Revisiting Teaching Literature

Teaching literature is difficult, especially around the high school stage.  This is because most teenagers have lives, they want to be social, and reading is about as nonsocial an activity as they come.

I currently belong to a book group, and we have had many invigorating and wonderful discussions about the books we read together, but the fact is, it’s only social after we’re done with whatever we picked for the month.  The reading part is as lonely as it gets.

I read all through school, and while I would participate in several different activities, most of my time was occupied with my nose in a book.  It wasn’t rare to find me walking to class with a paperback in one hand and almost walking into a tree as I went to the next period.  I spent a lot of time by myself.

Most teenagers are not me.  They want social lives and they’re pretty good at getting them, too.  Why do they want to read when it cuts into the most important aspect of their lives?

Besides, which, a lot of the books teachers assign can be downright horrible for two reasons: One, the book really is bad; or two, the book is confusing and they don’t understand why it’s important that they spend so many weeks involved with these various stories.

I’ve never forgotten a conversation we had my freshman year.  We had just finished John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and were discussing the ending.  Before this, we had read Romeo and Juliet, and we understood that the next book coming up was going to be William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies.  One of the girls in my class had had it.

“Why are we reading so many books about death?  This doesn’t make me happy.  It just makes me feel depressed.”

“I hate to break it to you,” our teacher said, “but people die.”

That was the weakest answer to the best question ever asked the whole time I was in school.  Yeah, people die; we knew that.  We were teenagers for crying out loud; several of us already had relatives that passed on, myself included.  Why did that mean we had to read it?

I’m not going to answer that question in this post, although I may try in the future.  I just give this as an example of the disconnect students have in understanding the purpose behind the classics and why they should read.  I sure didn’t get the point behind Of Mice and Men until a couple years later, and by then, I found other Steinbeck novels I much preferred over that one (Cannery Row I will recommend to anyone.)

I switched high schools my junior year, and they did something rather incredible: they combined English class with History.  There was still a lot of grouching (did you expect anything else?) but the complaint I never heard was, Why is this important?

Because it was American history, the books we read would correlate with the time period we were studying.  During the Colonial Era, we were reading short stories like “Rip Van Winkle” and after, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.  For the Civil War, it was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the best books I’ve ever read.  For the Roarin’ Twenties, The Great Gatsby.  Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath.  McCarthy Era, The Crucible.

And I could go on.  Now, I’m confident that most of my classmates still didn’t read any of our assigned literature.  But when it came time to talk about it, nobody could argue that they didn’t see the point.  We were discussing and learning how each book was relevant to our American culture, why it had lasted so long, and what we could still learn about ourselves in those books today.

                   ***

All of this is my usual meandering to come to this point: Books matter because of the impact they have on our culture.  They comment on societies, force us to look at ourselves, occasionally, they will even create new cultures and new ways of behavior.

Some books are easier to understand because they’re part of our culture, or our shared experiences.  The reason Harry Potter became such a phenomenon, partly because it’s a fun and charming fantasy, but moreover, it was very familiar to our own experiences.  We could relate to difficult families, school, sports, awe of nature, the shops, vacations, the politics, the social ladders, and yes, that battle of good versus evil and coming to terms with the meaning of life and death.

I had a lot more I wanted to say, but it didn’t come together well when I wrote it down.  So I’ll just close saying  that I don’t know how to instill the love of reading in another person, but I feel that progress could be made in teaching literature if the students can be told and shown the cultural context behind the work, and how it has made us the people we are today.