I'm starting my 4th year of teaching High School English, and I'll be the first to admit that I learn something new about teaching pretty much every day. Some days I learn it by trial and error like when I accidentally made a quiz retake way too hard the other day. (Sorry about that students, but I did make it up to you by allowing another retake.) Other days I read an inspiring blog post by Betsy Potash or some other creative English teacher influencer out there. She has amazing ideas about making English fun. Over the summer, I read several books on teaching Reading and Writing. My favorite was one called Readicide by Kelly Gallagher. It's been around awhile, but it was new to me. Ultimately, it was a wakeup call that English teachers share some responsibility in systematically killing students' love of reading through over-analyzing and over-testing a novel in high school English classrooms. I fear that I've been guilty of this these past two-three years. In my defense, this is how I was taught when I was in High School. This is what a vast majority of the curriculums steer you towards. So how do we fix it?
Figuring this out is my quest this year. One of the ways I'm tackling it is by encouraging more choice reading. While the number of minutes of instructional time already feels inadequate, I've chosen to give up 20 minutes per week of this precious time to allow students to do "choice reading" time. I wish it could be longer than 20 minutes, but this is all I can spare, and this year it's really an experiment to see if we can still cover everything. During choice reading time, they must read a book of their own choice. It can't be a text that is assigned as part of my or any other class's curriculum. The goal is to remind students that reading can be enjoyable while also building up reading stamina. In a day and age when students increasingly do most of their reading in the form of a text message, it's no wonder that many students struggle to create academic and grammatically correct sentences in formal writing. The vast majority of my students admitted that they did not read a single book over the summer vacation. While some are only 50 pages into their choice books 6 weeks into the semester, others have told me that they have been spurred on to get back into reading, plowing through all three books of the Shadow and Bone trilogy in about a month!
A key to the success of my choice reading program (is it too soon to call it a success?) has been to spend a big chunk of my own money to buy both high interest teen books as well as some of the classics of American, British, and world literature. I've filled two bookshelves with my personal books that students can check out for an indefinite period of time. I love seeing students walk in the door and immediately start perusing the shelves because they have finished their last book. While we have a school library, it's a known fact that most 11th and 12th grade students don't visit it on their own and are much more likely to choose a book if it's right there in the room they already visit 4 times per week. Additionally, I've observed how they feel slightly overwhelmed by the number of books to choose from in the library. With my shelf of books, most of which I've read, I can give them personal recommendations based on what I know of their interests and reading level. Here's a look at the two seemingly puny yet surprisingly punch-packing shelves. This was taken just before the first day of school, and I've added a few more books since then.
So am I still requiring students to read and analyze whole-class novels like The Scarlet Letter, The Grapes of Wrath, and Jane Eyre? Yes, we will still be doing that. I think that working through some some of these classics together is an important part of the high school experience and allows them to really experience what life was like at those times in history. However, the way I approach teaching the book will be a bit different this year. We start The Scarlet Letter next week in my 11th grade U.S. Literature class, so I'll try to update you on how it goes.
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