Now I’m pissed at you McDougal Littell

Early in the year I submitted a letter I’d written to McDougal Littell, the company that published the literature anthology we’re now using in my district. The letter was full of flowery praise, and I truly meant every word of it.

But a few days ago, McDougal Littell, I found myself seething. I’ve had to wait three days to write this, because I want you to know you made a gigantic mistake in your anthology.

Nope. It’s not a factual mistake, haven’t found one of those yet. Nope, it’s not a spelling mistake, though there are a few of those. The mistake came in the production of the student version of the anthology — what I like to call the “green floppy book.” Every day the kids head to my class asking: “Do we need our green floppy books today?” And that’s pretty cool to hear because it means the kids are actually interested in using these materials in class. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that this is the first time they’ve had a Language Arts book they could take outside of the classroom.

But they’re kids and they didn’t see the problem they held in their hands and stuffed into their backpacks every day. I’m sorry to say I didn’t notice it myself until the very moment the problem showed itself in my classroom. The problem comes in your printing of the play “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

When you printed the play in the hardcover anthology, you filled it full of information and pictures. You gave the kids faces to look at, and with those images the kids kept making statements in class like: “That must be Dussel because he’s sitting down, and in this part of the play the guy showed up and was tired and bewildered. It must be dussel.” “Yeah, you can tell who everybody is because of how they’re described in the play.” That’s powerful stuff right there, because to make decisions like that, the kids had to connect with the text; they had to have a communication with the anthology.

Another way the kids show me their connection with the anthology was when they got into reading the play using the different formats you gave us with the books — we started off listening to the audio version performed by professional actors, we moved into reading the play aloud, and then we got into moving the actors around and here’s what I found the kids doing: instead of choosing who would read the play each day (or only letting those interested in reading aloud perform), I made the kids choose each other. Whomever played Anne one day would have to choose the next day’s reader, and so on. This worked wonderfully because after a few days of doing this, the kids really got into their performances, and they were modelling their readings after the actors they’d heard in the play. And if you know 8th graders (that’s somehting that’ll come up in a minute here), you know that reading aloud in front of others and putting your own emotion into it is an embarrassing thing. It’s never done. I give credit there to the original authors.

I also give credit to the original uthors — that includes Anne Frank — for crapturing a story that cuts right to the hearts of my students. They’ve never been more interested in reading. They’ve never been more interested in listening. When we were reading the play aloud, I would butt in to ask questions and they would groan: “Can’t we just move on?” And when we listened to the audio version you provided they had their faces in their books, all turning pages at the same time, and only raised their heads when I paused the audio to ask another question. I’m thankful that you provided me with several versions of this play so that I can keep the kids’ interest as much as possible. I’m thankful for having the opportunity to move ot the audio selection again when the students lost steam in performing.

But imagine how unpleased I was when I asked the students to read alone to the End of Act 1 in their green floppy books and heard the next day:

“Yeah, I finished the play.”

Oh, wow! You read that far ahead. You must’ve been pretty caught up in the story.

“No, I read to where you told us to read. That’s the end of the play.”

Huh?

“It goes to Hanukah, and that’s the end of the play. Is that all she wrote in her diary? I thought we were going to read about her going to the concentration camps.”

No, she didn’t get the opportunity to take her diary with her, but wait a second. Let me see your floppy book.

Leafing through the floppy book, I noted all those things I initially loved about it — the space in the sidebars to take notes, the selections of text circled and annotated for ectra information, the questions that pop up every now and again, and the prompts that ask students to “pause & reflect” on what they’ve read. I flipped through Act 1 and quickly came to the “end of the play.” Yeah. The play just stops at the end of Act 1, Scene 3, where Mr. Dussel comes to stay with the family.

And that’s it. Play’s over. Nothing more to see here. They must have lived happily ever after. Move along.

One major hint I should have noticed about this abridged version of the play (no wait, abbridged would mean you cut the text to pieces and got rid of the extraneous stuff — if you’d abridged the text, the gist of the entire story would be there) is that the title in the floppy book reads: “from the Diary of Anne Frank,” where the word “from” notes that the whole story’s not there.

I should have noticed that “from” a long time ago. That’s my own fault. You got me there. What really angers m, though, is the little statement you put in the floppy book at the end of Act 1, Scene 3 that reads something akin to:

If you have a copy of the full McDougal Littell Anthology, please continue reading the play at scene 4 on page 484.

How awful of you to exhibit right there in the kids’ books the fact that a school probably can’t afford the actual anthology. The kids already complain that most of their books are old and falling apart; they know that schools don’t have an awful lot of money. Don’t give them the idea that a school is so poor it can’t even afford an entire play or story. It’s a bad ‘yo mama’ joke. If that statement about “If you have a copy of the full anthology” isn’t baraggardly, and you’re actually concerned with having students read entire texts (but know their schools can’t afford them) then put the whole freaking text in the cheaper version of the book.

But no, you didn’t do that either. Instead, you turned that screw a little harder. You wrote something akin to:

If your school doesn’t have the anothology, a copy of the play, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hacket, can be found at most libraries.

Sweet. Thanks for the tip there. Here’s a tip for you: IF you were concerned with saving space in the anthology (which is a fine idea — it means you want to give the students as many opportunities to read many different types of stories), maybe you should have just printed a list of titles in the book and wrote beneath them:

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a really awesome short story. You can find it online right here, because that story is in the public domain and no one should charge you money in order to read it.

Same thing with O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief”

Hey kids, searching for things on the internet is fun! If you look hard enough, you can even find a copy of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes online!

If you can find these amazing short stories online (or in your library!) we’ll bet you’ll have an even easier time finding the poems we’ve supplied as well!

That’s my beef with you McDougal Littell. You print one-third of a text word for word and then tell kids to either find it in a library or to pray-to-god their school has a copy of it lying around somewhere, and at the same time you provide a chunk of stories that can be found in the public domain. If I wanted, I could print off, and make copies for my students, the Poe or Henry stories and by doing so would save a good deal of money. Money I’d gladly give you in place of the missing portion of this play.

Not all of my students thought the play ended at the end of Act 1, Scene 3. As a matter of fact, most of them noticed the play just stopped, and came to class and grabbed the full anthology (thank god we have that!). But once that happened, the green floppy book — the ones we’ve been using as personal books; likely the first Language Arts books our students have taken ownership over — became useless. Way to go.