See Daisy Drive. See Jay Swim. Look Out, Jay!

Roger Ebert  pointed out the “obscenity” of a retelling of The Great Gatsby by Margaret Tarner, a book which is presumably intended for struggling high school readers.

Ebert points out the contrast between Fitzgerald’s original novel and Ms. Tarner’s “retelling” most effectively when he contrasts the endings of each work.

Fitzgerald:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Tarner:

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.
Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

I’ve had the opportunity to teach Gatsby each of the past two years and have come to appreciate it more each time I’ve read it. My students teased me this year because every day I would come to class earnestly proclaiming one sentence or another as “the finest piece of writing you’ll ever come across.”

It’s a beautiful, moving, complex text which can transform a reader. You know, what literature should do. Ebert is right that Gatsby is accessible to high school students and that they deserve the opportunity to read and experience the original text. Boiling down art to a means to transmit plot and low-level vocabulary not only destroys the art, but damages the reader.

No teacher should have such little faith in her students as to teach this text.

I disagree with Ebert, however, when he uses this text as evidence of a collapsed American educational system. He writes:

What depresses me is what this Macmillan Reader edition says about our American educational system. Any high school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read. That student has been sold a bill of goods. We know that teachers at the college level complain that many of their students cannot read and write competently. If this is an example of a book they are assigned, can they be blamed?

It’s too easy to blame the educational system alone.   As pressure mounts to increase graduation rates without maintaining intellectual and academic growth and as the federal government and business interests demand education focused less on ideas and more on “marketable skills” and “proficiency,” we’ll see more pressure to lower the bar, even as low as this:

“My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West.”

In his essay Dehumanized, Mark Slouka persuasively argues that education our education system has become almost entirely focused on commerce at the expense of ideas:

Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity.

Is it any wonder that, in a climate like the one Slouka correctly describes, books like retellings of classic novels are finding their way into classrooms? That a cursory look at the plot suffices?

Teaching literature is difficult in a culture increasingly dominated by short attention span entertainment. It’s even more difficult when those who teach literature are told it has limited value in the marketplace or on standardized test scores.

End the Remedial Worksheet Factories and Expand Opportunity for All Students

Jay Matthews at the Washington Post sparked a long debate about the role of honors, general, and Advanced Placement courses in high schools, suggesting that one school eliminate general education courses altogether.  Instead, students should, he says, either take an AP course or an honors course to better prepare themselves for college and jobs.

While attempting to refute Matthews’ argument, Chris Irvine at the Fordham Institute makes the best case for pushing students into Honors and Advanced Placement courses.  He writes:

From my experience teaching at an under-performing high school in a blue-collar area of Metro-Detroit, I am all-too-familiar with mislabeled classes and the problems they create. The class I taught was an A.P. Government course, the same course I took in high school with a group of top-notch students, over 90% of which took and passed the A.P. Exam. The course I taught, however, looked nothing like what I had previously encountered. The chapter exams were all multiple-choice and the questions (and answers) were given to the students literally word-for-word during the review. Any student putting forth even the slightest amount of effort (you’d be surprised how many didn’t) had no problem receiving an “A” in the class. Yet, less than 10% of the class took the A.P. exam and I can count on one hand the number that passed.

I believe Irvine’s argument boils down to the idea that, because he didn’t believe his students were capable of intellectually demanding work, he chose to give them multiple choice tests and busy work. That’s hardly an indictment of placing students in challenging courses; it’s an argument against lowering our expectations because students don’t enter our classes matching the stereotype of “top-notch students.”

Irvine’s specific experience certainly speaks powerfully to a problem in education: the idea that any student should spend her time answering multiple choice questions or regurgitating verbatim answers to objective questions in any class is not only absurd, but an affront to the very idea of education. No matter how low the skill level of the student, we must provide the opportunity for intellectual challenge, exploration, discussion and debate.

I’m not sure that placing every student in an honors course is the right answer, but ending the practice of treating general courses as if they are remedial worksheet factories would be an incredibly good first step towards improving educational outcomes and student interest.  Whether we place students in Honors or regular classes, the most important step we must take is to provide content worthy of their time and attention.

With regard to AP specifically, I’ve long believed that the College Board is correct to ask for open enrollment in Advanced Placement classes. The real power of challenging curriculum is that it can develop the skills of a wide range of students. Schools and teachers should aggressively recruit students who want the challenge of AP and want to improve their skills for college, focusing particularly on traditionally under-represented groups of students.

It’s easy to guarantee success in an Advanced Placement program if success is defined as helping a carefully screened collection of students achieve a 90% passage rate.  Real success, however, can be found in those schools that expand opportunities to take challenging courses to a wide variety of students.

The Case For the All-Class Novel

I stumbled across this piece by Pam Allyn at Education Week, in which she argues against requiring an entire class to read a novel, suggesting instead that teachers:

give students agency as readers; where we stop blocking or banning from our classrooms the kinds of reading and writing our students are doing outside of school. We should stop reacting as if all the ways students read and write outside school are wrong and superficial, and instead bring that mash-up of personal ideas and text variety into our teaching.

Allyn asserts that “we have now reached a point at which teaching with neither the whole-class novel nor the basal reader is viable,” connecting the idea quite nebulously to technological advancement and Common Core Standards. Her piece is filled with phrases like giving students “agency” and making them curators of their own interests, but offers a simplistic defense of washing our hands of the responsibility of providing excellent material for our students to learn from.

That students find reading a chore has far less to do with mandatory assignments than what teachers do with those texts.

The most important benefit of a whole class novel is that students will learn far m0re–about the work, themselves, each other, and their world–if they share and discuss a text with classmates and the instructor.  Having a classroom of students reading individual works may certainly initially generate more interest, but a sustained conversation about ideas that a whole-novel discussion can generate will be far more valuable and provide much greater opportunity for personal growth.

Reading an assigned text also provides students the opportunity for students to become acquainted with works they might otherwise never have read. Allyn cites the example of a student reading 16 blogs about boats before reading fictional works on the same subject, but it seems unlikely that students are going to stumble on Ellison or Garcia Marquez without a bit of direction. My own passion for literature (rather than history) was sparked in high school by a teacher who “made us” read Herman Hesse, an author I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have found on my own. As for Allyn’s claim that we can teach especially important books by “reading them aloud” to students, I’d suggest that sounds like the worst reading chore one could possibly invent and reduces the amount of time available for in-depth learning that comes from analysis of a text.

A final reason whole class novels are important is simply that students must be exposed to quality works, works that they will understand and appreciate better as part of a classroom discussion. I’ve heard (and Allyn argues) that it doesn’t what students read, but it certainly does. I don’t mean to channel Harold Bloom here, but quality tells–and quality matters. While students may be “curators of their own interest,” part of our job as instructors is to provide them texts that will both challenge their intellects and expand their worldview. Horton may hear a who, but he doesn’t teach reading.

Allyn is certainly correct to argue that not all texts work as well for each student, but effective instruction can generate interest and enthusiasm. Of course we should encourage our students to explore their own passions and interests, but not at the expense of the whole-class novel.