To Teach Equity, We Should Choose Modern Texts

by Mike Ziegler Notes from the Classroom

A colleague of mine recently received an interesting reaction to Zora Neale Hurston, when a young black man in his class declared one of Hurston’s essays to be “bullsh**.”

The student wasn’t interested in Hurston’s perspective on race, in a piece written in 1928. While my friend handled the incident as well as possible, it gave our whole PLC pause, since it raised an important question:

When selecting texts for an English classroom, how do we rank student interest and equity?

For many of us, the gut response is to look to The Canon. We find reputable voices from across time and distance, and select texts that diversify our collection of readings.

Which gives most English classes something that looks roughly like this:

Shakespeare
Hemingway
Fitzgerald
Lee
Miller
And a grab-bag of other White or European or early-American authors

And then, for balance and equity we might add:

Cisneros
Harlem Renaissance voices
MLK
Amy Tan
And Toni Morrison, if the school district will allow it

I’m not looking to unfairly profile anyone here. But the list of names tends to be finite.

Yet for non-white or non-male students in your district, these canonical texts, which felt relevant not so long ago, might not resonate today.

This was the case in my colleague’s class.

Hurston’s piece is mainly about taking life by the horns in spite of adversity. But in the process of being pro-self-confidence, she takes more than a few shots at fellow African-Americans who, she believes, are too busy feeling sorry for themselves.

Can you blame my colleague’s student for not wanting to hear this 90-year-old voice, two generations removed from a modern perspective? (Here I should point out that my colleague and I teach the same curriculum–my criticism is not of him but of the texts we–all of us ELA teachers–have allowed to define the course for too long.)

It’s not hard to imagine that this one forthright student speaks for many who quietly suffer through a whole semester of reading that never speaks to a modern point of view, much less a modern perspective for minority students.

It’s something that my PLC considered a few years ago. We had realized that out of our first six or seven texts, we had to present caveats for five of them about the use of terms like “negro” or other racial insensitivities, and that included Fitzgerald’s wonderful Gatsby.

That doesn’t make Gatsby a bad choice, but it certainly creates an oppressive classroom atmosphere for students of color who have to hear this language almost daily, in literature that we tell them is important and definitive.

Even our well-meaning texts, like those from the Harlem Renaissance writers, can alienate the very students we hope they speak to the most.

Why?

Because–ironically–we ask students to embrace the perspectives of (to them) ancient voices while refusing (or neglecting) to listen to or examine the modern voices that have emerged since then.

Is Langston Hughes an important voice in our history? Of course.

But in this cultural moment, is it more important for our students to hear Langston Hughes’ voice than, say, Angie Thomas or Clint Smith or Jason Reynolds? These are writers who have captured the zeitgeist of our current race issues. And they’ve done so through eyes that dilate more or less in sync with those of our young, impressionable students.

If you haven’t read these enormously popular and well-known modern voices, perhaps ask yourself, What limitations exist in your own perspective of modern cultural issues? If The Canon offers our kids one set of eyes to see the world through, is it not our responsibility to try other, newer lenses as well?

Michael Ziegler (@ZigThinks) is a Content Area Leader and teacher at Novi High School. This is his 15th year in the classroom. He teaches 11th Grade English and IB Theory of Knowledge. He also coaches JV Girls Soccer and has spent time as a Creative Writing Club sponsor, Poetry Slam team coach, AdvancEd Chair, and Boys JV Soccer Coach. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, majoring in English, and earned his Masters in Administration from Michigan State University.

Misreading Readers

by Mike Ziegler Notes from the Classroom

shutterstock_561669964 My youngest daughter is a wonderfully spunky first grader whom people often call “headstrong,” using that tone that suggests they’ll make sure and say a prayer for me later.

People make those casual remarks and we all have a good laugh, and I quietly cross them off the family Christmas card list. Just kidding. They’re right about her and I’m glad for it. She knows what she likes and doesn’t like, and she’ll never waste a moment of her life letting someone else tell her how to live it.

All of this is to say that she gave me a heart attack a couple nights ago when she announced at bedtime, “I don’t like reading.” I challenged her immediately by pointing out that she’s constantly reading Mo Willems books and Dog Man and all sorts of graphic novels.

Which led to this exchange:

“No, daddy, I don’t like reading THESE books,” Taylor said, tossing her bag of leveled-reading books at me in disgust. These are books she brings home at least a couple times a week to help make sure she’s reading in the right difficulty range and to help her continue growing. They’re good at that job, I think, but they’re about as interesting as potato salad.

“Oh. Buddy, those are to help you get better at reading! They don’t have to be your favorites,” I said.

Her response: “I don’t like them and I’m not reading them anymore.”

We eventually talked things out. But not before the episode got me thinking about Taylor as a future student in high school, and by extension, my own current students.

Willful Reading and Forced Reading

I suddenly imagined Taylor as the sort of student I see all the time–the type who lights up conversations and writing assignments when a text catches her fancy. Passionate about their favorite readings, these kids are equally passionate about their hatred for what they consider forced labor–any assignment related to a text they aren’t into.

