Great Books? Not so much.

We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up (WaPo, 8/24/08):

Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."

FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT!

Basically, the gist of this piece is what I've been wondering all along: as a high-school English teacher, what exactly am I teaching? The course descriptions in both the district catalogues and the curriculum framework say something about literature (which differs depending on the grade) but the concepts that are the core of the standards suggest that I'm basically teaching reading and writing. It's been four years--two with an SOL-exam year--and I definitely lean toward thinking that I teach the latter. That probably makes me some really bad, "teach to the test" SOL monkey or something, but when I look at reality, I kinda think I'm right.

Nancy Schnog's commentary here is right on when she goes into some detail about some of the works her high schoolers have encountered, as well as her own children and their struggle with reading list material like "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," a piece that seems like it was chosen because of its multicultural reach by a department chair or teacher who was trying to hit the "reach everybody" mark with just one book. My favorite part, though, is this:

I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.

Why why WHY are 11th grade students being subjected to Wordsworth and Coleridge? I couldn't stand them when I was in college, for crying out loud. And American transcendentalists aren't nearly as exciting as some English wonk makes them out to be. Yes, Nature and Walden serve as part of the backbone of American literature, but while Emerson's ideas can get across if you make going transcendental seem like something really trippy, all I ever got out of Thoreau was that he bought peas. Whoopdee.

That's not to say that great works aren't important, but it's been to my increasing dismay that the fun that can come in reading--even for those kids who don't have much interest in it--is sucked dry by the required elements of your average high school English class. This piggybacks onto my last post, but what we teach needs as far as content is concerned needs to be reexamined. The concepts are pretty solid: comprehension and analysis are worth looking at, although some of the methodology can be changed.

Some suggestions ...

1. Ditch the textbook. In four years of high school English on Long Island, I never, ever had an English textbook. Shit, I didn't have one in junior high from what I can remember. Why, then, in Virginia am I forcing my students to haul around a book that weighs about as much as my 13-month-old son? And what use are they? Oh, I know, they put pictures with the words on the text and provide vocabulary. Yeah, that's great. They also give snippets of various works, sometimes in a way that is appalling.

For instance, the Prentice Hall Literature book I used in 11th grade last year had an excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath that was simply a short chapter describing the movement of a turtle. Really. That's ALL you're doing with Steinbeck, one of the most important writers in American history? I would rather basically spend nine weeks on The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden than read half of the stuff we were reading. In fact, I had my students turn their textbooks in around March because I was more or less done using them after we read poetry from the Harlem Renaissance.

I think poetry was pretty much all I used the book for anyway ... and even then, it was limited. When we read "I Hear America Singing," I had students break it down but also read several other pieces that were responsive in nature or whose themes could be considered responsive. This ranged from Langston Hughes's "I Too Sing America" to "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy (I also used "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ... yunno, because I have a desire to look cool or something, I guess). There was another poem, whose name escapes me, that was a Native American poet's response to that poem and if you read the margins in the teacher's edition where all of the teaching suggestions were, there was something about how the author of that particular poem was actually wrong in saying Whitman excluded her people because he actually did mention them in his poetry.

No, really. A textbook criticizing someone's views, totally missing the point and sound like one of those people who bitches about "political correctness."

2. Allow for more freedom of choice. The most appalling part of this piece is when Schnog mentions that The Catcher in the Rye, a teenage standard, is being read by eighth graders. She posts something a student of hers once wrote:

But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.

Why do I have to go through early American writers and other dry, boring works in the first nine weeks when THEY'RE NOT TESTED ON ANY OF THAT SHIT?! Why can't I start with something that will at least hook them? The greatest success I've had in 11th grade has come with A Raisin in the Sun. Granted, most of the students I had could say two things about it: 1) they didn't understand why Walter turns down the money at the end; and 2) they remember the line about the faggoty shoes. Hey, I never said that connecting with kids meant that they turned into brainiacs right away.

But that was in the spring. I started the year with The Crucible, a play that I love but can be murder on a junior, especially one who doesn't have the ability or just doesn't care to read at his or her own grade level. With an advanced level class, I was able to connect it to a higher concept of fear of "the other" (fear of commies doesn't resonate with students born after 1989); with a general/inclusion class, I was begrudgingly doing the classic, "This is Puritan life" bit and focusing on simply getting through it and making them remember what happened.

3. Stop Testing. I'd love to stop SOL testing but we know that's not going to happen. But why does every piece of literature have to have a terms quiz or vocab quiz or plot test or essay analysis? Can't some of the discovery of stuff like symbols and irony come organically as you read through the text instead of, "Okay, stop. What do the eyes on the billboard represent?"

To this day, I'll never forget sitting in 11th grade Regents English, looking at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--praying for my own demise because I hated that class and I LOATHE Mark Twain and always have--and having one of the less-bright bulbs in my reading group figure out on his own that Jim was a Christ figure. We weren't even looking for it. I mean, that's a moment you don't get in a lot of classes because we're so focused on covering certain things with certain works.

But the reality is that we're stuck with what we have because we don't let ourselves get lost in what we're teaching the same way we love to get lost in what we read for pleasure. And that's sad.