Defining Literacy

    Although it is well established that there is a 'problem' with public education in America, there is no consensus as to what caused it: is a lack of funding for critical academic programs? Or is it because many parents don’t help their children with their schoolwork? Erica Goldson, who graduated Coxsackie-Athens High School in 2010, argues in her valedictorian speech that the root of the problem lies in a current overemphasis on standardized testing. "We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective." (Goldson) To become valedictorian, Ms. Goldson had to give up learning for the sake of her objective; the almighty 'A'. Non-valedictorians must also do 'whatever it takes' if they want to achieve their original objective, which, according to Ms. Goldson, is usually "to get out [of school] as soon as possible." (Goldson). This means that pursuing their passions, whether in the areas of literature, music, technology or the sciences, must take second seat to their schoolwork. For Ms. Goldson, the tragedy in this is that schools are failing to give their students a proper education; by forcing their students to adopt a "whatever it takes" mentality, they suppress their natural propensity towards intellectual inquiry. But the success of Ms. Goldson and others like her seems to contradict this idea; if some students are able to finish public school with an education, why can’t others?

            Peg Tyre, author of "The Writing Revolution", argues that public schools fail to educate students by not teaching them how to write analytically. Backing her claim is the success story of New Dorp High School, a formerly failing public school on Long Island that succeeded in improving its graduation rate from 63% to 80% between 2009 and 2011. Observing that its worst students were usually the least adept at expository writing, New Dorp’s principal changed the curriculum to make analytic writing a central component of every subject, from science and mathematics to history and english. Students were taught "how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts - but, because and so." (7) Once they had mastered the basics of sentence construction, they were taught "how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own." (7) Although the program is ostensibly a "rigid, unswerving, formula", it worked: from 2009 to 2011, New Dorp's passing rates on the English Regents exams jumped from 69% to 80%, and its passing rates on the Global History Regents shot from 64% to 75% (3). These statistics support the idea that analytical writing is a critical skill for any student's education. Although this may be the case, it is certainly not the whole picture. Erica Goldson would argue that, despite an improvement in passing rates on the regents, students were still not really learning, and the unless New Dorp stopped ‘teaching to the test’, it would continue to fail to educate its students.Both authors are trying to answer the question of what, exactly, students need in order to succeed within the education system. But neither Goldson nor Tyre can hope to find the answer without understanding what schools are supposed to be teaching in the first place.

    Paolo Freire, a writer best known for his work teaching Brazilian peasants, believes that schools aren't supposed to teach using any form of rote memorization, or lessons that involve a lecture, because these teaching methods create a disconnect between the lesson and the real world; something Freire refers to at “narration sickness” (368). Instead of immersing students in the world they are supposed to be learning about, the imperative of the lecture "leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content." People, places, and events, become discrete facts embedded in the matrix of the test they are taught towards, and students' minds become "receptacles to be "filled" by the teacher." (368) Because of this, public education becomes reduced to a series of business-like transactions:

Education thus becomes an action of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.

                                (368-9)

Like Erica Goldson, Freire believes that the education process provides negative feedback upon a student's willingness and ability to learn, which is inherently dehumanizing; if the best that students can aspire to do with the information they receive is collecting and cataloguing it, they have been gravely underserved. The daily transactions of lessons to be received, memorized, and repeated, serve to wear down the primal urge that all humans share to discover everything they can about the world around them. If Freire’s assertion holds true, then we cannot fix our education system without levelling the playing field; a greater level of communication must be established between teachers and their students, both in and out of the classroom.

