Moderation in All Things
This post was originally going to be about how very Wrong on the Internet this New York Times opinion piece is, until I realized that the problem is more that Ms. Hollander is unpersuasive and her argument full of holes, not that she is wrong about everything.
Not that she isn’t trying to be. Wrong that is. I am sure she is attempting to be persuasive as well, but anyone who describes Flipped as “center[ing] on divorce and kissing” is very clearly trying very hard to be Wrong on the Internet.
For the record, that’s merely the plot of the book - minus some very important parts about a tree, some hens, family secrets, and bigots. What Flipped is about is perception, prejudice, and pride. It’s about the way that we construct ideas in our head of who we think people are, and how those ideas often have much more to do with what we want and need than reality. Much like the way Pride and Prejudice is not actually about Mr. Bingley being in want of a wife.
As she is a reading enrichment teacher, I’m going to give Ms. Hollander the benefit of the doubt and assume that she is not stupid and in fact knows this. I suspect her point is that middle grade readers will often miss this, making the book - to them - to be merely about Juli and Bryce’s not-romance. I suspect this not because I want to make up stuff to argue against (although I would disagree with such an opinion) but because it’s the missing bit of logic in her argument about why kids should not be reading such books for summer assignments.
Despite focusing mostly on the pros and cons of various novels the essay is not really about fiction at all, it’s about non-fiction and how we should assign middle and high-schoolers non-fiction for reading over the summer rather than fiction. She seems to be arguing that titles like The Hunger Games do not challenge students enough, while the classics challenge them too much. Or maybe that it’s much more difficult to get the right level of fiction book for each reader without tailoring one’s list to that student? Or maybe it’s simply that she thinks fiction needs more guidance to understand properly?
This is the problem. It’s all very unclear. The essay is a jumbled mess of bad explanations of how kids read, bashing of popular literature...and then a jump right into the conclusion that kids should read non-fiction over the summer.
Which is all very disappointing because I really do think kids should read more non-fiction. I think there are very good reasons for this that are more than simply because boys like it, which is the usual reason given. I also think we should give teachers more time to spend* on how to read it and I think we need more quality non-fiction for youth of all ages. (Although, I note that all of Ms. Hollander’s recommendations would fall under the social sciences. Which seems to be missing half the point of having kids read non-fiction. But I digress.)
What I don’t think we should do is pretend that reading is merely a matter of vocabulary and gaining factual knowledge, which is what Hollander’s poor explanation suggests that it is. Reading is also about language and patterns and themes, things that are present in non-fiction as well as fiction and which, in both, often require a different skill set to decipher and appreciate than merely reading for comprehension. By pretending that The Hunger Games and Flipped are about ideas as simple as their language, Hollander buries the very important fact that complicated themes in a book with a lower reading level can help independent readers develop non-vocabulary, non-world knowledge reading skills.**
We also, as we teach reading non-fiction to students, need to talk about about the difference between non-fiction and fact. Reading non-fiction does not mean that one is using critical thinking to merely decode the words on the page, or apply what we have learned to the world around us - anyone who does it that way is doing it wrong and is vulnerable to becoming misinformed and an uncritical voter. Ms. Hollander discusses whether the students reading these titles will be taking on too heavy of a subject by themselves, but she doesn’t mention anything about discussing with younger readers how to judge and evaluate the veracity of the non-fiction they are reading. A skill that is increased by understanding the literary concepts she fails to assign any importance to.***
Really, Ms. Hollander had it right in the beginning. Any reading is good reading. Not just because any is better than none, but because variety and interest are what is most important. It’s not that middle graders and high schoolers should be reading A Long Way Gone but not Flipped, The Red Badge of Courage but not Smile, The Crucible but not An Inconvenient Truth - it’s that they should be reading all of these titles and genres and levels and literary forms. And thus any good summer reading list should let readers choose from among them - and any good curriculum will include this kind of variety as well.
*I hate it when people say “teachers should” as if the average middle school teacher really has that much leeway in what kind of time they spend on what. Especially concepts that would be a radical departure from the current curriculum. I do think teachers should teach reading non-fiction, but I also think the more relevant issue is that we need to provide them with the tools, the time, and reasons to do so - not simply the requirement.
**For example: Terry Brooks’ Shanarra series. Which we can all agree is pretty shitty writing with basically the same plot over and over. I also loved them in junior high. While it helped that I found them by way of Brin’s story, the repetition of the characters and plot were also a large part of the appeal as well. Expanding my vocabulary - or even improving my reading comprehension in terms of following the plot and picking out facts - this is not what I needed to work on most. What I needed was some time to develop a better understanding of how to recognize themes and get a feel for characterization and character growth - without my teacher walking me through it. Before I could move on to really understanding complicated books when I read them, I needed more practice following the things that were not the plot. Much like a first grader with a badly written easy reader, the repetition and anvilness of the themes in the Shannara books was actually useful to me at the time in terms of developing this skill. They felt more complicated and nuanced to me at the time than they really are because I could see things in them that I still had trouble picking out when I read better and more advanced books. Which I did concurrently. As most readers do.
***The most obvious example being that readers who understand the concept of the unreliable narrator are going to grasp more easily the idea that a non-fiction account can be wrong unintentionally - and that often even in non-fiction there is never just one true version. Also that all the facts can be true, but the sum of them together might still be false.
