I struggled acutely with Fitzgerald in high school. I had read Tender is the Night in my junior year in high school for my College Prep Composition course, but I did not like the book. I couldn’t relate to it. I did the absolute minimum amount of work I could do with the book to enable me to get the paper done that I had to write on it. I never meaningfully engaged in the text. I probably never really read the whole thing but instead used Cliff’s notes or some other source to help me out with what happened in the text.
As an adult, I love Fitzgerald.
I was a fairly engaged high school student who took AP English Literature and went on to be an English major and then a high school Language Arts Teacher. But my current students—students who choose not to take AP or IB courses for language arts—are not exactly the picture of the student I was in high school. If I had a hard time connecting to Fitzgerald as a 17-year old, it might be even more so the case for my reluctant and struggling readers now.
Some may argue that it is our job as Language Arts teachers to expose our students to the classics, to help them conquer these challenging texts, and to make our students scholars of literature. But the reality is that many of our high school students are not even readers, let alone scholars. We cannot expect students to feign excitement over the books that we as adults have grown to love. As adults we find connections to the adult themes that play out in the pages of many classic works of literature. And the consequences for this are great: many students who need to deepen their critical reading skills in order to be prepared for the growing complexities of life in our changing world aren’t reading at all in their language arts classes. We need to examine the decisions we make about how and what we teach in our high school language arts classes in order to prepare all of our students to be the literate, critical thinkers that their world beyond high school will require.
Let me present a recent scene from my classroom, a class full of 11th graders in an American Literature class for students who have not chosen the AP or IB options for 11th grade. We were studying The Great Gatsby. They were struggling with it. In fact, many of them were not reading it. I felt I must help them with their reading comprehension of the text, thinking that if I could help them at least access the text on that surface level, we could then dive deeper into the wonderfully artistic layers of this brilliant piece of literature. So I crafted a “reader’s grid” with spaces for them to keep track of the characters, places, and events in each chapter. I presented guiding questions to frame their reading for each chapter. I did everything I could to help them keep track of what was going on in the text. And one day I stepped outside of myself for a moment to survey the scene in my classroom. Instead of the energetic, lively discussions of Fitzgerald’s statement on the American dream I had imagined for my students’ study of The Great Gatsby, I saw bored, disengaged students simply copying down on their reader’s grids the information that I write on my grid projected on the overhead screen. Sure, students were helping me to fill in the squares on the grid—the few that had done some reading—but for the most part, my classroom was quiet and lifeless and my students were only going through the motions.
This moment when I realized that I had before me a sea of bored, disengaged students may have occurred because many of my students were struggling to connect with a book to which they felt little real link. They struggled to see themselves and their life experiences in The Great Gatsby, which is an important first step for struggling and reluctant readers. Some kind of overt, meaningful connection to students’ lives can get them interested in reading a book and can keep them reading, even when the book itself may be challenging to their level of reading comprehension.
Around this same time, I attended a workshop with writer and teacher, Jeff Willhelm, whom my school district had invited to do a daylong workshop for teachers. He spoke of three traditions in curriculum: curricular based, student centered, and socio-cultural. His argument is that these traditions exist on a spectrum, with the curricular tradition at one end of the spectrum and the student-centered tradition at the other end. These he both sees as extremes; these he both sees as damaging to students. In the curricular model, students are passive receivers of knowledge that is determined important by whomever or whatever forces influence curricular decisions. In the student-centered model, students flail around with little guidance from the teacher. Willhelm argues that the third tradition, the socio-cultural model, should be our goal. Here the teacher sees herself as an expert in her discipline, mentoring the students into the kind of thinking that goes on in that particular field.
This model is easy to imagine in math or science for instance: mentoring students to think like mathematicians in math classes or to think like scientists in science classes. But it gets a bit murkier in language arts. What is the disciplinary thinking into which I, as a language arts teacher, should be mentoring my students? What exactly IS my discipline? I myself was mentored into literary analysis as an English major in college; is that my end goal for ALL of my students?
For students in AP or IB courses, the externally-created exams of those two programs clearly define the instructional goal as literary analysis because it is the sort of writing required on AP and IB exams. But I’m not sure that focus works for all of our students.
Reading for the purpose of doing literary analysis is important of course, but an over-emphasis on reading only to perform literary analysis takes the focus off of literature as something to enjoy (Edmundson) and often places the focus on instances of the various literary elements that show up in a given text. And with this focus, we of course want to make sure our students know the literary elements so that they know when they are looking at a metaphor (for example) in a work of literature. But over-emphasizing this purpose for reading communicates to our students only one vision of literature instruction, and this makes it impossible to convince our students that it can be exciting and fulfilling to study literature—even to analyze it for the purpose of figuring out how literature works to engage us as readers in the ideas about human life that literature ponders. Meaningful reading is definitely more than an exercise in finding examples of metaphors or reading just to form a detached analytical argument.
There’s a parallel here for me to what Jeff Wilhelm has written about teaching biology. Wilhelm quotes E.O. Wilson:
“Most people teach biology by starting with the molecule. This is exactly the wrong way to go…. It is not how we learn. It is not how disciplines create knowledge. You need to start with the big issues and questions and problems that drive the discipline! Go top-down—sell the students that you are going to consider the interesting problems that organize the subject…. You have to ask and pursue the big questions: if you start with molecules, you’ve lost them! Who cares about molecules? No one does, unless they are pursuing a question that requires an understanding of molecules. So start with questions like What is the significance of sex, biologically speaking? Is sex even necessary? Now you’ve got them! Or ask: Why must we die? Even better: How are we related to bacteria? Then you have their attention! Now you can get to molecules, biochemistry, biological principles and ethics, and so many other things in no time flat. From a good question it is a short step to any concept of importance” (15).
