Middle Level Luncheon with Richard Peck
NCTE 2004 Middle Level Luncheon with Richard Peck
Our job as teachers is to bring books and the literate young closer together because only readers have a real future.
The following is a really good quote, but I can't remember the context for it...sorry:
"...risen from the pit of other people's puberty..."
Lots of jokes, one of which was, "email, when you don't care enough to send the very best."
To get serious, though, Peck believes that we will live to see standardized testing "wither away".
Administrators see their professional survival tied to parents and not to teachers. Peck had to quit teaching to communicate with the young. When teachers are more tired than students at the end of the day, the wrong people are being educated.
Who is going to read the book I might write? A novel better be the biography of the person the reader wants to be. The reader is the key part of the equation. Writing is NOT self-expression; writing is communication.
Indianapolis is the Athens of the West...home of literary lights, the home of Tarkington.
No one but a reader ever became a writer. We write by the light of every book we ever read, or had read to us.
Ideas for Peck's books come from visits to the young. Tells the story of Calvin College, who brought 5th and 7th graders to campus and lined up experts to "teach" writing. Peck's lesson was: You're only as good as your opening line. A book never gets better than its opening line. If you're a student, you put something in your opening line that interests a teacher, you're going to get rewarded.
Peck's whole career has been a search for a perfect opening line.
"If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of the year for it."
-Peck reads some from his new book...funny-
He looks for the perfect opening line and then writes a novel around it.
Stories are what might have been, not what was. Novelists believe history can be improved.
At this point, Peck talks about his teaching career. He invented a mini-course, the gifted program, in the times before social promotion, viable alternatives to homework, ritalin derivatives touted as teaching tools. There were two revolutions that destroyed our educational system (integration and anti-Vietnam protests) that created a new literature:
- Paul Zindel The Pigman
- Robert Cormier The Chocolate War
And for today, there is Dreamland by Sarah Dessen, which is a book that everyone in every community should be reading and discussing because that girl is in every classroom in America and we should be reaching out to her.
When Peck crafted a reading list, he didn't worry about where the books came from. Finding the book was part of the assignment. We're no longer allowed to ask students to find the books. We work from approved lists and the literature anthology is making a comeback because it relieves a teacher from having to read anything new. It keeps students from reading anything, and it is parent-proof. We have gifted programs and remedial education, but we have very little for the students standing firmly in the middle.
To close, schools do not build foundations; schools build upon foundations. Peck's most valuable foundations were those his mother formed when she read to him.
Last Updated April 11, 2011
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