Steven Poling
Instructor, Castro Valley High School
The greatest challenge in teaching any literature course is getting students to read works thoroughly, critically and enthusiastically. This challenge is made more complex by the push to add more literature to the reading list every year in order to fully represent the diversity of American authors and genres. Sometimes I question the necessity of assigning literature that spans all two hundred years of United States history. I would like to know if the currently popular educational buzz phrase, "less is more" can be applied to teaching American Literature. If so, how can it be done successfully?
By participating in the "Making American Literatures" project I hope to renew my passion for American literature by discovering and articulating teachable connections between the diverse literature labeled "American." I would also like to find ways to teach analytical writing while at the same time cultivating the unique written voices of my students.
I teach English at Castro Valley High School (CVHS), a bedroom community for Oakland, San Francisco, and the burgeoning "edge cities" in neighboring counties. Castro Valley remains the largest unincorporated area (i.e. "we don't want to be city") in California. Residents want good schools, safe streets, clean parks and well-organized soccer and baseball leagues; but they don't want politicians, police officers, taxes, and regulations to help them achieve these goals. Castro Valley is a predominantly white, middle class, blue and white collar community. As long as I've been teaching in Castro Valley, residents have been slowly, and at times reluctantly, learning to live with the growing minority population. Since Castro Valley has but one large (2000+ students) high school, I often feel like I work in a giant socioeconomic test tube.
Cities like San Francisco and Oakland and Universities like UC Berkeley and Stanford are infinitely more diverse in their racial, political and socioeconomic make-up than the suburbs that surround them. Living and working in the suburbs of the Bay Area ensures that this dialogue and its resulting dramas are often heard and seen, for better or worse, but the rest of the nation. This dialogue is echoed in the American literature we teach.
I have taught American Literature for eight years at CVHS. My curriculum includes works by Hawthorne, Twain, Steinbeck, Salinger and Wilder with a sprinkling of short stories, non-fiction and poetry thrown in. The struggle with nearly every piece of literature is helping the students discover its relevance to their own lives. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath usually emerge as the most relevant to CVHS students.
One of my favorite American Literature writing activities involves one of my least favorite novels, The Scarlet Letter. At the end of the novel, I ask my students to create, write and present funeral services for Hester Prynne or Arthur Dimmesdale. The sermons, prayers, and music written for these funerals are enlightening and provocative. This activity often sheds light on the solid strain of Puritanism which still exists in our society.
While I am well-versed in American Literature, my greatest interest and expertise is in the area of facilitating small and large group discussions. I also have a great interest in writing fiction and working with other fiction writers as an editor.
The work of John Steinbeck has been especially significant to me as a teacher, a writer, and Californian and an American. Steinbeck's works, Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, are rich pieces of literature. Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town" has also been a very satisfying piece of literature to study and teach. I am also very interested in the emerging genres of prose poetry and short short stories as presented in anthologies such as Flash Fiction and Micro Fiction.
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