A few weeks ago, I wrote about working with one of my learners at Literacy for Life as she pursued her GED. We ended up doing that through the NEDP (National External Diploma Program), which allowed her to earn her high school diploma through a series of task-based assessments rather than through a timed test.
One of her assignments was to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and working with her on the tasks associated with this reading assignment was interesting. My student was from Africa; she had lived in the United States for a number of years and was a citizen, but she had not been raised as an African-American in the US, so the cultural context for understanding this novel was very different.
She had lived in the US for a number of years by that time, and was raising her children here. She was certainly aware of the racial tensions in American society. But she didn’t know the history of them, and I found I had to explain a lot of this book to her. It was set in the 1930s, and, although it was written two decades later, it reflected a rural South that was still identifiable in the pre-Civil Rights era.
My student had trouble with the slang that the author used in the book, and with some of the abbreviations that captured the Southern dialect. She didn’t recognize the problem with “the N-word” and didn’t understand things like “y’all” and “go ‘round dere.” She didn’t recognize the stereotypes of the subservient blacks or racist hicks in the story – stereotypes that are very familiar to people who grew up in those years. She didn’t recognize the cliché of the “white savior” who protects the helpless black man. I began to wish I didn’t recognize these things either.
She didn’t know anything about lynching and had never heard of Emmitt Till. She didn’t know about Jim Crow. On one hand, I didn’t really want to talk about the more gruesome details that underpin that part of American History. On the other hand, however, the NEDP program required that she read this novel because of its roots in that part of our history.
Part of the assignment was also to watch the 1962 Gregory Peck movie of To Kill a Mockingbird. My student’s problem with understanding the book and movie is captured by a statement Wikipedia attributes to Gregory Peck:
"The Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, reminds me of the California town I grew up in. The characters of the novel are like people I knew as a boy. I think perhaps the great appeal of the novel is that it reminds readers everywhere of a person or a town they have known. It is to me a universal story – moving, passionate and told with great humor and tenderness.
It isn’t a universal story. It’s an American story. My student who grew up in Africa recognized very little about it.
So the NEDP requires students to read a "divisive" book in order to graduate. Interesting.