I’m married to a high school English teacher. I love hearing about his students’ reactions to books that I also read as a teen: Animal Farm, Brave New World, Macbeth, and more.
But are some of these books, the classics, too outdated to teach today’s generation? Three seniors from Michigan area high schools think so. Here are a few quotes from their Our Turn Column in the Kalamazoo Gazette:
“As a student, I can firmly say that just because a book has endured through generations does not make it relevant to my generation. The veil of time often blinds young readers to a book’s meaning.” – Jacob Stroud
“Current required readings often make students skip the book and go straight to the movie or use Spark Notes to pass the test.” – Olivia Reed
“By exposing students to more modern literature they can relate to, they may come to view reading as cool or enjoyable, rather than only as homework or something that nerds do.” – Ashley Monroe
My husband says students have to read Shakespeare in high school because, well, it’s Shakespeare. I agree with him, but these students have a point. Perhaps students can read a classic novel or two along with modern ones, creating a balance of old and new. Schools are competing against Twitter and Facebook, TV and music, gaming and more–and they seem to be losing the battle. Bringing in modern literature won’t save education, but it could get more students interested in reading and increase reading comprehension.
Check out this list of the most popular high school books on Goodreads (which includes The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). What would be the modern-day equivalent to some of the books on this list? Or what modern book do you think would be a nice addition to the high-school curriculum?
15 responses
While browsing at the soon to be defunct Borders right before school started last fall, I was pleasantly surprised to see some great modern books on the ‘required’ reading lists. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Graveyard Book were sitting cozily next to The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Flies.
One thing I think English teachers miss out on is how educational biographies and memoirs can be. They can give an excellent POV about a niche topic, but do it in a way that’s entertaining and may just get the students to want to know more on the subject.
The one book I think should be required for every high school student across the nation is “Lies My Teacher Told Me”. High school history is so white-washed and false that students walk into college level history courses about other cultures with a high level of culture shock.
I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral in high school. Admittedly it’s about fifteen years old now, but it still felt a lot more relevant than, say, Heart of Darkness.
I don’t think it’s humanly possible to understand and appreciate books from past eras UNLESS you read books from your own era too.
I mean, it’s damn hard to imagine how books were understood and received by their contemporaries without a personal experience to base it on.
And if all you ever read are old books, then it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that books are relics from an inscrutable past with zero relevance to your life — which isn’t true, but it’s reasonable to conclude that given such completely biased evidence.
I would think that the average high school student should be reading less than 10% books from before the 20th century, and probably 60-70% books from the last 20-25 years.
I teach high school English in connecticut, and with different groups of kids and for different reasons, have really loved teaching Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Dean Bakoplous’s Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
High School teachers who force Shakespeare on their students are responsible for our country’s growing illiteracy problem.
As an English Department Chair of an alternative private high school, I can say with confidence that by starting with more modern, relevant texts, it opens the doors for high schoolers to appreciate the influence and literary conversation behind older, more classic texts. I would way rather my students find literature interesting and go on to explore older works as they feel ready and engaged, than to turn them off to literature entirely from the start. I tend to pair a lot of modern texts with classics: Never Let Me Go with Frankenstein, The People of Paper with Tristram Shandy, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with Tin Drum, The Watchmen with Metamorphosis. I’ve taught King Lear to 9th graders by pairing it with clips from the Jerry Springer show. It was a huge hit, and left them really intrigued to read other Shakespeare plays for modern relevancy.
I teach AP Language and Composition to 11th graders. The class is geared toward shorter works of non-fiction because the Lang course is more rhetorically focused that the Lit course. While I agree that students like more contemporary works (my last two summer assignments have used Into the Wild and Zeitoun), just because something is new doesn’t mean students will love it. In fact, the work my students got most into last year was The Great Gatsby (I was shocked too). I’ll stick with Flannery O’ Connor here when she said that our job isn’t to cater to students’ tastes, because we’re supposed to be forming them, regrettable as their dislike of a work may be (paraphrased, obviously). It’s OK for students to hate Shakespeare or Hawthorne or Thoreau or whomever. If, however, a student neglects their assignments because they “don’t like” a certain work, then that falls on the student’s head. English teachers should teach students the skills necessary for success as readers, writers, and thinkers in the classroom AND in the world outside of it. If we can do that while integrating some “classics,” even if only for enrichment purposes, then I say that should be the aim. Contemporary stuff definitely has a place, but sometimes eating your vegetables is necessary.
P.S. – If students can not read a book and pass the test, then that teacher is creating TERRIBLE assessments.
Teachers can also take advantage of prizes and awards to direct student reading, such as reading and discussing the BEST AMERICAN… anthologies, or reading the entire National Book Award shortlist from a recent year. Not because prizes are the be all, end all, but because it’s a challenge for students to see literature as something people are debating today rather than only argued about in the past. Reading recent reviews and criticism along with a recent book, and discussing the various viewpoints and whether students agree with judges’ decisions, can make literature a living thing and a more crucial part of the contemporary cultural conversation.
I was forced to read Shakespeare in high school, and I read Shakespeare today. People who would love Shakespeare, if they were just to read Shakespeare or watch Shakespeare, might have no idea until handed Shakespeare at gradepoint.
Steve,
Good call. Bringing the “classics” into the conversation alongside contemporary texts is a great way to challenge students to make and support their own connections and conclusions. As long as we avoid the trap of simply assigning texts because we think students will “like” them (obviously, we hope they do, but that can’t be the only criterion), getting contemporary works into students’ hands is a must.
It’s a fallacy to think that the year in which a work was written is the main factor determining its relevance to students’ lives. Should students living in New York read only books set in New York because they might not connect to a character living in California or Iowa or Peru? Should white students only read about other white students? Great books endure because they touch upon universal human experiences in original and memorable ways. One of the greatest joys of reading comes from traveling to an unfamiliar time and place, into the mind of a stranger, and finding that there is often common ground where we least expect it. Our job as English teachers is to help students discover those points of connection. Some of our most productive classroom conversations have centered upon this exact question: Is this work relevant to our lives today? If it’s good, carefully-chosen literature–written in 2011 or 1564–the answer will be yes.
Addendum: I should say that if it’s good, if it’s carefully chosen, AND if teachers try to place relevance and student connection (i.e. joy in reading) at the top of the priority list when planning a unit, the answer will be yes.
Why not just let teachers teach books they like? A middling book taught by a teacher who’s a passionate and precise reader will stick better with a student than a “great” book that’s taught by rote, or from a sense of obligation.
That’s why Nabokov’s lectures on Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were just as keen as those on Dickens’ Bleak House, because both books mattered. For the teacher, a lesser book need not (indeed, ought not) summon a lesser energy.
The Hunger Games would be a fitting replacement for something like The Lord of the Flies.
I’d like to think, in my 30 years of teaching, that I’ve helped students develop a love for Shakespeare. But I also think teachers who hate Shakespeare should not be required to teach it…they just turn the kids off. BTW I also teach The Book Thief, Please Stop Laughing at Me, Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, and Twilight to high schoolers who’ve been long term suspended and often hate to read.
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