Laurie Halse Anderson's 'Speak' almost too much for Temecula

Laurie Halse Anderson's 1999 young adult novel, "Speak," which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and the National Book Award, was selected as School Library Journal's Best Book of the Year and received numerous other honors, was the focus of controversy in Temecula this week. The school board's trustees were deciding whether or not to add "Speak" to the list of books that may be taught in high school English classes, and were concerned that it deals with the topic of rape and its aftermath.

Our blog LA Now reports that the board voted 4-1 in favor of the book's inclusion. But:

Trustee Kristi Rutz-Robbins cast the opposing vote, saying she feared that the book would become mandatory reading and that rape victims and others would be forced to read it. The district needs policies that alert parents to such assignments and ways to opt out of them, “so that rape victims, children who are emotionally and developmentally immature and those seriously interested in being prepared for college can stick to classics and other works without graphic rape scenes,” she wrote in an e-mail today.

Educators in the district have pointed out that other classic works commonly read in the community’s high schools, including Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” deal with sensitive subjects such as rape.

It's a bit surprising that there is an issue over whether or not high school students can or should be able to read about a difficult subject like rape in school while that topic is certainly present in other media, including television. In fact, "Speak" was made into a Showtime movie in 2004 and is available on DVD. Since it stars actress Kristen Stewart of "Twilight," I'd guess some teen girls might be curious enough to have already sought it out.

The Temecula school district, which has procedures in place for parents who want to opt their children out from certain lessons, has plans to reevaluate the policy this year.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Amazon unveils new Kindle DX in New York

If you thought the Kindle 2.0 was nice but too small, and have $489 you want to spend, then the just-announced Kindle DX is for you.

At a news conference today in New York, Jeff Bezos unveiled the next generation of the Kindle, which has an 8.5-by-11-inch screen. It's a significant size upgrade, as you can see from Amazon's comparison, above. The larger screen means less scrolling and zooming, but it's the only significant technological change from the Kindle 2.0, which was announced just 93 days ago.

The Kindle DX will be available this summer, although Amazon is taking pre-orders now.

A major development was telegraphed by the location of the news conference — Pace University in New York. Amazon has partnered with three major textbook publishers — Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley — that have 60% of the textbook market. Although the New York Times points out that this "pretty prominently" omits McGraw-Hill Education, Amazon is clearly moving to put the Kindle DX in college students' hands.

Engadget, which live-blogged the news conference, quoted Bezos as saying, "This is a dream to have textbooks on a device this small. Students with smaller backpacks, less load, easier access."

This fall, the Kindle DX will be tested by students at Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. At the news conference, Barbara R. Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve, said, "We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience.”

There are about 18 million students enrolled in college now, and providing a textbook-friendly ebook reader to them would seem to be a smart move. Is it one that Apple might also be making? In March, rumors flew that Apple might be working on a Kindle competitor. Could that be the reason Amazon announced the Kindle DX now, even though it won't be available for months?

Maybe the motive for the announcement was the new partnership with three newspapers — the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post — that will provide Kindle DX discounts to long-term subscribers. Exactly how much, and exactly how long the Boston Globe will remain available, was not announced.

As a recent textbook-lugger, I can see the utility of having lots of books on one device, but I'm not sure a standalone Kindle is any better than a laptop. And you certainly can't write a paper on it. And I would worry that the nice, light, delicate Kindle DX would get crunched by one of the old-style books I was carrying around.

The bigger screen is lovely, but I'm not sure it's the perfect fit — it isn't right for newspapers, really. And it just makes me want something more: full color.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Amazon.com

Attend class, or just download it?

In 2007, professor Hubert Dreyfus of UC Berkeley, above, said that he'd seen classroom attendance drop after his courses became a cult hit on iTunes U. But now it turns out that the students who were cutting to listen to his podcasts may actually be scoring better on exams.

A new study by a researcher at the State University of New York at Fredonia shows that students who download podcasts of lectures do better on tests than those who attend the lectures themselves.

When it comes to literature, most of the podcasts on iTunes U tend to stick to lectures and special events. Oxford has podcasts on Milton and J.R.R. Tolkein. Emory has posted lectures by Umberto Eco and Alice Walker. MIT, USC and Yale have all posted a handful of lectures.

Stanford has an outstanding actual literature course, which appears as the Literature of Crisis in the listings. That's the umbrella topic for last year's required introduction to the humanities. As the podcasts begin, you can hear the scuffing of people settling into chairs, the professors -- Martin Evans and Marsh McCall -- speaking up to bring the room to order. The entire course, from Plato to Voltaire, is now online, and it sounds not like a lecture but like a class.

That liveliness is what can set a podcast apart. Which is why I also like the "Stanford Three Books" lectures (found among their Authors podcasts), given at the beginning of the year to incoming students, who have been told to read the books during the summer and who cheer with enthusiasm for Tobias Wolff, Julie Orringer, Khaled Hosseini, Junot Diaz and more.

Downloading classes may help student test scores, but the grades were not impressive: a D average for those who went to class, a C average for the podcast-listeners. Obviously, more is required to get an A than just playing audio or video tracks. But if we're not in school, we can download the classes without fear of being called on unprepared or getting hit with a pop quiz.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Dave Getzschman / For The Times

Writing letters about literature

The National Center for the Book in the Library of Congress holds an annual school-based competition, Letters About Literature, in which students write letters to authors. The intended author can be living or dead, and have written fiction or nonfiction or anything else; the key is to include "how that author's work changed the student's way of thinking about the world or themselves." The students compete in three grade-based categories; this year, one of the two high school winners, Ayesha Usmani, read "The Joy Luck Club" and wrote to Amy Tan:

My mother asks, in her not-so-perfect English, if there is a sale. The clerk mumbles an answer, and my mother is confused. I quietly whisper to her in Urda that the sale was last week. My mother responds to me loudly in Urda, and I feel embarrassed. I distance myself  from her as we head towards the car. People turn and look at us, muffling their giggles. I am imagining, but I am not imagining the shame....

