BY STEVE NUZUM
Every few years, pundits and worrywarts seem to start a new panic about literacy. The current cycle has moved, at least for the month of October, beyond the “Reading Wars”-- which, though rooted in legitimate discussions about research-supported literacy strategies, have often devolved into a battle over which canned curriculum is the magic bullet for improving test scores (which many would argue is the wrong target, anyway). The hot topic this month has instead been Why Can’t Students Read Anymore?
A recent Atlantic piece, entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” might be the most visible reflection of the current panic, but as an English teacher I’ve seen variations of it for a decade.
In my experience, it’s the wrong question. Virtually every middle school and high school English student I taught could read books, and did read books. Many did not read all the books they were assigned in school, and some didn’t read any. Some reported that they didn’t like to read.
I never believed them, because when I actually talked to them about their interests, most were voraciously reading something already: fan fiction, video game walkthroughs, YA literature, comic books, shoe advertisements, news stories, texts-- their lives were full of the written word. But sometimes they didn’t see the value in what they were reading in school. Part or our job, as I saw it, was to help them make the connection between what they already cared about and what we thought was important (and to accept, sometimes, that we weren’t always right about what students should care about).
One of my more memorable teaching experiences was with a class that consisted mostly of student athletes-- most of them members of the school football team. I don’t really know where we (the school system) went wrong, but somehow these students had gotten the message that they were “bad readers”. Like many students, they had also come to see education as something like an especially boring game with confusing and inconsistent rules. Some had been encouraged to look for loopholes to find their way to the minimum average required for sports. In this way, they shared a lot in common with my honors students, who often were looking for similar loopholes on their way to a Good College and a Good Job.
As writing professor Jonathan Malesic puts it in a recent New York Times piece,
I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.
I’m not sure that matches my own experience completely, but it definitely resonates.
In that football player class, we did read. We read whole books, as well as articles, essays, short stories, poetry, and excerpts of longer works. The class was technically British Lit, but I tried to respond to student interests and current events, to make the literature we had available to us (limited mainly to the small number of text sets owned by the school at that time) somehow meaningful.
Noticing that several young men in the class had frequent outbursts of emotion and trouble sitting still during senior English, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s heartbreaking Never Let Me Go. We had long discussions about the behaviors of Tommy, a character who begins the book unable to control his temper tantrums. We had deep dialogues about what might be driving Tommy (a mystery the book slowly unravels), and about how he might address his legitimate feelings in different ways.
I think it’s important that we didn’t spend much time on plot analysis, or on reading quizzes. We discussed the book. We wrote about the book. We journaled. We tried to find something meaningful that transcended school. I’m sure this didn’t work equally well for every student, and maybe that’s the point-- it’s okay not to connect with a book. That doesn’t make you a “bad reader”. It’s okay not to finish a book, too: as an adult who reads constantly, I have learned to set down about half of the books I pick up without finishing them. Life is too short.
Because Never Let Me Go went well, we read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a dense novel with similar themes about humanity’s collision with cutting edge science, full of ornate poetry and metaphysical reflections. While we did skip a few sections-- I thought I might be pushing my luck with the students if we read, for example, a ten-to-fifteen-page chapter in which Victor Frankenstein mostly just wanders around Switzerland and gazes at mountains-- we read enough of the book to pull out what might be important to us.
I remember students being engaged with the book and its emotionally- overwrought title character. They might have also found some ways to identify with the true protagonist of the novel, Victor’s never-named creature. After all, Shelley was a teenager, herself, when she wrote Frankenstein (and arguably created the modern science-fiction novel), and there is plenty of drama, passion, violence, death, and intrigue in it to satisfy teen readers.
We also read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a novel that might have helped some of them connect the dots in understanding neurodivergence in a more empathetic way.
What all of these novels had in common was that they put readers in the shoes of complicated characters, characters who are not always “good” at everything, and yet who have their full humanity on display. Although it wasn’t my conscious intent at the time, I hope this helped some of those students to understand that their reading lives, like the rest of their lives, aren’t linear and don’t end because they have graduated from school or passed a test.
One of the simultaneously saddest and most gratifying things a student ever said to me came at the end of that semester. “No one ever made me read a book before,” he told me.
While I seriously doubt this is strictly true-- because I knew this young man’s other teachers-- I do think his statement spoke to an emotional truth: he had come to see himself as someone who could read books, and he hadn’t seen himself that way before. And while the Atlantic piece has been criticized for blaming the supposed inability of college students to read a book (and while there is not especially strong research support that this is actually occuring), I will say that I believe high schools and middle schools have probably deemphasized reading longer works. Because “accountability” movements tend to reduce everything to test scores, and because districts often respond to the pressure to improve those scores by rolling out lots of practice tests, the external incentives for schools to assign longer readings have certainly decreased.
During my last few years in the classroom, I was explicitly told more than once by a district curriculum specialist that we shouldn’t be reading books because the ability to read a book wasn’t represented on the test.
The authors of a reading study called “What motivates students to read at school?” would likely not be surprised by my student’s development across the year from “No one every made me read a book” to a grudging acceptance that maybe he actually was a reader, maybe even a “good reader”.
As the researchers write in their literature review,
Research has shown that students' conception of themselves as readers, often referred to as reading self-concept – including ‘one's sense of competence and the role ascribed to reading as a part of one's personal identity’ (Conradi, Jang, & McKenna, 2014 p. 154) – is strongly related to both reading performance and reading achievement (Chapman et al., 2000; Susperreguy et al., 2018).
If we want students to be “better” readers, of course we have to answer several questions for ourselves first: Do we (teachers, parents, society) value reading, ourselves, and if so, why? What do we mean by “better” readers? (Is it important that students read “classics”? If so, why? If not, what it is that we actually value about books?
Students tend to read more when they are able to access texts that are relevant to them. This is one of the reasons that it is so misguided for would-be censors to try to do away with Young Adult literature and other high-interest reading materials, often with the argument that students should get “back to the classics”.
Research and experience tell me that students will read more when they feel that they can be readers, and when they feel that there is some kind of authentic reason (beyond grades or the promise of future earnings or the avoidance of punishment) that they should be good readers.
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