teaching english Archives - Page 2 of 2

If you’re a high school English teacher – especially of the AP variety – it’s easy to get smug about books. We believe that some books are better than others and that every student should believe that Hemingway is a better author than Sparks or Rowling. We may not believe that “at least they’re reading something” holds true, and we look in horror at the proliferation of adults reading YA books. At one point or another, I’ve held all of these positions.

However, my view over time has softened quite a bit as my criteria for what makes a good book has changed and become more inclusive. My dad loves Clive Cussler novels. For him they are good books. Enough said. He’s not interested in me telling him he should read something better.

But how do we reconcile that view with our role as teachers? We want students to love to read, but we also want students to read important books that they wouldn’t otherwise, and we want them to think they are great books too. Is there a definition of a great book that teachers and students can both live with? I believe there is, and we can ask two questions to arrive at that answer.

How well does the book achieve its main goal?

According to Thomas Arp in Sound and Sense, the primary goal of all literature is to entertain. Personally, I would broaden that definition to say that the primary goal is to provide a significant experience, because I would never call a book like Elie Wiesel’s Night “entertaining.” But there are plenty of books whose main goal is to provide escape. If the book provides you with a respite from your otherwise boring life, then the author has done what he or she set out to do.

Of course, some books want to do more than just entertain, which brings up the second question:

How significant is that goal?

And it is at this point that we can distinguish between books that merely provide entertainment value and those that provide additional value through giving us a lens into human behavior. We can then claim that Huck Finn is a more significant book than The Hunger Games because Mark Twain has a more significant purpose in his story.

We don’t want to tell our students that the books we read in class are better than the ones they read outside of school (if they read at all) because they never respond well to that. But we can tell them that we are reading books that are more significant, and that will continue to enrich their lives in a second or third reading. As I’ve written in a previous post, Harry Potter has become that for a lot of our students – a series that is entertaining, but also provide a great deal of wisdom as well.

Some of this has been adapted from Thomas Arp’s book Sound and Sense.

For resources that make great works accessible for students, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

In college I worked at a local book store where one day we received a humorous couple of phone calls.

“Do you have the Cilffsnotes to Hiroshima?” the boy on the other end asked. The book was read in the local high school, and the students had to buy it for class. Unfortunately, there are no Cliffsnotes to Hiroshima (probably because the book is so short), so he hung up.

Two minutes later, the same kid calls back. This time he asked, “uh, do you have Hiroshima?”

This story was a lot funnier before I had students like this in class.

I have a fair number of students that don’t read the books that I assign. I know that many do the reading, but a some don’t. The fact that this is in an AP Literature class make this all the more unbelievable. Why sign up for an AP class if you don’t want to read? Most say they just want the weighted grade or the college credit.

If these students didn’t read and were failing as a result, then I could rest assured that the students are being punished for their misdeeds. However, most of the kids that don’t read aren’t dumb; they are actually very smart. Smart enough to come to class having read summaries of a book, prepared to eagerly listen to class discussion so that they can fake their way through actually reading it. And it’s especially grating that many of them take pride in getting through school without reading books.

So the simple answer to the question of why students don’t read is simple: because they can.

This is probably my biggest headache. However, in order to deal with this problem and not get extremely angry and frustrated, I try to keep a couple of things in mind.

1. Don’t take it personally. If a student has made up their mind that they aren’t going to read books in my class, there’s a good chance that this isn’t the first time that they’ve done it (I teach seniors). They have honed their ability to get by in school without reading for years now. I might inspire them to read something, but I’m not likely to change patterns of behavior that have become habit. And chances are, if they had another teacher, they would be doing the same thing.

2. This doesn’t reflect poorly on me. If I went to the office and complained that my students weren’t reading, no one would say “you obviously aren’t a good teacher.” They would say, “You obviously have lazy students.”

3. This is not a problem I am ever going to solve. I have tried every method I can think of to outwit kids that don’t read,and sometimes have a pathological obsession with catching the culprits. I have never come up with a solution that absolutely punishes those who don’t read while rewarding those who do. Daily reading quizzes make more work for me and don’t always catch those who only read the “study guides” online, and can punish those who read, but may not understand the text. For the most part, all I’ve come up with is ineffective solutions that only make more work for me. And if I don’t catch the non-readers, then all I’ve done is made the original problem worse.

I have to accept the fact that this is a problem that I’m never going to solve. That doesn’t mean that I should ignore the problem completely; I can always take steps to curb the problem as much as I can.

4. Whether or not students read is their choice. Pretty much everything in school is, actually. When I give a test if students ask if they have to take it, I say no. They can always choose not to do it. They are free to not do work, but they aren’t free from the consequences of their choice. And that’s really where I get stuck with kids who don’t read; I feel like their should be a negative consequence for choosing video games over books. I can tell them that later in life their lack of effort will catch up to them, but who knows if that might be true. It might or might not, and I’m not likely to get the satisfaction of a student coming back to me ten years later to tell me that I was right all along.

Anyway, I really don’t want to live in a world that’s consumed with this kind of bookkeeping where if you make a mistake then you will pay for it. That doesn’t seem to be a very kind thing to do for anyone, and is not likely to encourage kids to read. In fact, it is more likely to encourage them not to read even more.

5. Don’t let those who don’t do work take away from those who do. This is a common problem that I know a lot of teachers face: a couple of hairballs in a class distracts you from the kids who are actually there to get an education. But I’ve learned to never base my instruction on what the lowest common denominator will or won’t do.

Dealing with plagiarism is a good parallel here. There are times that I have spent an hour trying to catch a kid plagiarizing. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. But either way I get mad at myself for having spent so much time on one kid that won’t do what he should. Plagiarism, like not reading, is another problem that I won’t solve completely. I read somewhere that trying to completely stop plagiarism is like vaccinating an entire village for one sick person. I do what I can, but I’m not going to spend more whole day trying to catch those who cheat.

If I really wanted to, I could figure out a way to stop kids from not reading. However, it would drastically change the way I teach. I would spend much more time on trying to catch kids not doing work than actually teaching kids. The second is more important, and if I spent too much time on the first, I become very frustrated and discouraged. If you focus too much on the negative in teaching, you won’t allow the positives to guide you through the day.

For some fun comics that might encourage students to read, click here to go to my store.

What Makes a Book Great?

Why Students Don’t Read (And What To Do About It)