I Don't Mind Being Named Martha Anymore

On Embracing the Talking Dog—or Silly Girl—in Me

I'm almost fond of Martha Stewart. She's got chutzpah, rising from the ashes of securities fraud. But anyone who's seen the messy piles in my house would know that I loathe housekeeping and hand-woven flower wreaths. I lack that Martha's spit and polish and need for physical order.

I'm not embracing my inner housekeeper here. Yet a recent mention of a children's book called Martha Doesn't Say Sorry! in a New Yorker article got me thinking about my given name, my long-time ambivalence towards it—and the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I'm growing into it.

According to Daniel Zalewski's article, the latest picture-book Martha by Samantha Berger involves a "stubborn" otter. It has a transparent moral message, Zalewski notes, meant to encourage discipline.

But my first reaction was to think, oh, no! Not another wacky animal character named Martha!

There's already Martha the hippo of all those George and Martha books by James Marshall; there's Martha the talking dog of Martha Speaks and other titles by Susan Meddaugh, now a PBS cartoon series.

To be fair, Zalewski's article is about a lot more than potential Martha-bashing; he argues that many "obstreperous" children's books today depict parents as wimps. He also cites a slew of other characters named everything from Olivia to Finn to Lilly. There's no nefarious trend in naming creatures Martha—I think.

But do other people second-guess their name, as I have since childhood? Some do, I know. For those crossing cultural boundaries, often in the most painful way, it's a serious issue. See The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, in which an Indian immigrant's son resists being named Gogol Ganguli. Or talk to any international adoptee, even one as young as my seven-year-old son.

Back in the day, I longed to be Miranda or Antoinette or Angelique. Instead I got stuck with a long-dead grandmother's name, somebody with whom I'd never shared a personal connection.

I hated being a girl named Martha in the 1960s and 1970s. It was right up there with "A Boy Named Sue." In my Bay Area schools, I was the only one among a swath of Kathys and Debbies and Sherrys. There were a few Martas and Maritas, but the Spanish variations seemed to have infinitely more soul than my Anglicized "tha."

Flashback to third grade: It's February. President's Day is approaching, along with my annual dread of what will be shouted at me on the playground: "Martha Washington! Martha Washington? How's George?"

A year later, I'm at Bridget B's pool party, a few months after the Beatles's White Album has been released. I walk into the B family's swanky new house in a new suburban tract of what will eventually become the outer reaches of Silicon Valley—she's got a pool!—and the other girls giggle, as Bridget plays, "Martha My Dear."

I've never heard it before. I'm blushing, and I hate blushing. I suspect Bridget is trying to humiliate me. "It's so cute!" she insists.

I was still a child, but my response then was more complicated than hating "Martha Washington." I was embarrassed by the idea that I could ever be anyone's inspiration. It was even more depressing when I found out later that Paul McCartney wrote the song for his sheepdog.

Flash forward: I'm an adult hanging out with my friends' kids—and later the friends of my son—and these children love to say to me, "George and Martha!" (downcast eyes, sly grins) or "Are you a dog?" (snort, snort). I laugh along, because the kids seem so delighted to meet an actual human being named Martha.

Not so long ago, a friend of mine shakes her head and tells me, "You really don't seem like a Martha, you know?"

I'm guessing that's a compliment. Various baby-name books and websites translate it as "lady" (from the Aramaic "Marta") or mistress of the house. It's a good fit for Martha Stewart but didn't stick to Martha "Calamity Jane" Cannary Burke, frontier hellion of the late 1800s.

By 2008, the name Martha was ranked 617 in popularity, according to the Social Security Administration. At least it made the top 1,000, but Martha has been on a steady decline for a century, with a few spikes around 2000. Emma and Isabella were the most popular girl names in 2008; Madison was fourth, and Olivia came in a hot sixth.

(I feel compelled to point out that, in addition to Martha, many animal characters have old-fashioned women's names like Olivia and Frances—a pig and badger, respectively—as well as Opal and Daphne of the Toot and Puddle universe—also pigs.)

Meanwhile, Namipedia users on the Baby Name Wizard site rated Martha as sounding smart and strong but not young or sexy.

Yet when I think about Martha the hippo or Martha the talking dog—and really take in those wonderful books—I realize that maybe the name fits me better than I used to believe.

Martha the dog can't shut up after she eats a bowl of alphabet soup and gets the gift of human gab. In Martha Speaks, she annoys her family by rambling on as they're watching TV or reading:

"There's a poodle over on Circuit Street I'd really like to play with. He's small, but what a dog! And speaking of small, I'm sure you're all curious about the early days of my life..."

Martha the hippo wears huge print skirts and is George's best friend. She's pictured smoking a cigar and playing a saxophone. In George and Martha Back in Town, she stands on her head on a surfboard. George, the lifeguard, has a tough time reigning her in:

"Very soon George saw that someone was disobeying the rules.
'No horsing around!' he called through his megaphone.
'It's all right!' shouted Martha. 'It's only me!'

By college, I identified with "Martha My Dear." It became an affectionate nickname from some of my closest friends, who would address letters to me as "M.M. Dear." Others still call me Marth or M ("Em").

