The
Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick (New York: Scholastic Press, 2007)
The orphan boy Hugo
endures a lonely and secret life, sleeping in a hidden room in the Paris train
station, continuing his departed uncle’s work of tending the station’s 27
clocks from small dark tunnels in the walls. At the start of the book, he
sneaks out to steal a mechanical mouse from a toy store. He is himself a mouse,
a secret creature in inhabited spaces, and also mechanical - part of the
mechanism of the station – a boy with a function but no life.
The young thief is caught
and forced to show an old toymaker his precious notebook, drawings for
repairing his mechanical man. This automaton, the only inheritance from Hugo’s
watchmaker father, is Hugo’s great secret: a writing robot. He is working to
repair it using the parts from the toyshop animals, hoping that it will write a
note to “save his life.”
The toymaker also has a
secret, a terrible memory he wants to leave behind. He recognizes with
some strange alarm the drawings in Hugo’s notebook, and refuses to return it.
Hugo is desperate to get it back, and the two artisans become locked together
in a strange destiny: Hugo’s secret and the old toymaker’s secret are part of a
large, wonderful, sad story that promises a brighter future for both of them,
if they can just work out the mystery together.
This is how The Invention of Hugo Cabret begins. It is a demanding book, initiating the reader
into a specific time and place, Paris in 1931, and into a set of unfamiliar
ideas and metaphors. The young reader must learn his way around this world, and
believe in it. The success of the Harry Potter books shows that quite young
children relish the challenge of working within unfamiliar assumptions and
languages, of following a long and intricate story. This novel builds on that
insight.
There is an important
difference between the dark Paris of Hugo Cabret and Harry Potter’s school of
sorcery. As the novel progresses, we learn that Hugo lives in a strange corner
of the real world, not in some totally fantastic place. Hugo has stumbled into
a fantastic story from real history; the old man from the toy store is one of
the early geniuses of French silent film, from the days when filmmakers and
toymakers were classed with magicians, because they made impossible things
happen. The story begins with the texture of fantasy, but it moves ever closer
to real history, ending with bibliography and web references. At the very end,
we learn that the writing robot, which seems initially to be the most fantastic
feature of the story, is one of many such automata built in the Nineteenth
Century; several are on display in the Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. Thus,
Selznick challenges the readers’ certainty about where the line runs between
fantasy and history, forcing them to ask, “What is possible?” – one of the
oldest and best of the philosophic questions.
The form of the novel
provokes another kind of question. On the opening page, the narrator tells the
reader to think of the book as a movie. This is strange advice; we usually
consider books and movies as very different media, for different audiences, at
different levels of importance. But this is a movie/book, a sustained
meditation on the power of movies and on the early experience of movies as
magic, as doors into the world of dreams and unrealized possibility. The
conversations between Hugo and the toymaker develop this idea in many
dimensions.
However, Selznick’s most
striking reflection on the power of movies is built right into the structure of
the book. The first few pages are like scenes from a silent movie: a trip
through a train station, from the perspective of a boy hiding in the wall,
peering out through the faces of clocks. Each moment in this journey is
portrayed with great accuracy. Suddenly, the drawings stop, and we are
confronted with pages of dense text, picking up the story just where the last
drawing left it, carrying it on in lucid prose. This seamless alternation
continues throughout the novel, leading us to insights and questions about how
differently prose and pictures work. The pictures draw us in, convey immediate
felt experience, but they are very slow. The prose provides a faster ride
through the story, conveying interpretation and background impossible with
pictures alone. And then, just when we are feeling starved for the feel of
Hugo’s life, another haunting sequence of pictures brings us back behind Hugo’s
eyes, in the dark passages of the station. We are made vividly aware that
experience has both these dimensions, and that it needs both these media to
come to full expression.
I imagine a young child
encountering this book, following the trail of pictures, making up a story, and
then running up against a page of beautifully printed prose. The child will
naturally ask, “What do these strange marks mean? How are they going to help me
understand this story?” That question is an entry point into the world of
reading. Readers will keep asking it, all the rest of their lives. For asking
that question well, and for many other gifts, lovers of literature have reason
to thank Brian Selznick.
Remembering Gary Matthews
Gareth Matthews wrote this
column for many years.
Now, hearing of his death,
passing over our contacts in memory, I notice how much good he did for me.
