teaching

What should high school students be readingclassics or books they enjoy?

Personally, I wish the answer were. . . What do you mean? Don’t high school kids enjoy the classics?

I always have enjoyed them. I loved, for example, The Red Badge of Courage and The Scarlet Letter when I read them in high school. I was an English major in college, so it would have been torture for me to take all the required courses if I didn’t enjoy the books studied in them. As an English teacher I did a lot of enjoyable re-reading of classics.

Yet being an English teacher taught me pretty quickly that most high school students don’t enjoy “classic” literature. In fact in the suburban, middle-class, mostly-white school where I taught, most students didn’t enjoy reading at all. If I hadn’t had the luxury of teaching the AP class, where just about all of the students admitted they at least liked to read, I might have fallen into a deep depression at the attitude of my other college-bound students, some of whom proudly declared that they had never read a book for school in their lives. They had made it to the twelfth grade by plagiarizing and reading SparkNotes. I honest-to-God once had parents come in to argue to the principal that their son shouldn’t receive a zero for work done with SparkNotes instead of the actual book. If the answers are in SparkNotes, the parents argued, and their son “researched” them, why shouldn’t he receive full credit? Never mind that, ahead of time so there would be no misunderstandings, I specifically forbade the class from using any source other than the book. The boy cheated anyway and expected to get an A.

There is much I could say about teacher education or teacher quality or the million things about teaching in a public school that hamper teachers’ ability to do what they know to be right and effective in a classroom. I could rail against TV, video games, and the internet. I could cite additional examples of unsupportive parents. Although it’s true that there could be improvements made on all of these fronts if we want children to read, still some children do read. The bottom line is that not everybody is a reader, just as not everybody is an athlete or an artist or a good friend. Some people just don’t like to read.

But that is no excuse for educators not to have high reading expectations. (I cringe as I write this because I know how really, truly hard it can be to get reluctant, plagiarism-entrenched, entitled students to do honest reading. I do not know first-hand how difficult it is to get disadvantaged students to read, because the issues with poor students are different than in the middle-class suburban school where I taught, but I do believe teachers when they say it’s hard work.) For a long time it seemed schools resisted the idea of giving kids books they enjoyed because the classics were better educational tools. Now I see schools adding those enjoyable reads, and I have mixed feelings. (Here I cringe again because I write, I like to think, those enjoyable reads, and I feel that there is value in reading for pleasure.)

There is a report out from Renaissance Learning stating that high school students, on average, read texts for school (both self-chosen and assigned) that average at a fifth grade level. This is in language difficulty and complexity, not content, mind you, but still. This statistic is disappointing to me.

You can find a million sources out there to tell you why kids should read books. Heck, why people of all ages should read books. Books expand the imagination. They develop critical thinking. They encourage empathy. They teach about otherness. They teach about the common human condition. They give pleasure. Etc. Etc. Etc.

You can also find a million sources out there to tell you what books kids should read in school. Here are some quotes from students themselves that I found online (Here is the original blog post where I found these quotes.):

As a student, I can firmly say that just because a book has endured through generations does not make it relevant to my generation. The veil of time often blinds young readers to a books meaning.-Jacob Stroud

Current required readings often make students skip the book and go straight to the movie or use SparkNotes to pass the test.-Olivia Reed

By exposing students to more modern literature they can relate to, they may come to view reading as cool or enjoyable, rather than only as homework or something that nerds do.-Ashley Monroe

If you go here, you can read the full answers given by these three students, which are actually much more thoughtful than these quotes might suggest. I would like to focus for the moment, though, on the ideas in these three excerpts alone because, unfortunately, I have heard these very arguments made by adults who should have the benefit of a wider perspective.

The idea behind the first quote drives me wild. Irrelevant? The moral question of responsibility for the bestowing (or ending) of life? (Frankenstein) The question of whether our circumstances are determined by a higher power or by ourselves? (King Lear) The question of what, exactly, makes a person worth marrying? (Pride and Prejudice) A young person who is struggling with the more complex style of older literature can be forgiven the difficulty in seeing the meaning in the text itself. It is the responsibility of the school to guide them past writing style (actually, I would argue, to guide them toward appreciation of style) and toward relevance.

