12th Jul 2006
a moral tale
I gave the students in my adol lit class the blog post topic of writing about a tale, a story that was moral to them — however they might define that — and I wanted to write about that myself, as well as read their posts. I’ve been debating the story to write about, partly because a blog walks the line between public and private and as I use this more and more with my students I find myself more and more careful about what to reveal, and partly because through reading Robert Coles’ The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, I find myself thinking about teaching as a moral endeavor.
First, I would say that I think of moral as wrestling with the big questions, not being afraid to debate them when they come up in class. All teaching crosses big questions — questions of why and how — and I think good teaching doesn’t shirk away from them, nor preach static answers but allows all of us to wrestle with the implications of some of the answers. In this class, we’ve been talking about what it means to be a teenager right now, at this moment, in this America; how we define adolescence and how it is defined for us, as educators, and for kids. Those are big questions.
The story I want to talk about is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I first read when very young — maybe seven or eight — and much too young to really understand it. I’ve read it so many times I have parts of it memorized, and I know Atticus Finch to be one of the most moral characters I’ve ever come across. I was much more like Scout — curious, intense, outspoken and I loved Atticus’ manner of answering his children’s questions honestly, calmly, and with real words. He was not a man who pretended the world was something it wasn’t, or who lived one story and preached another. The neighbor Miss Maudie across the street tells Jem and Scout one day that their father is one of the truest men who ever lived and I think that’s right. He worked hard, he nearly won an unwinnable case, and he always knew that Boo Radley was in that house and meant no harm. He had patience more than a town full of most of us today. Atticus Finch and Harper Lee taught me an enormous amount about what it meant to be a man, and a woman — to do right and to keep doing it, over and over again. He let Scout run around in pants just so long as she understood that all men in their tiny Alabama town were created equal, in the eyes of God and man. That’s the kind of person I’d like to be someday.
As I read the “moral” blogs of my classmates, I reacted more than once with a “of course, I should have/could have chosen that”, but your choice practically made me fall off my chair. This is my all time favorite book, and yet it did not enter my mind when I was mulling over the assignment. I’ve been thinking about that and realize that the moral character of Atticus Finch was not the outstanding message or feeling I took away from the story. Yes, I agree with you and probably anyone who has read the book would also. He is a moral man, a true man and “big” man. That last descriptor is something I brought back with me from Africa and is a phrase reserved for only the most respected individuals.
For me, however, it is the emotions of all of the characters, Atticus included, that make the book so memorable. The joy and fear, the honesty, the despair, the sense of lost innocence, the way many of the characters just come to “kmow” things without really ever discussing them that has always struck me — and the grace of many of the characters, too.
It is an amazing book, my only regret is that I saw the film and while it is wonderful, the characters of my imagination have been lost to me when I read the book again. Now when I read Atticus’ words, I hear Gregory Peck and I sort of wish I did not.
An aside; when my daughter was little we called her Scout because of her tenacious and feisty nature. After she saw the film, she wanted us to stop because she thought the girl was “rude”