Exams show reading still relevant

Of course, a newspaper column is not exactly a story. But sharing with readers some of the words of my young friends from Part 3 of the test makes me feel like I'm writing a story. If this is a story, let me assure you, it is not fiction. This “really happened” in my life and the lives of a group of young people I care very much about.

In Part 3, I asked the students to tell me which of the four short stories we've read and discussed recently they like the most. I also asked them to give me reasons for their choices. And I asked which story they like the least, and why that is the case.

One of the stories we covered is Raymond Carver's classic from 1983, “Cathedral.” Here a first person narrator, which my mentor Dr. Kunst used to call an “I-narrator,” describes an evening with a guest in his home. The guest, his wife's former boss, happens to be blind. The story ends when the blind man asks the narrator what a cathedral looks like. To answer the question, the narrator uses paper and ball point pens to draw a picture of a cathedral. While the narrator sketches, the blind man covers his hand with his own, which allows the blind man to sense the sweeping movements of the lines.

Then the blind man, named Robert, suddenly tells the narrator to close his eyes and retrace his drawing by touch. He wants him to pretend to be blind. Robert wants his host to feel the flow of the lines on the paper as a blind person must feel them in order to “see.”

Now, earlier, that same narrator confessed to readers he was decidedly unenthusiastic about opening his home to a man who could not see. “He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me.” By the story's end, however, the two men are touching one another, making contact, “seeing” the world in a new way. We'll return to Mr. Carver and that literature exam in a moment.

Executive Yuan minister without portfolio Ovid Tzeng urged students recently to “use their existing life experience as education.” Mr. Tzeng was especially concerned about difficulties some youth have in distinguishing “the real” from the virtual world in which they so often dwell in video games and other computer-related phenomena.

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