Why teens don’t read: English teachers ruin it

Browsing in Barnes & Noble one afternoon, I found myself drawn to the “Summer Reading” table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.

It’s the time of year when I’m reminded of my twisted fate as a high school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in the United States. “The percentage of 17-year-olds,” it reports, “who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled” in the past 20 years.

If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today’s high school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It’s our job to take digital natives —- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube —- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.

But it’s time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn’t the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We’ve shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit: the high school English classroom and, all too often, English teachers like me, able and well-intentioned as we may be.

“Butchering.” That’s what one of my former students called English class, and the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of “So what?” The reading quizzes that turn, say, “Hamlet” into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes; the essay assignments that require students to write about a novel for which they have no passion. One parent, bemoaning his daughter’s aversion to great books after taking AP English Literature, wrote to me: “What I’ve seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection.”

Teaching methods can be constrained by Standards of Learning or No Child Left Behind testing. But even where teachers are free to design their own “best practices,” I’ve been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens’ sense that those choices are irrelevant. Ironically, kids’ turn-off to books can originate in teachers’ hopes of turning them on.

How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” For years, “Catcher” was a successful icebreaker for my juniors.

So imagine my dismay when “Catcher” was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn’t sophisticated enough for 11th-graders. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger’s 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.

But here’s what a former student wrote about this book: “To my 12-year-old self, the book didn’t seem to move anywhere. I didn’t understand why Holden couldn’t just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me.”

In adults’ determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soul mates.

Far too often, teachers’ canonical choices split from teenagers’ tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels.

When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. “When will we read something with a plot?” asked one agitated boy.

When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both them and the teacher, who will spend hours reading papers devoid of content.

The lesson couldn’t be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy into the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.

So if your kids never got to their summer reading, or had trouble getting through it, perhaps now you know why. It may be what they’ve learned at school.

> Nancy Schnog recently joined the English faculty at the McLean School in Potomac, Md.