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Classic sleep aid
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This high school teacher in Chicago admits what so many (dare I say most) high school English teachers believe. He’s talking about teaching the classics to uninterested students.
Of course, it is my responsibility as a teacher to engage the students in these classics so they can understand, analyze and appreciate the writings of our greatest thinkers. But I cannot. I have tried strategy after strategy, sought advice upon advice, and still, I am unable to spark sustainable interest in the vast majority of my students. Few students do the readings and even fewer seriously consider the ideas or themes presented in these writings. The class discussions are disgracefully unanimated and the student essays are dull, tedious and impersonal. For most students in my class, the months dedicated to the canons of Western literature are a dreadful waste of time. And yes, I know, this failure is mostly my fault.
Thus, instead of teaching Milton and Shakespeare and Dickens, he does what most teachers do: lets students read more recent literature (The Outsiders, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, etc.). They are at least able to follow what’s happening in those stories. Fair enough.
But the question remains: Why are so many high school (and, frankly, college) English teachers incapable of getting students interested in the classics? They are tougher to read, longer, more removed. But I submit that teachers can’t get students engaged in the classics because the teachers aren’t engaged in the classics. A passionate, well-informed lecture on Shakespeare, by a teacher who knows why it’s good stuff, can awaken entire rows of desks. It’s just that, as a nation, our teachers are as uninspired by the classics as their students. Even if they think they love Shakespeare, maybe they don’t. My high school teacher liked Shakespeare, but she seemed to find him as boring as we did. Which is why it was boring. Somebody, please contradict me here.
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One more diversion
Classic sleep aid. I thought at first it was a commentary concerning RDEAN’s posts.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
BAAAAAAAH
For two semesters I taught English (adjunct) at a Bible college. Some of my students cared about reading and writing; some didn’t. I remember my best-ever class session.
The students had to read some of Stephen Crane’s writing. I think all they had to read before class was “The Open Boat” (a based-on-fact report of his near drowing at sea after a shipwreck). They had read the story and more or less liked it, but they didn’t really “get it” until we discussed it in class. They asked questions and read passages, and I read bits and pieces of his poetry. My goal was to show them that his belief in an “empty universe” (no God) left him angry, and that attempting to communicate with platitudes with someone who believed as he did was worse than useless.
Toward the end of the class hour, as the students began to understand, I saw mouths wide open, tears. I knew I’d always remember that class period, and so would many of them.
But, though some of those students weren’t particularly interested in English, most were Christians who cared about the world around them and people. Most had read the assignment. How to motivate students who don’t care about anyone or anything, I do not know.
And I’m not arguing that Stephen Crane is classic literature. (If you’d like to see an essay I wrote about Crane’s worldview, e-mail me and I’ll send it.)
But seriously, folks!
Harrison I cannot contradict you. I was an anomaly back in high school, in that I followed the classics because I had an interest. I excelled in the english dept’s creative writing class, only because I had a slight background in Poe, Chaucer, et al. Those writers of yesterday inspired me to write of my own imagination, putting my own knowledge and conscience in the setting of the essays.
When the film, Dead Poet’s Society, was released, I saw it in it’s entirety with the same openess to the written word as was the teacher (excellently portrayed by Robin Williams) in the film.
I suppose if the individual takes a serious note to examine WHY something was written, it’ll create a sense that they can express their innermost thoughts and become someone that people will remember for a long time.
Oh captain, my Captain!
I started to read the post, but it was too long. Got anything shorter?
This reminds me of a story which is either funny or sadly indicative of our times, depending on your perpsective. My sister’s youngish high school honors English teacher made her class read Billy Bud. Midway through, the teacher announced that they were moving on to a different book. She explained that she had a graduate degree in English, and had read some pretty boring stuff to earn it. But, the previous night, she had fallen asleep trying to power her way through the assigned reading. She couldn’t in good conscience force mere high school students to endure something so dull that even she couldn’t hack it.
How many high school students can read nowadays?
I read “Men of Iron” by Howard Pyle in 4th grade. It is listed at 9.6 reading grade level. Have any of you ever heard of it? That was the only “classic” I can remember reading by choice. Well, I forgot about “Scottish Chieftains”, the story of William Wallace. But then they were both considered children’s classics. I don’t ever remember reading any classics in English. (Except one in 10th grade by Boy George or whoever she was.) I don’t like Literature. Does that say anything about me?
