Challenging texts, challenging texts, and challenging texts

What we name things matters—the words we use to bring something to mind, to give something a marker for existing. My daughter is named Jessica, I call her "Jess" or "Boo-Boo"—and you can imagine which she prefers.

I have long stories about the name we chose for my only child (now 19), but I'll spare you them here.

The column in English Journal connected with this blog is now titled "Challenging Texts"; that title has a story too (another I'll spare you). But the title is a game itself.

First, our classrooms must have texts that are themselves "challenging," thus challenging texts. In the first column I mention Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Paulo Freire, Lousie Rosenblatt, and Franz Kafka—challenging texts all.

Next, we as readers must learn and grow in our challenging of those texts, thus challenging texts. Critical pedagogy and literacy are about mining the assumptions in the text, peeling away the veneer of objectivity to reveal the inherent humanity of all language. In critical literacy, we know that there can never exist a "No-Spin Zone." Human expression is all spin, sometimes glorious, sometimes insidious, often engaging.

In a comedy routine by Steven Wright, he talks about going into waiting rooms—just to wait. He adds that a receptionist asks if he is waiting to see the doctor, and he says, "No, just waiting." Then he asks what kind of doctor it is. The nurse says, "A foot doctor." Wright pauses and says, "I'd like to see a doctor that size."

And we laugh. The names we give things, like "waiting rooms" and "foot doctors."

And finally, there are those of us among us who cling to the naive faith in objectivity, wanting to purge the world of offensive, confrontational, challenging texts. So they are apt to be found challenging texts—calling to censor.

Here, we will continue a conversation about challenging texts—unwrapping, rewrapping our assumptions and the assumptions of the texts around us and our students.

Because “[w]e are bombarded, thousands of times a day, with the emotional simplicity and terrible beauty of lies,” writes Chris Hedges (I Don’t Believe in Atheists, p. 177).