Letting the students read widely books of their own choosing as oppossed to telling them what to read: what an idea! It is a shame that after 70 years this is still considered radical in the English classroom. “How can you tell if they’ve read the book?” Is the question I get from my peers. It is always about testing, not really assessement, but a way to prove that the students have done what they were told to do. When the focus becomes a matter of checking to see if they have actually read the book, the students find easy ways to get around it: Sparknotes. My current UTeach student (a kind of student teacher) confessed to me that she went through her AP English classes in high school without reading any of the required texts, she relied solely on Sparknotes. Stunning! That she would tell me this, and that after that kind of experience as a high school student she became an English major! Arrrrgh!
“To reject the routine treatement of literature as a body of knowledge and to conceive of it rather as a series of possible experiences only clears the ground. Once the unobstructed impact between reader and text has been make possible, extraordinary opportunites for a real educational process are open to the teacher.” (Rosenblatt 1995, p.70). Since I finally let go of the main texts in my class ( I still begin each class with a poem or a passage of prose, or exemplar essays when we are writing), and my students read what they want, I think I have lessened the amount of “cheating” that goes on in my class. Of course it can still happen, students will read sparknotes on a “classic” and then come in to talk to me about it. But for the most part it is easy to tell, they have a superficial grasp of simple plot lines and character. In a way I think they have to think harder in order to get out of reading a book, than if they had just read it. On the whole I think my students read more and get more out of my class because they encounter texts on a more visceral level than if we all read the same book together. They react on an emotional level, getting angry or happy depending upon the connection they make with the book. When a student will not stop talking about the book they finished, even after I try to move on to another student, I see that as a measure of success; the student wants to talk about the issues stirred up in them by the book. Additionally several of my students after finishing a book, when they discover there is a sequal or another book by the same author ( I am thinking specifically about Walter Dean Myers) they show a level of excitement that rarely happened back when I taught whole class novels. It is this excitement that will more likely lead the students into the world of literature and all of the attendant perks of that world, than any teacher reading and explicating a book at a classroom full of children.
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