When did reading become a guilty pleasure?

Since when did reading become a guilty pleasure? When I was a kid, summertime, to me, meant two things: visiting my grandparents in Southern Virginia, and lots and lots of reading. Of course, at that time, I also read throughout the rest of the year, but come summer, I would fill my backpack up with a whole stack of books (even then my greatest fear was running out of reading supplies), visit libraries in two separate states on opposite coastlines, and settle in for a couple months of real, unadulterated reading. Reading was my summer pastime and the places I read were their own small adventures: in a tree; in Granny’s rock garden, laid out on one of the flat, sun-kissed stones; by the creek; on the deck with a lap full of fuzzy new kittens; in the Green room closet-turned-library; on the antique couch in the living room; in the car on the way to some other delightful summer excursion. It wasn’t s filler, something I snuck in between other important and fun activities when there wasn’t enough time to do anything else. It was a thing in and of itself. It was the important and fun activity. Nothing said I’ve earned this rest like settling in and reading a whole book, start to finish, without budging, except maybe to give your learning elbow a rest, or brush a tiny beetle off your ankle.

            Even when I got older, and our family trips to Roanoke became less frequent, Summer still meant reading, on the beach, then, or in Bogart’s coffee shop, or in my yellow bedroom with Bingo (the bird) perched on my shoulder, sometimes with some studying thrown in, maybe, once standardized tests became a way of getting somewhere, but still more reading than studying. Which brings me to yesterday, on my couch in Kansas City, older still, now, and still reading, but, it struck me suddenly, in a very different way. I had two and a half hours from the time I got home from my first scheduled event to the time I had to leave for my second scheduled event. (Scheduled events, I have found, are a thing that adults presumably created in order to enrich their lives and make easier the bondages of adulthood responsibilities, but they have actually, from what I can tell, greatly reduced our existence to droll appointment keeping, like we are secretaries, instead of masters, of our own lives.) Anyway, I had two and a half hours to – I don’t know – address wedding invitations, or clean the kitchen, do laundry, study for the PRAXIS (the standardized test that, due to a technicality, has reentered my life, cost me one hundred forty six dollars, and wasted hour of my time), make more appointments, plan dinner, or – well, you know the list; you likely have one of your own. But I sat down, instead, to read. Guiltily. And it was the guilt that surprised me. My summer break began nearly a week ago and I had not once in that time sat down to read a book for longer than thirty minutes. So when my book-absorption hit forty five minutes, I began to feel anxious, not because I was sick of reading, but because I felt a responsibility to be doing something else. And by an hour in, I had reached a full on state of guilt. Like entire cities were crumbling around me while I did nothing. Like I could have been saving the lives of innocent babies, but was instead lolling about on my sofa engaged in a mere story. An hour of reading and I felt as though I had squandered any productivity the day had to offer. No wonder people don’t read anymore. If I, a reader by trade, a person who believes stories are innately essential to meaningful human existence, can’t make it through an hour of reading without feeling extravagantly lazy, then who does?

            I hate to admit it, but I watch The Bachelor. I have a perfectly valid justification for doing so, if anyone wants to hear it (which no one ever does; evidently nobody really cares why – or that – I choose to waste an hour of my life once a week indulging in scripted fantasies of spontaneous love). So I don’t talk about it much. I’m a little embarrassed by it and so I prefer to indulge in that embarrassment alone – or with select people who expressly wish to join in it with me. And yet, when I sit down to watch The Bachelor, I generally watch it all the way through, on my couch, with a snack and a blanket, dinner and grading papers be damned. So why is this real guilty pleasure an easy hour spent and the reading of a great book unjustifiable to my conscience?

