Will Okun’s students at an inner-city Chicago high school answer “none”
when asked to name a favorite book. The classics — from Gatsby to Dickens — put them to sleep. But they come alive when they get a chance to read books they can relate to, such as The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or The Outsiders.
The class discussions are dynamic and cover tremendous ground. (There is nothing as satisfying as when a class discussion becomes so intellectually and emotionally charged that a security guard enters to make sure everything is okay.) The students’ writings are more thoughtful, perhaps revelatory. Miraculously, some students even do their homework. A lot of the students are fully engaged, and learning actually occurs as we analyze the ideas, themes, and literary techniques presented in the aforementioned books.
Okun wonders why teachers continue to assign literature that leaves students cold.
All the benefits of studying and learning the classics are irrelevant if few students are actually reading or engaged in the material. In fact, I believe that our educational emphasis of these classics plays a small role in turning many of our young people away from book-reading altogether (as documented in a recent, well-publicized NEA study.)
Read the lively debates in the comments section.
At the Core Knowledge Blog, Robert Pondiscio responds:
I’m not about to be dismissive of how hard it is to get students interested in classic literature, but no teacher can do so if he’s not excited by his subject, and Okun makes it clear he was just as indifferent as a student, calling his high school literature classes “tiresome, uninteresting and irrelevant.”
I’m no fan of The Scarlet Letter, but there are many classics that are great reads and it doesn’t seem impossible to find ways to hook young readers of various backgrounds. That’s assuming they know how to read well enough to understand books that used to be standard fare for high school students.
Update: On The Daily Grind, Mr. McNamar, who teaches Beowulf, lists his 10 favorite books.
I work to find a balance between books students choose to read for themselves (it is completely free choice for our research project), classics they’ll enjoy - Anthem and Bean Trees are perennial favorites - and works which are difficult to get through. My JOB is to motivate my students to do the things which are good for them but which they do not want to do.
For my advanced students, I appeal to the inherent sense of competition nearly all of them have. I explain that ANYONE can read a book they enjoy. The trick is to be able to read and understand books which are deemed good literature but may not be their cup of tea. Goodness knows we all must work through reading which is necessary - whether it’s in a college survey course or a worthwhile but dry report on a study - in order to progress professionally.
For my struggling students, who at this point are primarily English Language Learners, I tell them, yes, this work is difficult. But you come to a school every day as a minority, and you came here 6-12 months ago not speaking the language you must in order to get by. The fortitude you use to do THAT is more than you need to get through this work.
So far, it seems to work.
For Okun, I hate to sound flippant, but along the same lines I tell my advanced students … anyone decent teacher can teach kids the things they want to learn. The trick is in figuring out how to engage them in what they do NOT want to but still need to learn.
necessary but difficult, I meant to say.
There are times I feel for the male students who are taking AP English class. (I’m the science teacher). They’ve had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and now Wuthering Heights. The English teacher explained part of it was that students are given books they would not want to read to teach them to stick with it.
By all means ’start’ kids with literature that appeals to them. Use such literature to move them into the arena of that which they are unfamiliar.
To constantly give people that with which they are comfortable with is NOT education-it is merely ‘confirmation bias.’ Being truly ‘multicultural’ is to read the classics of all cultures. Jump of from literature that the kids can relate to in-say-war. Then pick classics of other cultures in that same vein and expand their minds.
I have had to explain Western Civ reference in movies and TV shows (in one case The Simpsons) to students who have read nothing but books that were ‘relevant’ to their lives. Why even go to school?
Hobbitt, that’s annoying. I have definitely noticed a strong “chick” influence in all of the books that end up on reading lists. Thank goodness for Orson Scott Card, Charles Dickens, Richard Preston, John Krakauer, Thomas Hardy’s MALE protagonists, Mark Haddon … they are out there. Just wish more English teachers utilized them.
The district honchos (all female) have concocted a list of 3 to 5 core novels per grade level. For example, freshmen can read only The House on Mango Street, Night, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or To Kill a Mockingbird. Note the lack of testosterone in these books.
