Jim White
Instructor, Farmington High School
June 1997 (Denver Airport)
I was ten when my parents led my brother and me up to the clump of trees inside the wrought iron fence. The October light was fading and I could not see any other visitors on the Gettysburg battlefield. My father let us read the markers that that July afternoon when George Pickett's surviving Virginians reached this Copse of Trees (now protected by the fence and nearly broke through the Union like at this angle in the wall on Cemetery Ridge.
"If they had made it through," my father said, "they would have gone to Washington."
My family had just made the trip in reverse that day.
"Can you imagine what happened here?" he said, looking not at us but out across the meadow.
I could not picture the map, did not know who Pickett was then. But I did understand that this story my father, who is Canadian, was trying to tell us, was something that I should remember.
Perhaps it began at that moment, a desire I gradually became aware of over the next 20 years---to have some sense of what it means to be American. What does it matter to some national character--if one character exists--that time began to run out for the Confederacy on that ghastly day outside a tiny Pennsylvania town? What does it matter to me, born a century later of an immigrant father and a mother whose people had been Ohio farmers, until her parents had decided to come north to Detroit for work?
I received my love of stories from both of my parents. My first job was that of newspaper reporter, teller of stories. I decided to go into teaching to do for students what my parents had done for me--spark a desire to know and to understand.
I love to explore, examine, and think about American literature for the most basically selfish of reasons: I want to know who I am, where I've been, and where I'm going. I have set sharing this desire as a primary goal of my teaching. I want students to be contributing members of our community. If they first understand themselves they can begin to explore the roles they can play.
It was okay this year to say, "You don't know about me without you having read a book by the name of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that ain't no matter." They could see that Huck's efforts to forge his own conscience mirrored their own. A friendship such as Huck and Jim's still must overcome barriers today. And they sympathized with Huck's (and my own!) desire to light out for the territory.
But our school community exhibits several facets of the American experience. Farmington and Farmington Hills are fairly affluent cities located 15 miles northwest of downtown Detroit. Farmington High School's current incarnation is located in a subdivision thrown up after World War II. The immediate neighborhood is aging. On Sundays, Irish and Polish families walk to mass. New residents of the cities are arriving from Albania, Russia, and Korea. About ten per cent of the community is African-American. And in our particular corner of the community, students' economic backgrounds actually run the full range.
So I come to Berkeley this summer with the hope that I will be able to discover and think about the texts--in the broadest sense---that we can use to convince ourselves that all of our voices can be, and indeed are already, part of the same choir. If Huck Finn is a start, then where else can our journey take us?
Email: Jim.White@farmington.k12.mi.us
Return to 
Introduction
