

How schools are destroying the joy of reading By Patrick Welsh The recent news hasn't been too good for English teachers like me. In July, the results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated standardized test, showed the reading skills of high school students haven't improved since 1999. And last week, the Pew Research Center's Internet Project reported that for today's teenagers, "the Internet and cell phones have become a central force that fuels the rhythm of daily life." Eighty-seven percent of America's kids ages 12 to 17 spend time online. E-mail is no longer fast enough for most teens who are using instant messenger and text messaging to keep up with their friends. Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that —Harry Potter fans aside — so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader. Just before the school year ended in June, my colleagues in the English department at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and central office administrators discussed which textbook to adopt for the 9th- and 10th-grade World Literature course for next year. Of the four texts that the state approved, the choices came down to two: the Elements of Literature: World Literature from Holt, Rinehart and Winston and The Language of Literature: World Literature from McDougal Littell. The problems with these two tomes are similar to the problems with high school textbooks in most subjects. First, there's the well-documented weight problem. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has said that an increase in back injuries among children might be attributed to the enormous textbooks they lug around in their backpacks. Injuries aside, what kid is going to sit in a chair and relax with a heavy hardcover, 9-inch-by-11-inch compendium? Worse is the fact that for all their bulk, the textbooks are feather-weight intellectually. Substance lacking So, what books get passing grades? High school English teacher Patrick Welsh's assessment of two textbooks — and a few alternatives:



What doesn't work ...



The Language of Literature: World Literature (McDougal Littel) Assessment: Reduces literature to memorizing authors' names and dates. By trying to please every racial and ethnic group, it includes boring and inconsequential literature.

Weight: 7 pounds

Pages:1,551

Complete poems: 63

Complete short stories: 15

Complete plays: 4

Excerpts: 44



Elements of Literature: World Literature(Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

Assessment: Pitched to the lowest common denominator of teacher and student. The classic "read the chapter and answer the questions at the end" kind of text. A dearth of good literature.

Weight: 5.6 pounds

Pages: 1,275

Complete poems: 95 (13 of which are four-line haikus)

Complete short stories: 19

Complete plays: 0

Excerpts: 36



What does work ...



Literature: A Portable Anthology(Bedfore/St. Martin's Press)

Assessment: Half the price, a third of the weight and double the literature of the other two. Has great mix of poems and plays both classic and modern and appealing short stories.

Weight: 2 pounds

Pages: 1,480

Complete poems: 250

Complete short stories: 35

Complete plays: 9

Excerpts: 0



Whole paperback books:

A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams

Night, by Elie Wiesel

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled "Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature," followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes "Persian and Arabic Literature" and "West African Oral Literature" — and that's only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it's the same drill — short excerpts from long works — a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare's plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard): "Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey: We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language." Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also "are not reader-friendly. There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that," says T.C. Williams reading specialist Chris Gutierrez, who teaches a course in reading strategies at Shenandoah University in Virginia. For kids who get books and reading opportunities only at school, these types of textbooks will drive them away from reading — perhaps for life. Such texts bastardize literature and history, reducing authors and their works to historical facts to be memorized — what Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, calls "the bunch o' facts" theory of learning. Students are jerked from one excerpt of literature to another, given no chance for the kind of sustained reading that stimulates the imagination. One of the most popular books I teach is Night, Elie Wiesel's powerful remembrance about Nazi concentration camps. Even the most reluctant readers are enthralled by the 109-page narrative. The Holt, Rinehart and Winston World Literature text throws in seven pages of Night, cheating students out of the experience of reading the whole work and giving them the illusion that they know the book. With my subject, English, special problems exist — any literature that has a whiff of controversy is kept out of texts to appease the moralists on the right, while second-rate "multicultural" literature is put in to appease the politically correct on the left. Quality is 'secondary' As researcher Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police, wrote in the summer 2003 issue of American Educator, "Literary quality became secondary to representational issues." You will never see John Updike's A&P or Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson - great short stories that kids can easily relate to — in these tomes because they might offend groups on either side of the political spectrum. No matter how highly esteemed poet Denise Levertov is in academia, The Mutes— her poem that evokes intense discussion about sexual harassment — will never make its way into the bland 1,000-plus pages of a high school textbook. The McDougal Littell text proudly lists its 10-member "Multicultural Advisory Board" in its introduction. A similar problem exists with math and science books. A study of textbooks by the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded: "Today's textbooks cover too many topics without developing any of them well. Central concepts are not covered in enough depth to give students a chance to truly understand them." 'Teacher-proofing' Teachers who didn't major in science tend to "use textbooks — lean on them — more than better-qualified teachers do," Arthur Eisenkraft, former president of the National Science Teachers Association, told Science News in 2001. The desire of school officials to make courses teacher-proof — to put more faith in bland compendiums than in the skill of teachers — is only getting stronger with the spread of high-stakes state exams. Textbook companies now get state approval by boasting that their wares cover every possible skill demanded on state tests. The safe thing for school systems to do is to limit themselves to the state-approved books; if a school district adopts its own materials and its test scores go down, administrators could take the fall. The fact is that for all the anxiety schools have about state exams, with the exception of science and math, those exams have turned into nothing more than minimum competency tests that any average student can pass with little preparation. And no decent teacher needs a 1,500-page text to prepare below-average students for these dumbed-down tests. It's time for states and school districts to kick the mega-textbook habit that four or five big corporations control and start spending money on the kind of books that will make kids want to do sustained reading, to get lost in the written word. For English classes, that's paperback novels (whole novels) and collections of short stories (complete short stories) and poetry. Patrick Welsh is an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.