Teachers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (plus the Sexy!) Part 3b

(This is the final section of the third installment of a post on teachers. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and the first part of of Part 3 here.)

The Sexy, Part B

It was near the end of September, not long after the discussion about the Vietnam War, that I began to linger in Mr. S's classroom after dismissal. At first our conversations were trivial and impersonal—discussions of assignments or continuations of classroom debates—but they soon evolved into more relaxed, personal exchanges about all manner of topic. I took these conversations seriously, occasionally even prepping for them! They had become the highlights of my week and I consistently skipped math class so that I wouldn't have to forego them. At some point, Mr. S expressed concern about my math grades but after I reassured him that I was doing well, he stopped worrying and accepted my decision to skip. I can't imagine a teacher doing that today, but it was a different era, one whose spirit was more conducive to respecting kids' inclinations and choices. Even then it was a Zeitgeist on its way out, but Mr S, with his irreverence for convention and rules, seemed to embody it perfectly.

In our after-class chats we talked a lot about books, with him recommending and lending, and me acting like an eager sponge. In the first few weeks alone, he introduced me to Susan Sontag's I, Etcetera Joan Didion's Play it as It Lays and The White Album, Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, Proust (whom he adored but recommended I hold off reading until I was over thirty), and poetry by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Éluard. One day he brought in his copy of Violette LeDuc's classic of lesbian lit,  La Batarde; I'd asked to borrow it after reading about Simone De Beauvoir's interest in Leduc. As I flipped through it, I jokingly said I was going to show it to my parents and ask them what they thought of his taste in literature. He grabbed the book out of my hand, tore out the page where he'd written his name and handed it back to me. This gesture (which I assured him was unnecessary) was a springboard to talk about homophobia, a new-ish term at the time, whose meaning he explained to me. This in turn led to a discussion of "projection"—a concept that interested him. People who fear homosexual urges in themselves, he explained, will often project that fear onto another, thus relieving them of the burden of confronting the true source of their fear.

Books were not the only conduits to such discussions. Music and movies played a similar role. Mr. S would recommend movies that were playing at the local rep cinemas, alerting me to foreign films that he thought might interest me, especially classics of the French New Wave. (He shared my Francophilia, though in his case it was more understandable—his mother was Swiss French.) But he surprised me by praising certain popular movies as well. I remember him pronouncing Saturday Night Fever a "well-made movie." At the time, I was firmly in the "disco sucks" camp; such praise coming from him was a significant challenge to my adolescent snobbery.

Other topics I remember discussing included: the legalization of marijuana—I was in favour, he did not disagree; the jock-ish culture of high school; Canadian and American politics; and suburbia, against which I chafed but which he defended as a quiet place where people understandably chose to raise kids. "How can you defend it?" I asked. "It's soul-destroying." He shrugged. "Living here is part of why you are who you are." But the next day he brought in his copy of Cheever's Bullet Park for me to read: "My favourite suburban novel," he said.

What surprises me when I look back on those chats is not their breadth and occasional depth, but that they occurred at all. My own participation is not particularly surprising: the student "crush" is a familiar trope in both popular and literary culture, though I would argue that the trivializing term (often applied to unsanctioned attractions, especially those of the young) does not do justice to the potent mix of sexual and intellectual attraction I felt towards Mr. S. More difficult to understand from my perspective is Mr. S's motivation. I wondered then and I wonder now why he was willing to forgo so much of his prep time to engage in an ongoing conversation with a student. The more I think of it, though, the more I realize that what is important is not that he didn't feel anything inappropriate—though I believe he did not—but that if he did, I didn't know. He did not let it show. There was no physical contact between us, with one minor exception. On a spring day when I was the last to leave his classroom, he followed me out, and as I moved through the doorway, he took hold of my braid and let it run through his fingers. It was in all likelihood an innocent, affectionate gesture—which didn't stop me from wandering around for the rest of the day in a thrilled daze, thinking to myself, he touched my hair, he touched my hair!

But the point is, regardless of what he may have felt, and what I clearly did feel, nothing (beyond hair-touching) happened. Or rather what happened was entirely positive, from a pedagogic perspective: feelings rippling beneath the surface of our interaction acted as a catalyst for engaged teaching and learning. It's no accident that I produced better work and learned more in Mr. S's class than I had in the previous three years of high school English.

