I’ve had lots of random but related thoughts recently, and I’m compiling them here.
During my first semester teaching, my 18-year-old student asked me–I was 21 at the time–why I was giving college-level work to my classes. I was teaching The Scarlet Letter to my English III students that semester, and they were reading a chapter a night at home and we were discussing it the next day. We were also doing vocabulary and grammar and working on essays here and there. In addition, we were preparing to start working on research papers. It was a heavy grind, but I was determined to offer a good education to my students. I’ll add that I was raised in a privileged environment, and although unlike me a lot of my students had to work, I did not take such circumstances into consideration when plotting my early class assignments. I’ll forever scold myself for that, but I did ease up and eventually adopted a no-homework policy. (I would have a 15-minute homework policy if I were still teaching today.)
At any rate, the student who questioned me had already failed English III with another teacher the previous year. I knew a bit about her because she was my troubled younger cousin’s equally troubled best friend. I was annoyed with her question but took it with a proverbial grain of salt. After all, I myself had graduated from the school where I was teaching. I had student taught at the same school. I aligned all of my lesson plans to the standards in effect at that time, and I used the same curriculum my mentor at the school had used for years. In my naive mind, I was simply trying to give my students a great education.
How misguided I was. A foolish consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds. My 21-year-old mind wasn’t yet developed or challenged enough to be changed.
I liked The Scarlet Letter when I read it in English III in high school, but it was not my favorite novel. That distinction belonged to The Grapes of Wrath, written by my beloved John Steinbeck. In the last two to three years I was in high school, I immersed myself in education, taking humanities classes, going to art museums, listening to classical music, and reading a lot of what was considered “the canon.” I was just not your average high school student; I remember vividly reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by the pool during summer break in between dual enrollment classes. But after high school, after entering into a serious relationship with a boy who was lucky to graduate at all, my priorities changed. I decided I was tired from four years of heavy coursework. I dropped out of honors college because the professor teaching it was assigning a lot of heavy reading material–Socrates, Aristotle, etc.–and I was already taking multiple junior-level English classes as it was. As an English major, I took the required Shakespeare class the summer before my senior year of college, but because I went on a trip, I chose to read only the Cliffs Notes of the history plays to save myself some time while I was partying in Nashville. During my three years of college, I took some really great classes and read literary works I greatly enjoyed, but let me be honest: I did not invest enough time in my education.
By the time I was hired to teach high school English the year after I graduated, I was newly single but still mentally exhausted. Determined not to reinvent the wheel, I closely followed my mentor’s lesson plans where literature was concerned, and that meant reading The Scarlet Letter. I was dismayed that my students didn’t see the beauty in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel because of the difficulty of the language, but I pushed onward–for two semesters and two different sets of students. Then I spent the next summer changing the literature curriculum in my classroom. For year two, I assigned my English III students Frank Norris’s McTeague and my English III Honors students Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I quit teaching a few years later, but through the wonders of social media, I’ve had a fair number of students reach out and tell me how much they loved those two novels. I’ve never had anyone from my inaugural year reach out to extol The Scarlet Letter. (Maybe they didn’t even read it, and if they read the CliffsNotes instead, I don’t know that I could blame them.) Today, I know that I should have read the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story “Young Goodman Brown” and read a more modern novel. My objectives should have been just as much about inspiring a love of reading as about covering American literature.
As a homeschooling parent who taught in the public school system, sometimes parents will lament aloud to me that their kids aren’t fans of reading. They ask me for advice on how to encourage higher-level reading. My opinion is this: Encourage your children to read what they want to read. That should be the basis for everything. Does your kid want to read graphic novels rather than chapter books? Let your kid read graphic novels! There are some great ones these days, including on historical topics. (I am currently reading Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf.) If all your kid wants to read is Harry Potter or Diary of a Wimpy kid or the new Sweet Valley Twins graphic novels, embrace that for a bit. Then use your local librarian or the web site Literature Map to find similar authors or works to branch out to. Take your kid to the library, and talk to the child or teen librarian. Look for books together. And let your kids see you reading, whether you’re reading “classic” literature or mystery fiction or self-help books. The primary goal is to encourage life-long learning, life-long reading.
If you’re a teacher or a homeschooling parent, I say you’ll get further reading more modern, more relevant works that are easier to read. The goal is to encourage kids to read and to develop critical skills through that reading, and you can do that with Sandra Cisneros short stories just as you can with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Even if you’re surveying American literature, you don’t have to read The Scarlet Letter; you can always read “Young Goodman Brown,” a shorter and easier read. You can read an abridged version of Moby Dick if you just want your students to be aware of the work.
I’m really encouraging my kids to play music in our household this year, and I started with desk bells and Boomwhackers. My kids–ages 6 and 12–are really not interested in playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They want to play modern music, even if that music is actually a decade old. Encouraging kids to read is no different. If your child is like high school me and reads John Steinbeck’s The Pearl for school and goes on to read The Grapes of Wrath as a summer project, great. But even if your student never loves reading the older classics but reads modern works voraciously, who cares? Are your objectives being met? If yes, great.
Final note: Banned books–particularly dystopian fiction–are really popular with teens and young adults as they have been as far back as I can remember. Animal Farm, 1984, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse Five, The Handmaid’s Tale, Catcher in the Rye, and A Clockwork Orange are all great reading suggestions for teenagers. (So are McTeague, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Sun Also Rises, my three favorite novels to teach.)
I’ll also note that if you have a reluctant reader, you may want to start with short stories before you “graduate” to novellas or novels. I’ve read The Color Purple so many times, but “Everyday Use” is still my favorite Alice Walker work. The Grapes of Wrath is my favorite novel of all, but I’ve read The Red Pony twice this year. Shorter works just don’t seem as demanding–not even to me. That said, I do not always recommend grabbing the lost works of anyone unless you are deep diving into the work of an author you love. I borrowed The Lost Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald earlier this year and did not even finish it because I disliked the stories so much. (To be fair, I have never been a huge Fitzgerald fan.) On the other hand, I’m currently in the middle of reading the new Harper Lee collection, and her essays have stopped me in my tracks more than once.
Seriously. Just read something. Read something you love. Never stop reading.
Erin
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