A Novel Burden

Teaching books kind of sucks

I’m honored to have written a guest post for Holly Korbey’s The Bell Ringer newsletter this past week. My post is a sort of response to Korbey’s own “TL;DR” which weighed in on the recent conversation around why high school and middle school students, in particular, aren’t reading more books in school. If you haven’t read the piece responsible for starting this discussion — The Atlantic’s “The Elite Students Who Can’t Read Books” — it’s worth a look (as well as the trenchant response of one of the high school teachers who was interviewed for the piece, “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty”).

One of the thing that irks me about so much commentary and reporting around education is how little the journalists and authors understand the day-to-day realities of schools and classrooms, which are in some ways far simpler than people realize and in others far more more complex. And if they do bother to actually visit a classroom or talk to a teacher, it’s usually one that is entirely non-representative of the average experience. (The Atlantic piece makes broad claims about American education based on what a few professors at hyper-selective colleges have reported seeing with their students, who probably comprise, what, 5% of the total college-going population? Give me a break.)

My piece isn’t so much of a disagreement with what has already been written about why (or if!) students aren’t reading as much as they used to as it is an attempt to shed light on what is actually possible in high school classrooms and reveal what actually happens. I’m confident my experience is fairly representative, but I also have little doubt there are teachers and administrators who think I’ve got it all wrong. I welcome their dissent, and hope to hear from them, or anyone else for that matter.

I’m posting the first few paragraphs of the piece below before sending you to The Bell Ringer’s page. Let us know what you think. Enjoy!

The death of the novel arrived in my 9th grade English class some years ago. We had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird and had approached the dramatic courtroom scenes where the reader finally learns what actually happened between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson. As is customary when doing a “novel study”—as English teachers call them—I set aside a few minutes to review the major plot points and characters before we settled in to read. I hadn’t planned longer than a few minutes for this when, shortly after I asked students to give a short synopsis of the book so far, an astonishing debate ensued about who Tom Robinson was.

Tom Robinson was the sheriff, one student asserted.

No, that’s Lennie, corrected another.

Lennie’s from a book we read last semester, stupid, someone politely corrected. Tom Robinson is the character who never leaves his house.

The class erupted. That’s Boo! Above the din, someone shouted, Tom is Scout’s classmate, the boy with no lunch!

On it went.

I remember watching silently, in complete shock and not a little despair, until I finally berated my class for not having kept up with the reading, crisply described exactly who Tom Robinson was and what awful predicament he was in, and then commanded them to grant one of the most moving novels in American literature a measure of respect by reading quietly at their desks for the rest of the period and that, yes, there would be a freaking quiz. It was not my finest moment.

I never taught that novel again. Subsequent years saw me teaching increasingly shorter novels —Things Fall Apart, The Stranger—that I was able to actually get through without relying on students reading for homework (a lost cause) until, for a solid 2-3 years, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I abandoned teaching books altogether. I made peace with this fate by knowing two things: my students were still reading a lot of good quality texts and, equally important, my students were writing a lot, too. . .