The second quote could have been said by any number of students at the school where I taught. This is simple immaturity in the form of lack of personal responsibility. I didn’t cheat. The required readings made me skip the book and go straight to the movie or use SparkNotes. This is a very difficult challenge for an educator to overcome. Where I taught, a student saying such a thing would be just as likely to cheat on reading a book of their own choosingin fact, many students tried to do just that and would be angry at meat MEwhen their cheating was discovered.

The third quote has potential as an argument, but it is only the beginning, which I will expand upon in a sec.

So what should high school students be reading? In my humble opinion, anything that challenges them.

Challenge them to expand their vocabulary and decipher complex sentence structure. Challenge them to consider a new idea. Challenge them to view something from another’s perspective, from another era’s perspective. Challenge them to stick through a long book to the end. Challenge them to analyze, apply, synthesize. Challenge them to grow, to understand this world and their place in it. Challenge them to enjoy being the “nerdy” type who likes reading books!

School is for learning and challenges are the vehicle for learning. High school students should not be assigned books that fit snuggly into their comfort zone. To use a running metaphor . . . if you’re an 800 runner who races the 800 every meet, it does you good to challenge yourself to the longer 1600 or the faster 400 once in a while. The endurance or speed you pick up from going outside your comfort zone helps you grow as an 800 runner. Similarly, high school students have a reading comfort zone, a type of book they “enjoy.” Reading something that challenges them will affect how they approach the next book they read in their comfort zoneit will help them to see things in the text they might not have noticed otherwise, therefore giving them greater opportunity to grow from everything they read, even if they initially choose texts for their entertainment value only.

Now, I don’t think it’s useful to lay down the law and say, “They must read classics! Only classics are challenging! Everything else is a waste of time!”

I also don’t think it’s useful to say, “Let them read what they want! At least they’re reading!”

It’s likewise unhelpful to state simply, “They should read a mix.”

So much depends on the way the material is handled in the class. It does little good to assign challenging reading when the teacher ends up supplying all the insight, all the “right” answers, and it does little good to let students pick their own books if the teacher can’t then engage them in conversation about what they read.

There are many ways to approach teaching challenging texts (here I mean the “classics”), but I’m currently a believer in what I’ll call, because I’m quoting Barry Gilmore below, the “gateway and destination” approach, best explained in an article written by Gilmore in the above referenced Renaissance Learning report. Here is an excerpt from that article:

“The works students choose are largely what I think of as gateway novels and plays; they introduce themes and stylistic devices similar to those in classic works but often in a less urbane or nuanced manner. The Giver and The Hunger Games are gateways. They open the door to thinking about issues such as the rights of citizens to resist or the value of human relationships in a power-driven society. Julius Caesar, on the other hand, is a destination: a place where students, with their teachers, can investigate the same fundamental themes in depth. But the leap from the former works to the latter is a broad one. It requires the bridge of discussion and reflection.”

I would love to see more high schools pairing “accessible” works with “classic” ones. I like that more and more high schools are seeing the value in using popular YA literature as a teaching tool, and I appreciate that works today are encouraging more and more reluctant readers to read. I found value in having popular works in my classroom, but not at the expense of the challenge classic literature provides.

I once had a student, as her AP project, do a comparison of Paradise Lost (which we read together as a class) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (which she read on her own and which is supposed to be a children’s version of Paradise Lost). I wish I could produce the paper for you to read her excellent insights. It was the kind of work I wish more kids had the opportunity to do.

Not every child is going to love the classics. Not every child is going to love reading. That doesn’t mean reading isn’t good for them, or that they can’t learn to love books, or that educators shouldn’t try to meet them on their level and progressively challenge them to understand things they might not seek to understand otherwise.

So the short answer to the question posed in this post’s title?

Yes.

P.S. I wrote a follow-up to this post that discusses sources I used to research a high school curriculum book list: http://www.jenbrookswriter.com/2012/06/09/what-should-high-school-students-be-reading-follow-up/.