    There is one instance, in my mind, where such communication has happened, which is between Ian Downing, a high school senior at Humanities Prep, and myself. For the past several weeks, I have tutored Ian on writing his PBAT, an essay that is prerequisite to his graduation, and we have often talked together on Skype before and after our Thursday afternoon tutoring sessions. Halfway through the month of April, Ian had not yet written the introduction to his paper, when the final draft was due the first week of May. When we sat down together that Thursday, I held my breath. How are we going to get this done in time? If we didn't do any writing that day, there would be no way he would finish his work by the deadline. I scribbled down a skeleton outline for the introductory paragraph, before sliding the paper over to him and explaining the process step by step. "Your first sentence is the hook; the statement, as in-your-face and controversial as you can make it, that will get your readers interested. In the second and third sentences, you expand the idea in question and give the readers a taste of why the issue is complicated - opposing sides of the 'debate', and so on. Your last sentence is the 'thesis' - the platform on which the rest of your paper will stand." I looked him in the eye and asked: "Are you up for it?" Ian nodded his head. "Sure, I can do it."

    Ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes passed. I kept trying to surreptitiously glance over at his work, but he kept turning the computer screen away from me. When he finally turned the computer around, what I read was even more than I'd dared hope for: he used an analogy to introduce his topic ("Our current economy is like an outfield in baseball. There is such a large area to cover and only three people available to do so.") Building on the analogy, he made the argument that a lack of economic diversity in the U.S. poses a significant risk to the middle and lower classes. He pointed out that the government bailouts of the banking and auto industries were largely ineffective in stimulating economic growth, and argued that greater economic strength would come from the encouragement of small businesses:

Because the government does not prioritize these [small] businesses, they are not only taking a gamble with little industries, but are not motivating small business owners to grow enough to become major sources of income.

Everything I would expect of a college-level paper, I found in this first draft of the introduction. It did need editing, but it showed me that my student had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of good writing. Although I would need to continue to push him to write more, and to expand and challenge his ideas, I did not need to pretend that this was a remedial English class. When I recently asked Ian via Skype what he thought the most helpful things I'd done with him in tutoring were, he listed my helping him with his intro as number one; "since I didn't know what to write for it exactly." Moreover, the second most helpful thing was "seeing your reaction to my paper each week, it kept me really motivated to write more." It seems as if what Ian needed from me was not a lesson on how to write a paper, but rather he needed me to teach him specific tools he could use to better express his ideas. As far as I can tell, Humanities Prep does a good job of educating students like Ian who take the time and effort to apply the lessons they learn in school in their everyday lives. However, Humanities prep is a high school that a. uses the New York Regents exam system and b. is a public school whose curriculum appears to match Freire's description of "The Banking Concept of Education." I doubt that Ian was able to Skype with any of his high school teachers, and certainly not on a regular basis. I can also assume that he didn’t have any tutors before me, as all students from humanities prep in this program were graduating seniors. So if Humanities Prep doesn’t emphasize teacher-student communication, as Freire prescribes, then why is its program still effective?

What Freire misses, in his attack on banking education, is that there are some things that have to be learned by rote. Freire assumes that ‘creativity, knowledge, and transformation’ occur spontaneously, which is patently untrue; students cannot learn without the proper intellectual tools. In the context of literacy, those tools include proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar usage. These tools require rote memorization, because they cannot be permanently impressed into a student’s mind after the first exposure. This is why Peg Tyre takes pains to point out that New Dorp’s success came from the fact that it abandoned the predominant theory of teaching literacy, which held that knowledge was “caught, not taught” (Tyre). Schools that subscribed to this theory, which included most public schools throughout the 1900’s, typically gave kids interesting, social, creative-writing assignments where their work would be shared, under the assumption that kids would “catch” what they needed to become successful writers. What this theory forgot, much to the detriment of public school students, was formal instruction in grammar, sentence composition, and essay writing. Although this theory works for some kids, it doesn’t work at all for kids who are unable to catch anything from their home environment, namely, kids who grow up in poverty, or who had weak early instruction, or have learning disabilities. These kids never learn how to write an essay, and New Dorp high school had a lot of students who fell under this category.

