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re: the ya/classics ragebait thing...
i was a high school english teacher for ten years. i enjoyed my students immensely and we got on well with only very rare exceptions.
i was a high school english teacher for ten years. i enjoyed my students immensely and we got on well with only very rare exceptions.
i was able to establish an open environment & thru dialogue & an ethic of care, i was able to nudge them often into openness & curiosity. they liked writing way better than reading & most of the time, i made a hesitant peace with that. you take your victories where you find them.
that said—and mind you, this was ten years ago—they were almost universally post-literate, and i don’t think any book, no matter how relevant to their lives it was, would have fostered a love of reading in them.
it was so dispiriting. at the beginning of each year, i thought i’d come up with a solid strategy to finally increase engagement and enjoyment. there were occasionally mild successes, but mostly wild failures.
the failures could have been mostly attributable to my desperation, as the sitch was so dire, i came up with some pretty out there approaches. nothing i did seemed to move the meter. i taught mostly seniors, so i trust the results of the year-end survey i i used to do.
once their grades were finalized and those who were graduating and those who weren’t was settled, i’d ask them, for each of our novels from the year, how many they’d actually read in full. the number of my students for each of those books was always right around 15%.
i’d say, “i don’t get it guys, you are always telling me how much you love my class. if you love it so much, why won’t you follow my lead and trust me on this stuff?” those who spoke up often said some variation of, “we just really hate reading, birt.”
and that was that. they were just really hostile to reading. now, maybe i was just a lousy teacher when it came to books. there’s no false humility there. it’s certainly possible. teaching is hard.
but part of me believes that you could pull all the moby dicks out of the curriculum that you want and replace them with year 2020 stuff (or even graphic novels... i tried that, btw), and kids still won’t read. we live in a post-literate culture.
the teachers in that thread are deluding themselves that they’re going to create little readers by putting their favorite ya in their hands. and delusion is strong in that profession. students are masters at hoodwinking teachers.
“well, i taught [insert favorite ya title here], and my students adored it.”
me: oh, yeah? how many of them? are you sure about that?
me: oh, yeah? how many of them? are you sure about that?
still me: if i sat in for part of a class without you in it, and had a heart to heart, are you confident that i wouldn’t discover elaborate schemes they created to give off the appearance of having read it? because you have the keys to that all-powerful grade book.
methinks what we see in that thread are a bunch of perormative woke teachers and education-adjacent people deluding themselves into thinking that it’s the classics that are the problem.
our culture’s problems with the written word go way beyond such simple solutions.
our culture’s problems with the written word go way beyond such simple solutions.