            Most of what I remember of elementary school is recess and reading (except Kindergarten during which I vividly remember using staples, tape, and stickers to make extraordinary pieces of useless art; and a few distinct memories of writing compositions too long for anybody to read; and, of course, my first poem in second grade which set me on the path to becoming a writer.) In elementary school, reading was also an adventure. We read in our seats and on the carpet. We read alone to ourselves, we read to each other, we read in reading groups, and we were read to. Daily. Reading was the thing. It was (at least part of) the lesson for the day. Education theory will tell you that around third grade, we shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Certainly, by high school, reading is no longer the thing anymore; it is instead a means to an end. By high school, we have also stopped reading together, for the most part. (Interestingly, the excerpts from novels my high school English teachers reread aloud to us still stand out distinctly in my mind – the teacher’s reading mannerisms, their voices, the discovery of something in the story I had not heard before. Even then, being read to was a sacred affair.) By high school, reading is homework. Writing that word recalls to mind Mark Twain’s wise observation that, “Work and play are two words used to describe the same thing under different circumstances.” By the time I was in high school, reading, regardless of whether it was homework or not, was a joy to me, but I don’t think the same is true for most people. By high school, we have taken all the play out of reading, and along with it, the indulgence, the relaxation, the intrigue, the sense of self-gain. We have relegated it to work.

            And now I work in a school, assigning reading work to my students each night. I also have a bad tendency to be a hover teacher. At times when students are supposed to be working and thinking independently or with each other, I have a strong urge to hover. To circulate the room, butting in, prompting, answering questions they should be answering on their own. They will tell you that hovering is good teacher practice, but I have learned from experience that that is only partially true. Equally as important is providing space between. Students will take anything you will give them to try to come up with your thoughts instead of their own. And most of them are practiced in this luring of other peoples’ ideas because they have found it to be easier and less scary than coming up with their own. If you refuse to say words, they will read your face instead, and your body language, and will snatch answers – rightly or wrongly – anyway from what you are not saying, without thinking about them at all. But if you remove yourself from their direct access, make yourself small and unobtrusive in the corner, both inertia and social stigma will encourage them to use their own minds and each others’ to develop new thoughts, instead of the teacher’s old ones. Hover teachers get answers, but usually they are merely their own – or a perversion of their own – spoken back to them.

            So what do I do in the spaces that I try to force myself to allow my students? I work. I do the innumerable tasks that come up unpredictably in the daily life of a teacher, and I do the more routine ones, like taking role and grading papers. And every once in a blue moon, I find myself caught up – momentarily – on all of those things and I take out a book to read. And inevitably, I feel guilty. Maybe I should hover more, I think to myself (though it has only been thirty seconds since I last hovered). Maybe I should check my email again, or lesson plan for next month. Maybe I should reorganize, or regrade, or make a new seating chart. What part of a reading, a well-read, high school English teacher is detrimental to students? What part of my job description delegates that I don’t waste time reading? When has a reference to something I have read ever diminished a conversation I have had, with students or other people? Not only that, but when has a happy and fulfilled person ever been worse at her job, as a teacher or a citizen of society? And yet, reading during class, as an English teacher, makes me feel guilty.

            Adulthood is not easy, but it’s also, sometimes, not wise. And I’d like to see what would happen to our society if we took a little more extended time to book read and a little less to rant, or cell phone, or hurry around. It’s hard to imagine that things would take a turn for the worse. If delving into a story is wasted time, then so, it seems, by extension, is taking the time to think divergently, to grow in compassion, to build new ambitions. If laundry is a more important adult task than reading a book, what happens to greatness and community and innovation?

          I fought the guilt. I finished my book. And it was great. It made me feel proud and patriotic and hopeful over things and times I will never experience myself. I didn’t even notice the unclean laundry. Neither did Jason. Neither did the world. Maybe laundry should be the guilty pleasure. As in: why am I wasting time folding clothes that I’m about to unfold again when I could be reading a book; expanding my worldview; building something with my hands; dancing with a forlorn child; creating a feet of engineering genius; painting a reflection of God’s greatness; helping the impoverished; or sitting by a campfire watching for shooting stars, just because that kind of faith and soul-renewing is what makes living life worthwhile. What kind of adult wisdom makes reading, of all things, a guilty pleasure? 

-R.E.A.

I rush.

            I rush. No, it’s not the latest Apple product. It’s what I do. Have always done, really, I think. For all that I am a lover of nature and simple pleasures, the magic and beauty of the universe, the little things, in my daily life, I rush. Always. Even when I’m not actually in a rush and have nowhere to go. It’s a habit that I’m not even aware of. It’s also a problem.