“As such, on the first day of school, when I ask high school juniors and seniors to list their favorite books, too many write “None.” After the class finishes an especially intriguing novel, I have had students inform me, “That was the first book I ever read [all the way through].” If there are not avid readers in the students’ homes, who is going to teach and show these young people a love of reading?”
“That was the first book I ever read [all the way through].”
I wonder why they don’t like Literature.
Bob,
I think you can say you don’t like reading. But assuming you do like to read sometimes, it’s probably too broad for you to say you don’t like literature. Probably, based on your stated dislike, you haven’t sampled much of it, and there’s plenty for all sorts of tastes.
Ever read Robinson Crusoe, for instance? An adventure story (and a good one, far more interesting than Moby Dick), and literature at the same time. Or anything by Charles Dickens, for someone else who writes long but readable, fun books. “Literature” includes poetry, short stories, plays, novels, and more. Basically “literature” is just good writing that has stood the test of time, generally fiction of some sort as opposed to biographies and other forms of nonfiction.
I dare you. Pick up a college textbook of “English literature” and go through it and see if there’s anything you like. Or try a high school text. (I say English lit rather than American lit because the English are all-around better writers, unfortunately.)
But if you just don’t like to read at all, say that.
In high school (heh I still love saying that) my “humanities” teacher was very enthusiastic. When she gave us an assignment–a reading assignment or an essay–she would always say, “You guys are going to love this!” I credit my interest in the classics to her enthusiasm. She was such a great lady, we felt bad not enjoying something she told us we would love.
She wasn’t a blind enthusiast, though. Sometimes she told us that a book was pretty “soporific” but that we had to slog through it anyway. I think it was Democracy in America that she said was soporific. It was. I fell asleep over it quite a number of times, but it had good stuff in it.
I wax long. It’s too bad there aren’t more teachers like her, though.
Here’s a description of two beloved characters representing something like Harrison’s logos-pathos distinction in the other thread:
“Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and culture, noble in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of a special faculty of working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something__ not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose one out of the innumerable paths of life and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovich, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul any more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.”
Despite the fact that this passage draws us deeply into some compelling characters, and shows a little of Tolstoy’s clarity and amazing command of detail, and is really not that tough, compared Hawthorne or Cooper, it’s too long and too remote.
I guess maybe my high school had an unusually good set of English teachers. (Except the British lit teacher, who may or may not have been a good teacher, but whose alcoholism had gotten so bad that she was doing well to show up at all. She went into rehab early in the semester I had her, and we had a sub the rest of the semester.)
I remember struggling to stay awake in chemistry, mostly because it was after lunch my senior year, when I was taking four college-co-op classes and the sheer volume of reading was too much for me. But in lit class, never. (I do remember clicking my pen open and shut when I was bored, until my teacher told me to stop.)
I loved English class. And while I can’t say all my classmates felt the same, I don’t remember ever having a sense that no one cared. I don’t remember any specific class discussions, but I don’t think the teachers had to push that much to get us thinking and talking. Is that because I went to high school thirty years ago?
College was another matter. Nineteenth century American lit was one of the most boring classes I ever took. I’m sure I nodded off a few times. But in a big lecture hall, and so many students that most of them couldn’t participate in a discussion even if they wanted to, that’s par for the course (pun intended).
I was blessed to have an amazing English teacher in high school. He made everything from Dickens to Shakespeare to Bede to Chaucer…even Dostevsky and Thomas Hardy interesting because he knew so many intriguing facts about the authors, the books, and the culture and history surrounding the books. He also introduced me to modern authors (John Updike, Tobias Wolff, Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor) and poetry (from John Donne to Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda to T.S. Eliot).
I actually am now an English (and pre-law) major in college and have found my college English classes to be lacking in any depth. I’m halfway through my third year, and I have yet to read a book that I did not read already in either middle school or high school. It’s disheartening, really, to point out facts about whatever you are reading to your professor and find that they have no idea what you’re talking about. Point in fact, I am rereading Huck Finn this semester for a class…the sixth time I have read this book. I have had to read it four times already for school (seventh, eighth, ninth, and twelfth grades), and once for pleasure (fourth grade).
I’ll get off my soapbox now. I just find it all so frustrating.
I have no quibble with Harrison here. I think he’s right. Add to that the fact that none of their parents are reading at home, great books or otherwise, and you’ve got generations of people who have little understanding of how even to begin to enjoy–let alone study–great literature.
