Readings, Rated
High School Reading Lists, Redux
On The Wire, cop-turned-math teacher Mr. Pryzbylewski schools his inner-city Baltimore students about probability by letting them play dice—like the kids do on the streets. Smart teachers are always devising ways to keep lessons interactive, or more cynically, trick students into learning. But sometimes the trick is as simple as giving them fresh materials. That’s the idea behind updating high school reading lists, a welcome trend in school districts around Chicagoland: Contemporary novels like The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson are joining the old heavyweights. Educators are “choosing more works where the protagonist resembles the student,” and in one Naperville program elementary school students even get to be proto-editors (or, again more cynically, market research participants): they read and respond to unpublished manuscripts supplied by HarperCollins.
And good thing, with young people (nay, everyone) reading less and less. Whatever works, get ‘em to read. But what the Trib piece doesn’t acknowledge is that this practice really isn’t new. The House on Mango Street and Stop Time, among other contemporary titles, made it into the curriculum in my high school, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Middlesex or Housekeeping on the lists these days. Somewhere out there, I’m willing to bet, there’s a senior seminar on graphic novels where they’re poring over Maus and Persepolis. And all of this makes me very happy. There are classics that should never get elbowed out, but curriculums should always resist calcification. And when the objective is, in large part, getting kids to learn how to read and analyze texts, not just feeding them their recommended allowance of the canon, a text written last year is no less worthy a tool than one written in the 19th century.
What contemporary books did you read in high school? Or, teachers: Which ones do you use in your classes now?