How can one answer, all at once, the questions:
which animals should we not eat, what medical conditions warrant the
termination of life support, and at what stage is it permissible to abort a
pregnancy?
I met Gary in the graduate
philosophy class he constructed around this strange question. He taught by
digesting the issues for the day into a short argument, then inviting
discussion. His summary made the issues equally accessible to everyone in the
class, and thus made a truly democratic discussion possible. This remains the
only sort of lecture I can make sense of; it has become a model for my own
teaching.
I haunted his office
hours, mostly to point out mistakes. Because he made his arguments clearly, his
mistakes stuck out, and we had so much fun thinking of ways to fix them. Each
conversation reminded me again that philosophy is the best thing in the world.
I told him about my early
work with philosophy in the schools, and he invited me to present on philosophy
for children at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. This was a
big deal for a young graduate student. I knew I couldn’t just present;
descriptions wouldn’t convey the excitement I experienced in classroom. So,
with his encouragement, I undertook to produce my first philosophy video. I
went on to a shadow career in philosophical television production that has
lasted thirty years. Without that initial encouragement, I wouldn’t have
started.
Later on, as I was
preparing classes and workshops for parents and teachers, I read Philosophy and the Young Child. This put
me on to thoughtful children’s literature, especially the work of Arnold Lobel;
the pieces Matthews discussed became the workhorses of my introductory courses.
His suggestions were especially important for classes with parents, who used
his suggestions and strategies to make their nightly story times into
intellectual adventures.
My older son, Tim, was bragging about being tough.
My younger son, Ben, said, “Tim, you are not tough.” Tim responded, “I am
tough, compared to lots of kids.” Ben shot back, “Tough guys don’t say
‘compared to.’”
When my own kids started
to talk, a stream of email reports flowed from Minnesota to Massachusetts, one
brilliant remark after another. Gary was more excited than I was about what my
kids said; he sometimes put their sayings on the board to start a seminar. He
kept urging me to write a book, just about Ben. Gary helped me to take my kids’
thinking seriously, and he modeled, in the accounts of his own parenting in Philosophy and the Young Child, a style
of parenting that I could live with – that gave me a role in my sons’ lives
that I could stand to play.
“If people could become invisible, I suppose
everybody would do some bad things, but lots of people would do good things
that they otherwise wouldn’t do.”
I saw Gary work with a
group of children only once, at a conference I organized on the community of
inquiry. He worked with Plato’s Gyges story, and his demonstration opened up
two new ideas for me: (1) pieces of the classical canon, slightly rewritten,
work well as prompts with young children; and (2) a philosophical conversation
with children can and should have closure, should reach some kind of
provisional conclusion. In my own classroom work, I had proceeded by opening
questions and then pursuing the investigation until the bell rang. I didn’t see
the point of summing things up. Gary liked summaries. In his demonstration, he
made very clear the appeal of shaping a conversation into a work of art. That
idea stuck with me, though I haven’t figured out how to do the trick yet.
“She believes that flowers feel.”
Dialogues with Children is Gary’s most enduring contribution to the
philosophy for children movement, and his most perfect book – a fine
introduction to philosophic work with young children. It is mostly an account
of what kids said, presented with great care and accuracy from recordings. The
opening prompts are varied, innovative, and clever. Also, Matthews has pulled
off the astonishing trick of writing a helpful introduction to each of the
major areas of conventional philosophy, entirely motivated out of students’
conversations – a book that can serve quite well as an intro text and also
convey vital information about the attitude, attention, and skills necessary
for successful, long-term philosophic work with children.
---
My experience with Gareth
Matthews illustrates some of the ways he helped bring philosophy into the lives
of children around the world. He presented a set of clear alternatives to
Matthew Lipman’s approach. His work was more accessible to parents, more open
to children’s literature, more free-wheeling in the range of its basic teaching
strategies, and more cumulative in its methods
- than Lipman’s classroom-oriented curriculum. Matthew Lipman was, in
important ways, close to Socrates: a provocateur, concerned to build basic
philosophic capacity. Gareth Matthews was closer to Aristotle: he wanted to
make progress, to build on conversations to construct a plausible view that
stood against objections. Together, they
built a rich literature and gave generously to the future.
