How should novels be taught?
+ more things
“They don’t teach novels anymore, that’s what she said,” my wife said.
“What do they teach?”
“Only excerpts. Passages. Short poems.” My wife leaned back in her chair.
We were sitting on our front porch, looking at our neighbor, a high school English teacher, walking her dog in the park.
“No novels?” I asked.
“No novels.”
“I get it,” I said. “If you’re trying to show styles and examples, it’s hard to read a full novel.”
Reading a novel takes concentration. And focus.
And it’s a mono-medium.
I taught middle school English at a private school for only 4 months. One semester.
I didn’t have any teaching experience, I didn’t take a workshop or anything, I hadn’t gone through Teach for America.
Why hire me? I had an English degree and a willingness to take the job. I had spent one year in an elementary school as a reading tutor — very different than a middle school English teacher with 6 (!!!) class preps a day.
Now I had to teach these kids Edgar Allan Poe.
And Tom Sawyer (I think).
Probably To Kill a Mockingbird.
The novels were the hardest. Most of them were paperbacks, which was fine.
But the small size became a disadvantage: they were easier to use. They would get lost in backpacks, left on desks, or forgotten at home.
The heft of the textbook was an advantage — the kids could feel it.
The textbooks, of course, did not contain full-on novels, only the excerpts.
However, the kids would not only lose the paperbacks, they would also lose the thread.
Characters were forgotten, plot points were disregarded. When you only read the book for 15 minutes every few days, and it wasn’t something you really wanted to do anyway, the kids didn’t care. They would become frustrated and lost.
That’s how the “reading is too hard” trope gets going and why teaching a full-length novel is so difficult.
There’s a lot of joy in reading fiction, but it’s not a straight-through line. It takes perseverance, contemplation, reflection — all things our culture is not great at.
Wrong Novels?
Or perhaps we’re teaching the “wrong” novels.
That’s not a political statement, it’s just the understanding that the classics change and reading habits change, too.
We know educational bureaucracies are slow to change. There’s a lot of controversy about what can and should be taught in schools.
Meanwhile, my 7 and 9-year-olds grab graphic novels, and love them. Getting them to read chapter books takes more work.1
To teach full-length novels or not?
I’m not a hardcore traditionalist, close reader.
Yes, I have a master’s degree in English, but I focused on experimental literature and forms. Stuff that broke the bounds.
I had one Shakespeare class total in undergrad and graduate school, and one Dante class.
Instead I read DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Cortazar, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
I’m woefully under-read, despite a semi-advanced degree, or I’m well-read for the modern moment.
In that way, I’m okay with textbooks instead of novels. But it depends on the goal, the job, the expectation.
I’m no expert on what should be taught to kids right now or even what is being taught. But for a lot of kids, something like Harry Potter or Ready Player One is too long from the get-go even if they’re interesting.
Excerpts from something like that could get them hooked.
If the textbooks are a gateway drug so to speak, an entry point to more challenging, longer novels, then the textbook sounds like a good way to go — recognizing that not every student will become an English teacher or writer, that many more will be insurance adjusters, customer service reps, delivery people, and the occasional doctor or banking exec who peruses the bookshelves at Target.
It is difficult to teach not only one novel, but several over the year, sometimes you feel like you’re spinning your wheel.
I’d much rather the kids write and discuss what a text or story is doing, but to get there you have to read some of it.
Obviously, my pedagogy is not well-formed on this — yes, I took a couple of those classes, too.
More Things:
This Ross Douthat profile in The New Yorker.
I don’t read every Douthat column, but his position in between conservatives ande liberals, really resonates with me as a Christian, and a place many of my friends have found ourselves in over the past few years. Related: Losing Our Religion by Russell Moore.
Not sure why I didn’t start this season until it was over, but the cinematography is so great. It’s one of the most well-shot reality shows out there, so much so it deserves the title “docu series” lol. I’m a horrible swimmer and can’t surf at all, but I do paddleboard so it’s fun to see people doing amazing things in the water.
Why Guys Who Post More on Social Media Are Seen as Less Manly. At The Conversation.
Been writing more at Medium:
I’m flying to Birmingham, AL Friday morning and then heading directly back on Saturday to catch the first night of the hardcore/punk festival Furnace Fest. I scheduled this with a long-time friend of mine before moving was ever on the table, and so I felt like I needed to honor that commitment. Enjoy!
Last Thing
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” — GK Chesterton
Keep going,
-Josh Spilker
(Though my 9 yo just discovered Lemony Snicket and is really into them!)
In my recent 6-year stint at MSU's English Dept. I taught novels of varied lengths. Six books in an Edith Wharton/Sinclair Lewis seminar; 8-10 in various mystery classes: Michigan, International, Genre survey; ditto in Jewish-American Lit. Students kept up for the most part, so I was lucky.