The most famous of us—Martha Graham, Martha Stewart, the fictional Martha Jones of Doctor Who—make things happen. Martha may even have become cool because of that sexy Doctor Who character, at least in the U.K.

So is it possible that I actually like my old-fashioned, unpopular name?

This is a fate I never could have imagined at fifteen. But it's true. I can save the world with words, especially in the guise of the latest Martha Jones. I'm zany and stubborn and I refuse to apologize. I can't stop talking or writing, and what's wrong with that?

Even Paul McCartney has said Martha was his muse, not just a sheepdog.

When you find yourself in the thick of it
Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you
Silly girl...

How to Discourage Young Readers: Turn Books Into Numbers

In first and second grades, I had a hard time with reading. There was trouble in my family. My mother had been hospitalized, and my dad was a struggling graduate student, caring for two small children. I got stuck in the lowest reading group at school. I sat with other "under-performing" kids, obsessively drawing pictures of horses.

Oddly, I was a whiz at arithmetic. I'm guessing that numbers didn't scare me, stripped as they were of drama. But stories? The ever-shifting relations among words and meaning? Too risky.

Decades later, books are my profession. I'm now running a blog called WOMEN = BOOKS, and have encountered far more book-blogging sites than I ever would have dreamed. (Did you know that the second annual "Book Blogger Appreciation Week" kicked off in mid-September?)

Yet how I learned to read can't be distilled into an easily reproduced action plan with "metrics." I've been thinking a lot about reading education lately, in part because my seven-year-old son has yet to discover the joys of chapter books. (I'm a little worried, though I know I shouldn't be.) More to the point, Accelerated Reader, the bane of many a literary parent in the public schools, has clumped into my awareness like a bully with no sense of humor.

In "Reading by the Numbers" an excellent but disturbing New York Times essay, novelist Susan Straight reflects on the rise of AR, a "reading management" software system produced by Renaissance Learning.

It's been around for awhile, so my only justification for ignorance until now is that my son's just reached second grade and is going to a groovy private school. Still, in an earlier piece that I wrote about Straight's essay, I was surprised by the loathing for AR expressed by some parent- and teacher-commenters.

Here's my friend Angela Mann, mother of two teenagers in California: "Ah, the AR system. My pet hate. My kids have been forced to use this hideous reading system for years."

Here's another old friend of mine, a long-time teacher in Washington state who wishes not to be named: "As a Title 1 Reading instructor in an elementary school, I have experienced Accelerated Reader and detest it. My opinion, garnered from my 18 years experience in public education, is that teachers who use it are lazy."

It's hard to blame public schools for pushing reading as if it's the answer to everything from McJobs to Global Warming. (They're pushing math and science, too.) But parents and teachers have every right to be angry about mindless quantification just to "make the numbers."

The education bureacracy, lashed on by companies that profit from curriculum "systems" like AR, are trying to trap the equivalent of a many-armed goddess in a soda can.

Accelerated Reader is used by upwards of 75,000 schools around the country, notes Straight. Participating students get points for reading books, with a goal of 50 points for outside reading in a given class.

That means students get a point tally instead of that tingle of recognition when a story speaks to them. As my teacher-friend explains,

Teachers use AR to measure comprehension on "leveled" books. The child says he/she has read a book. The teacher tells them to log on to the computer, answer the questions, and return with a printed-out score. Why not listen to a child read and talk about the book to measure comprehension?

Then there's the way books are rated. Straight says she delved into the mathematics of the ratings system, which likely has something to do with page length, average sentence difficulty, and percentage of tough vocabulary words. In this scheme, according to Straight, Willa Cather's My Antonia gets 14 points, while Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gets 44.

I like the Harry Potter books just fine, but comparing one to My Antonia is not only apples and oranges; it's simply the wrong message about what makes a great book great.

Renaissance Learning's website carries the tagline: "Advanced Technology for Data-Driven Schools." But how do you measure character development and emotional catharsis? My friend Angela doesn't hold back about AR's banality:

I've seen it turn readers into point counters and strategists. What can I read to give me enough points? Why should I read this when I've already got my points for the semester? Why should I read this when it is not an AR book and doesn't count?

My teacher-friend in Washington adds:

A few years ago, shortly after AR was purchased by our school, I took an AR test myself on a book I'd read many, many times. Rather than focusing on the deeper meaning of the beautiful historical fiction story by Joan Lowery Nixon, the historical facts, or the motivation of the characters, the AR test asked me about the color of a dress a character wore. I had no idea. I was stunned. The question had no relevance in the story at all.

Not all parents and teachers hate Accelerated Reader, but as I've discovered after googling around, opposition to it is nothing new. On the Family Education Network's site for parents (FamilyEducation.com), an entry about Accelerated Reader has generated 30-plus reviews going back to 2000. Titles range from "Excellent" and "AR Encourages Reading" to "AR Sucks!!!" and "AR Can Shame Readers."

The latter review, posted in 2004, opens with, "My son is now in 5th grade. He used to love to read. Hates it now." This writer concluded, "I am forming a parent organization to fight AR current policy. Anyone want to join?"