I strive to find the connection with mother. A connection that will balance independence and loyalty to my heritage. A balance of Pakistani values of love, obedience, and humility in harmony with American values of independence, free speech, and self-esteem. A journey that will always be difficult but worth the effort. I desired that connection with your guidance Amy Tan. A connection that I have now found.

It's lovely that the mother-daughter relationships of "The Joy Luck Club," published 20 years ago, can speak to a second-generation immigrant today from an entirely different culture.

But not all of the entries are so serious. Over the last two years, more than 100,000 students have participated nationwide, and a few of the amusing lines are posted on another site for the project. "Initially this book showed me nothing of interest, but then I reached page three," wrote Kyle to Caral Maras, author of "Daniel's Story." And Lance told Lemony Snicket, author of "Hostile Hospital," "I think you should write more books. But that's just my opinion. Think about it." Maybe Snicket, a.k.a. Daniel Handler, got his letter -- he went on to write five more books in the Series of Unfortunate Events.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Caitlinator via Flickr

The MLA meets, student athletes and a new recruiter

More than 10,000 literature scholars are in San Francisco for the 124th annual Modern Language Assn. (MLA) convention. Oddly timed to fall between Christmas and New Year's, the MLA is where most universities hold their in-person interviews for professors of literature. In, quite frequently, hotel suites. I've heard of hiring committees taking all the chairs, leaving the interviewee to perch on the bed. Awkward....

More discomfort in academia: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published an investigative report about the gap between the test scores of student athletes and their nonathlete counterparts. The study focused on 54 public universities with major sports programs:

Football and men’s basketball players on the nation’s big-time college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into question the lengths to which schools will go to win....

Nationwide, football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates — and men’s basketball players average seven points less than football players.

Inside Higher Education points out that student athletes must devote many hours a day to practice, training, playing and travel. But does that put them at greater risk for academic failure, especially if they're less prepared than their classmates? It also asks some complicated questions:

Are colleges doing a disservice to athletes if they have markedly different admissions standards for them than for other students? Or, as many sports officials argue, should colleges be held accountable more for the ultimate academic performance of their athletes on the way out (e.g., do they graduate?) than for their credentials on the way in?

On a more optimistic note, Rueben Martinez, who won a 2004 MacArthur Foundation grant for his barbershop-turned-bookstore Libreria Martinez, is now working with Chapman University to bring more Latino students to college. Martinez himself never had the opportunity.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Swami Stream via Flickr

English literature at Harvard may get less English

A proposed curriculum change for English majors at Harvard would get rid of two required survey courses of British literature. The English department guide describes 10a and 10b, both lecture classes, as constituting "a full-year introduction to British literature from Beowulf to the twentieth century." The Harvard Crimson reports:

The demise of the lecture courses is the most pronounced feature of a proposed overhaul of the undergraduate English program, the first in more than two decades....

The department still needs to iron out the details before a final vote can take place on the proposal. It appears almost certain, however, that the current form of the "Major British Writers" series will go.

The classes don't seem to be very popular. In that article, one student complained that 10a and 10b did little more than "repeat a lot of what we learned in high school." Another said that "it's hard to have a relationship with the text" because so many books are assigned. The New Yorker's Book Bench found a 2006 note: "Many students give up when assigned a 500-page George Eliot novel in one week" -- editorializing, wickedly, "Oh, come on, you call yourselves Harvard students?"

Frustration with 10a and 10b aside, the real issue with the courses appears to be that they overprescribe a course of study. From the Crimson:

The plan would trim the number of basic requirements for concentrators from six to four, which members of the department said would allow students more leeway to design their own curriculum.

The published reports make clear that requirements will continue -- a course in Shakespeare, literature of different time periods -- but that this change will enable students to study, say, American literature in more depth. This does not sit well with everyone. One Harvard senior -- Christopher Lacaria -- is outraged by the proposed changes. In an opinion column at the Crimson, he writes:

While these innovations may bode well for the undergrads interested in plumbing the depths of postcolonial narrative, they only further point to the ongoing crisis in liberal education.

I do love me some postcolonial narrative, and I might point out that "postcolonial narrative" -- depending on your cutoff -- now constitutes almost 500 hundred years of literature and culture. Lacaria is a history major, so perhaps it's not surprising that he looks backward: 

The Greek and Roman classics, and the modern canon of "great books" of literature and philosophy, once occupied much of the intellectual experiences of Harvard students -- presumably because the study of such works imparted knowledge of the virtues, and made men's minds "liberal" in the original sense, not slavish....

But as concentrations continue to scale back their programs in response to the later declaration deadline and departments continue to obliterate common requirements, any semblance of a coherent academic purpose has disappeared.

It's the old Great Books debate, repeated by a twentysomething Harvard student. "These resentniks have destroyed the canon," Harold Bloom told the New York Times in 1994. "The rabblement, the barbarians have taken over the academy." Lacaria would have been 6 or 7, so it's no wonder that he's sounding the same chords. Those who don't read postcolonial literature are doomed to repeat it. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by zenobia_joy via Flickr