FRIDAY, OCT. 4
WHAT’S INSIDE:
FALL 2024 | ISSUE 5
A&C
SPORTS
OPINION
Poet breaks creative, cultural silence
Looking at men’s soccer’s tenured players
‘Barbarian’ comments on male gaze
‘Freed Between the Lines’ SUNY Plattsburgh reads banned books
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Banning books stifles children’s interest in reading ALEKSANDRA SIDOROVA/Cardinal Points
Tracie Guzzio, professor of English, reads excerpts from banned books at the banned book read out Sept. 25.
Professor reflects on decades experiencing banned books BY ALEKSANDRA SIDOROVA News + Managing Editor
Professor of English Tracie Guzzio has spent decades studying banned books, eventually teaching them at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is also a central part of the college’s annual Banned Book Week’s observances, taking place this year from Sept. 22 to 28. This interview was conducted in-person Sept. 27, and has been edited for clarity and brevity. Question: At the banned books read-out at Feinberg Library on Sept. 25, you read excerpts from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Why did you choose those books? Answer: I often choose something from “The Bluest Eye” just because it’s banned almost all the time. It may be the longest-run-
ning, consistently banned book. It’s also one of my favorite novels. “Favorite” seems like a bad word because it’s such a brutal book, but I think it’s beautifully written and really important for people to understand the impact of racism on someone so small and vulnerable like a child. I think we need to think about those ways — especially when someone’s talking about banning books for children — and children need to see themselves represented in the world. It works on so many levels for me. “Lawn Boy” is a newer book. I taught it for the first time this past year in an Honors seminar called Banned Books, and it is now consistently being banned. I didn’t have a contemporary male author on the list, either, so I thought I should try this one out, and the students just loved it. They loved Evison’s voice. He’s funny, he survives things, so he’s a really good role model for people who have a lot of anxiety and feel like things are going badly. He just kind of
keeps trucking, just keeps going on. All these beautiful changes in his life happen towards the end, so you really root for him. Again, it’s really distressing that that book is pulled from high schools, that it’s not available in middle schools, but I think a lot of high school students would really benefit from that story. Then the other one was “The Handmaid’s Tale” — that one just seemed so pertinent. I think my students were shocked at how contemporary and current the book sounded as they were reading it. I think we have to consider some of the real-world impacts of some of the decisions that we’re making, and that book does that. Q: What is the spirit like in your Banned Books class? A: I think that a lot of students are shocked when they begin to see which books have been challenged, censored or banned. Q&A > 3
BY ALEKSANDRA SIDOROVA News + Managing Editor
More book titles than ever before were challenged last year — 4,240, according to the American Library Association’s report. Besides restricting thinking, taking books off shelves can also influence how well students learn to read. “The only way to improve and to learn how to read is to learn those skills and at the same time, practice those skills,” said Yong Yu, a professor in SUNY Plattsburgh’s teaching department who specializes in literacy. “If you don’t give (children) a book to read, it’s not going to happen.” In the three decades that the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been administering reading tests to fourth, eighth and 12th graders, not once was the average score considered to be “proficient” in reading — between having “basic” and “advanced” skills. A third of fourth graders who were tested in 2022 didn’t even meet the “basic” benchmark.
Yu said these scores aren’t good representations of how well children are reading because the NAEP’s tests focus on comprehension, which isn’t all reading is. These results also tend to fluctuate year to year. “The results of the assessment itself are not 100% valid in terms of assessing students’ literacy skills in every area, but it is a data point nonetheless,” Yu said. “I think people should be really careful before they interpret, what does this mean?” By reviewing research, the National Reading Panel in 2011 identified five pillars to literacy: phonemic awareness, the knowledge that sounds have corresponding representations in text; phonics, the ability to identify the relationship between sounds and their written counterparts; fluency, the skill to read quickly and expressively while understanding the meaning; vocabulary; and comprehension.
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Researcher compares attitudes toward capitalism BY GRANT TERWILLIGER Staff Writer
Capitalism is described as an economic system in which a country’s trade and industry are driven by private ownership of property for profit. People’s perceptions on the economy stem from their own experiences with the world around them. Kylie King, director of institutional effectiveness at SUNY Plattsburgh, gave a presentation at the Plattsburgh Public Library on the similarities and differences between generations in regard to their feelings on capitalism Oct. 2. King has been working on a research project since 2021 that GRANT TERWILLIGER/Cardinal Points includes collecting responses Kylie King presents at Plattsburgh Public Library on Oct. 2. from different populations of
people to better understand how to navigate democracy and capitalism. “We think this is important to look at as the way that people feel about themselves and the way that they approach the world is related to how we think about the economy, how they think about business ownership, how they think about participation,” King said. King’s research project includes two surveys that have been running for a couple of years. One of them — “Confidence in Capitalism” — allows business leaders to understand the generation that is entering the workforce and their ideals. “When we think about the traits and the personality and the opinions and values that young people are bringing
forward into the workplace, into the economy, it seems like they are getting more certain,” King said. The second survey that King conducted over the last three years was the “Capitalism Barometer” survey, which collected data from American adults 18 and above and asked them about their perceptions of capitalism. The respondents were sorted into categories of detractors, who are unlikely to support capitalism; passives, who are likely to support capitalism; and promoters, who are extremely likely to support capitalism. Not all of the groups can argue their positions on capitalism equally.
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