I also mention a few specific titles for a classroom library in this post:http://www.jenbrookswriter.com/2012/06/25/books-for-high-school-kids-building-a-classroom-library/.

And it seems I couldn’t help but mention the subject again:http://www.jenbrookswriter.com/2013/09/17/thoughts-after-reading-insurgent/.

* * * * *

Articles linked in this post:

“Updating High School English” by LaToya Jordan: http://therumpus.net/2011/07/updating-high-school-english/

“Is the Literature in High School Too Cemented in the Past?” by Stroud, Reed, and Monroe: http://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2011/07/is_the_literature_covered_in_h.html

Renaissance Learning report (you have to click the link “Download your copy here” to get the pdf of the report): http://www.renlearn.com/whatkidsarereading/

Articles for further reading:

“Teaching Kids, Books, and the Classics” by Monica Edinger: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monica-edinger/teaching-classics-kids_b_1191115.html

“Against Walter Dean Meyers and the Dumbing Down of Literature: ‘Those Kids’ can read Homer” by Alexander Nazaryan: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/01/against-walter-dean-myers-and-the-dumbing-down-of-literature-those-kids-can-read-h

“High School Students Aren’t Reading Books by Choice or Assignment” by Maureen Downey: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/04/12/high-school-students-arent-reading-challenging-books-by-choice-or-assignment/?cxntfid=blogs_get_schooled_blog

“Leveling Up and Keeping Score: High School Students Reading at 5th Grade Levels, Report Says” by Becky O’Neil: http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2012/04/03/leveling-up-and-keeping-score-high-school-students-reading-at-5th-grade-levels-report-says/

“American High School Students are Reading Books at 5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels: Report: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/22/top-reading_n_1373680.html#s805920&title=20_Marked_A

 

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The question of “too edgy” in YA

My latest YA manuscript contains sixteen uses of the “s” word in various forms, and one use of the “a” word. No “f”s, because that’s where I chose to draw the line with my character. It also has a scene of questionable sexual content, although it is not violent. Is my story appropriate for a YA audience?

I’ve been reading a lot of YA lately, mostly because I want to inform my own writing by studying what’s being published. I have to say, as a writer, former high school teacher, and parent (though my son is only three and still reading picture books), I have very mixed feelings about the issue of content in YA literature. My personal reading tastes tend to the “pure” rather than the “dark,” so I find some of the content of YA novels today stretch the boundary of my comfort zone. Fight-to-the-death contests for national entertainment and drugs in the water that encourage feral mating in the street, are two examples of YA content that makes me uncomfortable, even though both of these examples occur in books that have meaning–discussable, reading-circle meaning–above and beyond the element of shock.

And then there are novels that address such teen issues as drugs, cutting, anorexia, abuse, etc. I don’t deny that these are issues faced by teens today, but I also know that many teens aren’t touched by these issues at all, or if so, in a cursory way. I was touched by one of these issues. My best friend in high school was anorexic, and she directed me once to a novel titled Kessa so that I could understand some of what she was going through. It was helpful for me to read that book when I did, so I do believe “issue” novels belong in the adolescent canon.

It’s just that I fear that so much negativity, so much grotesque content, gives teens an unrealistic wide-angle picture of adolescence. (Much as TV and movie content gives an unrealistic picture of adulthood, or the “real” world, in general.)

Censorship, however, is NOT the answer. Or, let me clarify, censorship on a wide scale is not the answer. I’m all for censorship within a homeparents should be free to choose how to deal with their child’s reading choices in a way that is appropriate for their family.

As a teacher, though, I strongly disapprove of having a single parent’s parenting choices dictate the reading assigned in a classroom. When I was teaching, the issue of content came up only oncewhen I assigned Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth to my Advanced Placement seniors for summer reading. One parent, who had read the book, took issue with the violence, including rape, Follett used. She requested that I assign the book in the Fall so my class had a forum for discussion as the reading occurred (as opposed to summer reading, when they had only their journal to talk to). I thought that was a reasonable request, so I substituted another book on the summer list and read Pillars along with our medieval unit.

