"...If you love a story, let other people know!"

March 24, 2024 8:00 AM

A Bronx Teacher Asked Tommy Orange to Visit His Class. “In our 12th-grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in an under-resourced but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you’re our rock star. Our more than rock star. You’re our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness.”

Tommy Orange is the author of "There, There", a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

posted by storybored (17 comments total)

Wow. Very moving. Thanks for sharing, I need to read these books!
posted by agatha_magatha at 8:19 AM on March 24 [1 favorite]

“In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 out of 26 students earned college credit, surpassing state and global averages.” WOW.
posted by mollymillions at 9:09 AM on March 24 [11 favorites]

People want books they can care about. I’m so glad that he cared about them in return.
posted by corb at 9:31 AM on March 24 [7 favorites]

I like it but I have to wonder what they were teaching before that ONE BOOK changed the AP pass rate that much. How? Either they were trying to make every single kid read Scarlet Letter and Ethan Frome before they switched it up or something else is going on here.
posted by kingdead at 9:52 AM on March 24 [7 favorites]

The class broke into a round of finger snaps
Wait. People do that? Guess I haven't been to a hootenanny recently.
posted by pracowity at 9:58 AM on March 24

"…I have to wonder what they were teaching before that ONE BOOK…”

I would imagine that they were probably still teaching A Separate Peace, maybe The Outsiders if they had a particularly hip teacher. Though I'm sure Hemmingway is still on the list.
posted by straw at 10:35 AM on March 24 [2 favorites]

I was turned off of Hemingway for decades because of how it was handled in high school. It turned out to be enormously relevant for me as an Iraq War veteran years later, but it is just Not For young people - they haven’t had the life experience to relate in any kind of way and it’s incomprehensible. Teaching it in high school is just confused sadism.>
posted by corb at 10:52 AM on March 24 [11 favorites]

Hmm. I remember liking Hemingway as a teenager. For a classic school example, take "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." I guess I didn't need to be able to directly relate my own experiences to a story about waiters and a lonely old man and drinking and suicide and existential despair in a late-night cafe in Spain. It's just a good story. And I never did like the S. E. Hinton sort of stuff we were supposed to be able to relate to.
posted by pracowity at 11:26 AM on March 24 [1 favorite]

There There is an excellent book and this teacher sounds wonderful.
posted by feckless at 12:54 PM on March 24

beautiful story. i had never heard of tommy orange but was suggested wandering stars by the algorithm and i just finished listening to it last week. i will look up "there there" now...
posted by danjo at 12:59 PM on March 24

For folks wondering why really old books are being taught: it’s for a boring pragmatic reason. Most teachers are not allocated the budget to buy a whole class worth of new books so instead they replace worn copies of books one by one. This becomes a kind of cycle as the district learns oh ok AP English only needs $150 a year to replace their books and then never allocates more.

Love that this teacher did this and that Orange responded.
posted by CMcG at 2:02 PM on March 24 [10 favorites]

I like it but I have to wonder what they were teaching before that ONE BOOK changed the AP pass rate that much.

It's not necessarily the case that a sharply increased AP pass rate actually means the students learned any better, or were any more engaged.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:14 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

Its a good book and really great for a high school lit class because it's got a section on the occupational of Alcatraz, something more people should know about.
posted by subdee at 7:00 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

“Over the din, to anyone who was still listening, Ouimet called: “If you love a book, talk about it! If you love a story, let other people know!””
posted by bunderful at 9:13 PM on March 24 [2 favorites]

Happy sigh.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:59 PM on March 24

I pre-order a whole bunch of books right after Christmas when I get gift cards, and Wandering Stars showed up on my ereader in February and is next up on my to-read list (after I finish James).

Two decades ago, I worked for the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia and part of my job was running their Writers In The Schools program, which arranges similar writers visits (though we paid the writers a modest honorarium). There are a ton of these programs across Canada and the States but demand always wildly outstrips supply. We had research that showed that the program improved literacy and engagement in English classes.

Most years, our entire budget was exhausted in the first couple of hours of opening booking. In the time I worked there (1996 to 2001) the only year that didn't happen was 2001, because of the twin towers falling literally in the middle of that few hours. We ended up having maybe $1k left of our (then ~$55k) budget, and we used it to arrange visits to ten schools with a high proportion of First Nations students because that community was not getting the number of visits they should have based on population. IIRC, we sent Daniel Paul (of We Were Not the Savages fame) though there might have been another writer who took some of the visits, I don't remember now.

Thanks for sharing this article - really great to see the value students get from these visits.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:12 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Since we're going to talk about pass rates, let's see. College Board changed the exam in 2019 or 2020, I can't remember any more. The rubrics became analytic rather than holistic, so it's much easier to pin down how the points are awarded.

AP Lit is a 12th grade class, so it's nominally British literature in most states. Just so you can imagine dead white British authors, instead.

In one AP Lit classroom that I am very, very familiar with (that is not Millennium Art), students read Things Fall Apart, Wuthering Heights, The Awakening, and Fences as a class. They also read short stories like Space Traders, The Metamorphosis, There Will Come Soft Rains, The First Day, Popular Mechanics, and The Thing Around Your Neck. Depending on the school there is a lot of room in the curriculum.

Great to read this story! I'm inspired :)
posted by Snowishberlin at 9:48 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]