My Turn

I’ll be honest, I really hate the Kindle. I cannot read anything online. Every article I was assigned to read in college (and in this grad program) I printed out on paper so that I could highlight and annotate. I developed a deep relationship with paper books as a child. I am one of those people who flip through books, too. I’ll pick up a novel, read the first half, then read the last chapter to see how it ends, then flip back to the middle and read it in order.

My mother read Little Women to me when I was 7 (we all were crying on the couch over Beth), and Great Expectations when I was 9. On family road trips to Canada every summer - 10 hours in the car - we listed to Tolkien and Swiss Family Robinson on tape. We were all about reading in my house.

On the flip side, my husband would never identify himself as “a reader.”  He really struggled in school with reading, mostly because his “reader voice” (the voice in your head that you hear when you read stuff) was not very strong. Because of his ADD, his reader voice is stilted, and puts pauses in the wrong places and emphasis on the wrong words. But he is one of the best auditory processors I’ve ever met. You tell him something once and he’s got it down. When he went to college to get his associate's degree, he would record his professors rather than take notes. I bought him an oral dictation software for his computer so he could “talk” his papers rather than write them. He knows the words to every song on the radio. Like, every song. He hasn’t read Shakespeare, but when he watches the plays he laughs at all the right parts and seriously can’t understand why Hamlet doesn’t just kill his stupid uncle and move on with his life.

When my mom bought him a Kindle for Christmas, his whole world changed. He’s read more books in the past 3 or 4 years of his life than all 32 combined. Something about the format just works for him. His vocabulary has skyrocketed (probably because he can look up words with the press of a button), and he’s really gotten into philosophy and logical argument (thank you, Ender’s Game). His “reader voice” is more fluent, and he now enjoys reading passages aloud to me that he finds poignant or funny.

So I’m not completely sold on Nicholas Carr’s idea that eReaders and the Internet are making us stupid. I agree that it has changed our brains - absolutely - but I’m not sure that deep, critical thinking is in as much danger as he believes. He laments over a “loss of elegance” and “virtuosity,” and to degrade “society’s attitude toward intellectual achievement.”

But here’s the thing: Best seller lists have always hovered around a 7th/8th grade reading level, so I’m not sure if the  “readers” he’s talking about are everyday folks or the intellectuals you find in academic circles (i.e. folks like Nicholas Carr).

With my students, I’ve found if the book is compelling, they’ll read it. I have to wrestle books away from my kids, and not just eBooks, either. They are reading constantly, but they are reading books that are more conversational and narrative than in the past. They’re reading Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, not Jane Eyre or Ulysses, but they’re 12. They are reading to escape, to transport themselves somewhere other than middle school (can you blame them??), and they are learning about themselves and the world around them in the process.

Intellectuals and avid readers of the classics like myself: we’re still gonna do our thing. We’re still going to stand around a cramped art studio drinking wine and talking Voltaire. Because we like it! But that doesn’t mean society is going down the drain because our kids don’t want to come with us. In fact, young people are having a lot of these same types of conversations, but they’re in brewpubs and coffeeshops and they’re talking about Black Lives Matter and gender equality.

Students are looking for a connection - a relationship. Ask the student in the back to read Maya Angelou’s poem “I Rise” aloud to the class and watch them all roll their eyes and shut down. Here she goes again. But let them listen to Serena Williams read it. Or Nicki Minaj. And watch the goosebumps show on their skin.

So I argue this: let our students read in peace, on their Kindles, on their phones, whatever. Let them choose what they like, and encourage them to keep reading and sharing their thoughts with others about what they’ve read. Let’s allow our students to develop a relationship with the page (or the screen, as the case may be) before we ask them to autopsy the author’s “message.”

I’ve always hated making high-schoolers analyze text for a variety of reasons, but the main one is this: reading is hard. Reading is personal. Reading is the universal “smart kid” litmus test, and it’s totally unfair (see: my brilliant husband). When I taught 9th grade English at a military boarding school, I read everything out loud to them. Everything. The Odyssey, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird...it was storytime with Ms. D every day. I did this because I didn’t want it to be about the reading - I wanted to spend my time talking about the books. Which characters to you like? Who is a jerk? Why do you think he’s a jerk?

If we don’t start working with our kids, we’re going to lose them. Simple as that. What do we want to foster and preserve? Deep thinking, critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, making inferences and connections, reflection, mindfulness. But do all of these things have to be learned through reading?

Challenge kids with paradoxes and philosophical quandaries. Ask a group of teenagers if a hot dog classifies as a sandwich and watch the debate ignite.

Watch a movie like Ex Machina and create a classroom definition of humanity and then challenge students to pull out literary elements like foreshadowing, suspense, identity, irony. Identify character archetypes and tropes (Chekhov’s Gun, for example). Give students multiple examples over a wide range of media (music, theater, poetry) and pull the threads together. Give students poor examples of directors or authors trying to do something profound and failing. When “identifying” literary elements, what counts? What doesn’t? Why not?

Our kids don’t have to read page after page of paper text in order to develop these skills, they just need someone to ask them the right questions.