To develop students’ analytical skills, New Dorp’s program used classroom discussion to teach the socratic method. When students speak in class, they were required to use specific prompts, "I agree/disagree with ___ because...", "I have a different opinion...", "I have something to add..." and "Can you explain your answer?" (Tyre). This form of structured speaking turned classroom discussions into opportunities for classmates “to listen to each other, to think more carefully, and speak more precisely, in ways they could then echo in persuasive writing.” (Tyre) By doing this, New Dorp’s revamped curriculum was developing its students’ ability to translate lessons learned in the classroom into real-world actions, or what Sylvia Scribner refers to as ‘functional literacy’. According to writer Sylvia Scribner, functional literacy is defined as "the level of proficiency necessary for effective performance in a range of settings and customary activities." (9) By extension, Sylvia argues, functional literacy also applies to the ability to use computers and other now-commonplace technologies, which are forms of "second-order literacy" (11). In other words, literacy is the ability to use tools and concepts that you know to learn something that you don't yet know. This is why Erica Goldson credits her education largely to her 10th-grade English Teacher, Donna Bryan, who taught her how to open her mind and "ask questions before accepting textbook doctrine." (Goldson) Knowing how to ask questions before accepting doctrine is part of learning how to learn, which is exactly what functional literacy entails.

Paolo Freire would be against the concept of functional literacy, because he believes that literacy programs are intended to teach textbook doctrine - not to enable students to question it. If the banking concept of education is true, then the teacher’s role is "to regulate the way the world ‘enters into’ the students", instilling in them a mindset where they must become complacent with the unsavory aspects of the world, rather than attempt to change them. This implies that functional literacy is essentially a brainwashing tool used by those in power to maintain the status quo (373):

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating "knowledge," the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

Literacy is a notion prescribed by a minority to define what the majority of society should know, and how they should respond behaviorally to given situations. Students themselves are deprived of the right to self-determination in terms of what they learn, and what career choices are made available for their pursuit. Per Freire, this is accomplished by putting up an artificial social barrier between teachers and students, which takes the form of required readings and ultra-specific forms of testing, shoehorning nearly everyone into the same, narrow, education spectrum. This is an accusation that toes the definition of a conspiracy theory; our own government, which is one of the most stable, cohesive forms of government today, is so divided that there are factions within political factions - especially among the wealthy. No real, historical conspiracy has ever been executed as flawlessly as Freire imagines the ‘banking concept.’ Using Occam’s razor, which states that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is often the one that’s correct, we may assume that any grave errors in our education system are due either to incompetence or to well-intentioned, albeit misguided, initiatives.

It must be conceded that there is a certain ready-to-wear approach that the government has used over the past few decades, which can be seen most recently in the No Child Left Behind Act. That is what (likely) Freire is reacting to in this passage; such top-down education reform acts tend to do more harm than good because they allow no room for flexibility at the level of the school districts. The attitude that ‘what’s good for some is good for all’ fails, because not everyone learns the same way.

    One barrier to real education reform is coming up with an operational (read: measurable) definition of functional literacy. Because literacy is a social convention, it may have different connotations in different contexts. For example, although economics is not widely taught as a core subject, compared to history, literature or mathematics, I believe that it should be. During one tutoring session in April, when Ian and I first began to work on the body arguments of his PBAT, I noticed that although he had a cogent argument, there was a major logic gap between his argument that a lack of economic diversity would cause the downfall of the middle class and his main piece of evidence, which was that Apple, Inc. and other major tech companies played too large a role in the U.S. economy.  I stopped reading to point out the error. "You've got a great idea, here, Ian, but your discussion about Apple has nothing to do with it... at least nothing your readers will pick up on their own." Ian frowned a little and nodded as he re-read the passage. "Uh-huh." I backtracked in case I had hurt his feelings. "That's not to say you shouldn't talk about Apple at all; just not right here." I explained that he needed to find a numerical way to compare individual companies, as well as their respective industries, to the overall economy. Ian gave me a puzzled look; "And... how do I do that?" Both of us fell silent for a minute. Neither of us had taken any real economics courses, and my only grounding in the subject came from the fact that my mother is a lawyer who represents major firms on Wall Street. After a minute or two,I blurted out "Let's find out how much money Apple and other big companies make in yearly revenues, and then compare that to the U.S.'s GDP. That'll give readers the sense of perspective that you're trying to convey." This ad-hoc solution worked, but it bothered me that we had any difficulty figuring it out. Both of us should have at least had some idea of what numbers to analyze besides GDP and company annual revenues. Knowing how and why you get paid a certain salary, and where that money gets spent - both in retail and on taxes - is as necessary an intellectual tool as writing itself. Thankfully, although I was unable to help Ian produce a paper worthy of Paul Krugman’s critique, we were able to both satisfy the requirements of the paper and learn something new along the way, thanks to adequate research. That tutoring session impressed upon me that, whether or not economics becomes part of the ‘common core’ standards, the ability to effectively research a topic online is a form of functional literacy that everyone should master.

