novel. The gray world of ghosts and horror stories felt more familiar and strangely, more soothing, than the harsh light of a realistic novel.
Elizabeth wasn't yet ready for novel about a girl who was “just like her.” Could I bring myself to enjoy the kind of book that she loved?
Later on the morning of June 27, I sat with Elizabeth on my family quilt, and we talked about books. By that time, the temperature inside our borrowed summer classroom had started to rise. The late morning air felt heavy and wet with humidity. The toxic-smelling fumes from upstairs were getting to me. By eleven that morning I was already feeling exhausted and confused about how I should work with Elizabeth. But curiosity—a desire to understand what I don't know—was always one of my strongest motivations as a teacher. So I tried to get to the bottom of Elizabeth's feelings about reading. Like everything else, she was passionate about her books.
“So do you like to read?” I asked Elizabeth, who was looking smug, like a young queen on a royal carpet.
“Heck, yeah. Whoo!” replied Elizabeth.
It wasn't exactly the response I had expected. Since our book group discussion earlier that morning, Elizabeth had seemed lost in a preteen sulk.