Said honchos allow us to teach only certain stories/poems/essays from the literature textbook. Eveything else in the text is verboten, not that there is very much worth reading.
If you veer from their list, you are tied to the mast and given fifty lashes. Our female overseers are dead serious and most unforgiving as they captain our ship through narrow straights and uncharted waters.
Our head female overseer glories in her quest to expunge from the list novels written by white males, be they dead or alive.
Other than that, it’s really fun teaching English at my school. It is. Really.
“Okun wonders why teachers continue to assign literature that leaves students cold.”
It’s interesting to note that because Okun may feel he has trouble generating interest from his students, that should translate over to all students being uninterested. I tend to do very well with Gatsby (we’re reading it right now), and some others that might not be seen as exciting. Just because Okun can’t get his students interested in the novels, doesn’t mean that’s the case for every teacher, and therefore the idea that the books his students don’t like are the fault of the book rather than the teacher seems a bit suspect to me.
I think there’s often a push for “relevant” works that directly appeal to the kids’ immediate interest. Often this push comes from education professors in the field of language arts who seem to prize instilling an elusive “love of learning” much more than any actual particular thing learned. This all downplays that really relevant works often require some intellectual labor and that giving teenagers what they think they want in the short term isn’t really what education is about, IMO.
I do think that districts should give some thought to balancing reading list so that at every grade we’re not bombarding them with largely the same message. If teachers have some choice and yet every grade a particular kid gets the teacher who chooses the young woman coming of age novel to teach, that’s got to get old and it’s unnecessary. There are plenty of works with recognized literary merit to choose from.
And I have to say that I think The Scarlet Letter, if taught well following an accurate presentation of Puritan thought, is an excellent work to teach to almost all kids at some point during high school. It seems to me that there’s an ever-present tension between enforcing what the community values morally and showing regard for individual freedom in American life, and although Hawthorne comes down pretty heavily in favor of Romantic individualism with his sympathy for Hester, there’s a real complexity to his presentation and a real regard for belief in sin.
There’s a couple factors at play here.
1) No teacher should teach something in which they are unable to derive some measure of interest and satisfaction. If that means you’re in mandated curriculum land and you hate it, go find a new job.
2) Some of these “classics” pretty much suck. There’s better books than Anna Karenina, where a dude plows a field for almost 100 pages. Thanks, but no thanks.
3)Having some kind of hierarchy is lame, anyway. Gatsby is great, but you know what’s more of a classic for me? The Outsiders. Why elevate one over the other? I hated Jane Eyre, but loved Wide Sargasso Sea, it’s imagined prequel. Everyone’s different, and requiring kids to analyze the symbolism of the Conch in Lord of the Flies every year till world’s end just because they are freshman is just a little silly. Choose a wide range of books that cover the big universal themes, reflect life in a variety of guises, vary in difficulty, and let’s all move on.
4) When kids aren’t interested, that’s on us. Step up. Bring the text to them in any number of ways. Some of this failure is a result of #1 above, but some of it is just lazy now-we’re-gonna-read-Things-Fall-Apart-open-to-page-3 garbage.
BadaBing, you could learn a few things from a southern belle who’s been convincing testorone-is (rhymes with macaronis) that things were their idea in the first place. Come on, quit whining about the ruling class and work on what before have been referred to as feminine wiles, just from a different angle. You’re clever enough to craft that incredible extended metaphor about ships and captains and such, surely you can figure out a way to make the captains think it was THEIR idea to steer the ship more Gary Soto and less Sandra Cisneros. I believe in you.
<<< Gatsby is great, but you know what’s more of a classic for me? The Outsiders. Why elevate one over the other?
Oh, I dunno. Quality, longevity, the sheer weight of critical opinion, other than that, no reason whatsover.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. I like the Outsiders too and have recommended it to more students over the years than Gatsby, but c’mon!