The Higher Power of
Lucky by Susan Patron (New York,
London Toronto, Sydney: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006)
This middle grade novel,
which won the Newbery Medal, is about a ten-year-old girl, Lucky. Her mother
has been killed in a freak accident, her father is missing, and she is being
cared for by her father’s former girlfriend, Brigitte, in a tiny town at the
edge of the California desert.
Early in the story,
Lucky’s friend Lincoln (so named because his parents want him to be President)
asks her to bring a black marker and meet him by a sign on the school bus
route. The sign says: “Slow Children at Play.” Miles, a beginning reader
intensely interested in signs, has asked Lincoln about this sign; does it mean
that children in Hard Pan move slowly, or that they are stupid? Lincoln changes
the sign to read, “Slow: Children at Play.” Lucky calls the change
“Presidential.”
This small episode sounds
the themes of this fine book. Signs matter. A person discovers how to
proceed by reading signs. Misreading a sign can be costly. People help each
other out by helping them understand. And, finally, children are not
slow. They quickly and obsessively synthesize information to make meaning:
maps to navigate by, words for communication, models for how to be themselves.
Lincoln’s solution
prefigures the actions in the book in another way: it is elegant, economical,
and appropriate. No one is going to fuss about “vandalizing public property,”
confronted with two accurately placed dots.
Throughout the novel, characters solve problems with similar economy and
elegance. Brigitte freaks out about a snake in the dryer. Lucky tapes the door
shut and bangs on the lid until it leaves through the vent. Brigitte is
satisfied, and the snake is safe.
The novel takes place in
Hard Pan, an old mining town named for way the ground resists miners digging
down to the silver. Like its soil, the town looks hard and ungenerous: a
cluster of trailers and patched-together houses. Only a few people in the town
have jobs; most live on welfare or pensions. But, though adult readers know
that this is a poor place, the text never presents the town as poor. It is, for
Lucky, a treasure house of information and insight. Brigitte speaks French, a
language which alternately fascinates and repels Lucky. In her job cleaning up
at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, Lucky gets to
eavesdrop on three different Twelve Step meetings: for alcoholics, for smokers,
for overeaters. She overhears stories and secrets, and encounters the idea of a
Higher Power, for which she immediately begins to search. In school, she learns
accurate natural history, brain physiology, and evolution. (Lucky names her dog
“HMS Beagle” in honor of Darwin.) From these lessons, she takes ideas to think
about and to think with. The model of her brain as containing many folds and a
great surface area suggests to her that she might be able to have more than one
feeling or idea on a given topic at the same time, and so she is not surprised
when that happens.
The town is also connected
to the wider world. People log on to the internet, belong to world-wide
associations. Brigitte is taking an online course in restaurant
management. Lincoln, a knot enthusiast,
belongs to the International Guild of Knot Tyers.
So – Lucky is lucky. She
has art and science and religion and technology to help her think about the
world and construct her life. Lucky is also intelligent and, in a very
non-standard way, erudite. Lots of information is available to her, and she has
the stamina, hope, and flexibility to keep re-arranging that information in new
combinations, making new connections:
“No, the ants acted like one single machine, instead
of zillions of tiny minds and bodies. They had good teamwork. If some died, the
others didn’t stand around worrying about it. For ants, there was definitely no
“I” in “team.”
So,
as Lucky was realizing that, to an ant, its Higher Power might be the whole
colony itself, Lincoln sauntered up.” (21)
Patron’s story is not just
a description of Lucky’s musings. Lucky has a nest of problems to solve. She
has not yet scattered her mother’s ashes. She has reason to believe that her
guardian wants to leave her and return to her home in France. Little Miles,
whose mother is mysteriously missing, has attached himself to Lucky in
endearing and annoying dependence. With these problems in mind, Lucky goes
searching for the guidance of a Higher Power, for some sign about a graceful
way forward.
What she finds is right
and strange and multi-dimensional and totally beyond summary. For this, one has
to read the book.
There’s been a flap in the
United States about one part of the story: Lucky hears about a dog being bitten
on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Some people don’t want the word “scrotum” in a
kids’ book, perhaps because that limits the book’s read-aloud potential;
librarians may not want to explain “scrotum” to six-year-old kids. But I am not
convinced this is a read-aloud book; it seems far more a treasure that children
will discover and take off to read in private places. More important, this
story shows that many different bits of information are useful to human beings
in making sense of their lives. They need to know about Higher Powers, brains,
knots -- and scrotums.