As I mentioned in Part A of this post, Eros has been recognized as an inducement to learning since antiquity. In the Platonic model, however, love or desire for a person is only the beginning of a process which, if all goes well, ends with the learner transferring her affection to Beauty or Knowledge itself. Human love, of the sort a student might feel towards a teacher, is merely a means to a "higher" end. (See the Ladder of Love.) It's a nice idea, but I don't think one has to view this progression as inevitable or necessary, in order to appreciate the role that Eros can play in learning. A love that remains focussed on a person or that is mixed with desire is a feeling that can produce intense and pleasurable learning. What is there to object to in that? (I'm not saying this is the only way to motivate students!) Love between student and teacher cannot be acted on under most normal circumstances; but it needn't be denied or suppressed either. As long as there are teachers like Mr. S, there will be students who love them. I say let the kids love and learn.

Reading for Pleasure: Losing Sight of the Forest for the Trees?

Over at the People for Education website, there is an interesting post about kids and pleasure reading. Both the post—sparked by this People for Education report, which documents a decline in reading for pleasure among school-aged children—and the ongoing discussion are well worth reading. Here's the comment I submitted:

Fascinating debate, and one in which I am deeply invested. My biggest concern at the moment is not how to instill a love of reading in my twin daughters—we managed to do that simply by reading to them frequently when they were younger, and by reading books ourselves, constantly—but how to prevent schools from quashing that love. I've blogged on the issue of reading for pleasure versus reading for school before (here), but lately another problem has arisen: the way the Ontario Library Association's Forest of Reading program is being used in schools as a means of taking away choice—and hence, reading pleasure—from kids. For instance, in my daughters' middle school, the Red Maple program, which is supposed (I believe) to be voluntary, has been made mandatory. The girls' English teacher has told the kids that they must read all ten books on the list if they want to get an A in English. There is so much wrong with this that I don't know where to begin. Both of my daughters have read more than ten books this year, but the key for them is personal engagement—and choice. Some of the books in the Red Maple program don't interest them at all. Others are simply inappropriate for them. (One example is the "problem novel," Dear George Clooney Please Marry My Mom, by Susin Nielsen, a book which assumes that 12-year-olds know who George Clooney is—mine did not—and are familiar with concepts such as "trophy wife.") If choice in reading is going to be taken away from kids in school, I would prefer it to be in favour of classic kid lit (e.g., Little Women, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), and not flavour-of-the-month type novels, many of which have not stood the test of time. (Which is not to say that some of them aren't wonderful.) I don't have a problem with books being assigned to an entire class and discussed in class; my daughters' English class read Animal Farm this year, and it was a positive experience. But when teachers ask kids to read books on their own time, they should not tell them what to read—or even how. (I'm agnostic on the issue of electronic versus paper reading, though my husband and I and both daughters favour the tactile experience of paper books.) Pleasure reading requires two things: time and choice, both of which are being eroded by the misuse of well-intentioned programs like Forest of Reading.

Summertime, and the reading is easy...

When I was a child I had a reputation as a bookworm. I wore the label proudly, since at the time I was unaware of its negative connotations. I remember reading book after book around the pool during March break in Florida, stopping only to dip into the water when I got too hot. During the summer, I read constantly simply because I had the time: my parents, whose parenting philosophy could be summed up by the phrase "benign neglect," did not feel the need to structure my summers.

My own parenting philosophy cannot be summed up as "benign neglect." Like most parents of my generation, I constantly fight the urge to rein in my daughters' freedom and micromanage their lives. But there is one way in which I parent like my mother and father: I do not structure my kids' time during the summer. I eschew the role of "camp counselor" both at the cottage and in the city; I do not see it as my job, and I've found that when left to their own devices, my daughters come up with imaginative and engaging activities to fill their time.

One such activity is reading for pleasure. I don't know how many books J and E read this past summer, but I do know that I was constantly having to replenish their supply. I frequently caught sight of the two of them lounging on the sofa, deeply immersed in their books, and though I sometimes felt the urge to tell them to go outside and get some fresh air, I resisted. They would often make their way outside at some point anyway, but even if they hadn't, I'm not sure I could have justified interrupting their reading. Here's why: I knew that when school started in September, their reading for pleasure would come to a grinding, depressing halt.

