Do Great Books Grow Old? Or Do We Just Forget How To Read Them?

A few days ago, the BookBub blog posted an article entitled “12 Books We Should Stop Making High Schoolers Read”, which you can find here: https://media.bookbub.com/blog/2016/09/01/books-we-should-stop-making-high-schoolers-read/

On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to this list, since I teach high school students—that is, high school students who suddenly find themselves first-year college students at a small regional university in Oklahoma. They haven’t magically transformed from twelfth grade to year one of college; they’re still the same students who (largely) don’t like to read or write, and (mostly) have avoided reading as much as possible. When ordering books for a prospective class, I always think, “oh, can they really read book X? Isn’t it too hard? Will they stick with it? Can I possibly make them see the big ideas here? Shouldn’t I try something easier or more modern?” So on the face of it, this list is an honest admission that students hate reading, so why not at least try to meet them on their own terms? What’s wrong with switching out Moby Dick with The Martian? (though I’ve got to think alliteration had something to do with this switcheroo, since they have almost zero in common). If high school students bitch about reading A Tale of Two Cities, why not substitute I am Malala, a non-fiction book by a brave woman who is admittedly not a writer and had a professional writer help her along (which doesn’t exactly compare to Dickens, one of our greatest writers of novels). But hey, if it gets students reading, why the hell not? Reading is reading, and all reading is good. 

Should Literature Professors Write Fiction?

When I was halfway through my MA program for Literature, a PhD student in the program gave me the following sage advice: “If you’re going to be a serious student, don’t take creative writing courses.”  Partly he meant that since you’re getting a degree on literature, you should chase one rabbit at a time.  Writing a short story is time you could be writing your MA Thesis, or drafting an article, or doing something to get you into a conference or PhD program.  However, beneath this was a threat of not being taken seriously: enrolling in a creative writing course at the MA level (for a non-creative writing MA) is amateurish.  It smacks of not being quite serious, or worse, being a dilletante.  “I would never enroll in a creative writing course,” he said, without a hint of sarcasm.  I went ahead and took the course, since it was taught by an author whose works I deeply enjoyed.  No regrets, either: I learned a lot from the course, finished my MA Thesis, and got into a halfway decent PhD program. 

"This Class Would Be Just Perfect Without All the Students!" (and other complaints of the novice professor)

About a week ago, an article was published on Book Riot entitled “The Joys and Sorrows of Teaching Literature,” focusing on a brief career teaching college English as a TA: http://bookriot.com/2014/08/26/joys-sorrows-teaching-literature/#comment-1568114287

Of course, the title is misleading: the article is only about the sorrows and the thesis consists largely of this: students don’t love reading the way you do, and if you want to keep loving literature you should quit teaching immediately (or better yet, don’t go into the field at all).  This young teacher was disillusioned by the incredible disinterest of her students, particularly when she tried to share her love of language and metaphor to students who simply wanted to pass a class.  This is indeed disturbing to any teacher in love with his or her subject, but of course not surprising at all: why should students made to take a required class be expected to love it the same way as the professor being paid to teach it (or in this case, the TA)?  What bothered me about the article—and I’ve read several like it—is the sense of pervasive defeat in every sentence: you can’t teach literature to students, they don’t care, the profession is full of jargon, so I’m going to retreat into a book club and simply enjoy reading again.