The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg (New York: Atheneum Books,
1996)
E. L. Konigsburg uses
every word and detail in her book, The
View from Saturday to provoke the reader into thinking. She is a monstrous
optimist: she just expects that the reader, like her characters, enjoys
thinking, is always looking for a puzzle or a problem, a thing to think about,
in every corner of the world. It’s a surprisingly successful strategy; one
finds oneself trying to live up to the book’s high expectations and outrageous
demands, and to the intellectual rigor that shines through on every page.
The title is the name of
the book’s first and biggest puzzle. The story begins on a triumphant Saturday,
and our job – we are immediately given a job, by this author – is to understand
how this unexpected triumph – the victory of the 6th grade team in
the regional quiz bowl – came about. Later, we understand that we have another
job as well. It turns out that the quiz bowl victory is just one small
dimension of the day’s triumph, and we are expected to see the full range of
goodness in this very good day, to appreciate the many ways in which it
completes the work and satisfies the deepest yearnings of the children and
adults involved in the story: four children, their teacher, and some of the
children’s family.
I suppose one might be
suspicious of a book about a triumph. Lots of lives don’t have triumphs; good
work doesn’t always lead to splendid results. Perhaps young adults should be
prepared for that.
There are plenty of books
that prepare people for sadness, for a good enough life, for getting by. It is
very rare that a book – for any age person – pictures what smart people might
really want, as their absolute best outcome. I can’t see how it hurts to flesh
out an ideal vision, a perfect day. How can people have adequate days if they
don’t know what moon to shoot for?
The moon in this book
shines very brightly, indeed. This is, quite simply, a picture of gifted kids’
heaven. The school honors, cultivates and challenges intelligence. Smart kids
find friends who are diverse, playful, deeply affectionate, and helpfully
engaged in the problems of each other’s lives. Families pass on important
concepts and skills for constructing a
rich and civilized life. Gentle, persistent good humor underlies every
important interaction. The central adults in the story are interesting and
admirable enough to make the case to the children that growing up is worth the
trouble. Every child should grow up in a world this good.
In its portrayal of an
ideal of community and support, this book is both a challenge and a roadmap for
teachers: here’s what has to happen, if kids are going to be encouraged to
persist in being smart and interested in their world, and in developing all the
parts of their minds and hearts.
One strand of Konigsburg’s
narrative prefigures, is perhaps the model for, the central idea in the movie Slumdog Millionaire: in the context of a
quiz bowl competition, for which students prepare by memorizing stray facts,
the underdog sixth graders happen to get questions that call to mind rich
experiences in their lives. In the strongest possible sense, they know the answers to these questions,
and they know why the answers matter. As the questions are asked, Konigsburg
tells the story of each contestant’s encounter with the relevant fact, showing
us how that particular, normally dead, fact is alive for this child. A question
about the Sargasso sea prompts Nadia to recall her efforts to rescue sea
turtles. A question about calligraphy brings back Noah’s summer spent helping
with arrangements for the wedding of some elderly friends. A question about the
word “posh” calls forth memories of Julian’s travels with his father, a chef on
a cruise ship.
This dimension of the book
raises daily questions about education that will be equally alive for teachers
and for alert students: what is it to know a fact? Or rather, what relationship
to facts is worth having? What kind of involvement in the world makes the
details and connections come alive? Noah, who answers the question about
calligraphy, understands far more than the definition: he understands the
mental and spiritual discipline required for fine writing. He knows that
festive occasions require special, personal touches rather than computerized
efficiencies. He appreciates the dialogue of giving and receiving courtesy that
makes civilized life work.
As these multiple meanings
surface during the contestants’ responses to simple-minded quiz questions, any
alert reader will wonder what comparable riches surround the other facts that
are passed back and forth in classrooms, as the currency of education. With
facts, as with any currency, it is reasonable to ask what backs them. Can a
currency of knowledge lose its backing, floating free of any connection to
lived experience or meaning? Konigsburg raises these questions adroitly, not in
a negative or even a critical spirit, but as a standing test for teachers and
students concerned that their education be ‘for real.’
Emerson wrote in Nature: “Go out of the house to see the
moon and it is mere tinsel. It will not please as when its light shines upon
your necessary journeys.” The View from
Saturday is a commentary on the necessary journeys of four children and
their teacher. What they encounter on those journeys pleases them greatly and
makes them strong in many ways. Konigsburg challenges students and teachers to
find the projects that will bring their own learning to life in this way.
