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.