And Julie is right.
But to what extent?
Look, I love to read. And I want everybody to love reading as much as I do. I love reading into things and understanding stuff and being able to analyze better than a lot of adults I know.
But forcing kids to read things they aren't interested in and that they won't understand isn't going to help.
A lot of the problem with kids in high school, especially on the lower levels, is that they hate to read. Once the first few grades of elementary school passed and we started being forced to read things that were above our grade level (Shakespeare in fifth grade) or we weren't interested in, they lost interest. And nobody bothered to revive it.
In every school curriculum I've ever seen, nobody bothers to let kids help choose what they're going to read and analyze. They're forced to read Merchant of Venice in eighth grade. Who the hell understands Merchant of Venice in eighth grade?! I certainly didn't.
And I'm somebody who has always loved the classics and loved reading. I read adult lit when I was eleven; Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre were both read before I was 15. All Things Great And Small has proudly sat on my shelf since I was 12.
But I still hated the books I had to read in school.
And the analyzation? It was terrible. It was all authorial intent (which doesn't exist) or details that we didn't care about. Maybe if we talked about the story as a whole and who we liked and why and what it said about the story - maybe that would have gotten my attention.
But it never did, because by the time I was allowed to study in that manner, I was in an AP class.
And the kids who needed that most? Weren't even in honors.
So I agree. Kids need to read and understand more.
But not things that are dry. Incorporate texts that they want to read. I'm a firm believer that the first week of school should be allowing students to choose what they'll be learning for the first semester of high school. Teach them how to analyze and read with books they're interested in and books they love.
Once that happens, bring in the classics; bring in the texts that need to be read; bring in all of the things that you want to do.
But none of it will work without fostering a love of reading first.
Great points! We're probably with you on this, and from what we've seen on the Twitter-sphere (mostly from aspiring writers who are also English teachers) there IS a push for more choose-your-own-curriculum type activities.
ReplyDeleteThat said, we do believe there's a bit of "you don't know what's good for you" -- or really, just forced exposure to things outside your comfort zone -- that required reading provides, and we wouldn't want to eliminate that. (Neither would you, it seems. We're just reiterating!)
So it's about balance (as are most things in life, hehe).
Oh, and certainly not about MORE. Kids have a lot of work to do already. Academics are important, but so is fostering skills and interests outside the classroom.
DeleteIn PreK, the first weeks of school were all about getting to know the kids and their likes so I could incorporate them into what I would be teaching. I never changed the curriculum I was given I just enhanced it with what I knew would get them excited to learn.
ReplyDeleteThe same can be done in this situation. Take what the kids enjoy and find that in the required reading. Then pull more contemporary books that are related for them to explore on their own or in class if time allows.
One of my journalism students, a sophomore, commented that she now hates mythology because she was forced to read Antigone. They spent an entire quarter (nine weeks) delving into the complexities of that story. Sadly, I think I'd hate mythology if I was forced to do that, too.
ReplyDeleteWhen I taught English, I went for the more is better approach, choosing at least 10 books (current to classic) that revolved around the same theme or had the elements I wanted to teach. Then gave kids a choice of what to read. It helped spark some students back into reading, and yet, I was still able to teach the standards and terminology I needed to teach.
It makes me cry when students tell me they hate to read or that they don't read for pleasure any more because they don't have time.
What was amazing was how I could read a book like A Wrinkle in Time on my own and love it, and come close to hating it when I had to read it for class. But my elementary and junior high were both good about picking age appropriate texts to read. (One of my sixth grade books, A Banner in the Sky, is still one of my favorites.)
ReplyDeleteThis is interesting and I'm not sure where I stand. I'm in an AP class right now and I've found that being forced to read a book is different for everyone. For example, we just read A Prayer for Owen Meany and my entire class agrees: had we not had the discussions in class, we might have missed a lot of the important aspects of the book. While everyone hasn't loved EVERY single book we read, we've come to appreciate it. We now know what kinds of texts will be mentioned on the AP exam.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for letting kids choose their own books but how much will they honesty analyze? My brother in the 6th grade has to write a book report on 12 books of his choice. While I do see that he reads, he doesn't do much for his analysis. I've met his friends and it's not important to them. Sure this is just a few kids but it might be true.
