Contains 'M' through 'P'
It's, I think, a sorry state of affairs when the best we can hope for is that middle- and high-schoolers will read something--anything. From today's New York Times:
JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.
But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.
Apparently, this approach is having some success. Everyone in the class reads different books, of their own choice. And, while I appreciate--indeed, laud--the idea that we want to produce life-long readers, I find it telling that we seem to have to choose between "the canon" and "reading". I think--and I don't think this is that crazy--that were kids already readers, they would be more than happy to read Shakespeare or Morrison or any of the other perennial high school classics. I know that--with the exception of Ethan Frome--I was. I still remember Gatsby and The Things they Carry.
But I'll take what I can get. If it takes the loss of a canon to get people to read when they're young, I'll take it, I guess.
But, good lord, what are we coming to that this is the trade-off we have to make?
Franzen, in his excellent (if haughty) collection of essays, How to be Alone wrote that (and I'm paraphrasing) people who become voracious readers in adulthood were often kids who identified with reading books. That is, kids whose childhood was spent with a flashlight under the covers and getting mocked on the school bus; that's the bill I fit--that's the bill many at Oberlin fit. And if this approach is another way to reach the same thing: adult readers, then that's terrific.
|