Making Over an English Curriculum

The most basic philosophy of literacy education is that kids will read what they’re interested in. When they find people who are like them represented in a story, they are often intrigued because maybe they feel like there are no stories about them so why should they read another story about someone they can’t relate to? This is often the underlying reason I find that students (disabilities aside) don’t read. As schools re-vamp their English curricula, this is something that should be at the forefront of the planning.

I have taught with several English teachers who prefer teaching Dead White Writers because that’s what they’ve always done and that’s what they know. However, I can tell you that the students in the classes I’ve taught are not that invested in these stories. We all know what they are: The Crucible. The Old Man and The Sea. Death of a Salesman. These are books we read in English class when we were growing up. These are also books that students find difficult to understand because they have no frame of reference for them.

That doesn’t mean we should throw out all of the classics. What it means is using these texts as a jumping off point for different discussions instead of merely “teaching the book.” When I worked with a class where we read Death of a Salesman, I suggested to my co-teacher that we also read Fences (August Wilson) since I could see clear parallels between the texts and thought the students would as well. And you know what? They could. That strategy worked out much better than just reading Death of a Salesman on its own.

When I taught middle school, I liked to read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes with my classes. This was the story of a girl who contracted cancer as a result of the radiation from the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A Japanese fable stated that of a person folded a thousand origami cranes, they would be granted a wish. So Sadako set out to do just that. Now, I don’t believe any of my students were Japanese but they related to the story of a little girl who wanted to get well so badly she would take unusual measures to get there. And in the course of reading this, my students learned a good deal about Japanese culture and empathy for people with chronic illness.

It is important to create space in the classroom to discuss literature this way, because people read to experience life and gain empathy for others. These skills are as important as or maybe more important than gaining skills to pass exams. So it’s crucial that we don’t lose students along the way because we pick texts that we’ve always “done” instead of considering our students and their interests and ideas.