There are too many schools, and too many teachers, for any comprehensive education reform plan to be feasible. The public education system is simply too large for any single curriculum, or any one test, to be applicable to all students; one size simply cannot fit all. But there are guidelines that can help individual teachers and principals decide on what is best for their pupils. Peg Tyre's analytical writing program could help show students how to learn, when they might not otherwise know how to. Paolo Freire's model of liberating education could help give an education to students who may have given up on learning, due to extrinsic factors. Erica Goldson’s speech could help introduce newcomers to the national, and global, education forum. Lastly, Ian Downing’s term paper could help teachers realize that, besides reading ability alone, functional literacy is something that must be taught before anyone can do it themselves. The sheer number of moving parts involved in the education system is staggering, but it should not discourage anyone’s attempts to fix the parts that are broken. Like any organic system, if one teacher comes up with an effective solution for a given problem, other teachers will copy him or her. The same applies at any level, be it the principals of various high schools, or the administrators of different school districts; no one is alone in their attempt to better teach the next generations. But anyone attempting to start their own education crusade would do well to remember that inertia can come from the students themselves, and that one would do well to ask their permission before starting any new kinds of pedagogical movements. Per Erica Goldson; “We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.” (Goldson)

Works Cited

Freire, Paolo. "The “Banking” Concept Of Education." Dwc.edu. Daniel Webster College. 11 May 2013 <http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Friere.htm>.

Goldson, Erica. "Here I Stand." America Via Erica. Blogger.com. 11 May 2013 <http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens-valedictorian-speech.html>.

Scribner, Sylvia. "Literacy In Three Metaphors." 11 May 2013 <http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true>.

Tyre, Peg. "The Writing Revolution." The Atlantic. The Atlantic. 11 May 2013 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/>.

Into the Electronic Revolution

Do me a favor; put away your cell phone, turn off the music and pay attention. If you are reading this essay to learn something, you must actively engage with it; otherwise you may as well go back to checking your Facebook news feed. Some academics observe the popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter and dismiss any possibility of using the Internet as a tool for education. One of these pundits, a former Harvard professor named Sven Birkerts, single-handedly catalyzed the polemic with his writings, and it remains to be seen whether or not he was right.

One moment in his essay “Into the Electronic Millennium” reflects on his encounter years ago with a professor who, because he managed a rare and used book shop, wanted to sell him his entire book collection. When asked to explain his divestiture, the man replied that he saw that computers were the future, and that his books represented a lot of pain for him. For Birkerts, a bibliophile by nature, this memory was rather unsettling.

