DTLA - In April 2015, Dan Johnson began volunteering to teach a weekly English class at the Midnight Mission. Soon after starting, Johnson — a Downtown resident, writer and calendar editor for Los Angeles Downtown News — realized the eighth-grade level curriculum was insufficient, to say the least.
[Get DTLA stories in our daily email newsletter.]
The class materials focused on esoteric lessons on split participles and verb usage. There was little that might awaken imaginations and inspire discussion.
“Nobody is coming to you on the street asking for a definition of an adverb,” Johnson remarked. “I started bringing in pieces of writing like the old Woody Guthrie song about Fifth Street, or John Fante talking about Bunker Hill. And students responded really well to these things.”
Thus, the idea for the Skid Row Reader was born. A collection of 26 essays and stories from myriad authors on myriad subjects, the 78-page textbook was crafted by Johnson over the course of a year. An initial run of 100 textbooks has just been released.
Downtown News talked to Johnson about the project and why reading matters on Skid Row.
L.A. Downtown News: What’s the format of the English class?
Johnson: It’s an hour class every Wednesday in the morning, and we have a core group of about six people, though there can be 10 or sometimes just a single student showing up.
The Midnight Mission has participation programs with diagnostic tests, and you’re assigned certain classes. The challenge on my end is that this class is a very easy one to skip, and the infraction isn’t going to get you kicked out of the mission or anything like that.
So what keeps people coming back each week is if you can promise something new and interesting. I’ll bring in material that’s relevant to some lesson but I’m not married to where the material will take us. If it sparks a question or a story or thought, we roll with it.
Q: Is it challenging to get students on board with the class?
A: Often, we get students who don’t appreciate the process of learning. Let me be clear: There are no dumb students. Everyone has intelligence, because you don’t survive in this particular world on Skid Row being unintelligent. The friction is sometimes mental health. Other times it’s a resentment of someone making you do something you don’t want to do, which we can all relate to.
If a student comes in and tells me off and doesn’t want to participate, they’re welcome to do that. Or sleep. When it starts affecting others’ ability to learn, they’re invited to spend the rest of the hour somewhere else. But students generally responded well to different new readings, and I had the idea to make a textbook that’s a jumble of ideas but a core text we can revert to that’s also savvier to the experience of the people.
Q: How is this project funded?
A: One bright spot on election day last year was that I got a modest $1,000 grant from the Vera R. Campbell Foundation, which offers a number of philanthropic grants across L.A. They got in touch and liked my idea, but they needed a partner organization to back me. So I reached out to a friend, Bill Deverell, the executive director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. The organization offered to join and matched the grant, which allowed us to print 100 textbooks.
Q: What’s in the Skid Row Reader?
A: I’ve got a decent amount of material from books that I teach out of, and I had a call for contributions. We ended up with writers from many backgrounds, most of whom I did not know personally.
That included the author David Shields, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, even vocalist Randy Blythe from the metal band Lamb of God, who sent us a personal piece about traveling to the West Coast for the first time and living on the street. I wrote a lot, too, and we centered the materials on themes of history, perception and context.
Q: What comes next?
A: It’s been a long process, but the important thing is the longer job of integrating this as a useful tool.
I obviously don’t have the answer to Skid Row. The Reader won’t change how Skid Row operates. And this is often a low-yield exercise with students — there’s no telling how many people will take it on. But there’s a large gap in how we handle homelessness. We want to get people housed and say that’s a good job, but we need to work more on helping people figure out life and how to find a place in society, while being in recovery. Hopefully the Reader helps people discover a critical analysis of the world around them.
© Los Angeles Downtown News 2018
