Back to school for faking season

It’s fall again, and the faking season has begun in high schools all over the state. Teachers are assigning numbered copies of many novels that their students’ parents and grandparents read. Some teen-agers will become immersed in those classic texts, but many more won’t. Instead, lots of kids — and not just the ones we usually label as “at risk” — will devise elaborate schemes to avoid reading. They’re not the only ones at fault here. We all need to think about why students are becoming more and more alienated from the books we have traditionally offered them in school.

Last year, while conducting research in the high school where I formerly taught, I talked to juniors about their attitudes toward reading. One of them, whom I’ll call Luke, teetered on the edge of failure in his English class all year long. Sheepishly, he told me, “I’ve read a few OK things in school, but nothing that would make me want to pick up a book on my own.” Able to read but only willing to do so if he has to, Luke is alliterate, rather than illiterate.

His classmate Jenny always makes the honor roll but confessed that she has never completely read a novel for school. “None of the books really have anything to do with what’s going on today,” she said.

She pays attention in class, skims important sections, and rents movie versions when she can; she doesn’t fail. Although she’s faking it better than Luke, neither of them is a lifelong reader.

Unlike Luke and Jenny, Jack is a voracious reader with diverse tastes, but he didn’t develop them in school. According to him, “When teachers have assigned books, I’ve yet to find one that’s been interesting. They’re usually `good-for-you” books’ … I can see why lots of kids don’t like to read because the books that are chosen for them at school are boring. If my mom hadn’t gotten me into reading, I probably wouldn’t like to read either.”

Jack’s got a point. Many of the books we assign to high school students are “good-for-you” literature. A lot of required reading can be divided into two categories: classics written in times and places far distant from ours, and books that sanitize or omit controversial issues. Students often have a hard time finding their concerns and interests reflected in these texts. And, as Jack notes, the books are often chosen for students, not the other way around. Small wonder, then, that kids like Luke and Jenny aren’t engaged readers.

It can be dangerous, however, for teachers who assign texts that don’t fit in those categories. In the spring of 1995, Penny Culliton, an English teacher from New Hampshire, defended herself at a dismissal hearing because her curriculum included contemporary books with homosexual characters. She lost her job.

How ironic that homosexuality is a taboo topic in English classes, yet people across Maine discussed it in churches, over water coolers, and at dining room tables when Question 1 was on the ballot last fall. Shouldn’t schools be among the places where supervised and thoughtful conversations about compelling issues can take place?

As I see it, this issue of what should be taught and read in schools touches all of us in the community. It’s not just an agenda item for English department meetings. After all, the most common kind of censorship occurs before students ever have a book in their hands: in the minds of individual teachers who exclude topics or texts from the curriculum from fear of community censure. And who can blame them? No one wants to be another Peggy Culliton.

Community members need to talk about a common vision for schools that includes a plan to diversify the curriculum to meet Jenny and Luke’s needs. One forum for this kind of conversation will be the University of Maine College of Education’s upcoming conference: “Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice, and the Place of Popular Literature in the Canon.” On Oct. 11-12, teachers, scholars, parents, and students will gather to discuss these important issues.

Sadly, several teachers have told me recently that they don’t dare to use King 1/4s work in their classes, even though many reluctant readers connect with his books. “The parents would crucify me if I let kids read that stuff,” one said. My guess is that at least some of those same parents must be reading King themselves. According to The New York Times, four installments of King’s new serial novel are among the ten top-selling books this week. “Silas Marner” may be rotting in the bottom of sophomore gym lockers, but a lot of people — both adolescents and adults — are reading “The Green Mile.”

I’m not suggesting here that all our literacy woes will be solved if we allow students to replace Shakespeare and Dickens with Stephen King and John Grisham. Books of all kinds, including the classics, can help adolescents to think deeply about the questions that will confront them as citizens. But students have to read them first, which isn’t happening in many schools.

We need to stop pretending that students who are force-fed the entire Modern Library will choose to read those classics as adults. If students like Luke and Jenny don’t read for pleasure by the time they graduate, the only choice they’ll make is which new release to rent at Blockbuster. When they don’t need to fake it anymore, they probably won’t read at all.

Kelly Chandler, a former English teacher at Noble High School in Berwick, is a doctoral student in the University of Maine’s literacy education program.