The key here is that the parent had read the book and so was familiar with the content of the entire story and how the controversial elements were woven through the book’s themes. She did not demand that I pull the book altogether, but that I (and the class) could talk about any issues raised. In fourteen years of teaching, I never had to deal with an uninformed parent who objected to a book based on a single passage, or with a group of parents who went over my head and asked the school board directly to take action to ban a book. I get very, very angry when I hear these kinds of stories.

The truth is, if an earnest group of parents who had read Pillars of the Earth came to me and said they really wished I would take the book off the list altogether, I would have done so. One thing I’ve learned as an English teacher is that although I may have personal favorites for books I’d like to teach, there is never a book that is irreplaceable. I would not have considered such action a victory for censorship, I would have considered it a victory for adults talking it out and working together to make decisions in the best interests of children.

Of course, Pillars isn’t the best example because it’s not a YA book, but is today’s YA too edgy for the YA audience? Drawing a line is a pretty dangerous thing because there is no way that an entire nation of readers and parents of readers will agree on where that line should be. I just wish that more parents would read what their teens are reading so they can discuss the issues raised and help them to understand how accurately (or not) books portray life.

I’m wondering what the parents of my former students would think of my new book. I’d like to think it warrants placement on a summer reading list or, even better, placement in a classroom discussion, but ultimately, it’s not up to me. And that’s okay.

***

Here are a few articles you can check out if you want to read more on this subject:
This Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Cox Gurdon questions the rationality of having YA lit contain “explicit abuse, violence, and depravity.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html

This Huffington Post article by Ru Freeman agrees with Meghan Cox Gordon’s ideas.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/im-with-meghan-cox-gurdon_b_879880.html

Carla Javier, on the Knoxnews.com site, disagrees with Meghan Cox Gordon.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jul/12/yas-can-handle-ya-lit/

A slightly older, but still relevant, article by Shelley Stoehr in The Alan Review.
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter97/w97-02-Stoehr.html

An article by Mike Penprase at News-Leader.com about the upholding of a ban on Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
http://www.news-leader.com/article/20100909/NEWS04/9090375/Stockton-book-ban-upheld-7-0-packed-public-forum

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Free creative writing course

Let’s say you’re a person who’s thinking about being a writer. You have little to no formal training and want to explore some topics in creative writing in a fun and friendly atmosphere. Or maybe you have some experience with creative writing and want to remind yourself of some of the basics. If you are such a person, or could put yourself in such a person’s shoes, I’d love some feedback on what’s below.

I’m putting together a syllabus for a course I’d like to volunteer to teach in my new community. Not long ago, I taught a community education course in my old town using this eight-week schedule. It met for about two hours once a week in the evening. Specifically, I’d love thoughts on . . .

1) What would be your ideal number of weeks for a course? Ideal number of hours in each weekly session?

2) What would be your ideal proportion of writing vs. critique vs. lessons? (Below there are seven weeks of lessons and one critique session. Writing exercises are part of the first seven weeks. We also look at passages from published books to illustrate the lessons.)

3) Any topics you’d like covered that aren’t mentioned below?

week 1: Description
An important concept for a writer to understand is the difference between showing and telling and when to use either. We will explore this concept as well as the use of all five senses in descriptive writing, how to select setting details to create a particular effect, and the concept of proportion.

week 2: Characterization
Most readers will fall in love with a story because they fall in love with its characters. We will discuss ways character is revealed, including selection of descriptive detail, using the mirror, words, actions, other characters, contrasts, and choices characters make.

week 3: Dialogue
A significant portion of a publishable story must be dialogue. This week we will look at proper dialogue format, speech tags, beats, and writing off-the-nose. We will review two common pitfalls of writing dialogue: Tom Swifties and As-You-Know-Bob (aka maid-and-butler), and we will discuss the choices of using profanity and/or dialect in characters’ speech.

week 4: Language
There’s no way around it, the most beautiful story and most memorable characters will mean little if your language isn’t readable. “Omit needless words!” (the 10% rule) is our mantra for this week. We will look at such common problem areas as overuse of adverbs, weak verbs, distracting repetition, misplaced modifiers, disagreement between subject/verb and pronoun/antecedent, lack of parallel structure, improper comma use, cliche. We will look at purple prose and the language of melodrama. We will also look at examples of the excellent use of simile, metaphor, and hyperbole to make writing more effective.

