Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high school students.
Rather, teens are given excerpts of books, and they often read them not in print but on school-issued laptops, according to a survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents by the New York Times.
The reasons are many – including the belief that students have shorter attention spans, and schools’ efforts to teach students to perform well on standardized tests.
One factor is the Common Core, a set of standards adopted by many states in the US more than a decade ago. Given those standards, many schools use curriculum products like StudySync, which uses an anthology approach to introducing students to literature.
The upshot is that many teens read far fewer full novels than in the past, teachers acknowledge. Some teachers, however, choose to rebel.
“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a survey respondent who teaches English in New Mexico.
I cheer these renegades because I can’t imagine my life – or bringing up my own children – without reading books in print.
One of my most cherished memories as a parent is taking my seven-year-old daughter to pick up our family’s copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from a local bookstore the first day it came out. In the car, she had the hefty volume on her tiny lap and had begun racing through it.
Books lead to a richer life. They also lead to a more successful life
When we got home, her older brother – not entirely charitably – seized it from her hands, and I realized it might have been wise to invest in two copies. Somehow, we worked it out. But if kids must fight, let them fight over a book, I say.
These days, my grown children still read for pleasure. I recently noticed one with Nora Ephron’s classic, Heartburn, and another reading Ian McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping today’s school kids from reading on their own, especially by taking advantage of school libraries or public libraries.
But not every kid has been brought up with reading fiction as a part of everyday life. They might need that school assignment – perhaps of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – to help them realize how rewarding reading a novel can be. Yes, start to finish.
Put a copy of Claire Keegan’s haunting novella, Foster, in a teenager’s hands – it’s only 130 pages long – and concerns about atrophied attention spans might fade. (Foster was one of the books recommended in this intriguing Guardian article about which books authors consistently give as gifts.)
Then that teen might want to move on to something else by Keegan, or by another Irish author, or make some other connection.
That’s how it works with loving books. One leads to another, making a daisy chain of interest, learning and enjoyment.
I love that feeling of wanting to get back to my book, which I felt most recently with Stephen Becker’s Covenant With Death, a literary courtroom thriller published in 1964, which in turn followed my immersion in Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover.
For me, it never ends, and I hope it never does.
Books lead to a richer life. They also lead to a more successful life, as a two-decade-long study showed. Kids who lived with books in their home – as few as 20 – benefitted significantly over those who didn’t, in areas like academic success, vocabulary development and job attainment.
There’s something about having the actual physical book in one’s hands that I’m convinced makes a difference. That’s one reason that those measly book excerpts, read on a school-issued laptop, seem so terribly sad to me.
There are charitable programs all over the country, including Reading Is Fundamental, that help to put printed books in the hands of children, and begin the formation of those all-important home libraries.
If schools won’t do it – or believe they can’t – book lovers everywhere may need to step in. We are legion.
