Walter Dean Myers at the Celebration of Teaching & Learning
Posted by SusanHorowitz
March 19, 2011, 9:03 am
Walter Dean Myers at the Celebration of Teaching & Learning
by Susan Horowitz, Literacy Coach at P.S. 196
I was introduced to the work of Walter Dean Myers in the sixth grade when one of my teachers offered me a copy of Fallen Angels that she was discarding. Not being much of a reader, but eager to pretend I was, I took the book. A few days later, thumbing through the book, I noticed all of the curse words, and I thought I’d give the book a try. By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked and read that book from start to finish without pause. So, you can imagine my overwhelming excitement when, today, I found myself sitting not thirty-feet away from Mr. Myers himself. It turned out that the keynote speaker I had been sent to see had fallen and injured himself. Mr. Myers had agreed to take his place at the event and, while very sorry for the injured speaker, I was overjoyed to see the man who made me love reading.
Mr. Myers has not only changed who I am as a reader, but has changed the lives of so many of the students I teach. Monster, Slam!, Hoops, not to mention many of the dozen of other books he has authored, have been among the most popular books checked out of my classroom library. Today, Mr. Myers spoke of his ability to reach young people at such a personal level and the “awesome responsibility” that comes with that ability. He described being able to “inhabit the mind[s]” of his young readers because his experiences have, in many ways, mirrored the experiences of his readers and so he understands them in a way few can. Mr. Myers talked about needing to “not only entertain people, but [to] give them a voice.” He recalled growing up in Harlem and not finding many books that were relevant to his own life. He discussed having only classic British authors as mentors and creating confused writing pieces that did not truly represent him, such as “Ode to a Fire Hydrant.”
It was not until Mr. Myers was in his thirties that he discovered he could write about his own culture and his own experiences. The first time he met James Baldwin, Mr. Myers finally felt he had been given “permission to be black.” Prior to meeting Baldwin, Mr. Myers “never wrote about being black.” As he recalled this first encounter with Mr. Baldwin, he told the audience how much better it would have been to receive this permission at a much younger age. “I needed this information at 12, 13,” he said.
Young children, Mr. Myers said, need to take pride in who they are. They cannot do this, he insisted, when they are not given strong role models. He talked about how a child’s education begins “when he gets up in the morning,” when he walks to school past those unemployed people standing on the street corner; education does not remain within the confines of the classroom walls. He asked, “how can you convince them that their education is going to do something different” than it did for the many unemployed people they encounter every day?
Mr. Myers looks to strong teachers, communities, and politicians to help young inner city students find a path. He reflected, “Our political leaders have avoided the issue of community. They have no faith in community.” It seemed as if he were saying that a school cannot complete its mandate if the students, their teachers, and their families do not form a community that has one common goal; that students can only be properly served if they are first provided with a sense of stability and community and if they become convinced of the necessity for academic achievement. “What we pay to have these children incarcerated,” when the system fails them, he reflected “is a tragedy.”
