How schools are destroying the joy of reading

Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also “are not reader-friendly. There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” says T.C. Williams reading specialist Chris Gutierrez, who teaches a course in reading strategies at Shenandoah University in Virginia. For kids who get books and reading opportunities only at school, these types of textbooks will drive them away from reading – perhaps for life.

Such texts bastardize literature and history, reducing authors and their works to historical facts to be memorized – what Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, calls “the bunch o’ facts” theory of learning. Students are jerked from one excerpt of literature to another, given no chance for the kind of sustained reading that stimulates the imagination. —Patrick WelshHow schools are destroying the joy of reading (USA Today/Yahoo (will expire))

Where is depth?

I treasure the hefty, intellectually weighty Norton Anthologies that I ploughed through as an undergrad, during a rigorous two-semester 300-level survey on British Lit — conducted as a stand-up lecture by a superstar professor twice a week, and smaller discussion groups once or twice a week, led by graduate students.

I had the luxury of taking that survey course with hundreds of other committed English majors who actually cared about the subject matter. No matter how engaged our majors are, and how diverse and well-informed the students from other majors, I simply cannot imagine that the instructional methods that my professors used to teach me will help me do my own teaching. If I had teaching assistants to handle all my grading, and taught only two classes a term, then of course I’d have more time to write craft wonderful lectures.

Now that our American Lit courses have been re-envisioned as writing intensive, and the class sizes are much smaller (capped at 18 as opposed to 35 last year), I’m looking forward to going into greater depth. But I understand the temptation to cram more, more, more into each term and each class. I am teaching more short stories and one-act plays than I myself studied, in part because I find starting the semester out with shorter works gives students time to absorb the fact that filling a page with plot summary or writing down the list of symbols Spark Notes provides rarely leads to the kind of critical thinking expected of a college student.

In college, I had a few blue-collar friends who were students at the nearby community college. I remember having a conversation with them about textbooks, and recall that they had a bit of difficulty understanding that, for one of my literature classes, there wasn’t a big textbook with study questions and answers in the back of the book. For a course on modern drama, we read stand-alone paperback editions of each of the plays. For a course on novels, we simply read the novels. I remember changing the subject so it wouldn’t look like I was being an intellectual snob, but the conversation stayed with me.

I feel like I have to work hard at the beginning of each semester to get across the idea that I’m not here to teach the one “correct” interpretation of literature… nor am I trying to teach “my” interpretation of literature. And because students need practice going into more depth than “Here’s what I was feeling when I read this passage,” or “Here’s what this word makes me think of.”

I’m not using any of these mega-anthologies in my classes. I do have a mid-sized anthology in my drama class, and I will probably put together one of those do-it-yourself readers for Am Lit 1915-present next term, but since all the texts in Am Lit 1800-1915 are out of copyright, I’m letting the students make do with online editions. (The only exception is the Riverside edition of Huckleberry Finn, which has critical notes and contextual materials, and also the “Child of Calamity” chapter that’s not in all the cheap paperbacks).

7 thoughts on “How schools are destroying the joy of reading

  1. That’s cool Dr. Jerz. I got everything I wanted, even a few personal things for just under $90.00. I ordered everything off Amazon.com

  2. Lou, I’ve decided to add one more book — not a novel, but rather a book called Writing about Literature, in recognition of the fact that AmLit is now officially a “writing-intensive” course, and many of the students taking it won’t ever have had to write about literature at the college level. But instead of asking you to by a recent, critically annotated version of The Scarlet Letter, I’ll let you get any cheap paperback, or just download it from the internet. So there are still just two books that are required for purchase, the rest being e-texts of various kinds.

  3. Yes, Dr. Arnzen, I do. That wasn’t really the point of my comment. I would have kept it–except for then I would have had to pay for my other book as well.

    I’ve been doing a lot of reading this summer actually. The Norton Anthology would have been a wonderful edition to my library. Perhaps I’ll buy it once I have more money for lesuire reading, unless someone has a used copy they’d be willing to let me borrow. *hint, hint*

    I love to read, and have loved to read since I was in elementary school.

    But my point was, the bookstore was quite rude on their part, and wouldn’t admit to making a simple mistake. That’s the only thing that ticked me off. Otherwise, I would have said, “fine, I’ll keep the book and buy the one I need.”

    Reading Is Fundamental people! Read all you can!

  4. Lou: An English major could do worse than keep the Norton Anthology they “accidentally” received, even if it’s not required for a class. Don’t you want to read all those great stories? (I’m actually serious!)

  5. I’m very happy to read Professor Arnzen’s comment, esp. the second paragraph which supplies some answers to my own anguished questions right now about “how” to read. Thanks!

    As to the textbooks, I can confirm that there is a huge difference in style and substance from those of yesteryear, and I’m not sure it’s all good. The colored blocks, the references to more information online (for $100 a book, I expect it to give me the information I need within its pages)directing me elsewhere, are all distracting rather than inviting. We should be, at college level, beyond relying upon colored pictures to hold our attention, especially when they in fact, are breaking apart the text instead.

  6. I am glad to see that those are the only two books that I’ll actually have to buy for this class!

    Now, if only the book store staff wouldn’t have gave me the Norton Anthologies for American Literature. I had to pay $5.00 for their mistake! I know it’s not the money, but for me, its the principle of the matter.

  7. The teachers I had who taught “just the facts” were the ones who put me to sleep, time and time again. I deeply resented their approach to literature and it really gave me a chip on my shoulder about historical subjects. Luckily, those teachers were few and far between. But they did teach me some literary history (rather than just interpretation), and that gave me a way of thinking about literature as a fingerprint of its time and culture (later, such mimetic thinking would be shattered by theory, thank god). I think the best American Lit teacher I had in my BA work was a sort of “jacks of all trades” in approach; she would spend one session lecturing about the historical period, or the author’s biography, and doing so in creative ways — the next period she’d challenge us with group discussions of questions she’d hand out or a quiz — and the next she’d ask us to just talk and do in-class freewriting. I loved getting into in-class debates. She just used one Am Lit anthology…it was enough, and I’ve still got it, marked up like crazy, on my bookshelf (that’s a drawback of relying on online sources too much, in my opinion — at the risk of over-romanticizing things, it doesn’t give the students a treasured class object to return to on their bookshelves later in life and it depreciates their emotional attachment to the format of the book (though of course, they could always turn to the internet or file folders again…but those really just are not the same)).

    Anyway, to the point: I now see that that teacher I had was trying to not only cover the breadth opened up by the window in literary history offered by the course AND the interpretive depth that one could explore by looking through that window, but she also offered us all a plethora of alternative frames of reference we could use when reading. She modeled different approaches. The reader in a survey class often is unaware of different ways of reading — it’s all so new to them — and like trying on hats, a good teacher can assist them to find one that fits. Like different “intelligences” or different “learning types” I now assume that people have different “modes” of reading literature that work best for them (e.g., one might use the authorial identity as an “access point” into the literary concepts, while another might use feminist theory of some rudimentary kind). Naturally, I don’t want students to get too habitual or dogmatic about these frames of reference when I teach, so I try to encourage them to take risks by trying on new hats, so to speak, when they read. No anthology alone can really accomplish this well — that’s why we still need teachers to help them through the book (or the printouts). I’m glad to hear you emphasize critical reading…to quote John Barth, “the key to the treasure is the treasure”. You’re helping them to forge their own keys.

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