Cheers,
Robert
Such conversations remind me of Einstein’s comment that in the modern world we focus more and more on the means and forget the end. Why teach literature? I asked that question at an English department meeting, and didn’t get anything resembling an intelligible answer.
The original reason was to teach the values of Western Civ by teaching works in which those values were embedded. Then Western Civ was debunked, and along with that much agreement about what values were worth teaching. So we just teach reading, without talking to much about what is read or why.
Except that we’re all against racism. After the last department meeting selected novels for our local high school, I noted that all the novels were coming of age stories set against the backdrop of racism. All of them.
I virtually never meet any actual racists, but I meet a lot of young minority kids who’ve been taught that racism is the dominant reality of American life. It strikes me as a harmful teaching.
If these kids are ever going to escape the grim banal brutality of their neighborhoods and proscribed lives, they need to be challenged to try something outside of their very narrow sphere of everyday interests. The Outsiders isn’t much beyond a comic book, in terms of literary sophistication. Literature, and all art, is supposed to take us outside of our heads, our houses, and our little worlds. Teachers who don’t want to make their kids work very hard are shackling them to their bus stop bench.
Hey Robert, given the clear differences in quality, why have you reccomended T.O. over G.G.? Is possible there are other considerations at play?
Same to you, Kate. For the kid who hasn’t read so much as a comic book to read and understand and enjoy The Outsiders is an accomplishment and a move forward. We do wrong by kids to put the inertia of “quality” over considerations individual to the individual.
And Badabing, while Mango Street does come with the dedication “a las mujeres,” if you can’t use the myriad examples of men acting like petulant boys, men who use their fear and self-contempt to treat women like property, men who have no concept of how to be men to teach your freshman boys a thing or two, I don’t know what to tell you.
<<< Hey Robert, given the clear differences in quality, why have you reccomended T.O. over G.G.? Is possible there are other considerations at play?
Because I taught fifth grade.
Lordy, spare me the multi-culti crap that passes for “relevant” literature.
Who cares if kids don’t have a favorite book? It’s not required and there’s no evidence that reading itself (as opposed to reading abiligty) has any correlation to success.
After seeing the decline in testing standards over the past 10 years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a question like “What is your favorite book?” on a high school final exam. It would be followed by “Draw a scene from the book using the provided crayons.”
I guess I tend to be of the school-of-thought of “it’s okay to MEET kids at “their level,” but you sure as heck better not LEAVE them there.”
I realize I come from a “privileged” background where books where everywhere, but frankly, when I read “for fun” I want to read things set in Imperial Japan, or Britain in the 1920s, or Ancient Rome, or pre-Revolutionary Russia. I don’t want to read about some American chick who’s about my age and living at about the same time as I am - because most of those kinds of books, frankly, are kind of boring to me (either “meet cute” books or “I’m screwing 15 different men and wearing Jimmy Choo’s every day so why am I miserable?” books)
Also, I realize “Western Civ” has pretty much been “debunked,” but there are still literary allusions made all over the place - as someone pointed out, even on The Simpsons - and there’s something to be said for an education that allows you to “get” those references. (Also the idea of a “common culture” as opposed to a fragmented culture where no one’s read the same books, or knows the same music, or watches the same films, has somewhat of an appeal to me. But then again, I’m one of those detestable petty-burgeois types, so maybe my opinion shouldn’t count…)
My daughter taught English at an inner-city St. Louis high school for 3 years (two as a Teach for America corpsmember, then a third year after her TFA commitment ended). She told me that two works that she appealed tremendously to her students, and that prompted intense in-class discussions and arguments, were Beowulf and Macbeth — both, she said, because of the element of conflict between rivals and rival groups, which her students had little problem understanding.
Someone please explain to me precisely what has been “debunked” with respect to Western culture.
TMAO, re: Mango Street — Depends on your definition of manhood, I suppose. Some might argue we need fewer Bill Clintons and more John Waynes.