I remember Jason coming home one time and saying, “I saw you driving by the park when I was on my run.” I was probably, I thought to myself with that self-consciousness that comes from finding out that you were being watched when you hadn’t known it, singing loudly and atrociously. “You looked like this,” he said, simulating a tense race car driver, hands gripping the wheel at two and ten, head pressed forward toward the windshield, shoulders tense. We laughed. I realized that is how I drive all the time. Tensely, though I am not, overall, a nervous driver. Even when I am on my way home to relax after a long day of work. I rush.

A few weekends ago, I got miserably sick. I didn’t know it until the following Tuesday because my mom was visiting and everything always feels all right when she’s around. Also, it’s my first spring in Kansas and I can actually see the foreign pollens floating around in the air and up my nose, so I figured I was likely just fighting with Midwestern allergies. But on Tuesday, after Mom had left and I had to face, be in charge of, and teach a hundred forty squirrely, needy adolescents, I knew that I was miserably sick. The sick was entirely in my head (literally, not figuratively), but also thoroughly entrenched there, giving no indication that it ever planned to leave. I couldn’t inhale. I couldn’t exhale. I couldn’t swallow or open my mouth without coughing. I wheezed. I slept sitting at a ninety degree angle, on the floor, with my couch propping me up (so that I also acquired severe muscle cramps.) My ears hurt and my head hurt and sound traveled to my brain as though it were first traveling through a long and windy tunnel. When I spoke, I was pretty sure sound came out, but it, too sounded more like a gusty breeze than actual language. I wasn’t sure my ears would ever be unplugged again. And somehow, without begin able to sleep, and without being able to hear, I stopped rushing.

You know when you go outside after the first snow, or maybe even when there’s still a little dusting coming down, and the cloud cover is low and the birds are tucked away and there’s this peaceful silence over the world that is both startling and stunningly beautiful? Rest, it whispers. Be warm and still, it says. The world is waiting, it hums, you can wait too. Well, in a much less beautiful, much more mucusey way, that is exactly what my head cold told me. I stopped rushing because, like being stuck at home on a snow day, I couldn’t rush. I had neither the energy nor the self-awareness that a fully breathing, fully hearing human being has and so my pace just slowed to a state of social survival. I was miserable, physically. But emotionally, I actually felt calm. My head, though far from clear, cleared. I felt like I was better at my job because I was only able to focus on one thing at a time instead of the mad multitasking of my usual day. I had time to laugh even when I had forty papers to grade by Friday. When I asked or answered questions, I didn’t race through them because my tired brain needed an extra second to process. I paused to breath (through my mouth). It was an awakening for me. I rush; but not (it seems) when that oh-so-fragile blessing of health demands my humility.

Two Sundays ago, I was stuck in the airports of the state of Texas for a total of twenty travel hours in an effort to get back to Kansas City before work on Monday. As we roamed around the airport in Houston, walking between gates, grabbing dinner, finding places to charge our cell phones, getting cups of coffee, it struck me how slowly I was willing and able to roam inside the airport. Sure, it was due, in part, to the fact that I had a major case of boredom and a mild case of airport depression, but after some thought, what I realized was most poignantly missing was not the stress (lightning storms in Dallas are definitely stressful), or the lack of a destination or job to get done (we had both), but rather, my to-do lists. I didn’t have any, there, in the airport. My intention had been to fly home that morning and make my to-dos for the rest of the day and the new week. That had been part of the purpose, really, in leaving Texas so early on Sunday, to have time to prepare ourselves for the upcoming week. But there I was in Houston at about five hours past when I should have been home and, obviously, I wouldn’t have time to make the lists, let alone to accomplish anything on them that night. And not having an inkling about when I would actually get home (along with that mild depression) left list-making in the airport a futile and fruitless endeavor. I literally had nothing on my plate besides listening for Dallas weather updates (which weren’t really changing anyway) and the mediocre burger from Chili’s Too (yes, it’s actually called that) in the airport rotunda. So I walked slower. I mean, it’s strange to say, but that was really the most direct result of my being list-less. I walked more slowly. (Suddenly, the word listless has taken on a whole new meaning…or has it always been that way and I just never noticed?)

I rush; but not (apparently) in the airport, where the state of affairs is so out of my control as to be utterly immune to pre-planning. The length of the security line, the helpfulness of the attendants, the weather in Dallas, all dramatically important to my trip and entirely unpredictable, with or without my list making.

