A Novel Burden

One former English teacher's view on the problem with reading novels in school

Very excited to share The Bell Ringer’s first guest essay! 

We’ve got a banger today from Cafeteria Duty, a high school administrator in the U.S. who writes one of my favorite Substacks (CD’s post “Is Teaching Novels Even Worth It?”, which was also published at The Grade, is a personal favorite). 

After my recent essay on k-12 students reading fewer books in school, and the growing collection of reporting around the issue, Cafeteria Duty and I began a conversation about what the classroom realities are for high school English teachers. CD, a former English teacher, said the topic was ripe for their signature honesty, and I took CD at their word. This post is free for everyone, so enjoy—and then hope you’ll meet me in the comments section for some discussion! 

The death of the novel arrived in my 9th grade English class some years ago. We had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird and had approached the dramatic courtroom scenes where the reader finally learns what actually happened between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson. As is customary when doing a “novel study”—as English teachers call them—I set aside a few minutes to review the major plot points and characters before we settled in to read. I hadn’t planned longer than a few minutes for this when, shortly after I asked students to give a short synopsis of the book so far, an astonishing debate ensued about who Tom Robinson was. 

Tom Robinson was the sheriff, one student asserted. 

No, that’s Lennie, corrected another. 

Lennie’s from a book we read last semester, stupid, someone politely corrected. Tom Robinson is the character who never leaves his house. 

The class erupted. That’s Boo! Above the din, someone shouted, Tom is Scout’s classmate, the boy with no lunch!

On it went. 

I remember watching silently, in complete shock and not a little despair, until I finally berated my class for not having kept up with the reading, crisply described exactly who Tom Robinson was and what awful predicament he was in, and then commanded them to grant one of the most moving novels in American literature a measure of respect by reading quietly at their desks for the rest of the period and that, yes, there would be a freaking quiz. It was not my finest moment. 

I never taught that novel again. Subsequent years saw me teaching increasingly shorter novels —Things Fall Apart, The Stranger—that I was able to actually get through without relying on students reading for homework (a lost cause) until, for a solid 2-3 years, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I abandoned teaching books altogether. I made peace with this fate by knowing two things: my students were still reading a lot of good quality texts and, equally important, my students were writing a lot, too.  

And so let’s start with a couple obvious givens about the state of reading in high school: students are reading fewer books for school, and English teachers are assigning fewer books, most certainly at the high school level. 

Less obvious are the real reasons behind this decline and the degree to which this is bad. Much of the recent discussion around this issue has blamed external circumstances and—shocking—English teachers themselves, and has seemed to have forgotten that the purpose of high school English classrooms isn’t to prepare students to be English majors—it’s to turn them into competent readers and writers. 

Here’s what we’ve been told so far.

The Atlantic’s “The Elite Students Who Can’t Read Books,” aside from sounding the alarm that our nation may soon see declining literacy rates at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, largely blamed high school English teachers for top-tier college students’ inability to make it through any book their professors assigned. After No Child Left Behind and Common Core, the author, Rose Horowitch writes, “Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standard reading-comprehension tests.”

This isn’t not correct, but it oversimplifies those “instructional shifts” (as we educators call them) and blithely ignores that the majority of kids who go to pedigree colleges 1) don’t attend public schools, and 2) certainly don’t attend the sorts of public schools that were pressured by the various accountability mechanisms (teacher ratings, test scores, etc.) to make those instructional shifts. English teachers’ freedom to teach what they want increases in direct correlation with the proportion of their students who have orthodontics. 

Doug Lemov, in “Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms?” at Education Next, doesn’t see standardized tests as a problem per se, but instead he takes aim at the false belief prevalent among English teachers that reading is comprised of a set of discrete skills that students can practice, master and thus apply to any other text. 

This argument is the same as the guns-don’t-kill-people-people-kill-people argument. It’s true that this long-debunked teaching practice predates the NCLB, but with respect to Horowitch, Lemov doesn’t acknowledge that it became widespread as a direct result of Common Core, NCLB, and, dare I say, the influence of charter networks like Lemov’s Uncommon Schools, whose early success with poor kids was confirmed by their scores on the very standardized tests Lemov implies didn’t change how teachers teach. 

And for good measure, we’ve got Michael Petrilli, education’s grumpy dad, who disputes for lack of hard data the entire premise that high school English teachers are assigning fewer books—it’s “based on an assemblage of anecdotes and conjecture,” he writes—and, true to form, claims that if students are reading less, well, it’s because schools permit it. 

I agree with Petrilli on this last point, but he’s lost the plot if he actually thinks teachers aren’t assigning fewer books. It is true no comprehensive survey of middle and high school English curricula exists, but you would be hard pressed to find a veteran teacher or administrator who wouldn’t emphatically agree that assigned readings are down from just 15 years ago. Forgive me, but it’s just true. Similarly, we also don’t have any hard data on the attention spans of students, but if you picked a random staff meeting somewhere and told them we can’t definitively say student focus has deteriorated from 10 years ago since we lack “hard data,” those teachers would laugh you out of the room. 

This whole debate overlooks two major reasons why teachers are assigning fewer books, at least at the high school level. 

1. Teaching books kind of sucks. 

2. Books have become cornerstones of English classes, whereas before they were the foundation.

I taught high school English for almost ten years, and I taught very few books. I am not particularly proud of this, but it was an adaptive measure. Part of it had to do with the type of students I taught—mostly poor kids, mostly immigrants, most reading years below grade level— and part of it had to do with the hard reality that all of them needed to pass a state ELA exam. I had trimmed the fat from my curriculum and was satisfied to have struck a fine balance between richness and necessity. My kids needed exposure to a wide variety of texts and writing instruction. I simply could not justify including more than one book in my curriculum, especially when teaching that book took a long-ass time and I couldn’t guarantee that all of my students actually read it. 

