jefrye t1_itya9se wrote
Reply to comment by McGilla_Gorilla in The Great Gatsby: I don't know why this book is so popular with English teachers by knerled
Which is honestly really sad. Teachers (of literature, algebra, history, or any other subject) can understand that not every student is going to love what they're teaching but still try to instill that love. When teaching literature specifically, it's obviously important to familiarize students with our shared cultural literary history, but one would think that it's equally important to try to teach them to be readers who will go on to continue to explore literature on their own.
Kids' interests are malleable, especially in K-12. I definitely had teachers who got me excited about subjects I wasn't initially interested in—and on the flip side, I also had teachers who completely and utterly squashed any interest I had in what they were teaching.
Kianna9 t1_ityk6du wrote
You can appreciate the craft and artistry of a book without personally loving it. That’s one thing students should get out of Lit education.
jefrye t1_itykkr6 wrote
Oh, of course. That's not inconsistent with anything in my comment. I only disagree with the perspective that literature classes shouldn't exist to instill a love of literature.
McGilla_Gorilla t1_itzrjt8 wrote
>I only disagree with the perspective that literature classes shouldn't exist to instill a love of literature.
Pleasure reading is not the same as literature
jefrye t1_iu07ls9 wrote
>Pleasure reading is not the same as literature
I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Gray right now for pleasure, so...
It's quite telling about the state of literature education that we're in a book sub and the majority of people seem to think that literature is a subject to be suffered through in school because teachers should not be making an effort to teach their students to love reading. That people here seemingly believe pleasure reading cannot mean reading literature, equally so.
I wonder how many people here had such negative experiences with English teachers in school (for example, being taught that classics are objects to be dissected under a microscope in order to find the "right" answers for a test rather than that they're entertaining pieces of art to be enjoyed and analyzed from a place of excitement) that it completely turned them off classic literature?
McGilla_Gorilla t1_iu0cbk2 wrote
Sure and I read lit primarily for pleasure as well. But you don’t need a highschool course to teach you to read for pleasure, just like you don’t need teaching to watch Netflix or listen to a catchy song. You (generally) do need some guidance to learn to understand literature as an art form, to understand context and theme etc
jefrye t1_iu0fq9p wrote
I guess I just fundamentally disagree that students can't/shouldn't be taught to understand, appreciate, and enjoy literature as art. I mean, I view every book I read as art. That doesn't mean I enjoy them any less (in fact, I probably enjoy them more).
And while many students may not need to be taught to read something like Harry Potter for pleasure, they do need to be taught to read classic literature for pleasure—or, at the very least, not be taught that art appreciation and enjoyment are inconsistent with one another. In fact, teaching kinds to read well, to love reading and appreciating literature as art, will transform their entire reading life. The false distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" books will disappear for them, and they'll begin evaluating everything they read from that perspective. They'll become a better reader. Surely that ought to be one of the long-term goals of teaching literature in schools?
McGilla_Gorilla t1_iu0nj1a wrote
I just fundamentally don’t think you can force a love of something on a student. Like yes, if a teacher can help foster a love for lit while also teaching it, that’s great. And I think that will often be a natural by product of an educator who’s passionate about their subject and a student with a predisposed inclination to the subject. But it should be taught regardless, and instilling those skills is the higher priority. Not every student is going to love lit, and that’s totally fine.
What I dislike about post like this and the idea that kids need to “love” the subject, is it inevitably leads to changing the curriculum to allow for the path of least resistance. Yes, if kids just get to read their favorite Stephen King novel or Marvel comic book in a literature class I’m sure more of them would love it, because most kids (and people really) love entertainment more than education.
[deleted] t1_itzrmis wrote
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Gwydden t1_iu04kvj wrote
Hot take: all books are literature. Bad books are literature just as much as good books. By the same token, bad art is art just as much as good art. Whether something is "literature" or "art" has absolutely nothing to do with its quality. That doesn't even get into how it is literally impossible to create an objective standard of what "good" and "bad" mean in this context.
Or into how all reading that isn't forced on you is ultimately for pleasure. Reading is a luxury some people get to enjoy in their free time. I love reading, but hate the hyperbolic sacralization of it: no book is going to unlock Nirvana for you or summon a heavenly host to bear you straight to St. Peter's pearly gates.
jefrye t1_iu0dnp8 wrote
This is more or less what Lewis argues in An Experiment in Criticism. He basically says that we should spend less time arguing about whether a book is good or bad and more time considering what it means to read well, because if a person reads a book well and loves it then that book is good art to that person. The only truly bad book, he argues, is one that cannot be read well, which is a judgement that is almost impossible to make.
What Lewis means by "reading well" took him multiple fairly dense essays to get through, but I suppose it could be summarized as fully receiving, understanding, and appreciating the book as art—it certainly goes beyond mere enjoyment (though, for Lewis, so-called "mere" enjoyment is a crucial part of good literature).
That's what I think schools should be trying to teach: reading well. As you point out, this sub loves to act as if reading is by default superior to other hobbies, when that's clearly not the case. Reading well, though, is something special—not superior to any other form of art appreciation, but arguably "better for you" then other forms of art consumption. (And if people want to simply consume art, that's still fine. But we're specifically talking about education here, and I believe that teachers should be attempting to instill the higher form into their students.)