Austen: “…even Dostevsky”
Even?? Dostoevsky is one of the best authors out there!
And ditto what you said about college classes. I worked much harder–mentally, at least–in high school than I have in college so far.
I just had found him hard to get into when I was younger, and Joey finally got me interested…I know he’s good! : )
The key, as Harrison suggests, is to have teachers who have been well schooled in the classics and who are passionate about making them come alive. Unfortunately, few of these are left, as Alan Bloom’s book Closing of the American Mind made clear. Also, classic literature brings out profound truth about individuals and human nature, which goes against the relativism of the post-modern view that has seeped into all levels of education.
Classical education still exists among the best private and public schools, though the amazing thing is that not a few home-school students are tackling both Greek and Latin; thus the flame of classical learning still flickers and might just survive the present barbaric period.
I had some top notch English teachers in High School and they really made the classics seem ‘alive’ and ‘relevant’ and all that. But I was in AP sorts of classes and had good, demanding, challenging teachers and motivated classmates.
My impression from the original post is that the teacher in question was just a bit under-qualified. Just my impression from his own words.
And I might add that he was honest enough to admit this to some extent.
From the original post; “And yes, I know, this failure is mostly my fault.”
There is always hope where there is honesty.
DCL mark the day, we agree.
For the most part, the youth of our nation demand instant gratification from everything, thrive on truncated video images, and find anything requiring beyond 2 hours of commitment more than they can, or are willing to try to, handle. (With perhaps the one exception of a feature movie if viewed while multitasking electronically in some fashion.) Sitting down and spending multiple hours over several days reading a book of difficult words and phrasing is out of the question. They’re simply too busy keeping pace with the constant download of life which they think is required to survive.
It seems to me that if the love of reading, either classic or marginally intelligent literature, isn’t solidly established early on in life that part of the young person may remain dormant for a long time. I am such a person. When younger I found many more physical activities that I was attracted to rather than reading simply because it wasn’t something I’d been exposed to or encouraged to do when younger. That was over fifty years ago when the pace of life was half or less than it is now. It’s little wonder that today nearly all of this teacher’s students have no interest in committing to serious reading of thought provoking subjects. Most have not been encouraged to do so either by parents or other educators in their formative years.
My high school teacher liked Shakespeare, but she seemed to find him as boring as we did. Which is why it was boring. Somebody, please contradict me here.
I don’t remember. I slept through that class in high school.
I love to read, and tried reading Swiss Family Robinson (sp?) to my children. I almost fell asleep reading out loud to them. BORING!!! I read Moby Dick on my own a few years ago. BORING!!! I skipped all the chapters about whaling history, got to the ending and thought “I waded through this for nothing!” No wonder kids today don’t like classics and flock to the store to get the latest Harry Potter books. If there is not a lot of action at the start, most kids are going to go back to the video games.
Listening to the radio in the car this morning, I heard someone [don’t remember who] mention his favorite teacher. That brought my favorite teacher to mind, my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Preston Corsa. Now I’m not going to say how long ago I was in 7th grade [except to mention that my grandson is in college now
], but the fact that I still think of him so easily says what a good teacher he was. I remember we acted out several Shakespeare plays during class. He loved good books and frequently recommended that we read something that wasn’t in the curriculum. And we read them, because we knew if Mr. Corsa said it was good, it would be. I’ve always enjoyed reading, and I thank him for leading me into a lifetime love of good literature.
We loved Swiss Family Robinson. We had not watched any of the movies prior to reading the book. The book was engaging and full of Christian principles. We couldn’t ever stop after reading just one chapter. We make it a rule to not watch movies before reading the book it’s base on. Our rule sometimes extends to not watching movies based on books. Period. I couldn’t watch 5 minutes of Disney’s Pollyanna.
We all enjoyed the book, however. I wonder how much TV and the movies have taken people’s, especially children, interest away from books that are not action packed, but instead are full of beautiful imagery and thought-provoking ideas.
I think that part of the problem is that much of “education” today waits until high school to expose children to classics and to the great conversation (ideas). Plant those seeds early, prime those minds early, and inspire early. These things are not just for older students. Talk about the great themes in literature (true literature) from 1st grade. This is what we’ve seen in our classical, Christian school and my children love to read and talk about the meaning and beauty of the material, at the level they can. Kids aren’t as stupid as we think, IF we give them the tools in their toolbelt of learning, not just cram information and expect regurgitation and then, miraculously, true engagement.