Not that she isn’t trying to be. Wrong that is. I am sure she is attempting to be persuasive as well, but anyone who describes Flipped as “center[ing] on divorce and kissing” is very clearly trying very hard to be Wrong on the Internet.
For the record, that’s merely the plot of the book - minus some very important parts about a tree, some hens, family secrets, and bigots. What Flipped is about is perception, prejudice, and pride. It’s about the way that we construct ideas in our head of who we think people are, and how those ideas often have much more to do with what we want and need than reality. Much like the way Pride and Prejudice is not actually about Mr. Bingley being in want of a wife.
As she is a reading enrichment teacher, I’m going to give Ms. Hollander the benefit of the doubt and assume that she is not stupid and in fact knows this. I suspect her point is that middle grade readers will often miss this, making the book - to them - to be merely about Juli and Bryce’s not-romance. I suspect this not because I want to make up stuff to argue against (although I would disagree with such an opinion) but because it’s the missing bit of logic in her argument about why kids should not be reading such books for summer assignments.
Despite focusing mostly on the pros and cons of various novels the essay is not really about fiction at all, it’s about non-fiction and how we should assign middle and high-schoolers non-fiction for reading over the summer rather than fiction. She seems to be arguing that titles like The Hunger Games do not challenge students enough, while the classics challenge them too much. Or maybe that it’s much more difficult to get the right level of fiction book for each reader without tailoring one’s list to that student? Or maybe it’s simply that she thinks fiction needs more guidance to understand properly?
This is the problem. It’s all very unclear. The essay is a jumbled mess of bad explanations of how kids read, bashing of popular literature...and then a jump right into the conclusion that kids should read non-fiction over the summer.
Which is all very disappointing because I really do think kids should read more non-fiction. I think there are very good reasons for this that are more than simply because boys like it, which is the usual reason given. I also think we should give teachers more time to spend* on how to read it and I think we need more quality non-fiction for youth of all ages. (Although, I note that all of Ms. Hollander’s recommendations would fall under the social sciences. Which seems to be missing half the point of having kids read non-fiction. But I digress.)
What I don’t think we should do is pretend that reading is merely a matter of vocabulary and gaining factual knowledge, which is what Hollander’s poor explanation suggests that it is. Reading is also about language and patterns and themes, things that are present in non-fiction as well as fiction and which, in both, often require a different skill set to decipher and appreciate than merely reading for comprehension. By pretending that The Hunger Games and Flipped are about ideas as simple as their language, Hollander buries the very important fact that complicated themes in a book with a lower reading level can help independent readers develop non-vocabulary, non-world knowledge reading skills.**
We also, as we teach reading non-fiction to students, need to talk about about the difference between non-fiction and fact. Reading non-fiction does not mean that one is using critical thinking to merely decode the words on the page, or apply what we have learned to the world around us - anyone who does it that way is doing it wrong and is vulnerable to becoming misinformed and an uncritical voter. Ms. Hollander discusses whether the students reading these titles will be taking on too heavy of a subject by themselves, but she doesn’t mention anything about discussing with younger readers how to judge and evaluate the veracity of the non-fiction they are reading. A skill that is increased by understanding the literary concepts she fails to assign any importance to.***
Really, Ms. Hollander had it right in the beginning. Any reading is good reading. Not just because any is better than none, but because variety and interest are what is most important. It’s not that middle graders and high schoolers should be reading A Long Way Gone but not Flipped, The Red Badge of Courage but not Smile, The Crucible but not An Inconvenient Truth - it’s that they should be reading all of these titles and genres and levels and literary forms. And thus any good summer reading list should let readers choose from among them - and any good curriculum will include this kind of variety as well.
*I hate it when people say “teachers should” as if the average middle school teacher really has that much leeway in what kind of time they spend on what. Especially concepts that would be a radical departure from the current curriculum. I do think teachers should teach reading non-fiction, but I also think the more relevant issue is that we need to provide them with the tools, the time, and reasons to do so - not simply the requirement.
**For example: Terry Brooks’ Shanarra series. Which we can all agree is pretty shitty writing with basically the same plot over and over. I also loved them in junior high. While it helped that I found them by way of Brin’s story, the repetition of the characters and plot were also a large part of the appeal as well. Expanding my vocabulary - or even improving my reading comprehension in terms of following the plot and picking out facts - this is not what I needed to work on most. What I needed was some time to develop a better understanding of how to recognize themes and get a feel for characterization and character growth - without my teacher walking me through it. Before I could move on to really understanding complicated books when I read them, I needed more practice following the things that were not the plot. Much like a first grader with a badly written easy reader, the repetition and anvilness of the themes in the Shannara books was actually useful to me at the time in terms of developing this skill. They felt more complicated and nuanced to me at the time than they really are because I could see things in them that I still had trouble picking out when I read better and more advanced books. Which I did concurrently. As most readers do.
***The most obvious example being that readers who understand the concept of the unreliable narrator are going to grasp more easily the idea that a non-fiction account can be wrong unintentionally - and that often even in non-fiction there is never just one true version. Also that all the facts can be true, but the sum of them together might still be false.