This post is written by member Julia Franks.聽
One of my students, a high school senior on his way to Georgia Tech, told me he loved to read as a child and then, as a teenager, began to hate it. He blamed school, and the way his teachers 鈥渙veranalyzed鈥� literature. (Just to remind you: it鈥檚 not unusual for a class to read , a four-hour play, and then spend thirty hours talking and writing about it.) Other disaffected readers blame schools鈥� 鈥渢errible books,鈥� including one Stanford graduate who recalls the exact book that made him hate fiction鈥攆orever: .
Some give up sooner. Some have intuited that it鈥檚 not the actual reading of that matters to their grades, but rather familiarity with Dickens鈥檚 major themes. And it鈥檚 so very tempting to get that information online rather than spending twelve hours reading a book and then constructing your own meaning from it.
We know that non-readers don鈥檛 develop the same mental muscles, but there are other reasons why reading isn鈥檛 just for the nerds of the world. Our republic provides free education to its citizenry because an informed and intelligent electorate is a public good. Part of getting educated is experiencing other people鈥檚 stories. I鈥檓 not a Christian, but I identified strongly with the Congregationalist pastor in 鈥檚 . Likewise, I aspired to Pi Patel鈥檚 transcendent view of suffering in and was moved by 鈥檚 conflicted adolescent feelings about Jesus in . Because of those books, I have some tiny understanding of the very many ways there are of being a Christian. I could draw similar parallels about being a combat soldier or about being Muslim. By immersing myself in someone else鈥檚 story, I鈥檓 inhabiting his or her life a little. I鈥檓 practicing a different vantage point.
One night last summer, below a dingy Atlanta underpass, a police car pulled in front of mine and stopped, the blue lights flashing into the tunnel. An officer sprang from the car and ran forward into the blackness. Then: sounds of wrestling, moaning, a large soft mass being slammed against the car, the voice of the officer saying, 鈥淪top moving.鈥� He said it four times, each time sounding more as if he were begging. Moments later a tall wiry man sprinted toward my car, blood pouring from a head wound, his eyes dazed with either terror or drugs. The police officer, who was stockier and younger, tackled him, and they both slammed onto the pavement, not five feet from where I sat. The officer wrested the other man鈥檚 arms behind him and closed the handcuffs. Then he met my eye for a long moment, his gaze full of uncertainty. He looked Filipino. The man in the cuffs was White.
At first, I tried to square this incident with one of our national narratives, trying to shape my own experience to fit a story I鈥檇 already heard. Was it the brutality story? The resisting-arrest story? Racism? Which one was the bad guy?
But, life is not an action movie or a video game where good guys fight evil. There are many other stories out there. And if you鈥檙e a reader, you remember 鈥檚 accounts of police profiling in or the brutality in , written by and . But here鈥檚 the thing: sitting right there in your brain next to those stories are also of NYPD responding to the events of September 11 and 鈥檚 novels of a navigating complicated relationships in the neighborhoods of downtown Atlanta. If you鈥檙e a reader, you have a lot more practice holding all those conflicting stories in your imagination at one time. And perhaps you鈥檙e more prepared to see nuance.
Recent data show that readers are also better at controlling their own stories, which is an integral part of constructing identity and has given rise to an entire field called . Think about it. Stories are the way we make meaning. Take any personal crisis you鈥檝e ever weathered, even something as prosaic as a break-up. When it was all over, you built a narrative around it: 鈥淔irst he did this, then I did that.鈥� Cause, effect, cause, effect. You needed that narrative in order to feel as if you understood what had happened鈥攊n order to move on.
As a nation, too, we need these narratives. Election results end in an upset, and we spend a whole lot of time trying to answer the question why? Or a man walks into a church and opens fire on the congregation. We as a country respond by trying to make a narrative: cause, effect, cause, effect. When we can鈥檛 do it, we feel adrift, even despairing. And yes, we鈥檙e tempted to oversimplify the story. But the more practice we have at story-making, the more we鈥檙e able to construct a nuanced national story.
In my own classroom, I wanted a change, so one spring I offered my AP students a choice. They could read the books on the syllabus, or they could set up reading groups and read twice as many books selected from a list of some 300 great titles. We voted. Forty-nine students out of forty-nine chose to read twice as many books. And鈥攕urprise!鈥攖hey chose door-stoppers they鈥檇 long wanted to read (! !) and alternated them with shorter reads ( , ). By May, every kid in the class, with one exception, had read twice as many pages as I鈥檇 originally planned, and many had read four or five times as聽 much.
At the end of the year, my seniors鈥� grades on the national exam were exactly on par with the other AP students in the school. Research data on choice reading, particularly those from linguist , support this anecdotal evidence.
I鈥檓 not suggesting that we abandon the classics or the communal reading experience. But kids who have personal reading habits are far more likely to broaden their tastes than those who don鈥檛. They鈥檙e also more likely to be reading ten years after graduation.
We have to offer more choice, and we have to set actual time aside in the school day for reading.聽 (Maybe fewer hours, say, discussing Hamlet?) In this moment in American culture, we need reader-citizens more than ever. Because of that, English departments have the opportunity to be especially relevant in civic life. Some of them are already taking up that challenge.
鈥橳is a far, far better thing they do.
Julia Franks is a former teacher and an award-winning novelist (Over the Plain Houses from Hub City Press). She now runs a Web application that helps schools track independent reading from grade to grade ().鈥�
Note: Did you find this post interesting? You may like to read by Hannah Sislo whose college project focused on ways teachers could include reading choice in the classroom.