High school English teachers are assigning more excerpts and fewer whole books, writes Holly Korbey on The Bell Ringer. Students don't share the experience of reading a novel, together.
A former English teacher turned administrator, "Cafeteria Duty," explains the classroom realities: Students won't read books at home and it takes too much time to read them aloud in class.
She recalls trying to discuss the courtroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird with ninth graders. They weren't sure if Tom Robinson was the sheriff or the recluse or Scout's classmate or . . . She began teaching shorter novels and then no novels at all.
The Atlantic’s The Elite Students Who Can’t Read Books blames teachers' need to prepare students to read short passages on standardized tests, CD writes.
Doug Lemov, in Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms? at Education Next, blames "the false belief prevalent among English teachers that reading is comprised of a set of discrete skills that students can practice, master and thus apply to any other text."
CD taught "mostly poor kids, mostly immigrants, most reading years below grade level" and all needing to pass a state English Language Arts exam. "My kids needed exposure to a wide variety of texts and writing instruction. I simply could not justify including more than one book in my curriculum, especially when teaching that book took a long-ass time and I couldn’t guarantee that all of my students actually read it."
Even when there was no high-stakes test, she still taught only about one book a year. It took five weeks. "By week four, everyone’s bored, and the book, a great work of literature that was supposed to rouse the students from their adolescent solipsism and teach them an invaluable truth about the Human Condition, suddenly felt like that pot of chili you made on Sunday but were forcing down your throat for lunch on Wednesday."
Teaching books only works if students actually read the book. And you cannot teach a book without assigning reading for homework. And most students do not do the readings for homework. And so it is mostly for this reason, dear reader, why fewer books are being taught in English classes.
Some teachers read the book in class, CD writes. That pushes them to choose very short books. Others assign only the essential parts, which are read in class. "The rest is summarized or supplemented with whatever movie version the teacher can find online," writes CD.
CD thinks teachers should teach fewer novels to make time for "short fiction, poetry, argument, rhetoric, research, vocabulary, grammar and — most crucially — writing, the single most difficult academic skill we ask our students to master, and one that takes time."
In my day, we read and discussed novels, Shakespeare plays, short stories and a few essays and did lots of expository writing. OK, it was Level 1 English, but lower levels also were expected to do the reading -- at least read the Cliff's Notes.
We'd started learning to read in first grade with the first Dick, Jane and Sally book -- "See Dick. See Dick run. Run, Dick, run." -- and a book called Fun With Phonics. Teachers believed they had to teach children to read, not give them picture books and hope they'd learn on their own. They assumed that teaching students to read fluently would enable them to enjoy reading.