I see literary devices as a parallel here to molecules. If we start with metaphors—definitions, examples, etc., who cares? Students’ eyes glaze over. But if we give a real reason to care about metaphors, like that students have to work with them in order to understand something important and meaningful, then they care. It seems often that we literature teachers operate upon a sacredness of the literary terms and the need for students to memorize them and be tested upon them as some sort of precursor to dealing with the literature itself—like any approach in biology that starts with the molecule as a building block to understanding a bigger concept in the field. What these approaches miss entirely is an understanding of the need to establish meaningful purpose for students so that they want to understand the molecule or the metaphor in the pursuit of some bigger, engaging question. Literary analysis and literary terminology are an important piece of that pursuit, but they are not the end goal in themselves. Starting with the literary devices eschews the “big issues and questions and problems that drive the discipline” as E.O. Wilson argues about starting with molecules. The literary devices become important if students “are pursuing a question that requires an understanding” of the literary devices.
Grossman et al. argue that within the discipline of language arts, there is a “pre-existing battle over the very definition of the subject” (3). And in the absence of a clear, unified understanding of what our discipline is and needs to be to meet the changing needs of our students in our evolving society, we can easily default to the way things have always been done in our field, further validating the traditional approaches to teaching literature.
We high school language arts teachers love literature, and sometimes we get too focused on that literature. We run our classes like the college literature classes that we experienced ourselves without asking what it is that our students need, why it is we read these books, or what the ultimate goals should be. Therefore, “no instructional decision or teaching choice is entirely one’s own. […] it is as if […] ideas about teaching literature reside in the air we breathe or in the words that surround our heads as it were, the voices of former teachers, textbook authors, inservice presenters, college professors, and so on” (McGinley et al 260).
There’s a conflict between what the study of literature in school has traditionally meant and what our students may need to support their readings of literature that actually have some import on their lives. It’s true that not all of our students will become English majors and follow into the discipline of literary analysis, but all of our students will need to understand that reading literature, thinking about it, talking about it, and writing about it is about more than the literature itself. Emphasis solely on the discipline of literary analysis can be damaging because “the exclusive analytical study of literary elements, aesthetic devices, abstract themes, period histories, and the lives of authors forestalls the possibility that literature’s worth might also be tested outside the classroom for its potential to generate moral deliberation, critical and democratic debate, personal and social reflection, and pleasure” (McGinley et al 263). If we don’t realize that “behind each and every instructional choice we make, the discipline of English, with its accepted and authorized approaches to teaching literature, speaks to us and through us—often with consequences for the fate of reading in the life beyond school” (McGinley et al 261), we may never give our struggling readers the support they need and we will not make our students life-long readers.
Supporting our struggling readers and making our students life-long readers is about more than the discreet tasks of literary analysis. It’s about contemplating the ideas that writers present to us, ideas about our human world and about our place within it. It’s about understanding the role that stories play in our lives. It’s about understanding the human consequences of history. It’s about important practice in reading and considering complex ideas. It’s about being able to communicate one’s own ideas clearly in response to complex ideas. All of these are skills that will confront our students in their lives beyond school in a myriad of ways.
An intended focus on the real-world skills that literature offers us can be obscured by a focus on studying literature for the sole purpose of literary analysis driven by the teacher’s own ideas about the literature. For my students who met Gatsby in my classroom reluctantly to begin with, I only presented them with yet more reasons NOT to read. The instructional choices I made mirror an example Rosenblatt offers of a student who was initially very excited about a book until the teacher gave her a book report assignment to “summarize the plot, sketch the setting, describe any two characters, write a brief opinion or blurb” (65). Rosenblatt wrote about this in 1938; these issues of how we ask students to read literature are long standing. Surely this teacher intended to help her students’ reading with this assignment. With the reader’s grid I designed for my students, I intended to support my students’ reading of a text that was proving difficult to them. But with this grid I only encouraged my students to keep the book at arm’s length (Edmundson). I told them what they were supposed to think about the book and what was supposed to be important.
Tradition in the field often leads to classroom discourse surrounding literature that is rooted in the vocabulary of literary analysis. Our shared understandings about what it means to teach literature along these traditional lines can result in privileging one kind of reading and talking about literature in the classroom. But life long readers read for the joy of it, for the ways that literature can help them to understand their lives.
Many things govern the decisions that literature teachers make in their classrooms about what texts to teach, what instructional strategies to use, what kinds of readings to privilege, and how to ask students to talk about literature. This cacophony often obscures the most critical influences that should govern our decisions. We need to support our students as readers and develop readers who can read for analytical reasons as well as for reasons connected to “moral deliberation and reflection, thoughtful critique of everyday social and community life, and careful reflection on matters of personal importance and experience” (McGinley et al 269). But we will never be able to design classrooms that achieve these very important literature reading goals without keeping focused on the most important factor that guides our decisions making: who our students are and what needs they have as readers.
Works Cited
Edmundson, M. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Grossman, P., Thompson, C., and Valencia, S. “District Policy and Beginning Teachers: Where the Twain Shall Meet.” Research Report, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy and Center on English Learning and Achievement, University of Albany, 2001.
McGinley, W., Whitcomb, J. A., and Zerwin, S. M. “Amazing Space: Reading Life in the Literature Classroom.” Focus on Curriculum. Dennis M. McInerney (Ed.). Information Age Pub Inc., 2005, 253-272.
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1938/1995.
Wilhelm, J.D. Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry: Promoting Deep Understandings in Language Arts and the Content Areas with Guiding Questions. Scholastic: New York, 2007.
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