Richard Wilbur, The Pig in the Spigot, Orlando,
Austin, New York, San Diego, Toronto, and London, Harcourt Inc., 2000.
Illustrations by J. Otto Seibold.
Here’s a book to help us think about words. The Pig in
the Spigot informs the reader that a pig in the spigot is no big problem; a
little extra water will flush him out. An ox in the phlox is more worrisome.
The elf in the belfry has a problem; a belfry is too gloomy for an elf.
And the rat on Ararat has no problems at all; he should go make friends with
the lady rat. In short verses, the poet Richard Wilbur invites the reader to
find friendly little words inside big words, and then to imagine why they’re
there.
The trick is addictive. Friendships have ends, your mother
is other, there’s occasionally a bat in the bathroom, stewards sometimes serve
stew, and gophers frequently go, but there’s no sin in sincere, thunder is
over, not under, and balloons don’t have to be balls. The Pig in the Spigot
sets up games to keep on playing, for parents and kids or kids alone – a useful
benefit for a book, when the games are good games.
These games are very good -- for banishing the natural fear
that culture arouses in beginners. Mysterious words are scary to everybody.
When adults run into “eleemosynary” or “unprepossessing” or “reticulated,” they
feel they have been found out, shown up as not smart enough. That happens more
often than not to children. The culture keeps hammering at them: “There is so
much you don’t know.” This book suggests instead: “Make a friend within the
scary word, and then work together with that friend to figure out the place
where it lives.” That’s good strategy for coming to terms with new words.
Indeed, it’s pretty good strategy for coming to understand any complex thing:
find some part you know about, and work outward from there.
These games also show up the hidden power of words. The
feeling one has, coming off the book, is that words carry stories inside them.
Words are not just passive tools. Words, on the view Wilbur evokes in this
book, have all sorts of interesting relations with other words. One just has to
listen to them, let the words tell their stories. That’s an attitude that is at
least as accurate as the “words are shovels and hammers” attitude, and much
more helpful for a beginning writer, or for a reader hungry for meaning.
When someone plays the game that The Pig in the Spigot
starts, he or she will eventually come to make distinctions between fanciful
presences of words in words and the deep ways that words are compound and
complex and bearers of strange construction histories. This investigation is
deep in the roots of philosophy; the many ways that words contain meaning in
their internal relations is the theme of the first effort at linguistic
understanding in Western philosophy, Plato’s Cratylus, a work as playful
in its own way as this one, though largely inaccessible to those who don’t know
Greek.
Someone might object: “Yes, words are serious business, and
should be taken seriously. A child should learn about roots and prefixes and
suffixes properly, in order, without all this misleading fanciful talk. There
is no scientific way that ‘ant’ is a part of ‘pantry.’ Any educated adult knows
that.” There are a couple of answers to that objection. First, kids who are
forced to learn lists of prefixes and suffixes and Greek and Latin roots
generally end up hating word work, despising dictionaries. They are given many
answers before they have had the chance to ask any questions, and the possibility
of word-geology as fun is stolen from them. I’d guess that, once children get
started Wilbur’s way, finding words in words and wondering what they are doing
there, they’ll take on information about prefixes and suffixes and roots as a
way to make the game more fun, and they’ll develop a life-long habit of
squinting at words to see what might be in them.
Also, as with many things that adults allegedly learned and
now know, it turns out that mostly they didn’t and don’t. People usually have
as little sense of how words work as of how computers work. The person who sets
out to discover something seldom wonders what is covering it up: that
might be a good question to start with. If I inform you of something, I seldom
think about making a form in you (a sort of brain surgery). But I should
think about that. When I want to understand something, a plausible strategy is
to stand under it. And responsibility, that grand thing parents are
always trying to drum into their kids, insists on being about response,
not neatness and obedience. The old ways of teaching don’t make poetic
adults.
We can learn from our words, if we listen to them and play
with them and see what they contain. That’s a lesson from the outer limits of
philosophy, from Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. But the journey of listening to our own words
can’t begin with these venerable giants. It has to start with fine springboard
books like The Pig in the Spigot and with good games, played for life.