TMAO:
And Badabing, while Mango Street does come with the dedication “a las mujeres,” if you can’t use the myriad examples of men acting like petulant boys, men who use their fear and self-contempt to treat women like property, men who have no concept of how to be men to teach your freshman boys a thing or two, I don’t know what to tell you.
And why would I want to teach that? They get enough of that crap elsewhere and, if they go on to a university, it will be inculcated in their brains by the feminists that ride herd over them and everyone else there. It seems that woman bashing is a sin of the highest order, but that male bashing ought to be a state standard. I won’t be a party to it.
Aw man, okay. Hold that high ground like a champ. The calvary is just round yonder hill-top.
What’s been debunked: the Puritans, to pick one example from an infinitude.
Does anyone in school hear anything good about the people who overcame the divine right of kings through hard thinking and bold action on behalf of liberty, the people who developed the concept of “consent of the governed” as a basis for political legitimacy, the people who conceived and organized the assault on slavery in England?
My experience is that kids are subjected to a little hostility toward Calvinism through a quick reading of “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” and then it’s off quickly to that bizarre bit of liberal sanctimony masquerading as a tale about Puritans, The Crucible and then, maybe, a bit more Puritan bashing from Hawthorne.
Who were those people, who excite such fear from modern liberals?
Instead of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” I would nominate Bradford’s “A Model of Christian Charity” as a text to get young people closer to understand a vastly important part of their heritage:
. . .wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. Soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome, power, goodness and truthe, than formerly wee haue been acquainted with. Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it likely that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God, and all professors for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are a goeing.
I shall shutt upp this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithfull servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israell, Deut. 30. Beloued there is now sett before us life and good, Death and evill, in that wee are commanded this day to loue the Lord our God, and to loue one another, to walke in his wayes and to keepe his Commandements and his Ordinance and his lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that wee may liue and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possesse it. But if our heartes shall turne away, soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worshipp and serue other Gods, our pleasure and proffitts, and serue them; it is propounded unto us this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good land whither wee passe over this vast sea to possesse it;
Therefore lett us choose life
that wee, and our seede
may liue, by obeyeing His
voyce and cleaveing to Him,
for Hee is our life and
our prosperity.
Michael,
Okay, thanks. That was the only thing I could think of, as well: not an actual debunking — you know, actual facts that refute conventional wisdom — but the postmodernist revisionist history (i.e., lies) promoting a Liberal/Socialist agenda. This “debunking” is worrisome, to be sure, but I suspect truth with eventually prevail.
That, or our society will burn. But hopefully I’d be dead by then.
I think Freshman English should start off with the Iliad in a good translation—
Talk about Testosterone Laden! And relevant. What is the Trojan War, but Rival gangs feuding over “Hos?”
Clearly Homer was the first Gangsta Rapper.
Or some human experiences or universal. Not limited by time or place. Which is the POINT of reading literature. If you only read the “relevant” stuff you start thinking you’re unique and completely independant of history……
Of course, I may just be trying to keep my college major relevant to todays world. =)
Come to think of it, here’s another summary of a dead white guy’s classic:
A boy lives with his single Mom. Where’s his dad? Dead, Prison, Who knows. He left with his buddies years ago and never came back. Son doesn’t even know him. Mom has a string of abusive boyfriends who leach off her and never work, just sit around drinking.
So the boy goes off on a quest to find dad, beats up an old guy to gte some info…..
Meanwhile, Dad is wandering around, shacking up with random girls and getting into fights…. but eventually he comes home to find out that sonny boy has grown up and is all set to follow in his Dad’s footsteps…..
Or we could just call it “The Oddessey.”
Maybe the teacher’s problem is that he’s too lazy to read classics and FIND the relevance to his students’ experiences. So it’s easier to read the ones that proclaim their relevance on the dust jacket….
The Greeks and Romans had a LOT of testosterone. So did Shakespeare. And Doestoyesky and Tolstoy…..
Maybe if English Teachers were required to take a great books class?
Brilliant, Deirdre! I’m stealing your Odyssey plot summary!