In “real life” outside the confines of crazy weather patterns and crazier airline policies, I am always planning ahead. Always. Minutes, hours, days, months. At five A.M., in the shower, I am deciding in what order to make lunch, do my makeup, and feed the pig, trying to formulaically determine which will be the most efficient. (I don’t even sing in the shower anymore, I find. I don’t have the time.) When I am eating lunch, I am deciding what errands to run after school, and how long they will take, and how much time that will leave me to do the things that I need to do once I get home, and what those will be. Part of this may have been nurtured by the teaching profession. Preempting student issues can take up half of my in-class attention at any given time, at least. But also I can remember being obsessive about organized planning since high school. I am sure that this is, in some ways, a good quality. I have frequently witnessed the struggles of people who can’t organize their time or plan ahead to save their lives, and therein lies a different kind of stress and insanity and failure. But what is happening to my mind when it is planning my upcoming time to the tenth of a second? For one thing, it is missing the experience it is in at the moment. This planning, which is meant to make the future, when it comes, more manageable, is obscuring the present. So if it’s not, ultimately, affecting the present positively, is it not self-defeating? Pointless?

This has been a rough year. Everyone knows that I’m good at adventures, but bad at transitions. I like to be spontaneous, but I like to make a list before I go. And I’ve been a California gal for the past 28 years. Moving to Kansas has been exciting, but breathe taking, sometimes like standing on the edge of a windy mountain at sunset, and other times like a plain old asthma attack in the urgent care office at one in the morning. I have to admit, as this school year comes to a close, that I’m a little bit haggard, not just professionally, but also spiritually. And I am thoroughly sick of rushing. If there’s one thing my head cold and Dallas have taught me it’s that there’s something to be said for throwing urgency to the wind and telling the uncontrollably spinning world that you’re just not going to keep up all the time. It also taught me that slowing down is possible. After all, if it happened twice in two weeks and the world didn’t implode, it seems chances are that it could continue in a similar vein. As I’ve sat here, pondering why this lesson is so hard for me to learn, I am reminded of dozens of times that I have discovered this truth before, including:

• Have you ever seen a line of cars on a busy street, silently and patiently stopped? No red lights, no honking. Just brake lights. And you look up ahead and there goes a family of ducks, crossing the street with the faith of a mustard seed? The busy, flustered, late-for-work world stops short for the whole vulnerable lot of them. And most of them probably smile as their running-on-empty cars slow to a sudden stop.
• You know how really old people do everything slowly? And at first you think it’s because their bodies are tired and painful and arthritic and they just don’t have the energy they once had. But then you realize that it’s also because they just don’t give a damn. They talk slowly, they move slowly, they think slowly, they wait patiently, they observe, and it’s because they’ve learned that rushing life doesn’t make it any better or more lasting than taking your time in it.
• There was a quote written on the wall of the Starbuck’s in the Barnes and Noble at the Marina Pacifica in Long Beach. I wrote it down on a slip of napkin and I have carried it with me, on multiple pieces of paper, in notebooks, and in my mind ever since. It struck me like a blow when I first read it. I was already rushing by then. It said, “Speak softly; the world will listen. Take your time; the world will wait.”
• Ms. Gayer, my twelfth grade U.S. Government teacher had more poise than anyone I have ever met. In the face of unruly adolescent boys and our general ignorance about the country from which we came, she never lost her cool, her patience, or the slight smile on her face that belied any power we believed our rebelliousness might have over her authority. I have always wanted that kind of carriage.
• Southern drawls. Have you ever noticed that they still get everything said that they need to say?

            And now the head cold. And the lists. I’m writing fewer of them. My list-less, post Texas week made me aware of another flaw in my methods. There are so many things to write down and so many different types of lists that no amount of cataloguing, electronically or on paper, seems to organize them adequately anyway. Perhaps that is what adulthood is, having too much to do to even make lists about. It’s irritating to forget things, which I sometimes do, now that everything is not written down minute by minute. But it’s not as irritating – or disheartening – as losing a list because I can’t remember which organizational device I have stored it in, or spending hours writing the list and then finding that I cannot possibly do all of it when I’m supposed to, or, even more stressful, finding that the list is so complex that it actually needs to be divided down into multiple little list babies. It is not as irritating as finding myself overwhelmed and exhausted at the end of the day and knowing that I have not crossed off enough items, that the triage needs have changed, and that I’m going to do the same. damn. thing. tomorrow. It seems, at the end of the day, that I have finally become bored with rushing. And while it seems I am willing to allow myself to be miserable, I adamantly draw the line at boredom. It’s so nothing. Now my list is short and immediate and everything else has to just fly around, willy nilly, hoping to either smack me upside the head and grab my attention, or waiting until it, too, is short and immediate and makes the list cut. My life is a disorganized, chaotic, mess. And yet, I feel, myself, like the eye of the storm. Here are the results so far:

• I spend less money (mainly because I forget to buy all the things I need when I go the store, but also because forgetting has shown me that I need fewer things than I actually think I do. And because I try to do fewer things [and go fewer places] within a day.)
• I wake up with a clearer head. In the shower, when all the thoughts come rushing back. I ignore them by instead asking myself these two questions: “What will I do to make today exciting and new? How will I avoid boring myself to death?” It’s a more interesting question to mull over than whether I should put my grocery list in my phone or in my planner.
• I use more coupons (this sort of goes back to my first point). I used to find the lists quite unruly enough to have the energy to also organize and carry along coupons. Now, they’re just tucked neatly in an envelope in my glove box, ready to grab wherever I go. They also sometimes (ironically and delightfully) remind me what I am supposed to buy.
• I spend my time actually doing things instead of thinking about doing things.
• Those most obnoxious and distasteful and emergent tasks that always seem to pop up and harangue the edges of your mind, those items which I used to write down on a long list in order to put them off as long as possible, but then worry over incessantly, those things, I just take care of them now. Because I’m afraid to forget them and realize that they take so much longer to do when I wait until the problem is complicated.
• I notice people more. Their emotions, their conversations, their needs. And because I notice more, I take the time to connect more.
•  I pray more.
• My house is messier. But it stresses me out less.
•  I feel less like a middle school nerd bomber. It’s probably superficial and ridiculous to even bring it up, but I have always been a small person with a big load. I am a collector, a reader, a writer, and a resource hoarder, so I have always bogged myself down like a pack mule in daily life. With my wide load and my short, sharp, quick steps, I have never stopped feeling like that undersized kid at school who everyone either feels sorry for or mocks. But it’s amazing how much a slower stride can make my wide load more manageable, give me a sense of competence and power, allow me an awareness of my posture and my intentions.

            Random factoid about Keith Urban from the days when I used to like to watch him rock the electric guitar singing “These are the days we will remember”: He has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.” My interest in Keith Urban’s music has waned, but my appreciation for that tattoo has not. I have, I am coming to believe, in my adult life, held on too tightly to illusions of what it means to be fulfilled and successful. Have held on too tightly to things that are true in high school, but not in its aftermath, to a personal strictness and self-discipline that, though it has served me, has also at times inhibited my growth as a person. It is time to let some things go. I have also, it seems, let go of some things, inadvertently, that are dearly important to me, in exchange for succumbing to the demands of the world in which I live. Lost them like change out of a hole in my pocket, noticing them gone only later when they are much harder to track down, but when I need them the most. I want to hold those things again. In my hand. See that they can truly be tangible, even in this world, like Ethan Hawley’s glowing stone in Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. The fact of the matter is that my scale needs rebalancing in the holding on and letting go department. And it starts with slowing down a little, both in action and in thought. So I can at least think and observe again. I would like to live without continuing to make the exhausting and futile mistake of trying to do too much in a day and the other related and truly tragic mistake of failing to do enough in a lifetime. To rush it all away. 

-R.E.A.

A Willing and Searching Mind

The other day, at a department meeting, we were told about a teacher – somewhere in our district – an English teacher, no less – who was giving students the entire class period to just read. Read. No other requirements. Whatever they wanted. Whatever they had. Books, articles, emails. It was just an entire hour to read. The teacher who was purposelessly giving his students entire class periods to just read, was introduced (under a pseudonym) at our department meeting to remind us of the types of teachers we don’t want to be. The gravest evidence brought against the poor fool was that there were no listed objectives for the reading task. People in education today seem far less concerned about the gradual mushification of adolescent brains than they are about the necessity that all teachers everywhere have clear and explicit objectives listed all the time for everything they do. From California to Kansas, I have been interrogated about my objectives. What is the purpose of this day in your classroom? We are asked. Now, quantify that. “Learn” is not a specific enough objective. Neither is “Think,” although it remains alarmingly absent in the public school classroom.

