Do You Remember Your High School Lit Class?

On NCTE’s Connected Community, James Wilson responded to the discussion about multicultural literature, lamenting that “the focus on multicultural literature over the last 3 decades has resulted in an inability to teach the classics of the Western tradition. Few of my college freshmen have even heard of Faulkner and Steinbeck, much less read them.”

I understand Wilson’s frustration, but I learned long ago not to believe every word students report about their exposure to authors and literature. Their reports are more likely to be based on what they remember—things that made a strong impression for some reason. Sometimes that’s because they hated every word of text that they had been forced to march through. Sometimes it’s because they loved the text.

Ask me what I read in high school, admittedly a very long time ago—but even fresh after graduation I doubt I’d recall the details. In 12th grade English lit, for instance, I could tell you that I read Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, and “On Looking into Chapman.” Why? I remember hating Beowulf as endlessly dry and boring. I had to do a presentation on the “Wife of Bath,” where I was expected to come up with a costume out of no where. I had to use the nurse’s cape from my elementary school Halloween costume. I felt like an idiot. Macbeth I think I recall because my teacher must have liked it. I remember her reading aloud passages with a lot of theatrics, especially regarding bloody hands.

The most random thing on the list is Keats. My teacher also had a thing for precis and summaries, instilling a lifelong hatred of them in me, for what it’s worth. For some inexplicably nerdy reason, I wrote my precis of “On Looking into Chapman” in rhyming couplets. She read it to the class, without my permission, and I was made fun of for the next 2 weeks.

Bottom line: The problem isn’t “classics” versus multicultural literature. It’s that all too often students don’t have memorable experiences with literature. Frequently, that’s because they’re marched through the canon in an attempt at comprehensive coverage. Reading literature should be more than that, but many times, it isn’t.

Memorable experiences with whatever literature they read will create lifelong readers — and that’s how to get students who read widely and deeply. You can never possibly teach every great text, but you can teach in ways that make people want to read more widely.

[ I don’t accept that we have to choose between multicultural and classic literature. Multicultural literature is in most cases also what I’d defend as classic literature, but that’s a different topic.]