“That’s the best book we’ve ever been assigned to read,” I heard a student say to a friend in my classroom last week. Another student, on the day of our final discussion, said he wasn’t feeling 100% well but decided to come to school anyway because he didn’t want to miss us talking about the ending. The incidents and the great discussion that followed validated my text selection: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. The text is funny, engaging, detail-rich, at times heavy, and very well written.
Noah is no Shakespeare. He doesn’t have the sheer lyrical capacity of a Toni Morrison or the literary depth of an Alexandre Dumas or Louise Erdrich. And he doesn’t need to. Noah’s book is less than 10 years old, has a lot of ‘popular’ appeal, and is the sort of thing some students might even pick up on their own. So why would I pick this text to teach?
There are two extreme caricatures of English teachers (though I suspect there are some who would fit these descriptions entirely). On one hand, we have the stodgy ‘classic literature only’ type, and on the other the cool ‘let’s study whatever students will love’ type.
The argument of the first type tends to follow a path like this: these texts have stood the test of time, they are written by literary masters, they’ve seen a lot of study and are considered by many to be great literature. To be an educated person, one must be familiar with these texts, otherwise one might miss references to them in everyday conversation and in other texts. The study of literature should be focused on the great texts and only after decades or centuries can we know whether a new work will still be around to fulfill those criteria. So leave the new-fangled stuff for the airport bookstores and the ‘genre fiction’ lovers and we’ll study real literature in the classroom.
The second type would counter: but no one reads Shakespeare or Homer for fun. There is no literary canon and it’s mostly comprised of elites and white Europeans anyway. Our 21st century adolescents don’t care about the Victorian era or want to wade through copious descriptions of whaling. We should let students choose what they want to read, do lots of independent reading projects, pick only recent, relevant books, and leave all the dusty old stuff for those who want to become Literature majors.
I see both the merits that ground these opposing arguments and the flawed reasoning they lead to. There definitely are great literary texts deserving of study and I sincerely hope they continue to be taught, despite changing tastes, attitudes, worldviews, etc. Likewise, I value student autonomy, choice, and recognize that reading a text is not only about calculated study but encompasses the human attraction to stories.
As with so many things, I don’t think these two seeming opposites are mutually exclusive. The first type has its focus primarily on the texts, then on the readers, while the second carries it the other way around. There can be a balance, one that acknowledges some more objective approaches to valuing text while also embracing that reader experiences are subjective and grow out of immediate contexts. The further the distance between a reader and a text—in time, in culture, across languages—the greater the possible disconnect. But that distance also offers a lot of potential richness.
To foster life-long readers in my classroom, I need to strike a balance. On the one hand, I need to select texts that meet certain, somewhat objective criteria, such as quality of writing, narrative structure, complexity, evocative selection of details, and overall purpose. This can also include outside materials such as critical articles and analyses to supplement the reading. On the other hand, it is imperative that the students in my classroom can access that text not just on the level of comprehension, but they should be able to grapple with the context of a work. In some cases, that requires scaffolding on my end, on others, it can be them applying reading tools they’ve learned along the way. I believe it is valuable for us to study shared, whole-class texts. Simultaneously, if we want our students to continue to read beyond what they’re assigned in a class, we need to allow for opportunities for choice and agency. Otherwise, we set up a false dichotomy where either all reading is associated only with what is assigned and they then choose not to read outside of that, or ‘assigned’ texts are worthy of study and they select only ‘entertainment’ reading for pleasure.
My African literature class has now moved on to a more established ‘classic’, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. This text requires a lot more contextualization, holds more narrative distance to my students’ 21st century lives, but also provides so much value towards their understanding of the world, other literature, history, and tragic storytelling. They need this more difficult experience as well as the more readily enjoyable one before. And by the end of the semester, I hope that what they have gained was worth the time and effort they chose to put into it.
Part-time Human 