Neither, apparently, is “Read.” Maybe, we were informed, had there been objectives, or some kind of assessment or learning targets, the activity could have been justified. Maybe had guidelines been more specific; maybe if there had been some explicit purpose to the reading, it would not have been such a point of contention. But this teacher is instead under grave suspicion of parceling out nonsense activities to avoid the rigors of teaching. Now, I don’t know the character of the accused. It might be that he is an indolent shirker, an overseer, rather than a teacher. Even I’ll admit that checking (and presumably responding to) emails hardly counts for creative or analytical mental development. But what shocks me about this particular scenario is the way in which the issue was presented to us – along with a handy little handout – a handout! – highlighting just exactly what constitutes an adequate justification for reading (in an English classroom) during class time – those things like objectives and assessments and the endless list of other buzzwords that the system substitutes for actual teaching and actual learning.

            I shouldn’t have been shocked, though. That’s the sad truth. Because only four years in the classroom has confirmed to me that we are in the middle of an attack on reading – not just by our schools, but by our society as a whole. Why have writing skills declined severely (even by entire grade levels) over the past decade? Because students read less. Why do we have an uninformed general public? Because adults read less. Why are native English speakers unable to speak standard English or advance their vocabularies? Because society reads less. Author and teacher Kelly Gallagher wrote a book entitled Readicide, which discusses in detail the part that schools are playing in murdering reading for students. And every day, I am reminded of the unfortunate fact in a hundred different ways. My experience with high schools involves three particular schools – the one that I attended and the two at which I have taught. All three schools have had similar socioeconomic and education level demographics. But it continues to shock me how few English teachers in my students’ generation have classroom libraries. My English teachers in high school had shelves and stacks of books all over the place. Time-worn and mistreated, we had access to these books any time, all the time. I can name only two English teachers at my last school and none at my current school who have more than a half bookshelf of books for students to access. This seems to me like a grave and foreboding situation. How do kids ever learn to want to read if we do not surround them with all kinds of curious titles to choose from?

            Furthermore, I have been told my several administrators, every district representative I’ve come across, and many teachers, that the most important thing I can teach my students in the modern classroom is how to speak publically and work in effective collaborative groups. The most important thing. People really believe this is true. Do they realize the implications this has on the reading of a book? Reading is an independent, soft, and silent endeavor and that is one of the things that is so beautiful about it – it is a world at your fingertips that lets you reflect and wonder and inspect without the impatience and loudness of the real world interrupting you just when your mind is grasping new understanding. It is the opportunity to fly without having to buy the ticket, or go through security, or wait at the gate, so that you can do it anytime and anywhere and feel the exhilaration of new adventure. It is lonely expressly so that you can make friends with characters who are unlike any people you will ever have the opportunity to meet. – And so that you can take the time to think about how you would react if you really were to meet them and how you can become the person you want to be. I look at how severely my ninth graders struggle with reading comprehension and I often wonder how, after all these years of knowing how to read, they still cannot decipher what they are reading. Then I wonder if perhaps nobody has ever just let them be quiet for long enough.

            The idea that books are only useful in so far as they can be analyzed or discussed or tested on – or on the other side of the spectrum – in so far as they can entertain us before the next episode of Survivor comes on, is not only completely inaccurate, but also drastically dangerous to the individual and to society. Books expand us. They provide us with insight, but also demand insightfulness. And they do this even without accompanying study questions or formal discussion. If they are read. If. And so they say that interacting with peers will make students ready for a global economy without realizing that reading – and caring about the story being told – will prepare them too, in other, and valuable ways. See, it’s not just my ninth graders who think that reading novels and entering the real world are two mutually exclusive things. I was told today that students must have “real world” connections in order to find relevance in the novels they are reading. Really? I thought. So the story has no implicit value in and of itself? No richness? No vibrancy, no meaning, no truth, no depth, without being connected to Hillary Clinton or global warming or a business degree? So relevance is measured solely in how closely it gets us to career goals or positions of power? The effect it has on our souls and minds and characters and levels of wonder is only a lucky side effect for people who already, for some obscure, probably genetic, reason, enjoy reading? That outside of people who want to grow up to be professional readers (there’s no such thing, by the way, I’ve checked) or journalists or English teachers, there is no purpose in knowing how to breathe in a story and let it speak to you?  Because this is the message that our children are being sent.

