Reading Boring Books

EdWeek just ran a long complaint about assigning boring books in English class, carrying some extra heft because it came from a school district superintendent. Erich May is currently superintendent of the Brookville, PA, school district, which is just down the road from me, which I guess means some day I may get the chance to meet him and tell him personally how far off the mark I think he is.

He trots out the opening lines of The Scarlet Letter, the Nathanial Hawthorne warhorse and calls it ugly. And Wuthering Heights, too. And any author from then or before. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spencer, Browning, Blake, “and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s.” May says he doesn’t “mean to reject the canon,” but instead suggests we should “leave the canon to the English majors.”

May wants us to understand that Kids These Days have dumped books in favor of screens. May argues that “we are losing the Battle for the Book because teens and young adults are not reading books.”

For high school English teachers, the job used to be teaching students to read things that are rigorous and complex. But it is no longer a given that they will read at all. Now more than ever, the priority for high school English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read.

May says we should be getting comprehension, literary analysis, interpretation and evaluation to students, but those goals are “more important than reading any particular piece of literature.”

There is, he asserts, “no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays” when there’s other stuff out there that teens “would be more likely to enjoy.” Oy.

I’m not unsympathetic to his point. Particularly with students who read little on their own, it’s important to give them something with a good hook. But if we leave the canon to the English majors, where will the English majors come from?

More importantly, May, who taught English for about six years back in the Oughts before embarking on a series of administrative jobs, seems to be missing understanding of the English teacher’s job.

Annika Hernandez offers a good set of responses.

* English teachers mostly already emphasize modern works (if they teach complete works at all).

* An English teachers job is not just to assign works that students will enjoy most. Imagine, I’ll add, that we told history teachers to teach only the parts of history that students like, or phys ed to teach only the games students already play, or band and choir directors to teach their ensembles only music they already know. Imagine if we told math teachers to teach only the interesting stuff.

* English class is not simply for teaching skills and the content with which the skills are taught doesn’t matter. This skills-centered approach has been a huge bust for the past twenty-some years.

* The classic parts of the canon are not just for (probably snooty) elites.

May writes as if “assign” means toss the book at the students and wish them good luck. That’s not the gig.

The job is to show students why a work is interesting, and to help them find their way into it. Sometimes that means helping them navigate difficult language. Sometimes that means helping them look for compelling ideas or themes. It always means pointing out the features that make the work compelling and interesting.

The Last Bookstore-- a must-visit in LA

This has always been a challenge for teachers, and one of the reasons that a narrow required reading list creates problems. I was required to teach Julius Caesar for a decade or so, and it took me years to find a way to sell it (How far would you go if you thought someone near you was about to be the next Hitler? How often has your life gotten derailed because you misread signals?). But there were also works that I was always excited to teach. We talk about teachers with “infectious” enthusiasm for a topic, but a closer examination will show that the teacher “infected” students by serving as a native guide to the territory. That’s the gig.

Please note-- the gig is not to “make” a work interesting. If you don’t know what is interesting or compelling about it, you can’t “make” it interesting, you shouldn’t be teaching it. And the list of works that teachers find interesting and compelling will vary from teacher to teacher.

My old teaching colleague finished a year with seniors by studying Paradise Lost. She loved that work so much that seniors would spend the last part of the school year--after their grades were set, after their diplomas were ensured, after their college admissions were guaranteed, even after they were released from a requirement to come to school at all-- would sit in her room and work feverishly on their final Milton project. I could never have done that unit in a million years-- I neither know nor love the work well enough.

On the other hand, one of my teacher boasts is that I got a group of non-college bound seniors completely absorbed with MacBeth, to the point that they confidently judged the AP seniors’ MacBeth project.

You prepare the ground. You introduce the ideas. You walk them through the hard parts and difficult language. You show them what is exciting and engaging about a work. On top of that, you also show them that there are different types of works out there, different cultures and styles and views of How The World Works, and that just because they don’t like Dickenson, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will hate Browning. You can even teach them that just because they hate something, that doesn’t mean it’s awful, and that as sentient carbon-based life forms, they get to choose what they read. I always found it was supremely liberating for all of us in a classroom for me to say to a student, “I know you don’t like this, and that is cool. Give me some time to explain why some people do, and then we’ll move on to the next thing.” Permission to dislike a work of literature without being told you have somehow failed is a magical thing.

Every teacher has their own personal canon, and they should be making it wider and deeper every year, and certainly “does this have anything to say to my students” is an important question to be asking. And occasionally, when you are handed a work to teach that you find initially boring and uninteresting, you need to dig deep, do some homework, and find the hook. That’s important, too, because sometimes “boring and uninteresting” as code words for “hard and confusing” and working through those barriers will help you as a teacher understand the barriers that your students are facing.

You’re teaching not only reading and literature and culture and different ways of being human; you are also teaching how to be interested in something. That’s work worth doing.