Abstract:

Mary Tedrow, during her school's summer break, watches her veterinarian daughter look up the names of plants and trees and thinks about the effect of language's task of naming things--and inevitably, her mind wanders back to her own curriculum and students.

Tedrow, M. (2004). What english teachers think about in the summertime. Teacher Leaders Network diaries. Retrieved from the Teacher Leaders Network 10 Apr 2008. Link: http://www.teacherleaders.org/old_site/diaries/MT01.html 

Full Text:

What English Teachers Think About in the Summertime

Annie was anxious to get her birthday present. In fact, she barely acknowledged the wrapped packages sitting in a pile when she saw the two books her father had provided: one on identifying trees and one identifying wildflowers and grasses.

I was amused as she single-mindedly dove into the first book, immediately trying to identify the large, old tree in front of the farmhouse she rents, ignoring all of us in her intensity and zeal to have her curiosity satisfied.

"Why do we have to name everything?" I asked. "Why can't a tree just be a tree? Do we have to have a name for everything?"

"Shhh, mom." Annie would not be distracted. "It's what we do. We have to know what it is."

Annie is a veterinarian and, just a year out of medical school, she has spent the past nine identifying all kinds of organs, bones, microbes, foods, chemical configurations, diseases, and anomalies. Putting a name to something is the essence of a diagnosis and the beginning of a cure. Knowing is a good thing, and Annie is reliant on names in order to get her work done.

As I rocked on the porch, I mulled over the very human activity of using language to sort and separate our world. It's the essence of teaching, I think. We point to experience and put a name to it so our students see the world from the same point of view. The Ancient Greeks, standing in their sun-filled plazas, codified all the devices of argumentation so we would know when and how we were being manipulated by those who would sway our opinion in a democracy. I derive pleasure from revealing these techniques to the law makers of tomorrow. Could we do anything without a common language?

Though it is the key to learning and sharing, I think putting a name to something, or someone, can be confining. We've all seen the consequences of stereotyping. Too simple a name reduces a complex person to a cartoon-like figure, one easily vilified or attacked. A name, in this case, flattens out personality and removes details.

In the world of science, naming something too soon, before all the discovery and newness has been explored, may mean that the book is closed on that particular study and we proceed in ignorance until someone looks again, pulls out a detail missed, and begins the identification process anew.

Back in November at the NCTE convention, we were asked to write on a penny. No other direction was provided other than to contemplate a penny and write about it. I looked at mine, turned tails. Immediately I saw that this was the "wrong" side of the penny, the bad side.

Here is another area where naming can be a discussion-ender. The language seems compelled to divide everything into good and not good. This bad penny reminded me of an issue we skirted around in a discussion of Grendel in the AP class. This is the part of teaching that I like the least: the time when I must sort my students into ability levels. Too hard. Too secure of an ending to a debate that is subject to too many vagaries. The grade stops my students in their tracks, and I would like to give them an open door, a free pass into the opportunity to continue their growth and discovery, but grades seem to put an end to all of that.

In the Grendel discussion, the students pointed out what the dragon said to the monster. Grendel is a modern retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic tale of Beowulf from the point of view of the flesh-devouring monster. The dragon tells Grendel that even a monster serves a purpose in the humans' lives. "They define themselves against you," he says. The dragon encourages Grendel to accept his role as the necessary evil all human beings must have in order to determine how to live their lives. The monster is the counter-point. It is as if we do not know our worth without a balance weighed in the other scale.

Because we are always measuring ourselves against the monsters and the heroes in our lives, I think that my students will probably always self-sort themselves along a scholarly scale. I'm not sure that removing grades would change their view of themselves as a hash mark on the side of a graph. But knowing our place, or accepting the name placed on us, is a trick, I think, that we play on ourselves. It makes us think that knowing where we stand on a sliding scale between good and evil can help us control a fate that spirals away from us all the time. The language, ultimately, is all of our own making and will mean whatever we say it means.

Back on the porch my daughter has identified her tree. It is a silver maple, and when fall comes she already knows that the leaves will turn bright red, yellow, and orange. She is looking forward to this pre-ordained event that she has all ready sunk all of the faith of her science in. Soon, with her second book in tow, she will conquer the plants that populate the fields where the horses she treats roam. Should a poisonous or colic inducing plant take hold, she can advise her farmers to pull it out and save the animals from another sort of destiny.

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