For me, the ineffable thing about reading clicked by third grade. My dad had a teaching position at a local college, and we'd moved out of graduate student housing into a suburban tract. Suddenly I was reading chapter books. In my memory, it feels like the Doctor Doolittle series saved me.

Earlier still, there are family photos of me as a toddler looking at books with my father. He says "leopard" was one of my first words, because I loved animals. One of my favorite books in elementary school was The Golden Treasury of Natural History. (It took awhile before fiction ruled my universe.) Regardless, I didn't lack encouragement from my parents.

But fiction or non-, I always hated the canned reading assignments in school. By fourth grade, I was really hating the SRA program, which involved a series of color-coded stories and assignments that you worked through, moving up the levels. It was a competition, getting up to Gold or Purple.

The current promotion of AR has made me curious again about SRA—aka the SRA Reading Laboratories. These materials have now been used by more than a 100 million students, claims McGraw-Hill, their current publisher. On the publisher's website, the beginnings of the SRA reading program's 50-year history are described this way:

A lesser man would have given up.... [H]is oversized shoe box with its sections of coloured story cards and questions, which the students could mark themselves, didn't look like a text book; and that's what the educational publishers he took it to said...

Never mind that SRA ended up with McGraw-Hill, a textbook behemoth. According to this telling, the humble author of these shoebox materials, Don Parker, finally hit up a small publishing company called SRA (Science Research Associates): "It wasn't the sort of name you would associate with a schoolbook publisher, and indeed it wasn't—it produced aptitude tests for soldiers returning from the Korean wars trying to find a job."

Parker was supposedly doing battle with old-fasioned textbooks like "Dick and Jane." But the "Science" in SRA's name and those aptitude tests for soldiers tell the real story. When publisher Lyle Spencer of SRA agreed to take on the shoebox project, "It was the best decision he ever made."

Financially, no doubt. Yet for a self-motivated reader like me, nothing could have been more beside the point. I lived for free library days.

So how do we—or the schools—spark a love of reading in children? What matters most? I believe teaching students to be critical thinkers about what they're reading, whether it's a Twilight book or Pride and Prejudice, is crucial. But giving kids points for reading books neither encourages analysis (although Renaissance Learning would claim its AR system of quizzes does just that) nor a love of reading.

Consider this excerpt from Straight's essay and all it says about how novels expand our notion of the world in ways that can never be quantified:

One day last spring, after my eighth-grade daughter finished reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” (assigned reading for class), she sat on the couch, thoughtful and silent for a long time. Then she looked over at me and said: “I think that was one of the best books I’ve ever read. And not everybody could understand it. But I do. Especially Tom Robinson.”

Her father is 6-foot-4, 300 pounds and black. We talked about how American society has historically projected racial fear onto innocent men, and about how Harper Lee portrayed the town of Maycomb so vividly that you could see the streets and porches...

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is worth 15 points.

As I sensed at six years old, numbers are safer than stories; they can be pinned down. But a mom in the hospital? Racism? That requires something very messy—a lot of thinking and feeling.

Another version of this post orginally appeared in Talking Writing as "My Antonia Vs. Harry Potter: Crunching the Great Books." Thanks to writer Jeanne Schinto for sending me the link to Straight's essay.

For Shame

I've almost finished reading Scott Turow's One L, a memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School in 1975, and I'm struck by how bedeviled he felt by shame. "Me, too! Me, too!" I want to shout. This past year, while studying Vietnamese at Harvard, I struggled mightily. Learning a new language at my age has become a prolonged internal wrestling match with my fear that I'll never be good enough—a good enough mom, a good enough translator of Vietnamese culture for my son, a good enough writer.

Turow's account sounds so familiar. The context is very different—first-year law student in classes of 100-plus litigious brainiacs vs. my small language class—but his observations feel fresh 30 years later. He likens studying the law to studying a foreign language. And as the semester grinds on and he sinks into depression and bombs a mock exam, he makes clear that this kind of intensive learning experience lets loose personal demons (or "my enemy," he calls it) very fast.

Here's just one quote: "Over the weekend I remained in agony and disarray. I had never before failed an exam. That it would have no bearing on my grade did not matter. I had been confirmed in my suspicion that I was a ludicrous, miserable, unworthy failure."

Ah, Shame. You are a great humbler. Perhaps you have the firmest grip on us perfectionistic types. I've begun working with a Vietnamese tutor this summer, and she corrects my pronunciation every other word. I don't love it. It's sort of great. It takes me far outside myself—as being a parent does—into landscapes where I'm constantly checking the map.

Sometimes it's just plain funny, like the time in class when we were answering questions about a Vietnamese folk tale. In it, the River God (Thuỷ tinh) and Mountain God (Sơn tinh) end up locked in battle. As I attempted to say in Vietnamese that the angry River God finally had to withdraw his troops, I managed to mix up the word for troops (quân) with the word for pants (quần). My teacher replied, deadpan: "So Thuỷ tinh is taking off his pants?"

My seven-year-old son still delights in telling this story on his mom, who unlike Mary Poppins, is practically imperfect in every way. Vui lắm!

As for Scott Turow, he's still practicing law and writing terrific mystery novels. From Turow's web site: "Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver."