Michael Hoover:Louie, By Any Other Name
"I was an English major, and I studied some of the greatest works of literature the human mind has ever produced, and today I can remember virtually nothing about any of them, but I still know all the words to "Louie, Louie."
Several readers of this space have asked why I, a longtime English teacher, haven't written about the much-publicized report of the National Endowment for the Arts that in essence said that fewer and fewer people are reading books these days. Clearly this study is a call to arms, on a par with the one that was declared when the Soviets launched Sputnik and we finally realized that we were behind in the great space race.Duh? How much time and money did the NEA put into this survey? They could have asked just about any six English teachers in the country and certified their results quickly and saved themselves a lot of expense. That is not to say that I don't take the report seriously. In fact, it simply underscores what countless English teachers encounter every day of their lives as they attempt to promote literacy in every way they can. Day in and day out English teachers try to get students to read, to understand and to appreciate the extraordinary contributions the great writers have made to cultural literacy and, more importantly, to humanity. While we have many breakthroughs and successes, we also have many frustrations. The sheer length of time (34 years) I have been teaching helps put this into perspective. First of all, the NEA's findings are not really something completely new. It's not as if most students used to avidly read all that was assigned in the past and now, suddenly, hardly anyone wants to read anything. Probably over 80 percent of readers aged 30 to 50 could honestly testify to the lengths they went to to avoid reading their assignments in school. In truth, it's almost a cultural joke. I encounter this attitude early every year as I attempt to teach Beowulf, the earliest known substantial piece of literature ever written in (Old) English and therefore pretty darn important. Whenever I teach this work, student after student says, "Oh no, my dad (mom) said this is the most boring work ever!" How's that for parental support? My point is not to criticize the parents, but to illustrate what the overall cultural milieu is. Parents supposedly want rigor (at all levels), but are sometimes quick to join hands with their children in belittling reading assignments. I understand how arbitrary these assignments may seem to some. For example, the nurse who pre-screens me for my eye exam each year asks me to read the opening paragraph from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast which is printed in an impossible-to-read six-point type. Each year, after I fail her reading test, she asks me if I've added this great work of art to the curriculum, because, in her mind, it was a staple of virtue that all students should know. I have yet to summon the courage to tell her that I have never read her beloved novel, other than during my struggles in my eye exam. There is no dearth of suggestions about how to increase young people's interest in reading. Some say increase the amount of assigned reading, others say reduce the assigned reading and let kids read what they prefer. Some suggest more contemporary works, others more classic ones. Several years ago, one parent, insistent that the return to classics (as if we ever left them!), would renew students' interests in reading, pushed for Silas Marner to be reintroduced into the curriculum as a way to promote student interest. Recently I have experimented with graphic novels like The Road to Perdition on a strictly voluntary basis. Some say graphic novels are no more than glorified comic books with a 20 percent increase in verbiage. The New York Times Magazine recently ran a cover story on graphic novels. Last week's Newsweek magazine, in a brief piece on socially responsible comic books, reports that "school districts throughout the country have expressed interest in adding them to the curriculum." Other publications say that the relatively new genre called "street lit" is the answer to calling students back to literature. While I'm still a novice to this genre and I understand it has both its defenders and detractors, I do want to check it out; since another article cited librarians as saying that it was reclaiming young readers. One of the key issues, of course, is just what it is we are trying to do in our English classes. Pass down cultural literacy? Expose students to the giants of literature? Or just get kids reading anything? The past few years in my senior English classes, I have dramatically increased the amount of expository readings I assign the students, most of them borrowed from daily papers and quality weekly magazines. While there is still plenty of classic literature, there is a renewed interest in assuring that students simply understand the main idea in expository writing, a skill not to be taken for granted, trust me. Meanwhile, teachers across the world, for whom the idea of having students confront the awesome power of the written word is primary, struggle daily against the myriad forces that compete for the attention of young minds. As Dave Barry suggests in his quote above, it is always a matter of rock 'n' roll. |