Gwydden t1_iu0mh66 wrote
Well put. I agree that the primary purpose of literature classes should be to teach students to engage with texts—any texts—and language at more than a surface level, a useful skill not just when reading fiction but in their personal and professional lives.
Familiarizing them with culturally influential landmark works is still valuable but secondary to that. And there is no reason to make this process more onerous than it needs to be. Engaged students are better students. I read about an English teacher that had students read Shakespeare in comic book form; that sounds grand.
McGilla_Gorilla t1_iu0dnj6 wrote
I don’t necessarily agree. Just going off a basic wiki definition: > Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There are plenty of books that don’t hit this standard of “art”. And even if it’s true, that any written work is “literature” then yes there is a distinction between art from which it benefits to have a formal education to understand / appreciate / learn and “art” which can be easily digested at face value. Like there’s no way anyone actually believes that The Great Gatsby is just as easy to understand as Star Wars: The Novel #23 or whatever. > no book is going to unlock Nirvana for you or summon a heavenly host to bear you straight to St. Peter's pearly gates.
I don’t really understand this weird straw man or how it’s relevant to the discussion. Learning the periodic table or WW1 history isn’t going to cause you to transcend either, but no one goes around arguing that those aren’t appropriate for a highschool student to learn. There is value in learning to understand literature regardless of whether you end up personally enjoying reading as a hobby, and that’s why it’s taught in school.
Gwydden t1_iu0kdla wrote
The production of every book involves "creative or imaginative talent." Whether that talent is "expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas" is entirely subjective.
>I don’t really understand this weird straw man or how it’s relevant to the discussion.
And I don't understand how a distinction between "pleasure reading" and "literature," even if it isn't arbitrary as I firmly believe, is relevant to the post to which you were responding, which simply argued that literature classes should at least try to "instill a love of literature."
I teach history. Certainly, I think learning history is valuable even if you don't care for it, and I stress that to my students. But getting them to enjoy the class and, hopefully, instilling a passion for the subject among at least some of them, is definitely one of my educational goals and, when I achieve it, most cherished accomplishments.
bigwilly311 t1_iufs01y wrote
This is my favorite part of teaching Romeo and Juliet. I fuckin hate that play and all of the characters in it but there is no denying that it’s got some moments that leave me in awe that they came out of a man’s head.
knerled OP t1_iu085v4 wrote
Students don’t get to “choose whether or not they learn algebra”
(as another commenter wrote) any more than they choose whether or not
to learn literature, but teachers have some leeway in how
they teach those subjects. I can think of some creative ways to make
algebra or geometry more engaging to students, but perhaps history
would make a better example of my point. Throughout
my schooling, history was all about textbooks and fill-in-the-blank
worksheets. If the teachers had been purposely trying
to convince me that history is the world’s dullest subject, they
could hardly have done it any better. I didn’t “learn history”
in school; I memorized a few facts, took the tests, and quickly
forgot about it. It was mostly after high school, and mostly on my
own, that I discovered how fascinating history really is. I’m sure
many people never make that leap and never
gain the benefits of knowing history. The same could be said of
literature.
veriditas007 t1_iu9d4xu wrote
Learning a language? Vocabulary and grammar. Learning chemistry? Periodic table. Learning math? Addition and subtraction, and later proofs, graphs, and equations. Baseball? Throwing and catching. Music? Scales and arpeggios. Drawing? Lines.
And history? Yeah, those dates and facts and terms are foundational. If you don't have a baseline understanding of the timeline of human history, your thinking is going to be muddled at best. You can't do Regency historiography if you can't tell the difference between the Georges.
There is absolutely no field of human endeavor that doesn't have a steep learning curve full of dull and tedious tasks that need to be repeated and repeated and repeated.
This isn't subjective and does not rely on whether this or that person finds it "engaging" or "fascinating." What matters is if the baseline work gets done. That work is ultimately what the educator is being paid (and should be paid 4 or 5 times more) to facilitate.
The fact you keep coming back to personal likes and dislikes - it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of education. English teachers don't teach Gatsby because they personally love it and are trying to impose their tastes on everyone else, and history teachers aren't bad at their jobs when they make people memorize dates instead of do a Dead Poets' Society monologue about how cool history is. Pre-college education is about fundamentals, and there is absolutely no getting around the fact those fundamentals are not going to spark joy in every student every day.
PartyPorpoise t1_iu752ku wrote
At the end of the day, you can't force people to like something, even if you try to make it super fun. Hot take, but I think it's more important to teach kids how to read than get them to enjoy it. They can't enjoy it anyway if they don't know how.
veriditas007 t1_iu9dd0o wrote
if i had a dollar for every /r/books user i've seen who blames their lack of interest in reading on their high school teachers for "forcing" them to read "boring books," i'd be able to afford enough booze to make me tolerant of them
PartyPorpoise t1_iua4q0j wrote
Lol for real. I think most people fall out of reading for other reasons but I guess it’s easier to just have one target, one where someone else is responsible.
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