And let the kids express the book’s ideas and plot in age appropriate ways in addition to discussion. Grammar level: have them draw pictures along with summaries. Middle school: act out in plays. Or have them modernize the details in their plays while still portraying the plot and themes. Let them use people at their school as characters. High school: Well, my kids aren’t that old yet. Perhaps let them lead a discussion. Let them re-write a chapter and tell what they changed and why. Engage!
Harrison’s point about the teacher not really being inspired is right on the mark. As my daughter’s 4th grade teacher said, she wants to woo her students with the romance of learning. Yahoo!
When I really want some “clasic sleep aid”, I try slogging through Gibbon’s The History of The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire. My edition (still packed away from our last move) has about 6 volumes, if I—zzzzzzz— remember correctly. I haven’t yet made it past the third volume—zzzzzzzzz. ;?
I think the problem is that adults somehow have the idea that to educate their children should involve taking a bunch of books that were meant for adults and making children read them. Then they wonder why the kids don’t like the classics. I know I certainly didn’t care about theme and technique and thinking when I read books as a kid. But I did read books. I read lots of books. Mostly kids books, usually targeted a couple years above me. I still like books aimed at junior highers sometimes because, while their language is often simplistic, they are actually interesting.
I devoured fiction (and ONLY fiction) all the way from 3rd grade through 12th, because it was entertaining. Reading a book with deep meaning was NOT entertaining. It was dull. Boring. I thought (and still think) that The Old Man and the Sea was mediocre. I’ve heard Hemingway praised for his style, but it was only good enough to keep me from being bored, not enough to captivate me. Apparently there’s some deep meaning, but all I got out of it was that life was meaningless and we might as well live with it. (Hemingway committed suicide, didn’t he? Why should kids be required to appreciate his ideas again?)
The longest book I have read to date was The Lord of the Rings. I thought Tolkien’s writing was long and boring, but I was enthralled with the world, having been introduced to it by my 6th-grade teacher’s reading of The Hobbit during lunch hours. Of course, I was upset that Rings was about somebody other than Bilbo, so it took me a while before I checked it out from the library (I rarely buy books) and read it. Now I’ve seen the movies, read The Silmarillion (a book that alternates between dull and intriguing), studied Quenya, etc. I read Rings in junior high (before seeing the movies), but I found The Outsiders sadistic, and the shorter high school read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to be the most boring work of fiction I’ve ever had the profound displeasure not to be able to avoid reading. (However, Hitchhiker’s, if you catch the reference, I thouroughly enjoyed.)
For kids like me, length was not the issue, since we’d devour 400+ page books and avoid shorter stuff because it was over too quickly. We just weren’t ready to care about the historical value or deep meaning of the books our teachers wanted us to read. And then when there was an interesting assignment, my parents vetoed it (I read The Silmarillion because my parents didn’t want me reading Much Ado About Nothing in 8th grade…).
I ramble a bit.
Speaking of rambling, an interesting (to me) anecdote about my literature experience is that the only Shakespeare play I’ve read is Hamlet. Why? My mom, a long-time head librarian, didn’t like Shakespeare. I believe the phrase she used about his work was that he’s “not very nice”, which, when used by my parents, always means the book or movie in question has a bunch of innuendo or other such rot.
Random danger of literature: sometimes you learn words as a kid from books you’re supposed to read, and you don’t realize they’re very nasty racial slurs, because nobody tells you not to repeat everything you read. Then you get embarassed years later.
At the risk of irritating anyone who has already seen these statistics from another thread, I repeat them because I think they are very pertinent to this discussion.
#27
Wow. It’s hard to even imagine. I remember when I was little, we got to know another family at a campground we stayed at, and the next summer the girl our age came and stayed with us a week, and I went and stayed with her family a week. It was kind of weird staying in their trailer, the parents left for work and the kids, none of them much older than me, were on their own for the day. They spent pretty much the entire day watching TV and eating whatever they wanted, and the only reading material in the house (except what I brought with me and spent most of my time reading) was the TV guide. Plus the radio was on all the time tuned to the police/fire channel.
So I knew such people existed, but I had no idea they were more than a small minority of the working poor.
