Lit Up Read online

  And then there was Penny Kittle’s Book Love (2013), which, judging by the multicolored cover—happy teens with stacks of books—looked like a standard illustrated teaching manual. But the Mamaroneck teachers and administrators loved the book, and, after reading a few pages, I saw why. A teacher and reading specialist in Conway, New Hampshire, Penny Kittle was the real thing, a candid and funny writer—impassioned, penetrating, and affectionate in her description of students, and highly critical of teachers who failed to get their kids reading. In my experience, no American high school teacher ever wrote better prose. In her own high school English days, Kittle remembered, she had been bored and unresponsive. In college, she came alive as a reader—Jane Austen, the Brontës, Tolstoy, Henry James, one revelation after another. Eventually, she returned to high school as an English teacher. Then reality set in:

  Suddenly it was all too familiar: the slouching students, the yellowed pages of novels they weren’t reading, the “doing time” feel to the curriculum assigned to me. Surely my ineptitude contributed to the lack of engagement I faced, but my classes were also filled with students I didn’t recognize from high school: students who could barely read, who had no memories of book love to carry them through the dull parts in a play or a line that confused them in a poem. Students who had never been read to. Students who told me reading just wasn’t for them. Nice students, not defiant, just not interested.

  If they ran into trouble somewhere in a novel, they quit and never got back into gear. They listened in class, read SparkNotes, faked their way through the course, but essentially they were apathetic. The problem, according to Kittle, was widespread. “I’ve asked groups of teachers in nearly every state and almost all the Canadian provinces,” she writes. “I get similar answers. Teachers tell me they think about twenty percent or fewer of their students read the literature assigned.”

  Twenty percent! It would be nice to think that the teachers were exaggerating. But even thirty or forty percent would be sad. In any case, Kittle had a solution: get them started as readers by giving them books they could easily enjoy, including young adult novels; get them caught up in narrative, stories, outcomes.

  We can’t give up and accept so few readers. We also can’t have every student start with Austen, no matter what the Common Core or your department chair says. A book isn’t rigorous if students aren’t reading it. Every student must become a reader who can read Jane Austen. How? We start where they are. We start with an entry to a reading life and engagement with whole books, even if we feel they are less worthy than the classics. Yes, even Twilight, if that’s the book that will get a student reading.

  Kittle proposed that teachers set up a kind of parallel structure in which the teacher would work with the students on their personal reading and also on the book the class was reading together. The project was anathema, as she admitted, to some English teachers in her New Hampshire school. “They say teachers like me, who believe in young adult literature, just don’t have the guts or the talent to make The Great Gatsby work for everyone. We can’t let them bully us. They’re wrong. Independent reading allows students to build stamina so they can read Gatsby. Pretending to read it is far more damaging.” Kittle quoted the novelist Ann Patchett, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal (January 17, 2009): “I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”

  * * *

  No one in Miss Groninger’s ninth-grade class was required to read either of the books she pitched—not then, not on any day. The book talk was meant only as a prompt and a show of enthusiasm. But the students did have to have a book of their own going, and going at all times—an Independent Reading Book, in the school’s language. They could choose a book from anywhere—from the teacher’s recommendations, from home, from the town library, the school library. They could also take advantage of attending school in a wealthy suburb: each ninth-grade classroom and some tenth-grade classrooms had recently been outfitted with a small library of its own—maybe 300 books divided into such categories as history, romantic fiction, classics, dystopian, funny reads, graphic novels, sports, and adventure. A few classics, some current affairs, thrilling young adult titles, but no outright junk.

  When I saw the library in Miss Groninger’s classroom, modest as it was, I remembered the recurring fantasy of a twelve-year-old boy. A stairway led to a labyrinth at the top of the stairs, a labyrinth with row after row of books and shelves that turned into odd corners. The library at the top of the stairs was entirely his. It was a dream of endless happiness, but also a dream of power: proprietorship.

  And what was it that this dreaming boy was reading? What created love? As a child, at the recommendation of a school librarian, he had read book after book in Walter R. Brooks’s immortal series devoted to Freddy the Pig—Freddy, a poetry-writing porker, gentle, inquiring, bold (Freddy went into outer space among other places). Later—no surprise—there were the Hardy Boys, respectful teenagers with neatly parted hair who took on gangsters, swindlers, international villains, their adventures chronicled by a variety of newspaper hacks who were paid $75 or $85 a volume, all working under the formidable collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. And still later, about the time the library fantasy floated into his mind, the boy read the wonderful Landmark books (Random House) devoted to adventurers and explorers. Lewis and Clark killing a buffalo and drinking the hot, filthy water from its stomach remained his favorite emblem of survival. Yes, there were also the magnificently illustrated classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Swiss Family Robinson, and many others, in sturdy hardcover volumes, the reading centerpiece of many bourgeois American households—you can still find them somewhere on the Internet or at the library. Shy and often lonely, with loving, hardworking, newspaper-reading parents, he needed adventure, bravery, death defiance to nourish a faltering ego. In school, he was pronounced “jumpy,” and at home, he read slowly, with many pauses—concentration was hard-won and blissful when it arrived. Later he discovered the all-encompassing art form of darkened theaters, the screen commanding, enfolding, even overwhelming.

