Recommended Literature to Accompany the Hydroville Water Quality Curricula
Karen McMahon, a language arts teacher at Brookings High Schooland a member of the Hydroville Curriculum Development Team, developed these literature activities as a language arts strand to accompany the water quality scenario. Teachers are encouraged to choose a text and lesson plans that will meet both their language arts objectives and enrich the science in scenario.
I. A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr
A Civil Action, written by Jonathan Harr, won the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the nonfiction Book of the Year Award. The story traces the formulation and outcome of the legal complaint filed by eight families in east, against three local industries for the improper handling and disposal of toxic chemicals. The complaint alleges the toxic chemicals entered the groundwater flow system, were pumped by two municipal wells that supplied water to a local neighborhood, and the consumption of the contaminated water caused leukemia, liver disease, central nervous system disorders, and other unknown illness and disease. I recommend this book a mandatory reading for the Hydroville language arts activities, and accompany it with a viewing of the movie. It is pivotal to understanding, first hand, the consequences of toxicity in our groundwater. Some useful and interesting websites for this book that contain a myriad of ideas for useful activities associated with this fascinating book.
- Activites using a case study of A Civil Action
- An on-line documentary about the case
- A Civil Action: Before the book and before the movie (early newspaper articles by reporter Charles C. Ryan)
- In Toxic Tort Litigation, Truth Lies at the Bottom of a Bottomless Pit by Eric Asimow, Picturing Justice: The On-Line Journal of Law & Popular Culture, Feb. 1999
- Woburn Toxic Trial, mock trial based on the case, Ohio State University
II. Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water by Kathleen Dean Moore
Essays as fluent as the rivers Ms. Moore hikes beside, boats upon, and walks in. And they are just as surprising. From the Willamette to the Maclaren, each river she writes about is fed by tributaries of memory and meditation. The meaning of happiness, the rewards of poking around, the need for domesticity, motherhood, death, or the peculiar reproductive habits of the roughskin newt—anything might be waiting around the bend.
The following can be assigned after students read some or all of the essays in this book.
Student Assignment
The author of this collection of essays uses the following quote as a preface to her collection:
The life of the mind is not the rotation of a machine through a cycle of fixed phases, but the flow of a torrent through its mountain-bed, scattering itself in spray as it plunges over a precipice and pausing in the deep transparency of a rock pool.~ R.G. Collingwood
Read three of the essays in this collection and then, respond on how they apply to the above quote as far as how our lives are much like the flow of a river.
III. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The book is a personal narrative that highlights one year’s explorations on foot in the author’s own neighborhood.
Interesting and useful websites for activities associated with the book.
Student Assignment
After reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, consider the following quote:
So many things have been shown me on those banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.
With these words, Annie Dillard makes it very clear how valuable she views the creek in her backyard. It will serve as the setting for her journal, her environment for observation, her living, breathing, interactive fish bowl, or mason jar, if you will. And the creek will not just play a concrete, physical role. Dillard assigns a strong symbolic role to the stream as well. In frequent and curious metaphoric references the stream takes on a character of more depth than even its own dimensions might seem to allow.
Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights.
The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s a muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.
If I stay home I preserve the illusion that what is happening at Tinker Creek is the very newest thing, that I’m the vanguard and cutting edge of each new season.
1. How does Dillard use her microcosm of a creek to reveal something about the macrocosm of existence? Is she effective in this?
2. Does she rely too heavily on location or is her creek an effective symbol for the philosophical questions she wishes to undertake?
3. What is the role of Tinker Creek in the book?
IV. The River Why by David James Duncan
This novel is humorous, entertaining, and an all time great read. Since its publication by Sierra Club nearly two decades ago, The River Why has become a classic, standing with Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It as the most-read fiction about fly-fishing of our era. Duncan’s protagonist, Gus Orviston, is an irreverent young fly fisherman—a vibrant character who makes us laugh easily and feel deeply, and who speaks with startling truth about the way we live. Leaving behind a madcap, fishing obsessed family, Gus embarks on an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery along his beloved Oregon rivers. What he unexpectedly finds is man’s wanton destruction of nature and a burning desire to commit himself to its preservation.
Useful websites:
- Great interview with Duncan about his activism
- A review of Duncan’s latest, My Story As Told By Water
- Another review
- A great list of recommended reading about rivers and their conservation: www.riversfoundation.org
- Three River Words~Inhabit; Roots; Atonement: www.rivernetwork.org
Student Assignment:
"I felt that the one called Nameless was trying to speak to me—had long been trying. And his “words” were silent, spoken in a language of images—these were signposts marking both my inner and outer journey—And these things had been given as gifts—like rain, like rivers—unlooked for, unasked for: I had to follow signs that I was given, as rivers follow valleys, as spring follows winter, as leaves turn and salmon spawn and geese fly south in October. I couldn’t trade the trail images blazed for me for a straight and narrow way—not when the water’s way, meandering and free flowing, had always been my love.”
~David James Duncan
1. After reading The River Why and interviews with its author, how does Duncan feel about the preservation of our natural rivers?
2. Why is he so passionate about saving them?
3. Why do you think Americans will so easily pay a $1.50 a plastic bottle for so-called “pure” drinking water, but are unwilling to support legislation that protects the integrity of our water resources? Elaborate.
V. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Just as Norman Maclean writes in A River Runs Through It that he is “haunted by waters”, so have readers been haunted by his beautifully written novella. And though Maclean died in body in 1990, for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live on as long as fish swim and books are made. This novel and the beautifully done film by Robert Redford make an incredible unit that students really enjoy. I showed the film first, and then we read the novella. Redford’s movie is so cinematically beautiful, that it draws them into an interest into a story about fly fishing that turns out to be so much more. We had class discussions and wrote an essay and took a final exam on this book.
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