I believe that part of the problem is that students don’t start reading good literature at an early age. Some people (including many parents and teachers)feel that it doesn’t matter what children read as long as they are reading. They are not asked to stretch beyond their comfort zone. So students (these may not be the most current choices) read Judy Blume and the “Goosebumps” series instead of time-honored children’s classics such as “Heidi”, “Treasure Island”, the works L.M. Montgomery and Alcott and of course “The Chronicles of Narnia”. These may not be Shakespere
but they demand a higher level of thinking and are age appropriate.
By the way, I try to alternate between current literature and classics in my own reading. I think I once heard that C. S. Lewis had a similar rule for himself. In the past several years, I’ve read “The Brothers Karamazov”, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Les Miserables”, “Silas Marner”, and numerous others. Yes, some parts move slowly but the rewards far exceed the the effort. Currently, I’m reading “I Promessi Sposi” (”The Betrothed”) by the Nineteenth Century Italian author Manzoni. I recommend any and all of these.
Another way to look at: when we make literature the vehicle for “Western Culture” then it is almost by definition boring. Western culture is remote, abstract. Otoh, literature is about what connects.
For high school boys, it was pawing through the Miller’s Tale for the “dirty” parts. That, and 1984. Then our English teachers brought out early Donne — ah,”the Flea” and the epigrams. Oh, and we saw Zeferelli’s R&J. (These days, I’d introduce young readers to Ian McKellan’s Richard III)
For me, it was randomly reading the poems that were NOT assigned in the Norton Anthology; I discovered all sorts of interesting works from Ishmael Reed to Milton (”How soon hath Time…” is still one of my all time favorite poems).
After high school and after college I finally learned the lesson about Great and not-so-Great Literature: it’s not broccoli. You don’t read because it’s somehow “good” for you, but because it grabs you. And if it doesn’t grab you, it’s not your fault.
First off I appreciate the author’s comment on middle school teacher’s. As much as I would like to take the compliment, the real struggle is in the primary grades when many children are simply dropped off with little prior exposure to the literate world, very little social graces and utterly unable to sustain their focus beyond the “me” moment.
As for the Canon — who cares. That being said, I like the canon, I love the themes, the use of language etc. Reading War and Peace on the train through Europe was a highlight of my backpacking year. Yet I think we can not transfer this excitement of the written word by teaching the classics. In middle school, I like to use novels, short stories, poems etc to alert students to themes in literature. Once they have become attuned to even the idea of themes and messages can they then appreciate that these themes run through the entire history of western literature.
I recently introduced the concept of dystopia to my students - the idea of a future gone wrong because of technology and/or government/corporations etc. I offered my reading groups two choices The Giver and Among the Hidden. The former is an excellent and far superior novel to the later but like many well written stories, the setting takes a while to establish and so the first few chapters don’t jump out at you. After reading aloud the first 5-6 pages of each book. all the groups preferred Among the Hidden since being far less complicated did not spend time on the setting and hence there were immediate hooks to their attention span. They even applauded my reading of the book which almost gave me a heart attack for as a group they are least motivated students I have ever taught.
I got turned on to Shakespeare about a year ago through a creative interpretation of his play, ‘Macbeth.’ A local acting troupe put on this really slick, urban, high-octane version of it that set the events of the play in the underworld of modern-day London. The events took place within the hierachy of the Mafia, and it involved gun battles, dirt bikes, and this lumber truck from ‘Birnam Logging.’
Seriously cool stuff. I heard they got the idea from some Australian director who shot a version of it in 2006.
Anyway, point is, after that, I wound up reading the actual play, seriously liking it, then devouring the rest of Shakespeare’s work. Maybe a ‘Macbeth’ video game…?
But I submit that teachers can’t get students engaged in the classics because the teachers aren’t engaged in the classics. A passionate, well-informed lecture on Shakespeare, by a teacher who knows why it’s good stuff, can awaken entire rows of desks.
I think I saw this once in a Michell Pfeiffer movie. Or maybe it was an Edward James Olmos movie. Wait…maybe it was a Hillary Swank movie. Anyway, whichever one it was, it was very moving and inspirational.
http://snipurl.com/1×9em
Somebody, please contradict me here.
Always happy to oblige, Harrison. My senior English teacher was extremely enthusiastic about Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but I didn’t finish reading it. My sophomore English teacher was interested in boys who were good at football and devoid of interest in literature, who, in other words, were like him, so far as I remember, yet I was enthralled by The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar, and still remember the look of the Washington Square paperbacks under my brown metal desklamp.