This Week's Miscellany (03/10/22)
How to Kill Children's Love for Literature, Films about the Brontes, and Pinkeye
Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.
Our week was: 3/4 kids with pinkeye, everyone but my husband Daniel getting a low fever/crummy cold, kids home from school, and getting creative taking turns working/caring for sick kids in our house o’plague. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the way that illnesses constantly worm their way through a household of several kids is one of the most difficult parts of having a larger family. It’s also why parents are not surprised at the Atlantic’s article this week about remote work options increasing the likelihood of having babies.
This morning I’m off to Notre Dame for a conference on Catholic education, so teaching literature seems like a great theme for this edition of TWM!
Are We Training Kids to Hate Literature?
The internet was abuzz this week over a piece by Nathan Heller that I shared in last week’s miscellany on the decline of English majors. This was one of the best follow up pieces I read this week:
How to Get Kids to Hate English by Pamela Paul for The New York Times
…the study of English itself may have lost its allure, even among kids who enjoy reading. They are learning to hate the subject well before college. Both in terms of what kids are assigned and how they are instructed to read it, English class in middle and high school — now reconceived as language arts, E.L.A. or language and literature — is often a misery. It’s as if once schools teach kids how to read, they devote the remainder of their education to making them dread doing so.
In addition to the cost of higher education and concern about getting a job with a living wage, I agree with Paul that a big factor is how we’re teaching English in elementary, middle, and high school. This is partly due to Common Core standards.
While glorifying STEM, these nationwide standards, intended to develop a 21st-century work force, also took care to de-emphasize literature. By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction. Educators can maximize the remaining fiction by emphasizing excerpts, essays and digital material over full-length novels. Immersing children in the full arc of storytelling has largely gone out that window as novels have increasingly been replaced by short stories — or shorter yet, by “texts.”
YES. A great way to decrease the number of English majors is to treat reading literature (for the approved 30% of the time, of course, no more!) as a miserable surgical experience. Pinpoint the literary devices and label them. Focus entirely on the how and ignore the why. If we train students to see reading this way—removing all the wonder from the experience, diminishing the heart of the storytelling, treating it as a chore—we cannot be surprised if they believe that’s what literature is and that they are uninterested in the prospect of studying it.
Add to this a lack of respect for the young reader. Underestimate them. Assume they won’t be interested in the questions that the human soul has pondered for millennia because they’re not dressed up in “relatable” settings. Don’t present the young men of today with Jane Austen. After all, how could they find anything to interest them in her novels (despite the fact that G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Anthony Trollope, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Cornel West had no trouble delighting in Austen’s brilliance)?
Our lack of confidence in students being capable of enjoying literature can’t help but diminish their joy in it. But it doesn’t have to be like that. My teenager, assigned to memorize a short section of Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V, insisted on memorizing all of it. “It’s so good! Listen to this part, Mom,” he told me last night. Kids like Shakespeare. Don’t treat literature like a chore and don’t treat students like they are incapable. Will they understand everything in a work of classic literature? No—but neither do I! That’s no reason to fail to expose them to the classics.
While my kids are in a brick and mortar school this year, we homeschooled for a decade and focused on cultivating wonder, a love for learning, joy and delight in literature. We almost entirely ignored writing conventions in favor of time spent enjoying good books. I have no regrets. This morning over breakfast my kids were debating WHY Edmund pretended he hadn’t been to Narnia with Lucy. They all had strong opinions on the matter. Discussing literature is simply fun.
Our kids are regular kids who like to play video games and watch The Mandalorian. I think they’re remarkable because they’re mine but they didn’t come out of the womb reading James Joyce or anything. I don’t think it’s hard to get kids to love literature, but you cannot do it when you make it a misery for them or treat it merely as a skill they’ll be tested on.
My one quibble with Paul’s piece is her seeming lack of interest in including more voices in the canon of great books.
But if anyone had suggested that I be offended by a nearly all-male curriculum, I would have been insulted. Couldn’t girls read books by men just as well as boys could? And if it was true, as we also learned, that much of the world of letters had long been largely closed to women (and minorities), naturally there would be fewer books by them.
While I absolutely agree that it’s nonsense to pretend that we can only connect with books written by people like us with a setting we find relatable, I also think it’s a disservice to students to offer them a reading curriculum that ignores Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Sigrid Undset, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Gaskell, Marie de France, Dorothy Sayers, Rumer Godden, Flannery O’Connor, Julia Alvarez, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark…you get the idea.
And if you’re interested in thinking more about the canon of great texts of the western tradition and what it means to have a liberal arts education, you’ll really enjoy this wonderful conversation with
and Peter Mommsen of the Ploughcast and Dr. Jennifer Frey who is the inaugural dean of a new honors college.And since this Substack is creeping up on reaching 5,000 subscribers, would you consider sharing it with someone you think would enjoy it? We’re about 200 subscribers short of 5,000!
More Literary Links
Where the Lion and the Witch Met the Hobbit by Will Higginbotham for The New York Times (about Oxford, one of my three favorite cities in the world)
Movies Across the Decades (The Brontes) by Steve Larkin for The Washington Review’s Film Supplement (You’ve got to scroll down a bit to get to the extensive review of movies about the Brontes and adapted from their novels)
The Brave Women Who Saved the Collected Texts of Hildegard of Bingen By Janina Ramirez for LitHub
Speaking of great women writers, we’ll be reading Emma next for the Year of Jane book club and the details are here.
And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful Friday and weekend. And a huge thank you to Leah and Brandon for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, pleas consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.
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Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
Excuse me while I go put all those female authors on my Amazon wish list! There were at least three I hadn’t heard of!
Haley I am begging you for a public Goodreads profile with all your recs - I get so many great book recommendations from you (and Christy) but I am greedy and want more!
I remember my early intro to classic literature was in 8th grade in 1977 at Catholic school--we read entire books (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, etc.). The teacher, a religious sister, passed out the brown paper covered books and we read aloud in class. I have no memory of tests, though I am sure we had them. I remember the books and reading them in class, from beginning to end. All of our grammar training was in a different class, and, I remember liking it. My own kids have been homeschooled since day 1. The oldest with special needs was sight reading at age 2, the two youngest read on their own time clock (about age 9). We read aloud from the best literature I thought they could handle from an early age, and still read aloud today (they are 21, 18, 17). All are huge fans of great literature. I think late reading was an advantage to the younger ones since they weren’t inundated with silly chapter books at a young age. There is far too much “junk food” literature out there, and when kids read early they often spend too many years in that “processed” section of the library and book store. I agree that it is a myth that young people can’t appreciate a good story unless it is wrapped in some sort of contemporary setting/lingo/cultural references!