  As time went on, the boy’s actual proprietorship of books—my proprietorship—became more complicated: the neatly ordered volumes in an Upper West Side apartment were both a flattering mirror—I am these books—and a constant reproof, since it was a good chance that many of them were unread, or half read, or merely consulted. Still, I appreciated their presence as I appreciated sunshine; they provided reassurance and also an opening to endless possibility. Mamaroneck’s classroom libraries were hardly labyrinthine, but they would do well enough as a place in which a nonreader might emerge from reading poverty into wealth by owning something—a part of himself, perhaps.

  Some chose “hard” books, some easy; some switched in midbook because they were bored. One girl, defeated by Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, said, “Can I give this back?” and Miss Groninger turned her toward Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of trekking up the Pacific Coast Trail. Their reading skills and curiosity and endurance varied a great deal. In Miss Groninger’s ninth-grade class, the students chose such books as Orr: My Story, an autobiography by the great hockey player Bobby Orr; Tolkien’s The Hobbit; Veronica Roth’s Divergent (“one choice can transform you”) and its sequel, Insurgent (“one choice can destroy you”); Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a dissection of the commercial food industry and what it is doing to us; Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger’s sea story; and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (he travels, she doesn’t; they mate when they can). The choices were all over the place, which was exactly the point. Many of the titles may have been familiar as movie titles, but they were good books, better than the movies made from them. Except for Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, they were all books with a strong narrative drive.

  After Miss Groninger’s pitch for No Easy Day, the class
, with only a quick word from her, pulled their personal choices out of backpacks and fell silent. Discussion of Romeo and Juliet would have to wait. Virtually every day, usually at the beginning of the class, ninth- and tenth-grade students had a ten-minute reading period. In Miss Groninger’s class, the girls laid the books out flat on their desks; they were as still as monks in a thirteenth-century monastery examining old manuscripts. The boys scratched and shifted and tucked one leg under their butts or knocked their knees together rhythmically, but they hung in there and kept reading. Meanwhile Miss Groninger walked around with an iPad. She had everyone’s books listed on it, and she quietly intervened with kids who appeared to be idle, or who needed a difficult passage explained. She talked to two students about their books in some depth during the period; eventually, she got around to everyone. One side effect of the independent-choice strategy, as Miss Groninger told me, was that teachers got to know their students better. A few of the students read on an iPad themselves. Another privilege of going to a wealthy school: In 2013–14, every ninth-grader at Mamaroneck was given an iPad as a loaner for the year. In the next year, tenth as well as ninth-graders would have iPads, and eventually the entire student body would have them.

  In Miss Groninger’s class, the students entered the title of the book they had chosen in a classroom log—“the clipboard,” literally a clipboard, now unseen outside of doctor’s offices. They signed in every week, noting what page they were on. When they finished, they had to choose another book, and then another, all through the year. They also had to keep a journal about their reading, and they held forth about their chosen books on Goodreads, the website on which millions of users become critics. Sometimes students talked to each other before or after class, exchanging opinions, hectoring each other about a book—or warning off their friends. One girl fell in love with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, from 1985, a literary dystopian fiction about a theocratic revolution in the United States that leaves women completely subservient and ignorant, valuable only as concubines and breeders. She came to class one day saying “If you guys think The Hunger Games was good, wait until you read this book,” and eventually, even though she hadn’t finished the novel, Miss Groninger persuaded her to give a book talk to the class. When she finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale, however, she flew into a rage and threw it across the room. She was disappointed in the ending. Which meant she was definitely a reader. People who don’t give a damn drop books on a table. People who are excited and then disappointed throw them across the room.

  Restlessly innovative, Margaret Groninger would sit the students down, once or twice a year, for what was known as a speed-dating event. The idea was stolen from the New York and Los Angeles hook-up scene. Each student would have two minutes to talk over what he or she was reading and would then move on to the next student. The person who received the pitch would write down the title of the book she had just heard about and mark the title with a heart, which meant “I think I’m in love and want to read the book sometime soon!” Or perhaps, she would mark it with an open book, which signified “I’m intrigued, but need a second date to make up my mind.” And so on, down to the cold-shoulder “Not my type.” In two minutes, the students had to work hard to close the sale.

  After a while, I saw what Elizabeth Clain meant by a “culture of reading” at the school. The changed culture included teachers as well as kids. The teachers—all the school’s teachers—had to put up a little laminated poster in the hall just outside their classroom. With dry-erase markers they wrote down what they were reading at that moment. Mary Beth Jordan, an English teacher, was reading Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano. A social studies teacher opposite Mary Beth Jordan’s classroom was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This public display of honor was part of Elizabeth Clain’s attempt to shake the place up. No shirkers or hypocrites. Miss Clain told me she planned to send a memo to social studies and science teachers asking them to request books for new libraries in their classroom. A “book flood” was the term of art at Mamaroneck. Surround them with books. Connect teachers and students to books and to one another.

