Lit Up Read online

  * * *

  After reading the two books again with the class, I thought I was probably right decades earlier in my argument with my English teacher. As Nino put it, “In 1984, it’s the government power controlling you. In Brave New World, it’s our fault, it’s our nature.” Huxley’s predictions, based on the human desire for comfort and pleasure, were closer to our reality back then, and even more so now. By 2012, biologists had discovered methods of “editing” the genome of mice, rats, and monkeys, a technique that could be used on the human genome, to eliminate debilitating diseases—but also, just possibly, to enhance intelligence and beauty, the kind of engineering that Huxley was talking about. And didn’t we already have a society divided into castes? The castes were created by self-reinforcing patterns of wealth and poverty. And didn’t we have mood-altering drugs of every variety? A culture of spectacle and sensation? Pornography universally available on the Internet? Some high art (in museums) more loved than ever; other high arts (opera, symphonic concerts) struggling to hold on to their audience? In 1932, Huxley had anticipated quite a lot about postindustrial civilization eighty years later.

  Yet Orwell’s dystopian novel was a much more powerful reading experience, and it had its obvious sinister meaning for our time. In America and Britain, we are constantly under surveillance, guarded for our own good against terror. Our TVs don’t watch us, as the screens do in 1984, although they may, sooner or later; meanwhile our telephones have turned into involuntary tracking devices. As citizens of a hyper-wary state, we were afraid of yielding to Big Brother, afraid of giving up any part of liberty. Orwell was a stage—a rite of passage in language and political consciousness—that high school students still needed to go through.

  It’s an amazingly grim book.

  Is it good for fifteen-year-olds to read grim books? A novel in which there is no escape? What is the point for them? The boys wore sweatshirts with college names on them (Cornell, North Carolina State) and Nike Air Max; they fidgeted and slumped. The girls, with glinting pieces of inexpensive jewelry in their hair or at their wrists, were better dressed, more pulled together, more attentive. They were all perched between childhood and adulthood. They knew full well that society could be oppressive—that was the assumption behind a lot of their remarks earlier in the year. But at first they didn’t “identify” with the desolation Winston felt, the elimination of memory, desire, and self. Located on the far side of the awful twentieth century, they had trouble, at first, imagining a situation of total domination. Among other deprivations, Winston’s writing was always monitored, and some of the students—stupidly, I thought—were giving away their privacy on Facebook. They caught up to Winston’s fate only at the end of their classes on the book.

  Mr. Leon, treating them as grown-ups in the making, asked them to read texts produced by the fears and disasters of the last century. Modernity, in his teaching, was part of their moral education. Such catastrophes as totalitarianism, their elders told themselves wearily, remained a possibility for all time. Nazism and communism were gone; religious purity and racist fantasy were the latest totalitarian modes. The students would understand these things by comparing them to the older models. In effect, Mr. Leon said, “If you’re fascinated by dystopia, let’s read about the worst tendencies of our own society enlarged into literature.” So they read grim books with curiosity, without protest. They didn’t always understand the books fully, yet intimations of harder truths than those faced by most adolescents would become, I believed, part of their intellectual and moral armor forever.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAMARONECK, ALL YEAR: PERSONAL CHOICE

  Experiment

  Margaret Groninger Gives a Book Talk

  Penny Kittle

  Monitored

  Laddering

  Once Again, So What?

  The physical plant of Mamaroneck High School was as splendid as Beacon’s was mingy. The place is big—a quarter of a mile from one end of the school buildings to the other. The old Palmer Wing, with its red brick, its white columns, its general aura of Roman authority, was completed in 1928. The new Post Wing, an acceptably handsome mock-up of the original, was added in pieces in recent years, and the two sections of the school are now connected by a long concourse outfitted with pillars, benches, and a high wood-slatted ceiling, all of it rather in the style of an upscale shopping mall—but a mall without sushi, Ferragamo, and noise. In the concourse, students sat on the benches or slipped to the floor, talking about themselves, about friends, sometimes talking about books or even about physics. Among its other amenities, the school had a gazebo, a Japanese garden, a broadcast studio, and a large, very busy library. There were two sets of playing fields and lessons in golf. Also a Guidance Office, a Financial Aid Office, a Special Education Office, and a Teacher Institute.

  Mamaroneck was the sole public secondary school in a wealthy Westchester County suburb eighteen miles north of New York (the school also serviced the adjacent town of Larchmont). Long Island Sound was close by, also a park, a country club, and a yacht basin. On the concourse, and in class, the girls were mostly groomed and alert, as if ready to step into jobs in finance or law or corporate business. Many of the boys were casual, even slovenly. Eventually, I supposed, they would clean up and step into those jobs, too. In all, 93 percent of Mamaroneck’s graduates go to college (including two-year colleges), a wide selection of schools, though 61 percent of the acceptances were for private colleges or universities. Mamaroneck was a flourishing school in a mostly wealthy town. Yet it was also troubled.