Many of my teachers chose which book to read (especially in the APs). I think another aspect of this is HOW the teachers teach the text. I've had some GREAT teachers who were amazing and made people love all sorts of books that were required. Other teachers made us hate the book in all. There are a lot of factors I think when it comes to something like this.
I was homeschooled and even though I hated reading at first I still loved books because my Mom's way of teaching my siblings and I literature was to read it out loud to us. We read classics galore and I loved it. Even if I didn't understand all of it at first, being exposed to it gradually led to my understanding. When I finally learned to read on my own I devoured books and my Mom rarely had to tell me to read anything. I do agree that in-stilling a love of reading is important but I also think that stretching a child's learning by giving them something slightly hard to read/understand leads to them eventually understanding more than you think.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting you bring this up because I've noticed that a lot of reading is getting added in to kids school curriculums, but I've also noticed that it's a lot of popular fiction. I'm a nanny and the girl that I watch is in 5th grade. Currently her classroom has a bunch of reading groups and right now her's is reading Catching Fire. Some of the other groups are reading Percy Jackson, and The Giver.
ReplyDeleteI think it's important to be able to read and interpret stuff, but I also think teachers go WAY overboard. I know that at one of my local high schools there was an english teacher notorious for making her students analyze EVERY PARAGRAPH in The Great Gatsby to look for symbolism. Every student who took her class ended up hating the Great Gatsby.
Ultimately I think the most important thing is that we foster a love for reading in kids. I was homeschooled and while I was forced to read things I didn't enjoy (Silas Marner immediately comes to mind) I was also allowed a lot of freedom in what I read and I think I can attribute my love for reading because I was allowed so much freedom. Raising kids who love to read is much more important than raising kids who can read and interpret things but detest doing so.
I just took a little quiz thing about if you're better read than a 10th grader and I think, out of 33 books on the list, I got somewhere in the low teens for what I've read against it. Some of those books I'd never even heard of and I can't help but wonder what the hell kids are being taught on school.
ReplyDeleteIn that same vein school should not be a cake walk. All the hard things shouldn't be taken away just so it's easier for them to succeed. Holy crap we're dumb enough as a country when compared against other industrialized nations (test scores will support me on that one). The last thing we want to do is lower our ranking even more by dumbing down schools.
Kids need to pay their dues. They're going to have to learn that in order to succeed they're going to have to do things they don't like. I could have lived without chemistry and geometry in high school but, well, those were requirements for graduating so . . .
I do think the teaching methods are off when it comes deconstructing literature and some of these reading lists really need to be refreshed (I don't care what you say, Hemmingway is a surefire cure for insomnia). I do think it's detrimental to force difficult books on kids that can't handle it. It only teaches them that reading sucks and they'll never understand it and they failed English how many times so they're just not going to read. Bad. But, quite frankly, that chair in chapter 3 probably only symbolizes an instrument for which a character is to place their ass on. But teachers are so intent on finding authorial intent in these works that reading becomes a chore, even for someone like me that's loved reading my entire life.
I definitely see a change in summer reading lists compared to when I was in school. I'm sure the emergence of the YA category helps in this matter so they are branching out. But the reality is, for a lot of these books, if they're not forced upon the young many of these people will never read them. School sucks. You do things you don't want to do but there should be options, like a choice book once a month that you need to report on or something. Or maybe even reading retellings as a way to get the "classic" in there along with something modern and more relatable.
So yeah, it's part material and part teaching method. The worst books can be made easy by the right teacher and vise versa and it really sucks when you have a teacher that doesn't want to teach the text, doesn't know how or just doesn't care. I've poked holes in my teachers' teachings in the past; once I was just ignored, another I was condescended to as if I had no idea what I was talking about. So yeah, teachers need to step it up a bit.