  Independent reading programs were notoriously risky. In other schools, students, when they weren’t monitored, might read less and less, sometimes stopping altogether. But Mamaroneck’s ninth- and tenth-graders weren’t allowed to stop or even pause, and a few of the students got excited; their competitive instincts kicked in, and they became heroes of reading, including one girl I heard about who consumed twenty-four books on her own (mostly romance and fantasy fiction, but some historical fiction, too) by May of the school year. She was a special case. What about everyone else? According to Mary Beth Jordan’s calculation, a tenth-grader who did all the assigned texts for English at Mamaroneck read about 1,500 pages. A student who read a full load of independently chosen books read perhaps another 1,500 pages. So the amount of pages doubled.

  In all, Mamaroneck’s approach in its independent reading project couldn’t have been further from Sean Leon’s stern syllabus at Beacon. His students were given no choices, and they were pressed, challenged, even overwhelmed, at least at first. Leaving aside the core readings, which remained mostly intact, Mamaroneck gave in, initially, to the students’ desire for ease and companionability. But then the pressures began. High volume, high success was just the beginning.

  Annie Ward, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, told me a few happy stories. There was the student who went from reading nothing at all to reading four “independent” books a semester. And there was the tale of another nonreader, a boy named Jack—“I don’t read. I just don’t.” So Ward suggested that he read Tucker Max’s jocular and boastful I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (“My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole”). His mother bought the book for him, so the school didn’t anticipate a parental complaint. But Jack, it turned out, didn’t much care for Beer in Hell. “Every chapter was pretty much the same,” he told Ward. “He gets drunk and hooks up with different girls, but it’s pretty much the same.” Well, Jack was right about that; he was not a reader but somehow he was a critic. Annie Ward then tried something else. “Staying in the profanity-in-the-title genre,” she told me, “I gave him my copy of Justin Halpern’s Sh*t My Dad Says, which I’ll admit I’d read and thought was funny, and he read it. It was definitely a notch above Beer in Hell in that it is a memoir with a narrative arc. After that, I moved him to David Sedaris, beginning with ‘Turbulence’ [funny New Yorker story about a socially disastrous plane ride]. I thought the shortness of a single story would be palatable to offset the increase in literary quality. The last time I conferred with Jack, I left him with Sedaris’s collection, Holidays on Ice.”

  Well, that’s a pretty good reading ladder; in fact, it’s a terrific ladder. From “I just don’t read” to David Sedaris. If this kid was ambitious and lucky, he might get to read funny essayists Nora Ephron, Paul Rudnick, or Andy Borowitz. Or even funny critics Clive James, Anthony Lane, and James Wolcott. Why not? Jack obviously had a taste for outrageous wit and satire. All right, I’m running wild—the kid did nothing more than read a few stories by David Sedaris. But the possibilities were exciting. Everything was open to the newborn reader, not just my own choices; he would be free. But even if none of this happens, and he remains a lifelong fan of David Sedaris, he has already jumped from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.

  I heard stories from other English teachers at school. Mary Beth Jordan, whose tenth-grade class I was visiting, had a few good ones. Miss Jordan was fifty-two and, like Miss Groninger, a mother of three. She had worked in magazine journalism most of her life; this was only her second year of teaching, her first at Mamaroneck, and she was gung ho for the independent reading experiment. She had large blue eyes that widened as she told me about pushing kids up a ladder.

  There were three working-class Hispanic friends in her tenth-grade class. They were generally not good students, absent a lot, their lives in turmoil. She intere
sted them in Coe Booth’s 2007 young adult novel Tyrell, which was about a fifteen-year-old African American boy up to his ears in trouble, sex, and drugs, but a good guy in many ways who tries to take care of his mother and little brother. The book was written in a literary version of street talk: “When I pick Novisha up from school, she actin’ all weird and shit,” it begins. The three students were astonished by the details of the book; they were “amazingly articulate,” said Miss Jordan, “about what they liked and didn’t like.” Some of it was very close to their own lives. “I ghetto when I read that book,” said one girl, whispering the voices to herself as she read. The three girls, Camila, Valentina, Valeria, called themselves “the Gangstas,” and they kept on reading. Next the Gangstas read Cupcake Brown’s A Piece of Cake, from 2006, a memoir of Brown’s teen life as a foster child and then as a high-living and quickly low-living teen prostitute (Brown eventually became a lawyer). They had become an on-the-fly reading group: they met outside of class with a campus supervisor, a kind of mentor and guard at the school—“She runs the school,” Elizabeth Clain told me—who kept them going as much as she could. They had plenty of troubles of their own, they cut school often, but, meeting with the supervisor, they continued to read, moving on to Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s brilliant nonfiction work, Random Family (the subtitle was: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx).

  Miss Jordan had a student, a boy, who liked thrillers, and she moved him from A. Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles) to Dennis Lahane (Mystic River); she had another male student who began with a novel about a troubled wealthy family, We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart, and wound up reading about the Zodiac killer and the Columbine murderers. I don’t know if this is a ladder up; it could be a ladder to hell. But perhaps Crime and Punishment is at the end of it.