When school is in session, my daughters, like many school-aged kids, have very little time to read. Regular homework, extra-curricular activities, and socializing take up most of their free time. When they do find themselves with a spare moment, J and E—who, like most kids, experience the school-year schedule as a grind—are more likely to put on a DVD and collapse onto the sofa than to pick up a book.

A more complicated and insidious impediment to reading for pleasure during the school year has to do with how reading is handled as an academic subject. In Ontario, the reading curriculum, as set forth in documents available on the Ministry of Education website, focuses on

developing the knowledge and skills that will enable students to become effective readers. An effective reader is one who not only grasps the ideas communicated in a text but is able to apply them in new contexts.

Now, "effective readers" and people who read for pleasure are not mutually exclusive categories. And, to be fair, the curriculum document does acknowledge the importance of nurturing a love of reading:

A well-balanced reading program will provide students with opportunities to read for the pleasure of discovering interesting information as well as for the pleasure of self-discovery . . . and for the sheer fun of it.

But in reality, the Ontario language curriculum and the pedagogies that support it are not particularly conducive to fun or pleasure. Both seem heavily informed by research into the mechanics of reading, drawn from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, as well as by myriad constructivist and reader response theories borrowed from disciplines such as sociocultural psychology and literary studies. The result is an emphasis on the process of reading, and the "metacognitive" strategies that children and adults use when learning to read or when actually reading.

One such strategy involves the making of connections. In their influential book, Mosaic of Thought, reading researchers Susan Zimmerman and Ellin Keene, (synthesizing insights from transactional/reader response theory and cognitive science) outline three principal types of connections that competent readers make: "text to self," "text to world," and "text to text." Other theorists—such as Richard Anderson and P. David Pearson, in their seminal essay on Schema Theory—have emphasized the importance of prior knowledge to the reading process. According to Schema Theory, competent readers activate their prior knowledge (organized into schemata) to draw inferences, make predictions or employ "fix-up" strategies when they read. These activities and strategies allow readers to assimilate unfamiliar material by comparing and integrating it with what they already know, thereby enabling comprehension and learning.

It is important to note that these theories of reading—and the many others which inform reading curricula across North America*—are essentially descriptive in nature: that is, they attempt to describe what actually happens in the minds (or more recently, in the brains) of readers while they read. But during the circuitous journey from university to teacher's college to classroom, descriptive theories invariably devolve into prescriptive practices. So, for example, educators deduce (not entirely logically) that if effective readers make "text to text" or "text to self" connections or use inference and prediction to aid in comprehension, then children should be taught to read in this manner. The resultant pedagogy can take some unexpected and occasionally counter-productive forms.

A case in point: When my daughters were in Grade 2, their teacher decided that one of them, E, had a problem with comprehension. Asked what a certain chapter book reminded her of, my daughter had replied, "nothing." It's quite possible that the book did in fact remind E of nothing in her own life: at seven, her life experiences were somewhat limited. But I suspect the main reason she said "nothing" is that she was shy and inhibited around adults. The trick with kids such as these is not to ask a question that can be answered with a single word. If the teacher had asked E what the story was about, or whether or not she liked it, E would have told her, as she told me a couple of weeks later, following the parent-teacher interview in which I learned about the incident. On another occasion, the teacher asked a group of kids to predict what a certain book was about based on the cover. E's answer was, "I don't know." When I asked her why she answered that way, she said, "You once told me not to judge a book by its cover." (I stand by that advice!)

So in E's case, this emphasis on the supposed process by which efficient readers comprehend what they're reading backfired. The teacher's single-minded focus on what she referred to as "metacognition" actually prevented her from ascertaining who could read and comprehend simple chapter books and who could not. (According to my daughters, the outgoing kids would babble on about how the book reminded them of this and that, and would be rewarded for doing so, no matter how outlandish their answers.) Interestingly, E's teachers in the previous and following years chose not to use this method to assess reading ability; both recognized that E was a strong reader by evaluating her oral and written book reviews, and by asking her less scripted questions about the books she was reading.

