The summer reading book for my A.P. Language and Composition class is The Great Gatsby, which in my opinion is the closest thing to a perfect novel that has ever been written. I’ve read this book about twelve times in my life, and every time something new emerges.
When I taught this book in my twenties, I liked to chronicle the arc of Nick’s first party at Gatsby’s, focusing on the purpose of partying in life, the abandonment of the day to day, the momentary invincibility of youth.
In my thirties, I loved teaching the scene where Gatsby is trying to impress the Sloanes and Tom Buchanon, and Nick snidely observes how pathetic Gatsby looks in the face of such arrogance. The short line “As though they cared!” is one of my favorite lines in the book, and I used it to point out how much could be said in such a few words.
Last year when I read this book I was struck by the line: “. . . there is no difference between men, in intelligence or race, as the difference between the sick and the well.” As a man in my forties, who now has to think about things like cancer screenings, this line is much more profound to me than it ever was when I was younger. I sometimes wonder what will resonate when I read this book a decade from now, and am confident that something new will emerge.
When my A.P. Lang students come to class in August, they are usually pretty eager to impress. These are the go-getters, the ones who insist there are “good” colleges and “bad” colleges and they are going to do everything in their power to avoid the bad ones. While the expectation for this class is that students do the required reading, I do get my share of fake-readers, who believe (sometimes correctly) that they can get everything they need to pass an English class from internet resources. But even my actual-readers in this class often believe that the primary purpose for reading is to extract the information that the teacher seems to want so that it can be repeated back in an essay or on a test.
One of the first assignments I give in this class is an evidence-based presentation about a theme or topic in The Great Gatsbythat my students find compelling. While there is so much possibility for this assignment (the love triangle, the affairs, the parties, the car accident, the murder/ suicide, the empty entitlement of white men, and that awfully uncomfortable scene in the Plaza Hotel), I invariably get some student who want to tell me about the colors in the book. This student will go on and on edifying the class about green, yellow and red, about what each one symbolizes, like a teenage lit professor whose mission is to confound and bore. As if colors is what this book is about! This is the type of student who believes that a response to a book should be clever above all else, and that there is “hidden meaning” that needs to be found (generally by looking in the right corners of the internet).
I often cannot tell whether or not these color-symbolists actually read the book, but if they did, they certainly did not read it in the way I wanted. I want them to find the intersections between this book and their own lives, to consider the human condition, to let the book chisel a bit at their worldview. Anything but Sparknotes and Shmoop regurgitations! But I also understand that they have spent much of their school lives being asked for the correct answers, so it makes sense that they would apply this mindset to reading literature as well. I have also come to realize that any time I point out something in the book that I find compelling, that my students make the assumption that my interpretation is the one I eventually want repeated back to me in writing.
Last spring, I spent a day talking to my A.P. Lang students about their reading habits and practices before we began The Scarlet Letter. I made a conscious effort in my messaging to explain that I did not expect them to become experts on their first reading The Scarlet Letter, which is a very challenging book. I also told them that I did not expect them to memorize small details of the novel for a multiple choice reading quiz – I don’t know anyone who reads for the purpose of repeating small details back to someone who might ask. What I wanted the most, I said, was for them to read the book attentively, and for them to have an authentic experience while reading. I wanted them to embrace the struggle of reading a challenging work, and to get better at articulating their own clarifying questions. I wanted to see what they noticed about the book and found relevant and interesting. I wanted them to collaborate and listen to each other’s ideas and use these insights to enhance their own understanding. What I did not want was for them to skip over the struggle and dive into internet resources so that they could mimic someone else’s mastery.
These students and I brainstormed some ways that they could demonstrated this authentic understanding of the book. We came up with some great ideas (like Schoology discussion groups, Spiderweb discussions and Think Tank Sessions), and I also stripped away much of the context building work (or in their eyes “busy work”) that I have traditionally given with this book. There would only be suggestedreading deadlines and no reading quizzes or tests. In the weeks that we read The Scarlet Letter, I was astonished by the high level of engagement. It truly felt like a learning community with students having the freedom to read the book on their own terms, in their own time, and to use each other to clarify and construct meaning. In those days I was busier than ever, running around from group to group sharing my own ideas about this book, but emphasizing the fact that my own ideas were just the ideas of one person. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive, and the vast majority of these students read this book in its entirety. I even had a couple students collaborate to write poetry about how pathetic they found Arthur Dimmesdale!
I don’t know whether this kind of release of responsibility can cross over into every subject in this same way. Teachers still have to teach content, and I don’t imagine that students could learn a chapter of Chemistry entirely on their own. But my greatest takeaway from this experience is that my students were far more engaged when I valued their own authentic understanding, as opposed to mimicking a standard for mastery. I never thought I would see a class full of seventeen-year-olds actually enthusiastic about Nathaniel Hawthorne!