It is a kind of marker in my mental life, for that afternoon I got my first serious inkling that all was not well in the world of print and letters. All sorts of corroborations followed. Our professor was by no means an isolated case. Over a period of several years we met with quite a few others like him. New men and new women who had glimpsed the future and had decided to get while the getting was good. The selling off of books was sometimes done for financial reasons, but the other thing was usually there as well: the need to burn bridges. It was as if heading to the future also required the destruction of tokens from the past. (470)

The author fears that the selling off of books destroys pieces of the past. To him, people who sold their libraries and bought computers were completely abandoning the world of print. Considering the massive bookshelves in my home that have sat untouched for some time, though I come from a family of readers, I am inclined to agree. Online reading is seductively convenient compared to the process of finding and buying books.     

This seduction raises an important question: given the convenience and ubiquity of the Internet, how harmful could it be? As a much younger form of communication than print, we will

only know whether or not it caused a break with the past in posterity. Birkerts makes a number of predictions in his essay based on inherent problems with digital media that are not found in print.

Print, which is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax, requires the active engagement of the reader. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension. The electronic order is in most ways the opposite because information travels along a network. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. As such, the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages. (472)

The nature of Print as a thought-intensive medium makes it subject to strict rules of logic and syntax, and any published work must be supported by historical context. The Internet is not subject to this, which encourages more and more people to use anecdotes such as ‘I once read somewhere that...’ in their discourse. Moreover, content on the Internet requires neither sustained reading nor processing, and is often published with no quality control. Much of this content is thus rendered unusable for serious purposes.

Even so, print carries its own set of drawbacks; research is a painstaking process that becomes even more arduous by sifting through books. Moreover, the depth of a book depends almost entirely on the reader’s background. Unless he has previous knowledge of Salic Law or the foundations of European Monarchy, he would little benefit from reading the unabridged edition of Don Quixote. Perhaps most distressing is that written language is ambiguous, and like visual media can become propaganda in the wrong hands. I find that the two mediums have complementary roles; Google and Wikipedia are efficient tools for gathering data, while books donate structure and points of debate to one’s research. Web hyperlinks enable a deeper understanding of a subject, and books keep one’s thought processes coherent. The comments sections on websites provide exposure to multiple points of view, but analytical papers ensure that an investigation stays focused. The problem, as seen in the quote above, is persuading people that the two can coexist.

How can they coexist when students use the Internet for everything but school? Observing this, Birkerts argues that the Internet has worsened the decline of America’s education systems, and warns us of the “possibility that the young truly “know no other way,” that they are not made of the same stuff that their elders are.” (473) He fears that it has destroyed the work ethic of today’s youth, and that technology may be the only “way” they know how to learn. The other “ways” are the classroom paradigms of the lecture, the seminar, and the Western Canon. I agree with the letter of this warning; physical textbooks hold little interest with students who grew up with technology, especially for boys, since they are both naturally hyperactive and mainly visual learners. But if the lingua franca of today’s youth is technology, then why not teach them with it? I remember my 11th-grade Anatomy classes as being among the most informative and enjoyable parts of high school, because our teacher used animations to illustrate the lessons. This makes me believe that other classes would meet success with illumination.

One of the reasons that public school students struggle is because almost none of their classes emphasize visual learning. Worse, much of the work they do is so repetitive that it effectively discourages learning. The effects of both problems are so pervasive that they can even be seen in the “best” students; while researching for a public speaking class last year, I found a graduation speech by Erica Goldson, the valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens high school, that described how the work that went into her success ultimately stunted her education.

While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. (4)

Erica’s exceptional grades came at the cost of her ability to pursue extracurricular activities. By going through school  ‘by the book’, she was unable to explore possible future areas of study. She is now travelling around America, hoping to construct an identity for herself. Though I often imagine it would be fun to be a perfect student, Ms. Goldson’s story underscores the need for one to be interested in their work in order to learn from it.  

Because few of today’s students are interested in the classics, some have suggested that it is time to revise the Western Canon. Such a change would cause more harm than good, because it would hinder students from learning the foundations of western civilization. Fellow classicist and NYU student Andrew Montalenti takes a different approach to the problem, arguing that while people can and should still learn from the classics, they must be taught in a different manner.