week 5: Story
The plan for a novel must consider long-term goals for plot and character. We will look at novel structure and what must go into a novel’s beginning, middle, and end in order to satisfy a reader. Topics include character arcs, the hero’s journey, the promise and the pay-off, and creating frustration.

week 6: Business
We will look at examples of the cover letter, the synopsis, and proper manuscript format and discuss the properties of each. We will also touch on such practical issues as beginning a platform, searching for an agent, furthering your writing education, and e-publishing/print-on-demand.

week 7: Potpourri
Topics include point of view (types and “camera distance”), hooks, cliffhangers, in medias res, backstory, symbol, motif, theme, and echo.

week 8: Critique
Completely optional but highly encouraged! Students may submit up to five pages of writing, properly formatted, for critique. These pages may be a cover letter, synopsis, and/or opening page(s) for a novel and must be received by the instructor and classmates no later than [insert deadline]. At home (yes, homework!) and previous to our final meeting, we will read each others’ pages and write comments in the text. At our final meeting we will share our feedback . . . and maybe a little party food.

Thanks for any and all feedback on this!

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Where I’m at Part 1: from teaching to my first thesis

This three-part post is probably more appropriate to the “About” button, but for my own sake, I’m starting by defining where I’m starting.

In high school I would have been surprised to be told I’d end up as an English teacher. I was pretty set on a career in science. I did, however, enjoy English and took electives in creative writing and journalism because I liked to write. It didn’t matter much to my career plans at the time that I won a major book award as a junior and a major English achievement award as a senior. I was accepted at Dartmouth, and I was going to be a biochemistry major with a future in cancer research.

Then in my sophomore spring, the deadline for Dartmouth students to declare their majors, I took a course on contemporary issues in education. It changed everything. Once I decided I wanted to teach, it suddenly became clear that the subject I needed to teach was English. I did the whole English major and education minor in my final two years. I got a job and taught English for fourteen years.

Throughout my public school teaching, I sometimes regretted that I didn’t choose a medical research path, especially when it seemed like all the care I gave and work I did went unappreciatedor worse, actively railed against. (Many of my students, and some of their parents, didn’t feel the same way about plagiarism/cheating that I did.) For the most part, though, I really enjoyed my job and was content to teach and coach track and field, and advise a class and a club, and serve on committees, and mentor new teachers, and all the other things that went along with my teaching life.

Where I worked, a teacher could receive a pay raise in three ways: 1) yearly contracted cost-of-living increases, 2) moving up a step (which means a pay raise for each of the first few years teaching until you reach a particular year), 3) becoming more educated. I stood to gain a bit of salary by getting a master’s degree, which I didn’t mind doing since I enjoy being a student. The problem was that a traditional degree would mean a lot of time commuting from where I lived, and I already worked a six-day week from dawn until, often, into the dark.

I found a program at Seton Hill University called Writing Popular Fiction and wrote to the director asking how many graduates of the program were actually published. She replied that the program was pretty new so there weren’t any yet (or maybe she said there was oneit was a super low number either way). This was back in 2004. Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program is low residency, which means students only have to travel there for one week twice a year. The program is unique in that it stresses popular, as opposed to literary, fiction. Although I adore much literary fiction, I wanted to write a science fiction story, and the answers I had received to inquiries at other grad schools left me with the impression science fiction would not be accepted with open arms. At Seton Hill it was embraced. Now there are more published authors from the Writing Popular Fiction program (some award-winning ones and some with large national and international followings) than I can count.

Long story shortened, my experience at Seton Hill changed my life. Until that time, I had not really considered a writing career seriously. I didn’t know what a writer’s life entailed. I didn’t think I had enough talent. I graduated from Seton Hill with a completed science fiction novel of over 160,000 words. It’s title is Prosorinos, the name of the planet on which it’s set. I thought maybe I could be a writer.

On to the next post . . .

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Dartmouth, English teacher, Prosorinos, Seton Hill University, thesis, where I'm at, Writing Popular Fiction program