According to a front-page story in the Outlook section of today's Washington Post, the guilty parties in our generation's aversion to reading for pleasure are ... their high school English teachers.
It's an interesting premise, especially coming from a high school English teacher. Her idea is that teachers are turning beautiful literature into a rote science by making students clinically dissect novels that are works of art and then write essays about books they couldn't care less about.
I'm not sure whether I entirely buy into it, but I think she's got a good point. Reading fiction was something to be dreaded for most people in my high school English classes--Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry was particularly dreaded. No one liked that book. Being a bona fide word nerd, I was bound to be reading for pleasure anyway, but I wouldn't be surprised if having to plow through some of those books killed the idea for some of my classmates.
What about you? Did you like the books you read in high school? How about the way they were taught? Did they make you want to read more or less?
A couple more stray observations:
--Catcher in the Rye for eighth- and ninth-graders? Are you serious? Not is it (in my apparently prudish mind) completely in appropriate for that age in terms of language, but it's essentially a psychological portrait of a 17-year-old that's far too nuanced and complex for 13- and 14-year-olds to understand.
--Read the student's summer email to the teacher about halfway through. Ho-ly cow. I don't think I've ever met a high schooler who would right something like that to his teacher over the summer, and this teacher at The McLean School gets this from a student who's not even an interested participant in class. That's got to be one of the best signs I've seen in a while that suburban D.C. and Grand Island aren't even on the same planet.
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Providing you with views on a variety of topics connected only by the fact that I care about them. Wow, that's kind of narcissistic. Sorry.
4 comments:
I feel like I was kind of gypped in high school because I didn't read a lot of the classics that everyone else read. We didn't even read Romeo and Juliet - we watched the movie instead. I guess it's starting to motivate me to read more now, but that's just because I know I should read these books and I didn't in high school.
I remember having to write our own character (in poetic form) for the "Canterbury Tales", but I can't tell you what the original tale was about...
My mom emailed me this comment:
I think that reading classics (Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hobbit, Watership Down) actually made me want to read more. But I never wrote a paper on any book that I can recall. We talked about the books in class, and had to take regular quizzes to prove we were reading them. Regarding a lot of the older classics (Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Pilgrim's Progress), we read excerpts from them and not the whole thing. So, we really read excerpts from about 6 Shakespearean plays and learned about them without having to read the whole dreaded old english version.
My most fascinating reading came from my "Current Events" Civic class where we had to read books for points. (The more pages the more points). Black Like Me, Malcolm X, and Roots were among the politically and socially charged books of the day. I really loved reading them. My teacher was blind, and only gave oral exams so I really could just read them for pleasure or interest. Also, we could read any books we wanted from a list - thus the social struggle of the African-American was my choice of reading and not my teacher's choice. (He used that old trick of parenting: give your kids choices and they think they're in control!)
So where were the gaps? I kind of missed out on learning grammar and how to write properly. But I do love to read!
Long answer... should have just given you a link and put it on my blog!
ok, so you wrote this post forever ago, but I just haven't commented. I wanted to read the article, but just haven't gotten a chance to.
I've always loved to read, so I don't think that high school stole that from me. Because we moved after my freshman year in high school I missed out on To Kill a Mockingbird, so I actually went back and read it a few years after college. As a result of high school though, I feel like anytime I read a classic I'm supposed to analyze it and find hidden meaning and such. And I don't feel like I have a huge desire to read classics.
Just this past year I feel like I've started regularly "reading for pleasure" again since my friends and I started a book club. But I feel like I have a different definition of "reading for pleasure" than some people--reading fiction. I read Christian books or self-help (I guess?) books because I feel like I have to/suppose to/need to. To me, reading for pleasure is getting to be immersed in a book for fun. One that I choose to read, not to necessarily make myself a better person (although truths and insights can still be gained), but just for enjoyment.
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