Fortunately, these awkward moments with the Grade 2 teacher did not significantly affect E's attitude towards books or reading. But what worries me in retrospect is that they could have. They could easily have shaken E's confidence in her reading ability, thereby turning her off reading altogether. As it is, she learned that reading and discussing books in school (as opposed to at home) was not a pleasurable experience.

Unfortunately, that impression persisted and was compounded by other aspects of the reading curriculum. In the later elementary years, for instance, literature circles became one of the main vehicles by which the reading portion of the language curriculum was fulfilled. Harvey Daniels, in his book on the topic, describes literature circles as "a form of independent reading, structured as collaborative small groups, and guided by reader response principles in light of current comprehension research." In other words, a bit like a book club for kids, which sounds appealing. Indeed, it's difficult to object to the idea of students getting together in groups to discuss books; however, it seems that in the case of literature circles, somewhere between concept and execution, a vital ingredient got lost: fun.

In reality, literature circles are not kid versions of book clubs. Unlike adult book clubs, they are not self-organized. Most often, it is the teacher who chooses the books and the teacher who decides what types of activities the group will engage in. Typical (rotating) roles in literature circles include: "Discussion Director," "Passage Finder," "Illustrator," "Connector," "Vocabulary Enricher," "Investigator," and "Summarizer." There is nothing particularly objectionable about any one of these roles taken individually, but I wonder how many adults would join a book club in which these sorts of activities were required. (I certainly wouldn't: I can't draw, for one thing!) It should come as no surprise, then, that kids are not enamoured of them either. Both of my daughters love to read, but neither of them enjoys literature circles. Too little choice, they say, and too much busy work, often sent home as homework.

But critiquing current practice is easy, especially for a parent like me; I don't need to worry about fulfilling curriculum requirements or engaging children in a classroom setting. The question that needs to be asked—that I need to ask myself—is, what would a reading program that strove to inculcate a love of reading look like? The conclusions I've come to as a result of thinking about this question are not easy to articulate. But my sense is that the current curriculum, while well-intentioned, focuses too much on notions of "efficiency," "mastery," and "competence," and too little on concepts such as "enjoyment" or "pleasure."

Instead of asking what efficient readers do when they read, it might be worthwhile to consider what people who read for pleasure do. Do they stop when reading a novel to ask themselves what might be coming next, or what the book reminds them of in their own life? Do they put sticky notes (literal or figurative) on important passages? Do they make inferences and fill in gaps when the text is ambiguous? The answer is to all these questions is: quite possibly. But often people who read for pleasure do not do these things, or at least not consciously. Sometimes people are looking for escape when they read. Sometimes there are no relevant "text to self" or "text to world" connections to be made. Or sometimes, the cognitive processes that occur when a person reads are so routine as to be imperceptible. As Anderson and Pearson concede, "Many aspects of reading may be automatic, at least in a skilled reader, and hence require very little cognitive capacity."

Reading requiring very little cognitive capacity: it's an apt description of light "summer reading" for many people. Such reading is valuable in its own right for the pleasure it brings the reader. And despite its being largely automatic and imperceptible, learning—in the form of specific, measurable literacy skills—is occurring during this type of reading; in fact recent research suggests that intrinsically-motivated leisure reading may lead to greater gains in reading comprehension and competence than extrinsically-motivated (e.g., classroom) reading. But the less tangible rewards of reading for pleasure are equally—if not more—important. When a child or adult reads for pleasure, he or she is voluntarily exploring unfamiliar worlds, catching glimpses of the vast plethora of human character and behaviour, and thus building and expanding his or her capacity for empathy.

What better reason to encourage or at least allow for pleasure reading during the school year? Doing so would not require a wholesale overhaul of the curriculum. Teachers could keep the literature circles, for instance, but make them truly student-directed. They could let students choose the books and determine the way in which the circle is organized. Let the children read and discuss in any way they see fit. But, most important, just let them read. Give students unfettered access to the school library, and set aside blocks of time daily for independent, no-strings-attached reading. In other words, import a bit of lazy summer reading into the school year. Perhaps in this way, educators—with the help of supportive parents—can begin to bridge the troubling chasm between reading for pleasure and reading for school .


*For an overview of of these theories, see Lenses on Reading: An Introduction to Theories and Models, by Diane H. Tracey and Lesley Mandel Morrow.