On Deciding Which Books to Teach
It may shock some of you to learn that I didn’t get into teaching for the fame, late night partying, or dolla dolla bills, y’all. There are teachers like that out there, but mostly they teach gym class. No, when people ask me why I became a teacher (did you want to make a difference? Was it your calling? Has it always been your dream to take phones away from teenagers?), I’ve always given the same answer:
I wanted to talk about books, and I wanted people to pay me for it.
And one of the most exciting things about teaching English is the choice of what I want to teach (most years, anyway; some… darker forces are conspiring against that freedom) and how. So here’s a little insight into the process of how Mr. Sharpe chooses full books to teach to a class of high-schoolers.
Engagement: When it comes to high school English, I have to square with the fact that a good proportion of my kids straight up won’t read the book. Won’t open it, won’t try. They think they don’t like reading, or that they don’t have time. I maintain my sanity by not thinking too hard about exactly how big that proportion is at any given moment. The only way to combat that is by picking the most engaging books I can find to get the highest number of kids on board, and for those who were never going to read it, to get them at least interested enough to read just enough to pass their assignments. What makes for good engagement? Violence, mostly. Murder, ideally. But it also helps to have a character in the book that we can all make fun of and hate together. A common, fictional enemy does wonders for class morale.
Length: For non-AP classes, very few books longer than 300 pages have a chance of being taught, at least in my class. For years, my target number of pages students should read on grade-level per night was 30. Hypothetically, that’s a half-hour of reading. In practice, you might have slower readers, distracted readers, or kids who fell behind one night and started to give up. So with few exceptions, it needs to be manageably short, even if I love the darn book.
Is a Parent Going to Yell at Me?: This one is a fun criteria because it’s completely subjective AND unpredictable! Cursing is mostly okay to parents, unless the cursing is about sex, even if there’s no actual sex scene being described. Books about suicide or sexual assault make parents uncomfortable, unless that book is old. Middle school students, after all, read To Kill a Mockingbird, which prominently features a rape trial, but parents push back on, say, The Glass Castle, which describes real experiences with sexual assault that are pressing and worth discussing. It wouldn’t be so vexing if not for the fact that I’ve never had a complaint on a book from a parent who actually read the whole thing through. Interesting.
Literary Merit: This sounds snobbish, but actually does matter. To answer whether a book has literary merit, I ask a simple question: is the author doing something particularly skillful with language or plot? If the answer is yes, and that language or plot is complex enough to fuel a good, open discussion, that book has literary merit. This doesn’t count out all YA books, either. For example, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang is written in language that is really straightforward and simple. A twelve year old could read the book and understand the surface meaning no problem. But the book also has interlocking stories with multiple protagonists arranged so the stories reflect and contrast one another. That technique gets conversations going. By comparison, The Hunger Games is a quick, fun read, but it’s not the kind of book where you find new things to think about if you go back to it. The prose is flat. The plot is a page-turner, and doesn’t often slow down to ask big questions. I still have questions about American Born Chinese. I don’t feel the same about The Hunger Games.
#Deep: Tying into the above, the next thing I ask is this: is the book DEEP? Are there big ideas worth talking about, be they about race, or the economy, or history, or war, or family, or the relentless pursuit of greatness? I don’t care if students can memorize specific facts about a book. The internet does that for them. I want to know if they can talk about why a book is meaningful. I want the book to spark an opinion in them, and all the better if that opinion is at odds with what the book is trying to say about the world.
Is it a Dead White Guy Book?: It would be ironic and self-defeating for me to suggest that white guys have nothing of value to say about the world, but they have had the floor in literature for a while, and it’s nice to get a new perspective in when the possibility arises.
So that’s the process, in short. It’s subjective, and imperfect, but when I find a book that hits the sweet spot, it sure is rewarding. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way.