  In the academic year 2013–14, the administration and a part of the English teaching staff were engaged in an experiment. Mamaroneck wasn’t the only school in the country performing the experiment, but, for them, the project was new. The English Department was trying to create something that didn’t exist in many students, and their methods lay somewhere between pedagogy and conjuring. The thing that didn’t exist was enjoyment of reading. Yet it wasn’t too late, which was the necessary assumption behind what Mamaroneck was doing. The habits of ninth- and tenth-graders could be changed. The nonreaders, or grudging readers, could be gently but firmly pushed into becoming readers—real readers, not just functional readers. They could be pushed into enjoying themselves, which may sound obtuse and contradictory, though it doesn’t have to be. The practical question was this: How do you awaken hunger amid indifference or disgust? Answer: With persistence, pressure, and subtlety.

  At Beacon, I sat in three other English sections besides Mr. Leon’s, and I never heard anyone raise such questions. The teachers there may have assumed that quizzing the students, watching them closely in class, and reading their papers and journals—all the usual grading mechanisms—were enough to keep them honest. The competitive atmosphere among New York kids would have the same effect. Among the students at Beacon, faking it, punting, just getting by were all infra dig—the place had a strenuous spirit. But who knew if the Beacon teachers were right? At every school, there were clever kids who survived without ever opening a book; they even boasted about it. At Mamaroneck, however, the administration and the English Department were talking about more than honesty or performance. The people I spoke to were book lovers, and, for them, nonreading was an offense against spirit. Just as much as Mr. Leon, they were out to save lives.

  * * *

  In the ninth grade at Mamaroneck, the students read The Odyssey, Antigone, and Romeo and Juliet; they read novels, stories, poems, and essays—all assigned “core texts.” And in tenth grade, the students read Macbeth and Elie Wiesel’s Night, the inevitable 1984, John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley epic, East of Eden, and, again, stories, poems, and essays. (See appendix 1 for the complete list.) Just as at Beacon, the students took quizzes and wrote papers and prepared projects devoted to the core texts. But they also read a lot else, and that’s what was new. At Mamaroneck, the drill went like this: Get them reading. Let them choose their own books. But also monitor them and try to pressure them into ch
oosing something better. That was the tricky part—the something better. The school wanted the kids to surge past the simplest pleasures in reading and engage with more demanding work. The concept was called “laddering.” If it worked, reading might become a lifetime habit. The experiment was modest in some ways, but it aimed at transformation. Free of their teachers, the students might—just possibly—climb rung after rung, as greater difficulty turned into greater enjoyment. Eventually they would settle: they would read easy books and hard, whatever they desired, whatever gave pleasure. That was the hope. But they had to begin somewhere, and Mamaroneck was committed to the beginnings.

  In her ninth-grade class, Margaret Groninger, the head of the English Department, a tall, willowy woman with a light and easy way about her, held up a book: No Easy Day, Matt Bissonnette and Kevin Mauer’s 2012 account of the Navy Seals’ mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. Miss Groninger was giving a “book talk,” which was really a scholastic version of a Hollywood pitch. A bit later, she would get to the play they were all reading together—Romeo and Juliet, with its blood-raising poetry of teenage love. For now, holding up No Easy Day, she said that the book was exciting, and she read a few passages: “The roar of the engine filled the cabin, and it was now impossible to hear anything other than the Black Hawk’s rotors beating the air. The wind buffeted me as I leaned out, scanning the ground below, hoping to steal a glance of the city of Abbottabad.” She had read the book and was enthusiastic about it. On another occasion, she held up The Girl You Left Behind, an ambitious historical novel (First World War, modern London) by Jo Jo Moyes. She gave a little of the plot—or at least the complicated premise—and read the first page aloud. “I was dreaming of food. Crisp baguettes, the flesh of the bread a virginal white, still steaming from the oven, and ripe cheese, its borders creeping toward the edge of the plate. Grapes and plums, stacked high in bowls, dusky and fragrant.…”

  All right, then. Two books, neither of them close to literature. The first was written in hard “masculine” prose. Call it washboard-abs prose. The second was succulent indeed—too succulent by half—but the rhythms were appealing. Miss Groninger no doubt expected that the first book would interest boys more than girls, and the second the reverse, though she didn’t say that explicitly. There was no need, in advance, to limit interest by gender. Anybody could read anything—that was implicit in the experiment.

  Every week, almost all year long, Miss Groninger gave a couple of book talks, which meant, in practice, that she and the others in the experiment had to do a lot more reading than most high school English teachers. As well as prepping for Romeo and Juliet and The Odyssey, Margaret Groninger had to keep track of what was coming out, what the recent good books for teenagers were. There was no way of way of looking at everything, so she read reviews and the flap copy of new books; she took recommendations from other teachers, and sometimes invited one of those teachers into the classroom to stand in her place and make a presentation. In the end, she often chose books from the commercial world of publishing, including some young adult novels. Miss Groninger was forty-two, married, with three kids. She ran the English Department and taught “only” (her word) sixteen hours a week; she also had to do an hour of prep for every fifty-two-minute class. Again, I was astonished by how hard a successful teacher had to work.

