subtext

Popping Off

I have never really had a problem with using pop culture in the classroom. I also am a strong advocate for “high” culture in the classroom. Any thing that gets a student to read, to start to analyze and reconfigure the world through text, is a good thing. I allow (quite magnanimous of me I know) my students to read whatever they wish to read as long as it is a book: that includes Inyashu as well as Stephen King and Jane Austen. Personally I would rather they read Inyashu than King, but then I have an unreasonable bias towards King since I read once that he had separate rooms in his house for drafting, revising, novels and screenplays. I privilege “high literature” explicitly poetry, through my use of it in mini-lessons and free response prompts at the beginning of class, but my students choose the book they are reading and write a response to that book at the end of class often reflecting the focus I created at the beginning of class with the “canonized” text. I think any text a student is able to read and enjoy is a step toward a better world. I would love it if all my students read “the great works,” but not all of my students are able to read them. They are difficult and often more complex than my students are able to manage. This does not mean that my students cannot think about complex issues, they manage quite well with the moral dilemmas that arise in the pop and young adult novels they choose to read. Many, after months of reading the same type of book, move to something different, sometimes even trying an “academic” book, discovering that there just might be something to these books the teacher wants them to read.
I’m not sure just how intense the anti-pop culture crowd is in its hunt to suppress the interests of the student’s literacies. Most teachers I have worked with over the years will do and allow anything in order to get their kids reading. The only elitist attitude I’ve run across comes from the AP program my district has bought into: a fellow teacher likes to have his senior AP students read “A Prayer for Owen Meaney” by John Irving the summer before class begins. He was told this year that he needed to have them read a book of “literary merit.” A term I have never really been sure of its definition; after all, Dickens was a pop writer in his day. The book the district decided to go with for the senior AP students next year will be “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse. Not that this is a bad book, but if they are going to require a book they want the teacher to teach, it should be one the teacher is passionate about rather than one that is taught just because it is a “good book,” or has the patina of depth because it can be a field for symbol hunters to play in.