A David Sedaris Webcam Book-talk

by Clay Burell

Published March 16, 2009 @ 06:57AM PT

[This is a teaching experiment I did a couple of summers ago and can't recommend highly enough. Though Flixn is now a thing of the past, YouTube will work just fine for students with webcams. Be sure to check out the bonus YouTube of Sedaris reading one of his works on David Letterman below the fold!]

I just finished reading and responding to the first summer reading assignment for next fall's AP Literature class. It was just a warm-up, asking them to read David Sedaris' "Us and Them" from the Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* collection of memoirs. If you haven't read this story, I can't recommend it highly enough, from an English teacher's perspective. Of all the Sedaris stories I've read -- and I've read most of them -- this one qualifies Sedaris to me as a "literary" writer, in the highbrow sense of the word. Beneath the vulgar surface of low humor are quite a dazzling number of literary tricks and trap doors, all there for the discerning reader to enjoy alongside the jokes about turds and other crowd-pleasers.

I like assigning this story as a first class reading especially because it's a litmus test that separates the skilled from the less-skilled readers. Sedaris writes with a double point of view -- himself as an adult writer remembering an experience of himself as an eight-year-old. The child's point of view dominates the narration, which concerns a family ostracized by its community because this family (the Tomkeys) "doesn't believe in television." The child narrator reflects the TV-worshiping pathology of the "normal" community, and tells the readers how "puny," "stupid," and undesirable the Tomkeys are with a wide array of damning words. And the less-skilled readers fall for one of the best tricks in the "literary " authors bag: the unreliable narrator.

You can count on more than half of most classes blindly parroting the third-grader's opinion of the Tomkeys. Uncritical readers, they swallow whatever whatever moral judgments they hear from the narrator--even if he's an eight-year-old. The power of the printed word to kill thought: "It's true because the book says it's true." A scary irony there, how books can as often close our eyes as open them.

The skilled readers, though, don't fall for the unreliable narrator trick. They notice more than what is "told" in the story; they notice what Sedaris, the adult author, shows. And the images he shows of the Tomkey family, contrary to the herd-like judgments bleated by the vindictive and petty-minded "normal" community, are all too admirable. The Tomkeys are actually the healthiest and wisest family in the neighborhood, ostracism and all. It's the couch-potato, consumerism-drugged "normal" community that's sick.

(click "Read more" below for the rest, including a great student analysis of the story on her webcam, and YouTube of Sedaris reading one of his pieces on David Letterman ;-)

This is just the tip of this eight-page story's virtues, but for my purposes here enough. The story is a wonderful vehicle for letting students (and any readers beyond school) discover something important about themselves: namely, whether they think with their eyes, which requires the consciousness to really see and reflect on experience rather than sleep-walk through it, or instead think with their ears--which is not thinking at all, but the flaw of all blind followers. It amazes me how many of my students finish the story and join in the damning of the Tomkeys (the title's "Them") with a fervor and complacency that makes the "Us" quite frightening.

That Sedaris himself belongs to a "them" all-too-often ostracized, damned, beaten, and lynched by the "moral" "us" gives an added layer of depth to this story. Sedaris, as you probably know, is gay. Students--many of whom condemn homosexuals and, in class discussions, even advocate killing them--invariably come to love his writing with a passion. To what extent, if any, this makes them less eager to spill gay blood is something I wonder about sometimes. They see the beauty of this writer and love the joy he brings them with his art. But then they hear from other social "authorities" that this same man is an "abomination" and deviant. Life.

(If you've every listened to or watched Noam Chomsky giving speeches or interviews, you may have noticed that he repeats the injunction to "start with what you see in the world, not what you hear authorities and society say about it" as if it's the first step to real thinking--or to any consciousness at all. I always think of Chomsky when I read "Us and Them.")

Anyway. I gave this litmus test of a story to my students, and asked them to respond on a Moodle forum to two simple questions: What's the story's meaning, to you? And how does Sedaris create that meaning as a writer? Standard stuff.

But I've been using Flixn a lot lately, so I threw in an extra credit option: After writing your answers to those questions, fire up Flixn and talk about the story to your webcam. I've never assigned "webcam reports" before. I thought some of you might find it as interesting as I did. I like four things about it:

1. It's a way for me to put names with faces before the school year starts. I don't know any of these students, but the webcam reflections change that. They ooze with student personality.