            But if we believe this is true, then there is no need for literature classes at all. Reading – the act of. I mean, literacy itself – can be reinforced in science textbooks and history articles, and writing can be taught as a solely technical skill. In fact, I have come across more than one teacher of English who believes that the message of the Common Core Standards is that literature does not matter and should largely be replaced by nonfiction texts (like those children will see, presumably, in the “real world”). I have an article written by Pam Belluck about a study published in Science magazine. According to Belluck, the study “found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence – skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking. The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.” So say that again, imagination (also an activity conducted best by an independent mind, though it can be expanded on and added to by more minds) provides us with real world skills that will enhance our abilities to interact with others and to be successful? I find this so fascinating not only for what it says, but also because these are the exact skills that the education system argues are so necessary, the skills that supposedly must be taught through collaborative learning where students complete all of their thinking and working in teams.

            But I do not hear anything from the education community about the power of reading skills, besides the vague agreement that kids should learn how to have them. More disturbingly, it seems it is constantly being reinforced to my students, that the value in books lies somewhere outside of the books, the stories, themselves. So reading in class is a waste of time. It is not a part of our development itself, but merely a tool for learning “relevance.” Because of course, relevance must mean the same thing for all of us: keeping up in a global economy by interacting with our peers.

            I have ninth graders – and have had ninth graders like this every year of my career – who cannot read. I mean, they can read the words on the page, but they cannot understand them and they cannot summarize them and they cannot think about them or determine why they are important. These students are not in the minority. And they cannot do these things, in part or full, because they do not like reading. It is difficult for them, or it is boring for them, or both, and so they stopped doing it a while ago and made the decision to eek by without it. And at this point, even if they got some inexplicable urge to do it well, they have so much catching up to do that the process will be inevitably painful. Our mantra in the school system is to “teach every student to meet the highest academic standards,” so we are determined to make these students – the ones who for all intents and purposes cannot read – as successful in the classroom as all their peers. They will pass the same tests with the same score averages, they will lead discussions and keep up with the readings and get into groups to analyze the text with everyone else. But they can’t read, you’re thinking. And you’re right. So they do all of these things as wallflowers, covering up their inabilities with aloofness and averted eyes. But to backtrack with them, to meet them where they are instead of where we want them to be, would be to admit that we are holding them to a different standard than the other students in their grade. Would be to admit – to ourselves and to them – that they do not know things that people their age are supposed to know. So instead, we just keep hurtling them along; dazed and confused and hurt they struggle through the same rituals as everyone else without developing in any way except maybe to find themselves feeling increasingly dumber and more blindsided by a world full of symbols that they cannot understand. Talk about being unable to find relevance!

            So if we should really be meeting these students where they are, we must be able to answer the question: where are they? I’ll tell you. They’re back at the beginning. Through a series of unfortunate events, they don’t like reading. And they are not going to get anything useful – emotionally or technically or intellectually – out of it until they can be captured by it in some way. Which is why I proclaim that we must capture students with reading before we try to use it as a tool with which to teach them. Otherwise, it will be like forcing a wrench into their hands and instructing them to pluck out their own teeth.

            There is a magic in stories. And I know it by the looks on my cynical sixteen year old students’ faces when I say I am going to read to them. Before my eyes, they transform into small, hopeful, eager second graders again, sitting cross legged on a faded indoor/outdoor carpet, begging to see what’s on the inside cover. Their eyes sparkle. They lean in. They listen with a focus that they never possess when I am merely talking to them. No one ever reads to them anymore. And for the ones for whom reading has become a school-appointed sentence, the reading aloud of a story reminds them of just that – the story – and the purpose of the story in and of itself: to reveal, to reflect, to judge, to captivate.

