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ACTIVITY 1.17 continued
Teacher Notes
94 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 11
SCAFFOLDING THE TEXT-DEPENDENT QUESTIONS
6. Craft and Structure (RI.11–12.6) How does the author’s mixture of slang, colloquialisms, and pop culture references—dropouts, hippies, “phonies,” “plumb lazy”—with his formal
tone and language contribute to the text’s effectiveness? Reread paragraph 11 and
identify and think about the author’s use of pop culture references. What does this say about his knowledge of current culture? What does the formal tone of this and other paragraphs in the essay say about his relationship to his topic?
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94 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 11
ACTIVITY 1.17
continued
The Road to Success
My Notes
though badly threatened, is not extinct. Much has been written, for instance, about the fitful scholastic career of Thomas P. F. Hoving, New York’s former Parks Commissioner and now director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving was a dropout’s
dropout, entering and leaving schools as if they were motels, often at the request of the management. Still, he must have learned something during those unorthodox years, for he dropped in again at the top of his profession.
7 His case reminds me of another boyhood—that of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the most popular literary hero of the postwar period. There is nothing accidental about the grip that this dropout continues to hold on the affections of an entire American generation. Nobody else, real or invented, has made such an engaging shambles of our “goal-oriented society,” so gratified our secret belief that the “phonies” are in power and the good guys up the creek. Whether Holden has also reached the top of his chosen field today is one of those speculations that delight fanciers of good fiction. I speculate that he has. Holden Caulfield, incidentally, is now thirty-six.
8 I’m not urging everyone to go out and fail just for the sheer therapy of it, or to quit college just to coddle some vague discontent. Obviously it’s better to succeed than to flop, and in general a long education is more helpful than a short one. (Thanks to my own education, for example, I can tell George Eliot from T. S. Eliot, I can handle the pluperfect tense in French, and I know that Caesar beat the Helvetii because he had enough frumentum.) I only mean that failure isn’t bad in itself, or success automatically good.
9 Fred Zinnemann, who has directed some of Hollywood’s most honored movies, was asked by a reporter, when A Man for All Seasons won every prize, about his previous film, Behold a Pale Horse, which was a box-office disaster. “I don’t feel any obligation to be successful,” Zinneman replied. “Success can be dangerous—you feel you know it all. I’ve learned a great deal from my failures.” A similar point was made by Richard Brooks about his ambitious money loser, Lord Jim. Recalling the three years of his life that went into it, talking almost with elation about the troubles that befell
his unit in Cambodia, Brooks told me that he learned more about his craft from this considerable failure than from his many earlier hits.
10 It’s a point, of course, that applies throughout the arts. Writers, playwrights, painters and composers work in the expectation of periodic defeat, but they wouldn’t keep going back into the arena if they thought it was the end of the world. It isn’t the end of the world. For an artist—and perhaps for anybody—it is the only way to grow.
11 Today’s younger generation seems to know that this is true, seems willing to take the risks in life that artists take in art. “Society,” needless to say, still has the upper hand—it sets the goals and condemns as a failure everybody who won’t play. But the dropouts and the hippies are not as afraid of failure as their parents and grandparents. This could mean, as their elders might say, that they are just plumb lazy, secure in the comforts of an affluent state. It could also mean, however, that they just don’t buy the old standards of success and are rapidly writing new ones.
12 Recently it was announced, for instance, that more than two hundred thousand Americans have inquired about service in VISTA (the domestic Peace Corps) and that, according to a Gallup survey, “more than 3 million American college students would serve VISTA in some capacity if given the opportunity.” This is hardly the road to riches or to an executive suite. Yet I have met many of these young volunteers, and they are not pining for traditional success. On the contrary, they appear more fulfilled than the average vice-president with a swimming pool.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.