2. It's a way for me to compare student writing with student speaking skills, which can inform decisions for alternative assessments and multiple intelligence differentiation, etc.

3. It's authentic. I love writing about literature sometimes, but love talking about it to an audience that's also reading it even more. But I don't like writing "literary analysis" essays, as a rule, because it's such a stuffed and chalky genre. Who does that except Ph.D.'s writing for other Ph.D.'s (or, more accurately, for tenure)?

4. Other students are more likely to watch these webcam reflections, and peer-learn from them despite themselves, than they are to read the "school-y" reader-resonse questions in the forums. You'll see evidence of that from "Judy," after the student sample I show you below. First you'll see this this student's written response (which is a pretty goodon second look, brilliant interpretation), and then her Flixn response. Then you'll see her classmate's very telling -- and unassigned -- reply to this student. (For the record, the student's mother gave me permission to make this public by "unwalling" it from Moodle.) Here you go:

Us and Them: The Invisible Distinction

The meaning or the main theme of the story Us and Them by David Sedaris is simply the negative role of television and other modern distractions on family unity and further on the individual's personality. In this particular story, the main character, who is only about 9 or 10 years of age, develops an interest in the neighboring Tomkeys because they don't have a TV. The start of the whole ordeal is due to this key fact: Tomkeys don't have a TV, so therefore they are different from the rest of the society. The narrator pities them for their lack of common sense, and blames this on the absence of a TV. He believes that the Tomkeys are “ignorant and alone,” but what he doesn’t understand is that he is the one who is ignorant and alone. It seems as if the narrator’s family dislikes the Tomkeys for what they are. They are united, whole, and are a true family, because they know how to spend time together at the table and on the weekends. They actually talk to each other because they don’t have a TV distracting them from having quality time. Others, like the narrator and his family, see this as being “uninteresting,” as the narrator puts it. The narrator has been fed with false family images by the TV, and believes that a family unit should be fun, interesting, and attractive, and doesn’t understand why the Tomkeys are so ordinary. Also, we can see that the TV has altered the young narrator’s personality. He is unable to make friends (even though it is partially due to the frequent moving), and is indifferent and almost so apathetic that he hopes “that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder.” He sees a murder as entertainment, because he saw so much of it on TV. The TV, as can be seen from the narrator’s attitude, has corrupted the audience by feeding false images, and further on caused people to compare real life aspects to what is on TV.

Sedaris was able to create the meaning of the story mostly through his word choice and the attitude of his narrator. He uses words to actually imply the narrator’s personality, and the narrator’s personality further on explains why he thinks that way. For an example, when the Tomkeys spent the Halloween night on a trip, the narrator described that “they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake and had missed the opportunity to observe Halloween.” The interesting word choice is “isolated” and “observe,” because it causes the effect of feeling as though the Tomkeys were of another place, and that they are not part of the community. They are just observers, bystanders, and foreigners to the narrator. This is possibly why the narrator views the Tomkeys as being inferior. The Tomkeys do not fit the social norm. Also, in the last paragraph of the story, the narrator says that he “protected and watched over these people, but now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly.” How was he, a small boy, able to “protect” the Tomkeys? He just felt that way, because he believed that he was superior to the Tomkeys, and believed it was his duty to watch over them and ridicule them even more. And what was he to pity a happy family? He watched television and they did not. In fact, he feels so superior to them that he says he gave them the "gift" of his curiosity. So, when the time came for him to look back on himself, he turns for the TV with its false images, so that he didn’t have to see his ugly self, and again, is unable to regret his ugly behaviors.

Student "Judy" then replied:

honestly at first I got intimidated by the length of your two paragraphs. I was about to click the "back" arrow to go back to the forum but I found your video! It's much easier for me to comprehend your explanation by listening to you and watching your eyes looking back at me =). I really enjoyed it!

And then she bothered to hit "reply" again to add:

p.s. I wish I had a web cam.

You don't have to hear me characterize those two pieces of evidence, do you, reader? Look at what it says about engagement.

There's one more reason I like this Flixn twist: it's just more fun than text.

***

*That link, by the way, includes mp3's of Sedaris reading from the book on NPR. And here's a bonus for you: David Sedaris reading an essay on David Letterman :)

Sedaris photo by sporky
Cross-posted from Beyond School