Thirteen Reasons Why
by Jay Asher (Penguin: New York, 2007)
Gareth Matthews, the previous columnist for Thinking in Stories, introduced me to
several resources for provoking children’s thinking. He pointed out that simple
children’s books provoke the multi-directional inquiry that Mathew Lipman tried
to initiate with his novels. In particular, Gary made me aware of Arnold
Lobel’s work, which I used in college and community demonstrations of P4C
teaching strategies. These simple stories raise questions cleanly and then get
out of the reader’s way. As I remember discussions using Lobel’s “Dragons and
Giants” (from Frog and Toad Are Friends),
I am reminded of Yeats’ phrase: “the ceremonies of innocence;” surely, this is
a great story for people starting out: about friendship, taking risks, measuring
oneself against the standards of the adult world.
I will close out this column with a disturbing book, one
that would surely have made Gary uneasy: Thirteen
Reasons Why by Jay Asher. I am not sure whether I can recommend this book,
though I use it in my college classes whenever possible. In this book’s world,
Yeats’ prophecy in The Second Coming
is fulfilled, “the ceremonies of
innocence are drowned.” Friends betray friends. Adults are irrelevant to the
lives of children. Schools harbor violence and cruelty. The mind of the heroine
darkens, page by page, until she kills herself.
Thirteen Reasons Why
is a story told by Clay, a high school over-achiever. Shortly after his friend
Hannah kills herself, he receives audio tapes from her in the mail. Hannah has
prepared these to explain her decision to end her life to the thirteen people
who somehow contributed to that decision – by small acts of betrayal, by acts
of violence, by inattention and distractedness.
As Clay listens to the tapes, reconstructing the last years of Hannah’s
life, he is given a tour of the ways that human beings hold each other’s lives
in their hands, day by day, though they mostly never notice. We matter to each
other, and we can never tell how much we matter at any given moment. Asher has
done a breathtaking survey of the dimensions of moral responsibility. without
ever going beyond daily life in a public high school.
Many people are involved in Hannah’s descent into despair: a
friend tells lies about her sexual exploits, the class clown nominates her for
“best ass in the freshman class,” a snoopy reporter invades her privacy, a
social climber offers her friendship and then abandons her, a teacher responds
apathetically to her pleas for help, a sexual predator feels her up. None of
this is unprecedented or fatal. But the things that happen to Hannah cumulate
in her mind. Asher’s story shows how injuries add up, gradually weakening Hannah’s mind and heart.
Each contributor to Hannah’s decline might have acted differently, had he or she
known Hannah’s mind – but, alas, they only find out about that mind after her
life ends. Their principal fault: they showed little curiosity about her state
of mind, while she was with them.
Clay, the boy through whom we experience this story, is the
most problematic contributor to Hannah’s demise: a boy who loved her, who was
fearful about expressing his love, who wished her well throughout her life. His
part in the story is complex: he accepted just
a little too much the rumors about her loose way of life, responded just a little too slowly to her attempts
to reach out to him, gave up just a
little too easily when confronting her muddled feelings about relationship.
So Clay is by no means a villain, but he misses being a hero by just a few small failures.
When I first read this book, I thought, “I must change my
life. I must be more careful with people, especially people at the margins of
my daily activities. I am more responsible than I generally notice.” That seemed to me to be the essential ethical
awakening, the core of what ethical thinking requires, and this book seemed to
me then, quite simply, the best introduction to ethics I had ever read. When I
used it in classes, several of my students reported just the same shock of
recognition.
Since then, I have had second thoughts. One cannot get
around the fact that Asher portrays plausibly, with plausible examples, the
descent of a fragile person into disappointment, disillusionment, apathy, and
despair. He describes clearly the process by which someone gives up on life. I
cannot be sure that reading this book is safe for someone who has already
started down that path. On the other hand, as I ask my students about their
lives, I get stories that mix sexual abuse, alcohol, betrayal of friendship,
and adult negligence in a cocktail even more lethal than the one Asher blends,
and I come around to thinking that college is a dangerous place, and that there
is a point to acknowledging its dangers and asking all concerned to take
responsibility for helping each other through. I have not yet decided whether I
would use this book at lower levels; I think that depends on the constitution
of the class and the hazards of the school environment in which one is
teaching.
This will be the last printed “Thinking in Stories” column.
The column continues as a blog at this address: http://thinkinginstories.blogspot.com/.
I invite interested readers to subscribe. I will continue to write reviews.
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