I thus emphasize what should already be evident: the Canon does not make the artwork within it great; it is the artwork that makes the Canon great. By remembering this, our interpretation of these works can be richer and much more complicated than a mere deductive confirmation of expert opinion. (2)

Students must be allowed to draw their own conclusions from reading these works. This would give them the ability to be as interested in the Canon as they are in reality shows. A number of recent movies (“Romeo and Juliet”, “300” and “Gladiator”), shows on HBO (“John Adams” and “The Tudors”) and video-games (the “Assassin’s Creed” series) accomplish this by giving audiences a pleasurable, accidental introduction to the Canon. Teachers could use these to convey lessons in the lingua franca while respecting the intellectual sovereignty of their students.
    Assuming visual media to be of no use for teaching, Birkerts predicted three major events that may come true should the status quo be kept. With no impetus for people to develop their communication skills, the majority of people will increasingly use “plainspeak”; a dumbed-down language similar to “newspeak” from George Orwell’s 1984 (474). If Internet content remains shallow, there will be a collective forgetting of historical perspectives (475). Worse, without exposure to diverse perspectives, a social collectivization is highly probable; people will be polarized along national, ethnic and religious lines, and the concept of individuality will cease to exist (475). If these predictions came true, it would spell the end of free will for everyone but the political and economic elite. For this reason, before attempting to counteract them, we must first make sure that they haven’t already happened.

If Birkerts’ assertions were correct, I would have no business using computers to do schoolwork. If, however, I found an investigation that dispelled his worries, my only concern would be to use technology responsibly. I found such an investigation by the BBC regarding “the social consequences of the Internet” (16). As the author Michael Lewis made headway into the project, he found that the network actually encouraged the exercise of free will.

What I was after was more like the Internet consequences of society. People take on the new tools they are ready for, and only make use of what they need, how they need it. If they were using the Internet to experiment with their identities, it was probably because they found their old identities were inadequate. If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. When I realized this I stopped worrying over the social consequences of the Internet and began simply to watch what was actually happening on the Internet. Inadvertently, it was telling us what we wanted to become. (16)

People embraced the technology, not out of coercion or hypnosis, but because they wanted to. This allowed for experimentation with their identities, as well as the creation of entirely new ones; many youths used it to explore interests in music, finance and law, which destabilized institutional monopolies of these industries. This, I believe, was the cause of peoples’ worries; thousands of jobs were at risk for every company to go bankrupt.

This concern over job security also helps explain Birkerts’ fears; a growing disinterest in literature threatens his ability to teach, and it is understandable that he would believe the Internet is to blame. It is also possible to address these fears while meeting the needs of students like Erica Goldson, Andrew Montalenti, and myself. Our desire to learn is still present, but we also want to develop perspectives that are not derived solely from our teachers. We should be able to share our knowledge with our peers and remove the intellectual inequalities that come from a one-way, teacher-to-student learning paradigm. This could be rendered by a website that allowed students to discuss and collaborate on their assignments, thus alleviating the burden on teachers to make sure no one is left behind. By distributing our knowledge amongst ourselves, more class time could be spent on learning new things rather than reviewing old lessons, enabling us to more fully realize our academic potential. I intend to create such a website, and hopefully find a solution that would please even the likes of Sven Birkerts. Rather than trying to prove him wrong, I want to reassure him, and myself, that our past will not be forgotten in the electronic revolution. 

Works Cited:


Birkerts, Sven. “Into the Electronic Millennium.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Robert DiYanni and Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomas Wadsworth, 2007. 469-76.



Montalenti, Andrew. “Questioning the Canon.” Mercer Street. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II. New York: NYU College of Arts and Science. 2003. 1-7.


Goldson, Erica. (2010, June). Here I stand. Valedictorian speech presented at Coxsackie-Athens High School. Coxsackie-Athens, New York.


Lewis, Michael. “Next. The future just happened.” New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2001. 16-216.