No sooner did this “nightmare” occur to me than I realized my hypocrisy. I LOVE these sorts of students. They’re unwilling to “play school” but are more passionate–and much more knowledgeable–than students who do the work without slowing down to consider the value of anything beyond a grade.

shutterstock_568776415 There are lots of conversations to be had about this intersection of student interest and assessment. But let’s come back to my daughter for a second. Imagine her ten years from now. Or just look around your own classroom and pick the half dozen or so kids this description fits: She continues to love a good book when someone hands it to her, but she shrinks from most of what a teacher assigns, assuming wearily that it’s more literature that someone else has decided has value–or is being used to test her. If she’s learned to “do school” then she’s compliant but uninterested. If she decides that there are better things to do than complying with assessments, then maybe she’s taking a pass on most of what’s handed to her in an English class.

Taylor will be fine–she has two teachers for parents and a reading-centered household. I worry more about the students I have in class now. How often do we give them opportunities to demonstrate their skills as readers and writers, unshackled from the separate (much less useful) skill of compliance?

Our curriculum’s standards help expose students to seminal works of literature, but we are often slow to recognize that analytical reading and genre exploration are absolutely NOT tied to those same texts. If a student is reluctant to engage with Shakespeare or Krakauer, have we accurately assessed their reading abilities when we write them off, based on an effort we know wasn’t indicative of them as readers?

Balance for the Forced

It would be enormously insulting of me to suggest that you should build alternative assessments for your entire gradebook to accommodate students who haven’t learned to tow the line sometimes. But I think sometimes there’s also room for balance: If one opportunity to demonstrate annotation skills presents itself during The Great Gatsby, a standards-based alternative might be fairly easy to build with Flipgrid or a quick conference about a scene from a student’s independent reading. If they’re reading books that are Lexile-appropriate (or complexity appropriate, if you’re measuring implicit meaning), then their ability to perform on the text they’re attached to should overshadow however they perform on the task related to a class reading.

This idea can be a tough pill to swallow. Many of us got into this profession due to a love for the classics and the notion that we are laying the foundations of culture in our English classrooms. Yet for every one of us who fawns over Faulkner, there’s another of us who never quite figured out why Salinger was such a big deal.

If a student in high school has the fundamentals down–if she can read a grade-appropriate text and tell you the tone and the mood and tie it to current events and posit motives for the main characters’ decisions–then we should be much more worried about how to get all of those A-plus students who never pick up a pleasure book to follow her lead and learn the value of reading itself.

Graphic Novels Not Called “Maus”

by Mike Ziegler Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom

A real conversation, repeated yearly:

“I really wish we could find a way to reach these struggling readers.”

“You know what might work really well? Graphic novels.” (That’s me, in a very hopeful tone.)

“Oh, good idea—we have all those copies of Maus!”

“Well, yeah…” (That’s me again, giving up the gun, so to speak.)

I’ve previously argued that being too tied to the classics alienates a lot of our fledgling readers. But in some ways, the tunnel vision about worthy graphic novels is an extension of that classics-oriented mindset.

Maus is a tragic, intelligent, powerful story told with heart-tugging visuals. Teachers who use it in their classrooms are rightly proud. They are exploring an important fictional work, in a historical context that students should understand deeply. At the same time, they are teaching students about a new genre of literature that most of them otherwise might never be exposed to.

But Maus is also heavy and sort of depressing. It’s a book that demands stone-faced seriousness.

That’s all to say, Maus’s visual nature doesn’t necessarily make it an appealing alternative to a traditional novel.

A Successful Experiment

After years of mumbling about graphic novels at department meetings, I finally decided to put my money where my mouth is. A few weeks ago I brought into class my collection of Flight graphic novels, my copy of Batman: The Long Halloween, and the award-winning Concrete graphic novel.

On the first day, a girl forgot her Kindle at home and asked to borrow the Batman book. “I just need something for today,” she said insistently.

She conveniently forgot her Kindle for the rest of the week and finished the book.

A couple days later, a student in my 6th hour selected the same graphic novel, tore through it in two days (graphic novels are quick reads), and then exchanged it for Concrete, which he took home and finished in a single night. In both cases, I ended up enjoying extensive conversations with the kids about literature. An English teacher’s dream, if ever there was one!

Graphic Novels as Success Stories

The best part of this experiment, though, has been the reaction from my co-departmental class. These are students who collectively read at around a 4th-grade level.

Mark (name changed) was the first student to borrow the Batman novel. Mark is a well-intentioned reader who would spend his entire 15 minutes of independent reading time slogging through perhaps three pages of a traditional novel. He would then chat with me afterward, mostly to check his understanding of the strange scientific concepts that inhabit Michael Crichton’s works.

shutterstock_274167122 It was inspiring and tragic to watch him try to tackle a book that matched his interests, but which was simply beating him down in terms of comprehension. I wasn’t about to tell him to quit; he’d come too far for me to do that to him.

