My college students dread writing and reading. It’s time to re-think the way we teach.

 

*photo credit: Susan Sermoneta, Flickr Creative Commons*

One of the earliest assignments in my first-year seminar is a reading and writing autobiography. Basically, I want my students to tell me who they are as readers and writers, and how they came to be this way. All their stories are different, of course, but over the years a strong pattern has emerged, and it goes like this: When I was a kid, I loved to read and write, but something happened around junior high, and now I can’t stand it.

What happened in junior high? Everything narrowed. The world of writing was constricted to something called a “five paragraph essay” (a form that does not exist in the real world, by the way). As for reading, they no longer trundled down to the school library, that vault of treasures; now they all marched at the same pace through the same book, one chosen by an administrator from the category of literature known by that anonymous yet intimidating name: “The Classics.”  

“[T]alking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student,” writes Kim Brooks in “Death to High School English.” According to Brooks, the current curriculum of “standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.”

Like Brooks, I teach writing-intensive courses in college. We both receive essays that take a Jackson Pollock-esque approach to comma usage, or feature paragraphs that are mass graves of eighteen unrelated ideas. And we both agree that this stuff matters. When you teach English, you teach interpretation and reasoning and communication—skills that underpin not only the life of a thinking individual, but of a society.

But what’s the best way to do it?

Brooks proposes dropping literature from the curriculum, and focusing on technical skills of writing, like grammar, syntax, and thesis construction. And that’s where she and I part ways.

Her argument reminds me of the position taken by Common Core, a national program that outlines what K-12 students should learn in language arts and mathematics. Regarding reading, Common Core pushes nonfiction and technical texts over literature. As for writing, the “academic essay” is favored to the near-exclusion of other forms and genres. Brooks might not be entirely on board with Common Core, but both are part of a movement in this country to ghettoize literature.

Which is fine—if you want to snuff out a kid’s love for reading and turn her writing into soulless zombie prose. But if you believe that education should kindle interest instead of killing it, then you may want to consider a different approach.

Literature isn’t the problem; it’s the solution.

Some of Brooks’s students read difficult material in high school, works like “The Sound and the Fury” or “Macbeth.” When asked about those texts, they mostly “seem to recall struggling with comprehension of these classics, feeling as though they just didn’t ‘get it.’” I can relate. When I was assigned to read “Romeo and Juliet” in eighth grade, I felt out of my depth. Way out of my depth. Which was a detriment to my education.

Students learn best when they’re operating in the Zone of Proximal Development. That term, coined by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, describes what a student can’t do by himself, but can accomplish with a little help from a teacher. In this zone, students feel challenged, but not overwhelmed.

But if you give students a task far outside their Zone (like, say, dropping Shakespeare on a middle-schooler), you’re not challenging them; you’re discouraging them. They’re likely to think, “I guess I’m just not good at reading” or “Maybe literature isn’t for me.” A defeat like this can fundamentally change their self-concept, steering them away from writing and reading in favor of something they think they can do.

Every student in secondary school is trying to find his or her scene—Who am I? What am I good at?—and our current reading curriculum of chewy classics is telling millions of students every day, It ain’t this, pal. Keep moving.

My proposal: Help students find literature in their Zones. It won’t be hard. Young Adult lit might be the strongest branch on the literary tree these days. Give students a choice in what they read, but encourage them to read like sharks, devouring all kinds and forms of lit. Keep them developing as readers, and they’ll find their way to Madame Bovary when they’re ready.

And here’s the neat trick: reading like sharks will help them develop as writers, as well. Reading a lot will give you a pretty good idea about how sentences work, and how to engage a reader. Reading widely will help you understand how diverse the world of letters is, how many different forms and approaches you can explore in your own writing practice.

Stop fetishizing the “academic essay.”

The academic essay is the most important form of writing…if you’re an academic. But setting it atop the writing heap for students, even unto the exclusion of other forms, is pure solipsism. If the goal is to teach students to write with clarity and power, then we need to recognize how many forms and genres can get us there.

Let students experiment with real-life forms, like an advice column, or an op/ed, or an essay as a numbered list. Don’t mistake these forms as fluff; any one of them can involve argumentation, incorporation of sources, counterarguments, and other moves employed by an academic essay.

Let me be clear: I am not calling for the death of the academic essay (though I confess I am tempted). I am calling for diversity. I am calling for the end of monoculture. In agriculture, growing one crop over and over on the same ground can starve the soil. Do it long enough and you can turn a fertile plain into a desert. The monoculture of the academic essay has not only proven ineffective in teaching students to write; it’s parched the minds of an entire generation of students.

I have a secret curriculum of joy.

It would be easy to read my students’s autobiographies and despair. After all, they’re mostly stories of a dead love. But I hear a wistfulness in the way they write about how good it used to be. An unspoken wish that it could be that good again. Their hope—and mine, too—is to resurrect that love. If I can get them engaged once again, they’ll keep reading and writing far beyond my classroom (and that’s really how you get better: With a lot of practice). The key is desire. You have to feel pleasure and purpose in the act, or you’ll stop doing it as soon as you can. “If you want to build a ship,” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, “don’t drum up men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

An English teacher’s advantage is that reading is lovely, and writing can be, too. Most kids already know that when they come into junior high. Our job is to keep them from forgetting, and while we’re at it, to keep ourselves from forgetting it, too.