READING COMPREHENSION

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

Aristotle

LEAD-IN

Match the lines to make quotations about education. Do it in figures and letters.

1. “It is possible to store the mind with a million facts …

2. “Good teaching is …

3. “In an effective classroom students should not only know what they are doing,

4. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow.

5. “Learning is a treasure …

6. “Genius without education is …

7. “How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid?

8. “The ink of the scholar is more sacred …

9. “I am always ready to learn …

10. “Anyone who stops learning is one-fourth preparation and three-fourth theatre.” Gail Godwin

a. than the blood of the martyr.” Mohammed

b. It must be education that does it.” Alexander Dumas

c. … that will follow its owner everywhere.” Chinese Proverb

d. … they should also know why and how.” Harry Wong

e. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Gandhi

f. … like silver in the mine.” Benjamin Franklin

g. … and still be entirely uneducated.” Alec Bourne.

h. … old, whether at twenty or eighty.” Henry Ford

i. … although I do not always like being taught.” Winston Churchill

READING COMPREHENSION

2. a) You are going to read an extract from “Winter Hunger” by Cliff Schimmels. Before you start reading, make sure you can read and understand the following:

*American dream–is an image according to which America is the country of unlimited possibilities, in which one can reach his aim irrespectively of his origin and financial status

*John Deer–is a famous private American company producing agricultural machines

* Timbuktu – is a bay in a far-away country

* Shottgrass Basketball Conference – is a regional basketball association

b) Start reading the extract and pay special attention to Vince’s behaviour at the interview.

WINTER HUNGER

The year 1957 didn’t find Vince Benalli lying around. For him, it was the year when goals turned to dreams and dreams turned to decisions and decisions took root and grew. He graduated from college. Since he was the first of his clan to achieve that destination, the event carried special meaning and responsibility. He represented the whole family. He was going to stand for something. He illustrated the great American dream.

College had been good for Vince. He really hadn’t chosen North-western State Teachers College. When you grew up in the rural towns, the son of a gypsum miner or a wheat farmer, your choice was to go to college or to go to the City and try to get on with the fire department. And if you choose college, you went to the one nearest you where you mingled with other kids from small towns who had gone to the same high schools and who now plunged into the same activities and purposes. And if you were average or athletic or both, you stretched your vision as far as the elastic of dreams would allow and prepared for life as a teacher and a coach.

For Vince, graduation came as a paradox, an anticlimax, a little piece of hazy reality wedged into the wholeness of real life. He hadn’t planned for it to be that way. He had actually planned to save up for the event, to conserve both senses and emotions so he could celebrate the achievement as something consequential, bigger than anything which had ever happened to him before, and then to celebrate with all his consciousness on full speed.

At college Vince had majored in English and he had played basketball; and he was good at both. The same feistiness and determination which made him the smallest all-conference player also made him a tenacious student of literature. He liked basketball – it was the game of the young. He loved literature – it was the game of life.

And he used that thought to give himself youthful assurance when he drove into Wheatheart that spring afternoon of 1957, just too weeks after graduation. “They need a basketball coach, and I think maybe an English teacher,” his college coach had said. “I’ve recommended you. Why don’t you go down and check it out. That’s a good little community. I think you can handle it.”

But now when he headed his college-worn car up Main Street to the high school, he wasn’t sure…

The high school, sitting on top of the hill at the end of Main Street, spoke of community. The school was the heart of Wheatheart and gave the town a sense of pride and direction. Here teachers and coaches – the two were often synonymous – would be more than mere public servants relegated to anonymity. They would be known, integral agents in civic affairs and town distinction. Never mind the chuckholes in the streets or the peeling paint on the highway side of the drugstore, or the height of the weeds in the vacant lots, or the fire truck which never starts? How did the ball team do? “That’s well, eh? We sure have a great little town, don’t we?”

The whole tour didn’t take Vince long – one short pass along the highway and one short trip up Main Street, all the way from the John Deer on the south to the high school at the north end; but he learned a lot by looking fast, so he was ready for his interview with Mr. Casteel, the superintendent. Although relatively young man, Mr. Casteel was already a five-year veteran at his post and head of community unity, and he wore the job with an air of permanence. “You had better like this guy,” Vince thought. “He is here to stay”.