But if I’m being one hundred percent honest here, I also kind of hated teaching books, and even when I taught classes that didn’t terminate in a high stakes test, I still only taught about one per year. I found the standard way books were taught stultifying. You know the drill: teacher assigns reading, students take reading quiz, students answer more questions or have a discussion, teacher assigns the next evening’s reading. Repeat for 5 weeks, and cap it off with an essay. Themes are pre-selected, literary elements are “tracked,” and even the best teachers on Earth cannot prevent the discussions from veering away from the text into the personal experiences of the students. (It’s a geological force.) Who reads like this? By week four, everyone’s bored, and the book, a great work of literature that was supposed to rouse the students from their adolescent solipsism and teach them an invaluable truth about the Human Condition, suddenly felt like that pot of chili you made on Sunday but were forcing down your throat for lunch on Wednesday. 

I have a feeling more English teachers share my sentiment than would be willing to admit, given the sacrosanctity of books to the English classroom (more on that below). But that aside, teaching books only works… if students actually read the book. 

And you cannot teach a book without assigning reading for homework. 

And most students do not do the readings for homework.  

And so it is mostly for this reason, dear reader, why fewer books are being taught in English classes. 

The majority of high school teachers in the United States have multiple classes with a critical mass of students who will not faithfully do the assigned reading for homework. What the cause of that is—smart phones, streaming, cheating, a wider culture of aliteracy—is worth fretting over, but frankly outside the purview of schools and of little concern to the noble English teacher who junks her Great Gatsby unit because her kids won’t f*#k*&^ read a measly 25 pages at home. 

Sound bleak? It’s true. Don’t believe me? Ask any high school English teacher. (Discount those who teach the sort of highly driven kids who would read an HVAC manual if assigned, and any teacher who posts pictures of her color-coordinated classroom or herself grading on social media.)

English teachers have accepted this sad reality and devised three workarounds, none of them desirable. 

The first is to read the book in class, but this takes forever. A novel like To Kill A Mockingbird would, in a class that meets 45 minutes a day, five days a week, take three weeks to read if students only read silently for a minimum of 30 minutes each period. And that’s being conservative. Factor in any writing or discussion you’d want to include, and you’re well past one month. Then you’ve still got your final essay (or, more likely these days, some asinine “project”), and any of the expected and unexpected interruptions that inevitably screw up teachers’ unit calendars, and you’re inching toward 8 weeks, which is untenably long for a unit. 

But To Kill a Mockingbird is over 300 pages. Why not choose something shorter? Not a bad idea, but the first problem with this is that there are few short books of high literary quality—The Metamorphosis, The Stranger. The second problem is that a high school English class that only teaches short works excludes almost the entire canon. 

The last workaround is a shameful trade secret, a way that teachers make the book easier for students to consume. 

But the method is less Cheez-Whiz-on-broccoli than it is Sophie’s Choice.

To ensure the book survives—which is to say, to ensure it remains in their curriculum —the teacher disembowels it by carving out the least necessary parts as if they were a malignant tumor. 

Those are assigned for homework and mostly go unread. The most necessary parts are dutifully read in class. The rest is summarized or supplemented with whatever movie version the teacher can find online.

In the end, the students faithfully read maybe 30 percent of the book, and though everyone is happy—the teacher can technically say he taught Native Son, the students can walk away with a sense of accomplishment, however false—most English teachers can’t stomach doing that all year. 

Which luckily, they don’t have to (more on that in a sec). 

Now, if you’re feeling despondent, I get it. Many of us have warm memories of the novels we read in our English classes, and the High School English teacher occupies an important role in the American imagination as one of the first adults in life who exposes to you the Truth about the world. (It’s all downhill after Of Mice and Men.) There are no such epiphanies in Algebra II. So the image of an English class where students aren’t clutching tattered paperbacks of Brave New World as they hotly debate the perils of pleasure is, for many people, no English class at all.  

I sympathize, as would most English teachers. But much of the hand-wringing over the diminished presence of books in English classes is based, in part, on the romantic idea of what English classes should be, which is 4-6 novels taught over the course of a year, a curriculum the discipline began to abandon long ago after recognizing it did not confer the hard reading and writing skills our free market democracy required of our students. That version of the curriculum was officially consigned to antiquity with Common Core, a much maligned reform that rarely gets credit for two big shifts: 1) reminding English teachers of their essential role as writing instructors; and 2) convincing them of the importance of teaching non-fiction, which is to say argumentation and rhetoric, the finest examples of which—“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—may not answer the same Big Questions as Catcher in the Rye but nevertheless deserve a place alongside it in the English classroom. 

This is the second reason why fewer books are taught. The idea of what an English class should be has evolved. Indeed, they aren’t even called “English” classes anymore—they’re “English Language Arts.” Admittedly, it’s a bloodless term of art, and keepers of the flame love to sneer at it, but it necessarily encompasses all that the contemporary English teacher is expected to do: teach long fiction, short fiction, poetry, argument, rhetoric, research, vocabulary, grammar and—most crucially—writing, the single most difficult academic skill we ask our students to master, and one that takes time. 

If students are reading fewer books, it’s worth asking what they are doing instead. Most of us might be surprised at what we find. And even pleased. 

To be sure, a world in which students graduate high school without having read any books is untenable. (Even fewer than, say, 8, in my opinion, is, too.) But a world in which students graduate high school having read fewer books than they once did is actually what we want. 

The mission is for schools and teachers to figure out the most effective way to ensure that their students actually read high- quality books without compromising on standards.

So if we want the kids to read, what are we going to do about it?