            The value of reading stories has been (intentionally or unintentionally),  I believe, systematically undermined by the education system for a range of reasons. These reasons include, among others:

• An uncertainty about how to respond to the advancement of technology and access to information
• A desire to  ensure that high school graduates succeed in an ever more demanding economy
• An increased emphasis on collaboration over the individual mind (This is the one that I find to be the most dangerous and the most misguided.)
• An overzealous desire to excel at standardized tests
• An unprecedented concern for keeping up with the education systems of other countries (despite the fact that other countries that excel in education have dramatically different demographics and school systems from America’s own)
• A belief that traditional education has little use in our current climate
• A related belief that teachers should be teaching in a standardized way
• A belief that stories are not closely connected to real life

            Ironically, in all ways, the diminishment of fictional reading in the classroom is counterproductive to the goals represented by these reasons. I find it interesting that nearly everybody is worried about the critical thinking skills of our teenagers, yet all they ever want them to do in class is collaborate ideas through group discussion. How, I wonder, are they supposed to gather new and critical ideas if they are merely bouncing the same underdeveloped ones at each other day after day? From whence should wisdom come, particularly in a suburban classroom where world experience is likely fairly limited? One cannot merely stand at the front of the room and yell “Think harder,” at the top of one’s lungs when students get stuck on a question because they don’t have enough ideas on which to build an answer. One could offer them a book, but what should happen if an administrator walked in just at the moment when students were reading?

            What if, instead of asking teachers to do less reading in the classroom, we had every teacher, in every subject area, and every grade level, give students something to read for an entire class period each week. (On different days of the week, even, if that would lighten the burden.)  Something related to the subject area. Or not. Something selected by the teacher. Or not. What might happen to our students’ brains if they were so opened to brilliant and divergent thoughts and ideas that they were deeply inspired to create some of their own? What might happen to their ability to focus? To write? To form an argument? To work with others and to invent alone? To connect to things outside of themselves? What if students knew that for one period a week, in every class, their only objective was to be curious about what someone else had to say. I suspect that their own minds would begin to desire to make others curious as well.

            The other day, as I agonized over my 9th graders’ low test scores in reading, I realized I’ve been doing something very wrong. I’ve been assuming that reading the story would equate to loving the story. I figured if I gave the reluctant readers an incentive to read (a reading quiz upon their return to class) the story would eventually draw them in enough for other magical things to happen. But I underestimated the systematic destruction of reading within whose confines they have lived their entire lives. How could they possibly be bored by Atticus’ speech in defense of Tom Robinson in a small courthouse in rural Alabama? Because they don’t understand a word he is saying. They do not understand the nuances. They cannot grasp his tone. His language, even sometimes his syntax, is over their heads. The humor is lost on them. The irony is lost on them. The brilliance is lost on them. To them he is just a man rambling on in a courthouse. “I like books with more action,” more than one student has told me. More action?! I think. More action than the greatest human struggle of all time: to refuse to relinquish your convictions in the face of close-minded people and an unjust society? They don’t get it. When they said “action,” they were thinking more along the lines of someone blowing up Gotham City. When they said “action,” they were thinking external conflict, not internal conflict, which makes perfect sense. Because they have never been told or taught to be introspective. They have been taught to be extroverted. Because they have only watched and never read. Because someone else is always doing the imaginative work for them.

            So I’m setting out to change my ways. To teach a love of reading to students who feel no urgency to read and to students who are no good at it. Because as I sit down at the end of the day and contemplate the purpose of my job as an English teacher, I realize that one of the most important things I am doing on a daily basis is combatting a new kind of functional illiteracy. Sadly, I am fairly certain that “Learn to love reading” will not be an acceptable objective to write on my classroom board. People would tell me that the objective has no measurable outcome. But I assure you that it does. The outcome can be measured in good citizenship and strong character and meaningful peer interactions; in sense of humor, and argumentation skills, and the ability to think critically and to judge credibility; in passing state assessments, in passing not only English classes, but also science classes, and history classes; in nailing college interviews, and building high GPAs; in developing entrepreneurship; in success, not only in professional, but also in personal life; in a more competent society of free but rational thinkers. Not one of these measurable outcomes will not be positively affected by reading stories. Indeed, to succeed in all of these things, a person must love stories outside of their own, true or fantastical hardly matters. A person must be fascinated and invested in people and places and the way they all interact. That is the real world, my friends. And it is reflected in every story you will ever read, if you will only read it with a willing and searching mind.

-R.E.A.