Turned out, I didn’t have to. Batman saved him, and suddenly our conversations were two-way streets. He’d confidently tell me about the story elements that he loved, instead of asking whether he had the details right. He has since moved on to his second Flight story collection and chats with me practically every other day about the pleasures in them.

And it’s a good thing he moved on to another graphic novel, because the moment he set down Batman, his friend Daniel (name also changed) picked it up and plowed through it. Daniel had been reading the third book in the A Child Called It series, which seems like too much heavy-handed literature for any reader to take on before graduating high school. But Daniel has embraced the graphic novel format, and it’s gratifying for both of us to experience his actually turning pages when he reads.

Start Simple

My personal collection clearly isn’t going to meet the demand. And so I plan to apply for a grant for graphic novels to add to my classroom collection. But if you’re only curious to try this out, start simple. Besides the titles I mentioned above, there are countless great titles in the genre. Persepolis and American Born Chinese are both fantastic reads featuring minority voices.

More mature readers might even appreciate the political complexities of Alan Moore’s cult-classics Watchmen and V for Vendetta. They pair just as well with Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as they do with an ice cold Coke and a bag of potato chips. In other words, hand your students some graphic novels and see what it leads them to!

Michael Ziegler

Teaching Outside the Literary Canon

by Mike Ziegler Critical Literacy Notes from the Classroom

shutterstock_267444602 Years ago, in a jaded moment of teaching frustration, I purchased a book entitled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). I know, the subheading alone should’ve told me to save my money. The argument is pretty self-evident, but the details of the book—at the time—spoke to some of the frustrations I was feeling with my students.

At one point the author, Mark Bauerlein, shares an anecdote wherein some ex-student doesn’t show sufficient love for The Great Gatsby. Bauerlein’s diagnosis, then, goes like this: modern teens are possessed of a “brazen disregard for books and reading.”

“Yes!” I thought to myself then. “Finally, someone has given voice to the frustration of all of us English teachers!”

He is perhaps not wrong in that observation—save for the presumption that such an attitude is somehow unique to modern students. As English teachers, we fancy ourselves to be keepers of the culture, in addition to instructors of reading and writing. We imagine that the empathetic, essentially human part of society will wither and fall from the rose, one heartbreaking petal at a time, if we don’t help teenagers learn to appreciate Gatsby and Hemingway and Fahrenheit and Shakespeare—and Shakespeare and then poetry and then a little more Shakespeare. In other words, we don’t just want them to love reading; we want them to love reading the right things.

And we aren’t wrong. Cultural literacy is an important thing and kids get precious little of it. But pushing the classic canon and teaching kids to become more culturally enriched are not necessarily symbiotic. In fact, I want to propose that they are often antithetical (an argument which is not mine so much as Kelly Gallagher’s, in the indispensable Readicide).

Misguided Values

Students need to learn to love reading and the idea of literature before they can be expected to love literature independently.

shutterstock_182159027 In that sense, the focus of English classrooms has been off for a long time. We build our units around a core canonical text, and make everything else more or less in service of that text. Is our concern whether kids learn to love reading, or do we press them to love this book at this moment, because it’s what we believe people who love reading should value?

I can feel some of you dusting off your old “In Defense of the Literary Canon” speeches for me, so I’ll use your ally from earlier. Bauerlein, in Dumbest Generation, offers another “measure” of proof that today’s youth are culturally bankrupt. He cites the fact that almost none of them has ever attended a jazz concert. Almost none! Imagine that!

Maybe some of you attend jazz performances regularly. They aren’t my cup of tea—nor are live stage plays, to be honest—and yet I don’t consider myself culturally bankrupt. But according to Bauerlein, if you don’t go to jazz concerts at least a couple times a year, you’re an agent of the cultural apocalypse.

But any reasonable person would agree that a distaste for jazz does not determine or define cultural literacy. We know this in our hearts, and yet we often refuse to allow the same benefit of the doubt to students.

On the contrary, when we come across something like the infamous TED Talk about Shakespeare and hip-hop, we use it to push kids even harder to appreciate The Canon: “See! If these rappers sound like Shakespeare, how can you not like the famous bard’s rhymed couplets?”

How often do we stop to consider the implicit corollary? If they’re close enough to confuse, then either Shakespeare isn’t so unique, or a few voices in hip hop are.

Next Steps

Some kids will love the classics from the moment they get their hands on them. And many of them will learn to love them in the classroom—because of you! But we do a disservice to our students when we imply that these are the only books that matter.

We don’t generally have the freedom to rewrite our curriculum. But a few minutes of students’-choice reading every day, or an assignment that asks students to select something for the New Canon, can have a huge impact on how your students exit your classroom and enter into the world of popular culture. To deny them the breadth of cultural richness is to send them into the world with their eyes wide shut.

In future posts I’ll share the joys of letting students read whatever they please. In the meantime, go read a good book by an author you’ve never heard of. See if it doesn’t turn out to have its own universal truths.