Getting Students To Read

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I was in my friend Rochelle’s eighth grade literature class today.  She and the student teacher, my advisee Emma, had the students working in literature circles.  For the most part they were going really well, but one group of boys had not done much reading.  They were supposed to be reading Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the River, which is about the Black Panthers, but they weren’t.  One boy, however, defended himself to me by holding a different book aloft and saying, “But look, I am reading!”  His book of choice was Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars, a sort of sci-fi retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

This reminded me of an incident a couple years ago in one of Tiffany Smith’s classes of sophomore American literature students at E.O. Smith.  Her students were supposed to be reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild with my undergrads, but there again was this one group of boys just not doing the reading.  And yet when I went to talk with them one day in the computer lab, they were talking excitedly about the new release in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

The common thread here, of course, is that these boys who were seemingly non-readers are in fact readers, but the trick is to find books that are the best fit for their interests and reading levels.

Not that Tiffany and Rochelle (and Emma) weren’t already doing these things, but I think some of the best ideas I have found for getting students to read canonical (or curricular) books is to follow Kelly Gallagher’s advice in Readicide to allow students to read self-selected material fifty percent of the time and assigned books the other fifty percent of the time, and to pair classic texts with contemporary texts based on shared elements, such as theme.

I read pretty voraciously, and I like to jump around from young adult titles to popular contemporary titles to classics that I have overlooked to academic work on teaching and education.  And whereas we may find ourselves telling our students to read like writers, I found that I read like a teacher.  I am always thinking about ways I might teach this text, and one thing I often notice is the tendency of writers to use earlier, well known works as frames for their novels.  Now of course novelists have been doing this since Fielding wrote Tom Jones and filled it with allusions to everything from Homer and Hamlet to Oedipus and Quijote, but I am finding many contemporary writers deliberately using much more recently canonized work as their literary frames.

I am thinking of how Stephen Chbosky in The Perks of Being a Wallflower makes deliberate use of The Catcher in the Rye or John Greene in The Fault in our Stars makes deliberate use of The Diary of Anne Frank.  These works practically beg a teacher to instructionally pair the contemporary YA novels with the recently canonized works to which they refer.

A sort of reverse version of this can be found in some contemporary adult works that make significant references to classic works that most of us would have read as children.  I’m thinking of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which makes so many references to C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books, especially to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which relies so heavily upon allusions to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I got excited reading Díaz’s and Gaiman’s novels recently because I had read the Narnia books to Cormac when he was a little boy, and currently we are reading The Lord of the Rings together, so these were cool discoveries.

Tonight, Elsa finished R. J. Palacio’s Wonder (she still has to read the Julian chapters), and Palacio does something similar, not just with her extensive use of song lyrics but also with films.  In particular, Auggie frequently sees himself through the lens of the Star Wars films, especially Episode IV:  A New Hope (the one we all grew up thinking of as the first film, not the fourth).  When in the concluding chapters Auggie is awarded the Henry Ward Beecher medal for good character, he compares himself to Luke and Han when Princess Leia bestows medals upon them.

I know that such pairings can’t magically make all our students read or read the books we want them to, but they are a wise way to start.