CSotD: Reading, required and otherwise

Mike Peterson Published: December 3, 2012 1 minute 3 comments

Curtis
Curtis touches on the current craze of horror stories for young readers.

(By the way, I love the disconnect in panels two and three between Curtis's highly rhetorical question and Barry's response. He wasn't looking for an actual answer, little brother.)

I don't know how teachers handle book report after book report based on these dystopic "Hunger Game" knock-offs and Twilightish vampire bodice-rippers. "Hunger Games" itself was quite well-written and worthwhile. "Twilight" was awful stuff.

The fact that 90 percent of it is crap isn't a condemnation of kid lit. It's simply Sturgeon's Law, which was created with literature in mind but, really, applies to just about everything else, too.

As editor of a kid-oriented, kid-written publication, I am well aware that they are cranking these books out as fast as the presses can run, that the kids are snatching them up in droves, and that some of these authors have become rock stars.

Good teachers will welcome that. Not-so-good teachers won't be able to see beyond the literary quality to the fact that kids are eager to absorb books.

The question becomes, how do you turn eager readers into good readers?

Well, you can't inspire kids by cramming stuff down their throats, even if it's good stuff.

I learned the hard way that teachers don't assign a particular book to find out if you'll hate it as much as they did: Referring to "Ethan Frome" as "maudlin Victorian melodrama" is not going to get you an "A" from a teacher who was hoping to create a classroom full of lifelong Edith Wharton fans.

But at least she missed with something good, mostly by making it a full-class assignment. It might have been great for the right individual 10th graders.

And offering choices is pointless if those choices aren't well-considered.

I've seen way too many cases where teachers hand out brain-dead lists of same-old-same-old from which they require kids to choose books to report on. One school district a few years ago had a list for fourth graders that included "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

I deal with some awfully bright kids, but I don't know any fourth graders who could even get through, much less begin to understand, Gulliver. And the recurrent arguments over Huck Finn skirt the point that it is not a kid's book in the first place.

As I've said several times before, if having a child narrator makes Huck Finn a book for kids, then "Black Beauty" must have been written for horses.

But I digress. Full rant can be found here.

Meanwhile, my sense is that teachers who actually care about this stuff are happy to have a kid turn in a report on any book longer and more complex than "Pat the Bunny."

And, if you are hoping to elevate their taste beyond adolescent pulp fiction, there are two steps:

1. Let them learn how to be critical within their chosen genre. In my editing gig, I've had kids write reviews of these dubious books in which they noted that the writer seemed to lose track of the plot or that the story bogged down in the middle. The quality of the source material may be crap, but that's perfectly valid criticism and analysis.

Teachers should be looking for that from their best students regardless of what they're reading, though I'd be content with plot regurgitation from kids who do well to read "Twilight" all the way through rather than the first 30 pages of something from the canon. If they can follow a complex plot and understand even cardboard motivations, they may be excelling at their own level.

Don't give up on improving their taste or their skills, but don't obsess over how they get there.

2. Which is to say, if you want to move kids up to better literature, pay attention to them, not to the rulebook, and play to their strengths and interests.

A bright kid who enjoys the romance of "Twilight" can be transitioned to "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights."

An enthusiastic report on "The Hunger Games" begs for an introduction to "Lord of the Flies" or "Brave New World."

And a kid who just likes vampires and slashers should at least be introduced to Edgar Allan Poe, though he might also enjoy the irony of O. Henry, if you choose the right stories to start with.

But the real place to start is by having the kid put his nose in a book. That part is critical.

So, anyway, I don't know where Ray Billingsley is taking this, but we shall see. I'm going to be as interested as Barry in finding out how the teacher reacts.

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Mat

Reading assignments in middle school and high school did a lot to discourage me from reading. Only a couple books were really captivating and interesting (most notably Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe). However, the vast majority of reading assignments followed the same pattern: Force myself to read the requisite chapters assigned to us for the days in question and then try to find the points the teachers wanted to discuss in class. This isn’t fun for books that aren’t fun to read quickly (e.g. The Odyssey or anything Shakespearean when you aren’t attuned to his style of prose) and destroys a fair amount of interest in books that should be interesting.
For instance, in 10th grade, I read Lord of the Flies in class. The book should have been interesting to the typical teenage male (violence, anarchy, strife, drama, etc). However, the problem was when the teacher started discussing symbolism. She would, essentially, authoritatively tell us that the book is symbolic of certain things, but the arguments seemed rather dubious. While, as an older, more seasoned reader, I might be able to make the allegorical connections of some things (as well as connections to other concepts that aren’t mentioned), the problem in class is that the teacher was telling us to essentially accept the symbolism as she described it. I found this type of “discussion” counter-intuitive to enjoyment of literature, which certainly turned me off from reading books in general.
Once I began college and was free to whichever book I wanted at whatever pace I wanted to, my interest in reading came back. When reading at a more leisurely pace, I also managed to pick up on themes and concepts that I would have gone over my head if I had to force myself to read at a quicker pace. It also allowed me to sidestep whatever dubious concepts would have been foisted upon me had I been a classroom setting.
Ultimate point is that reading novels should be pleasurable experience, but school essentially made it a chore. Moreover, teachers should get with the times and start providing more contemporary literature. When reading assigned books, the vast majority of the books I read were well-tread novels that were at the youngest probably 40 years old, but tended to be much older. To that extent, I felt disconnected from what I was reading. While such a disconnect may be desirable in certain realms of fiction (e.g. Sci-Fi & Fantasy) it can be jarring when it comes to period dramas (Of Mice and Men, the aforementioned Huck Finn). When I read no book that was anywhere near the time period I grew up in (except when I found them on my own), it just further distanced me from interest in the assigned books. Sure, Holden Caulfield is a angsty, rebellious teenager in a story meant to appeal to angsty, rebellious teenager, but being set in 1923 and written in 1951, the angsty, rebellious teenager is essentially in a foreign country with different customs, which can make it difficult to relate to

Dec 03,2012
Mary in Ohio

My philosphy exactly. And some of the other English teachers were highlly outraged by this. I began teaching when it was still The Hardy Boys, some of the most poorly written crap ever. But if they wanted to read, that was my point.
Having 6th graders read Tom Sawyer wasn’t much fun either.
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the best books ever, but the beginning confused ME when I first read it in high school.

Dec 03,2012
Mike Peterson

I read a piece once — can’t remember where — about “community reads” and it said “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the perfect community read because the point of the book is so perfectly and completely unambiguous.
You DO have to understand the Jim Crow South, however, and that gets into Mat’s point about Steinbeck, etc. Part of appreciating literature is bringing some background to it — if you don’t know how the Depression and Dust Bowl worked, or the place of men and women in those days, you can’t read much of Steinbeck. And I think much of the humor of Jane Austen would be lost on someone who didn’t understand the constraints women operated under.
Which reminds me: Nobody ever said that Jane Austen was funny. I didn’t get into her until I was nearly 40 and then I fell out of my chair. Why didn’t anyone say she was a brilliant comic writer, and not just “Northanger Abbey” but all of it?
Or is it the case that, if you encounter Austen in English class, you’re not told it’s okay to laugh?

Dec 03,2012

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CSotD: Reading, required and otherwise

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Mat

Mary in Ohio

Mike Peterson

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