My stepfather was one of those people who believed in force-feeding literature to people. This was especially annoying because often it would turn out that he had never read the book in question, just been told it was “great.” This led to some wonderful interactions in which I “should” be reading one book while I was cheerfully reading other works of literature.
And my middle and high school experience mirrored this. I loved Hawthorne when I read him on my own. I hated reading The Scarlet Letter for class. Ditto, Anne Frank. But middle school reading lists were made up largely of books about young people whose best friend dies, teaching the young person an important lesson. They were books I never would have read, and that I wish I never had read. Those are hours of my life that could have been spent on Poe or Kipling.
Fortunately, I didn’t stop loving books. I continued to read outside of class and mostly being annoyed with the people who forced me to read things that sucked.
And when I got to university, I found professors who taught literature that they loved. My favorite professor would describe himself as the Pie Man of the English Department. Everything we read for his classes would be work he loved. I didn’t always agree with his tastes, but seeing someone else talk about what they love in a book makes me want to love the book. He taught me to love Jane Austen and the Brontes, to remember that even Shakespeare had a few less than stellar pieces, to appreciate Charles Dickens even if I never really learned to love him. Why? Because he loved these things and his enthusiasm for the work was infectious. Similarly, my favorite American literature professor loved Puritan poetry and our medieval literature professor’s love for Middle English made me want to be better at reading it. Their joy became my joy.
So when I read this article in the New York Times about the future of reading classes, I am both heartened and disappointed. I’m for encouraging kids to read books they enjoy, I’m not sure that removing required reading entirely is the answer. Because what made the biggest difference to me was instructors who loved what we were reading.
Over at SBTB, Candy’s thoughts on this closely mirror my experience, except for the part where, no, really, my teachers in middle and high school were much closer to Meg Cabot’s experience: people who wanted to explain the book rather than explore it with me. (I also shared her love of Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage.)