That’s funny, I thought all three of the books he mentions - The Color Purple, The Outsiders, and …Caged Bird… were classics. The Outsiders is a part of the upper-middle-school canon, as far as I know. That’s when I read it, alongside The Pigman, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and others. In fact, it’s one of the books I remember best from middle school. I read The Color Purple for a humanities class at Stanford, alongside Greek plays, Shakespeare, texts from world religions, philosophers such as Nietzche and John Stuart Mill, and other modern writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston. In no way did it fall short of its companions. The canon has already expanded, it’s a done deal. I’m years out of school and those were the books we read, and at no point do I think my schooling was unusually edgy… liberal, yes, but not far-out.
So now you’ve got a group of kids who get hooked on one set of well-respected, widely-assigned books more readily than on other well-respected, widely-assigned books. Why *wouldn’t* you start with the works they relate to most, and build from there? Also, the skills of literary analysis and critical thinking about a text can be applied to any well-written text - and isn’t that the whole point? Tools to use in further reading?
Cal wrote:
It’s not required and there’s no evidence that reading itself (as opposed to reading abiligty) has any correlation to success.
You’ve got to be kidding! I’d ask you to cite a reference but I don’t give a damn what it would say. It would just be garbage from Jay P. Green, the Fordham Foundation or the Heritage Foundation.
The ability to read well leads to success. If you can’t do it you’d better have a rich and well-connected Mommy and Daddy
Back to tilting at windmills, Mike? Look at what Cal said:
“…there’s no evidence that reading itself (as opposed to reading abiligty) has any correlation to success.”
Do you see, Mike?
Cal
Where in the hell did you get that info? I wanna see a source for something that outlandinsh.
I really agree with Ms. Mundy: Homer=OG (Original Gangster). I still can’t get enough of the Classics - The Iliad, The Oddessey, The Aenid. Even let them know what Armavirumque is (it’s the first line in the Aenid - “Of wars and a man I sing…).
Yes, I saw it Rags, and I thought it as pointless as the rest of the statement.
Do you REALLY believe that reading can’t lead to success? Do you NEVER read the instructions on how to do or assemble something? When you and I have one of our frequent disagreements do you NEVER read information on the internet to try and prove me wrong?
Mike, he implicitly agrees that reading ability is important. And you said “The ability to read well leads to success.”
So you’re in agreement.
Right?
If you disagree with his claim that reading itself ain’t correlated with success, go for it; but that’s a different issue.
Rags,
Will it make you happier if I add, the ablity to read well AND reading, lead to success?
Actually I think you and I disagree on what Cal was saying. Maybe he’ll clarify it for us. I read what he is saying is that reading does not correlate to success.
My students liked to read books that are real life situations and they really responded to them when we read them. Sometimes they liked to read books that I might have read as a teen and enjoyed because this makes them see what makes me tick.
For me, the important aspect of *The Iliad* is not the rivalry or testosterone but grim tragedy, as those who are supposed to be heroes turn out to be the destroyers of “tamers of horses,” i.e., civilization.
From what I remember, The Odyssey is less about Telemachus and more about Odysseus and the idea of pain or suffering, which is the meaning of the latter’s name.
Multiculturalism does not simply mean what is recommended in U.S. schools but great works of art that are also like Homer’s epics. Examples include *Ramayana* and the epics of the Philippine south. For another example, those who enjoy *Don Quixote* might also appreciate *Tale of Genji*.
“Western civ” is not “debunked” and the classics are not considered “lame,” at least in many parts of Europe and Asia where ideas by thinkers like Sokrates and Confucius are still followed. For example, in Asia, the Confucian idea of self-cultivation is prominent, which explains why intellectual culture in some countries in the region thrive and where Asian classics are read with those from the West. In parts of Europe, significant amounts of money are spent on cultural institutions ranging from operas to public libraries. It is not surprising that in several countries in these regions poets, artists, scientists, and other intellectuals are praised.