- “Well, what do you think of our little town?” the question was wrapped in a down-home friendliness, outwardly designed to make Vince comfortable for the tougher ones to follow. But even this one had purpose. In fact, after the interview was all over, Vince knew this might have been the most important question.

- “I like what I see. Very clean. What’s the population here?” An education professor had told Vince to ask some questions of his own during these interviews. It gave the superintendent the impression that you were discriminating, even if you were prepared to take the first job offered, even in Timbuktu.

- “We have about 175 high school kids, give or take a few. We’re mostly a farming economy, wheat. And we do well when it rains and struggle during the dry years. I guess we are about like a lot of districts around here.” He laughed, but it was a chuckle of condescension! They certainly weren’t like the other districts! Even if they were, in some respects, Vince knew he had better see the difference. This man was doing him an honor just to interview him, and Vince should appreciate it as such.

- “What was your major?”

- “English.”

- “Good. Excellent. We really put a lot of stock in our English teacher here. That is an important subject, maybe the most important in my way of thinking. If you can’t talk, there isn’t much you can do, I’ve always said. Gotta learn to communicate if you ever expect to amount to anything.”

- “Yes, sir. And…”

- “And another thing, our English teacher is the one person who sees them all. Every student takes English, so you might say that the English teacher sets the tone for the whole school. But if the English teacher lets them walk all over him, then they will walk all over everybody’ else. Yes, sir. That is an important job. You think you are man enough to handle it?”

- “Well, I have really enjoyed my study. I like to write, and I enjoy bringing literature to life, at least in my own life. And …”

- “That’s good. What about your basketball? You made all-conference, it says.”

- “Yes, I squeezed in a little time for basketball during my studies.”

- “Hey. I saw you play once.”

- “Really?”

- “Sure did. When you were in high school, state tournament game. You were playing, let’s see, that’s been a few years ago….”

Vince wished he could help with the picture. Obviously, it had made an impression. But that kid playing a wild, reckless game five years ago was someone else, a figure in Vince’s distant past. He knew him once, but not anymore. Somewhere during college, that kid passed on and left his legacy to a man more deliberate and thoughtful than the kid could have ever been. He realized that he sat in that interview under false pretence. Mr. Casteel thought he was the same person he had seen play in some insignificant basketball game five years ago. Now Mr. Casteel looked at a grown man with promise and a future and saw only a cocky kid who lived once years ago. Vince was confused, but deeper down he was challenged. “Give me an opportunity,’ he though, “and I will correct the misconception.”

Mr. Casteel continued, “As you know, Vince, we need a basketball coach. Someone like you. Someone who can come in here and teach our kids how to hustle. We got a lot of promise in this little town, a lot of future here. We got a good football program – a fine young coach, A.G. Rose – but we need someone to take those same old kids and turn them into basketball players during the winter. Someone to teach kids to play that game the way you did. I like the way you look. I think you can do us a job here. What do you think?”

It had gone faster than Vince had even hoped. “Well, what about the English?”

- “Oh, that’s part of it, all right. You will teach four classes of high school English and coach junior high and high school basketball. We’ll keep you pretty busy. Any questions?”

- “Well, I think so.”

- “Sure you do. As you probably know, we play in the Shottgrass Conference – Shattuck, Tonkawa, Moorland, and Eagle City. Teams like that. Of course, we just naturally plan a late start here. Our football team has been getting in the play-offs every year lately. So we start basketball late. But you will have lots of kids.”

- “But what about the English?”

- “Oh, don’t worry about our old kids in class. Mostly country kids. They’re pretty easy to control. That what makes them such good athletes. Discipline. They will do what you tell them. We’ve got a pretty good bunch around here. Lots of support from the community. Good turnout and all.”

- “Yes, but have they ever heard of Shakespeare, or Wordsworth, or ever Thoreau?” Vince thought it, but he didn’t dare to ask it, he just sat across the table from Mr. Casteel and tried hard to dream past what he had just heard.”

- “Got a family, Vince?’

Now was the question he could get into. “Yes, I have a wife. Elizabeth Ann. Beth Ann. We have been married almost a year. No children yet. She will graduate too.”

- “Teacher?”

- “No, she majored in business, but she is more interested in motherhood right now.”

- “Good. You shouldn’t have to trouble finding a place to live, and out contact is. …” and with that, the day droned into routine: contacts, houses for rent, starting days, gym floors, uniforms, and finally, English books.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 920