  At first blush, the book talks might seem a capitulation to undeveloped tastes. A few of the traditionalist English teachers at Mamaroneck felt that way, and they initially chose not to participate in the experiment. They complained that the school was giving up the battle, abandoning the canon. Their belief, roughly stated, was that they taught classic books, and that, in any generation, only a minority of students was likely to read them well. But Mamaroneck was not abandoning the canon. The ninth- and tenth-grade core readings were solid. In eleventh grade, for the record, the students were assigned The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, Jumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and either Huckleberry Finn or Twain’s other masterpiece, Pudd’nhead Wilson. Eleventh-grade honors students read The Scarlet Letter, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg.

  Mamaroneck’s get-them-reading strategy was initially created by necessity and a certain exasperation, even anger. The grudging readers and the fakers were cheating themselves and in some way insulting their parents and the school. And how were they going to do college work? In freshman year, depending on the college, students might be asked to read two or three hundred pages a week, or even more. They had to get over their resistance to reading. But remonstrating with teenagers in high school—threatening, warning, exhorting—was an obvious way to fail. Teen habits aren’t changed by exhortation.

  * * *

  I met with administrators and teachers in a conference room attached to the office of the school’s principal, Elizabeth Clain. “English teachers want to talk about Melville,” Miss Clain said. “But we have to teach reading as well as literature.” Annie Ward, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in Mamaroneck, building on Clain’s remarks, said, “We were stuck.” Ward, a woman about fifty with short blond hair, laid out the ground of the school’s discontent. “We were constipated in these roles—the teacher as tour guide. ‘Okay, now read chapter three by Monday.’ But we knew a lot of the kids were not reading. They were getting the content of the book in class and through SparkNotes. So we sought to change an English teacher’s role from that of book warden/tour guide to that of outfitter: ‘We’re going to equip you for a wide and wild reading adventure.’ The kid was the journey. We were the outfitters.”

  Mamaroneck was not a charter or a magnet like Beacon. “We take every kid who walks in the door,” Miss Clain said. Later, I accompanied her around the school. An elegant, driven woman, she rushed through the enormous spaces with her glasses perched high in her hair, nodding and waving to individual students. “Did you get your paper in?”—“Yes!”—“Good!” Clain was born in Zimbabwe, and came to the United States in 1976. She taught here for twenty-five years (mainly social studies), including sixteen years at Mamaroneck. She became principal in 2011. As kids went past us, she said to me, “I can never get enough names and faces. They drop out of my head.”

  There were 1,460 students in all. Seventy-six percent of the student body was white, many from prosperous families. Eighteen percent of the students were Hispanic, and many of them spoke English as a second language—their parents were often immigrants. Three percent were African American, 4 percent Asian. Even in this wealthy town, 14 percent of the students received free lunch, which means that their families lived below the poverty line. “I have kids with mansions along the shore,” Miss Clain said, meaning the coast of Long Island Sound, “and kids whose parents work as servants in those mansions.”

  The low-income students were not scoring well on standardized tests. But it wasn’t just those students that Mamaroneck was worried about. In 2010, in the name of “college and career readiness,” New York State abruptly changed the scoring of its tests in math and English. They raised the passing marks in grades three through eight. Overnight, kids who would have been “proficient” in English by earlier measures (gaining a score of 3 or 4) suddenly were deemed “not proficient.” In 2013, the Common Core standards went into effect, and actually raised the difficulty of the tests, rather than just the way they were scored. Compared to other schools in New York State, Mamaroneck was doing decently, but by its own standards that wasn’t good enough. The school district, led by superintendent Robert Shaps, was determined both to close the gap between rich and poor students and to get more kids reading.

  In the past, faced with a reading crisis, Mamaroneck and other schools like it would have invested a great deal of time and money in remedial work. Not this time. “Rather than layer on remedial intervention services,” Shaps told me, “we decided to double down on the single most powerful thing known to develop students’ reading: high volume of high success reading. We needed to get kids read
ing a LOT. We built classroom libraries at our middle school in 2010 and began to provide time during the school day for kids to read books of their choosing.” In that summer (2010), the district created what Annie Ward called a “book flood” at Hommocks Middle School, which was a feeder for the high school. “We set an ambitious, public goal that each Hommocks student would read 25 or more books over the year,” Ward told me. “We built time into the school day for all kids to read.” They also set up little book clubs for groups of kids to talk to one another about what they were reading. By the time the Hommocks students came to Mamaroneck High they had developed new habits. “When they read more, their skills go up,” Miss Clain said. “You have to find the passion, create a social culture of reading.”

  Miss Clain had an action plan, with money and support from the district supervisor. But a social culture of reading? At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Wasn’t reading one of the great solitary pleasures?

  * * *

  Everyone I spoke to at Mamaroneck was quick to disclaim originality for the experiment. They mentioned the research of Richard Allington, professor of education at the University of Tennessee, who insisted that if students read a lot at their own level, they built up fluency and capability, a happy experience that eventually leads them to take on more difficult texts. The pedagogic rubric for this, as Robert Shaps said, was “high volume, high success” reading. A student finished a book because she actually enjoyed it, and then went on and read another from beginning to end, in an endless chain. High volume, high success, an experience charged by pleasure. Allington had been publishing the results of his research for years. Mamaroneck was ready to act on it.