Contemporary high school English teachers are faced with a problematic choice: Harry Potter or William Shakespeare? Twilight or Gatsby? Do we teach quality literature that hits all curricular expectations, or do we choose popular literature that will engage—maybe even interest—our students?
Problematic question. If you think back to your own school days, you might recall that not everyone was a reader. There were always a few kids that it was impossible to bring in, whether the piece was Les Miserables or a Rob Zombie screenplay. That’s an absolute fact, but we’re being bombarded with studies lately that suggest that literacy levels of all Canadians have been on a steady decline since the early 1990s. People are reading less, and fewer of those who are reading are reading what is considered literature, and still fewer are approaching what they read critically or analytically. They’re reading for entertainment.
Now I could rant about “these days”, but in truth, our whole interest as a people has shifted. Teachers are competing with video games that demand hours and hours of attention for years—we’re just doing it more now. The Internet and social media gobble up reading time like Pac-Man on steroids, and again, the value in our pursuits seems to be entertainment.
We are teaching in the world of Avatar, where the “greatest” film of the last decade or so was all spectacle and little substance, all flash and dash with no little concern for, y’know, meaning.
“Writing? Oh, that’s the stuff we use to link explosion scenes.”
It makes for a conundrum when teaching literature. At the foundation, all provincial curricula in Canada call for a teaching of quality literature that hits the bullets: character, narrative, theme, struggle, language, all of that. Listen, we know that pulling out Hamlet or To Kill a Mockingbird will get us eye rolls—we read them in high school, too—but it’s arduous to find suitable replacements. Many of us have tried out modern(ish) novels such as Life of Pi or Crow Lake, meeting with varying success. The thing about Harper Lee is she really is that accessible, there are tried and true resources abounding, and when attacking a diploma exam or a university course, it’s true that having a “known” text in your bank is advantageous.
Some teachers bring in high-interest, plot-driven pieces like Harry Potter or Twilight, and as entertaining as they may be, as involving as they may be for kids, they’re hardly literary—and I say that as a huge Rowling fan. They don’t hit those bullets.
Other teachers—myself included—have tried teaching film as a narrative text. I’m a reformed comic nerd, and so I know the difference between a graphic novel and a comic book, and I’ve toyed with teaching that genre as literature.
All of these experiments speak to the problem of going down a level rather than attempting to bring our readers up. We begin questioning how many compromises we can make before we’re just teaching “books” instead of “literature”.
Ah, but it begs the question, just what is literature? Isn’t it just the stuff that pretentious CBC-radio listeners say they read? Isn’t it just writing that is harder to read than fun? Well, no. It is writing that seeks to do something more than entertain you. If literature works, it makes you reassess life; it makes you consider how you think. A good piece of literature should haunt you. I’ve taught Life of Pi a couple of times and find it one of the better new novels to teach because of the discussion it brings. Without ruining the ending, I find that the question “Which story do you prefer?” can tell me more about a student than a three-hour interview.
As literacy levels continue their gentle sag, as Avatar and Black Ops. continue to be credited as having “great stories” by the masses, need our expectations for our readers be lowered as well? If no, then it’s one of the only disciplines that we’re calling for a regression in. Imagine if we expected Apple to go back to its 1980s computers, or for doctors to start bloodletting again.
Does it matter that we teach literature or that we teach what kids are interested in, no matter the quality?
