Prometheus Was a Woman
November, 2004
I’m blessed with two or three heroes in my graduate classes every semester. They don’t know they're heroes, and if I told them so they’d blush from top knot to shoe sole. If southern, they’d say, “Aw, shuuucks. Ah ayumnawt.”
Missy (not her real name, but she looks like she could be a Missy) is a southern girl from the sticks. Thin. Purty. Intense. A smile so wide you can see ALL her teeth. About 27 years old with a boy almost four.
She’s seen rural poverty up close, and she doesn’t fool easy. She’s teaching first grade in the school SHE went to. Those kids are her kids.
Let’s watch as the crows eat her liver.
Missy don’ bah them treacly slogans and goofy progressive “practices.” She knows you must teach kids every one of the reading skills.
“Hey, theyain’tgonnajist pick ‘emuuup. Whahthayet’scuraazy.”
The third week Missy comes to class (6:30 to 9:15 PM after an hour drive) all flushed and shaky.
“What’s up?”
“The materials I have to use are really pathetic. I’m wore out. I’m up half the night preparing lessons. And I have to work weekends to get ready.”
“You shouldn’t have to prepare lessons. The materials should be scripted so you can spend your time teaching.”
“Yeah, you’d think so, but they’re not. An’ I’m just all confused. Look at this!! What am I supposed to do?”
The whole class (around the table) looks at the materials. I’ve already taught them what a good curriculum should look like and which ones are the best designed. Every page is so full of colors and boxes and arrows and borders and pictures that when you open the teacher’s presentation book demented clowns leap out and start screaming. If you had a seizure disorder, this curriculum would set you off, Boy Howdy!
There are a dozen activities on every page for the teacher to do with the kids, but no instructions on how many you should do, and with whom, the order to do them or exactly what the teacher is supposed to say.
You’d expect that at 50,000 bucks for the whole school, the curriculum developers could at least tell you how to use their materials.
So we tell her to stash those materials and find something else. I go to my office and get a Reading Mastery Level Ikit.
“Here, use this kit. Give all the kids the placement test and put them in groups of about eight. Lessons take maybe 30 minutes. You and your aide do the groups. You take the lowest.”
[The course is all about using Direct Instruction to teach reading, and Reading Mastery is one of the best—maybe THE best—there is. We spend the next two meetings learning to use Reading Mastery.]
Every week, Missy comes in and reports on progress—her own as a teacher and her kids as readers.
“You should jist see theyum a readin’! And they luuuve it. They’re sooo proud of theyemmselves.” [Yes, she talks that way. I think it’s lovely.]
Two months later Missy comes in near tears.
“They’re all talkin’ mean to me. They say I’m not really teaching my kids to read.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“The kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers. They’re still using whole language…”
“Well, that’s why the kids couldn’t read when they came to you!”
“I know that now! I tested all my kids again and they ARE reading. They know the sounds. They sound out words. And they are becoming fluent with their little story books. But the other teachers gang up on me and try to get me to do it their way.”
“Like how?”
“I’m supposed to have the kids memorize 100 words by Christmas. They call THAT reading. That’s not reading! They say my kids are going to fail the k-3 assessment test.”
“How can they possibly fail it? They can READ!”
“Because it’s a whole language assessment. They don’t have to sound out words. You point to words from the list that they are supposed to have memorized.”
[Years ago, whole languagists infested the state department of public instruction and created an assessment instrument that made it look as if the kids taught with whole language could read—because they defined memorization as reading. Missy, who IS teaching her kids to read, will appear to be incompetent even though her kids CAN read but haven’t memorized the word list. Missy is caught in a nightmare written by Kafka and directed by Orwell.]
Missy, tough little squirt, refuses to use whole language and insists on continuing systematic and explicit instruction with Reading Mastery. The other teachers now talk behind her back. They pass her in the halls and don’t say “Hey!” Some of them—in fits of histrionics—come crying to her that SHE is ruining her students. And the principal, instead of supporting Missy (whose skills and good heart in the long run will make HIM look good when HER kids pass the serious state reading test at the end of grade three), threatens her with insubordination if she doesn't stop using Reading Mastery.
Last time Missy was in class she was feeling much better.
“I’m on Paxil now. I was having anxiety spells over the fall break. Thought I was going crazy. Thought I was going to die. I was afraid to go out.”
These are the Voices Three,
That speak of endless endeavor,
Speak of endurance and strength,
Triumph and fulness of fame,
Sounding about the world,
An inspiration forever,
Stirring the hearts of men,
Shaping their end and their aim.
In the same poem, Prometheus says,
(Longfellow. The Masque of Pandora. VI. In the Garden)
But it's not the Gods making Missy crazy. It's the hollow men.
Prometheus was a woman.
