Do We Turn Kids Off to Reading and Writing?

I never finished my M.A. in English at Penn State.

Since finally learning to read in fifth grade, I had loved reading fiction and poetry and history. It was after a few years in the Air Force that I did my B.A. in American Studies on the G.I. Bill, took a year off to live in a primitive cabin in the Pennsylvania mountains, and then started work toward my M.A.

My vision of graduate school?

Well, looking back now, all these years later, my vision was a bit crazy. Somehow I imagined it would be somewhat like undergraduate school: We would read and write and discuss in an easygoing atmosphere. Smoke pipes. Wear corduroy sports jackets with patches on the elbows. It would be a kind of Heaven on Earth and, as teaching assistants with our own sections of freshman composition, we would infect our students with our love of the written word.

Indeed, the teaching inspired me and has sustained me. It changed my life.

But the lit seminars? To say that they were ALL shark tanks would be to exaggerate, but some of them in fact were like that. On the whole, the ten-week classes were forced marches through not only nearly everything a given author had written, but also through a great deal of the criticism written about some aspect of the author’s work. All this culminated in a twenty-page scholarly paper. Imagine reading all of Joyce—from the poems and stories through the novels (don’t leave out Finnegan’s Wake!)—then researching and writing about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. In ten weeks, thank you very much.

A Ph. D candidate friend from India used to marvel at this absurd way of doing things. He had done his M. A. in a small elite college in Delhi. The method there had been to choose, say, four seminal poems by John Dunne and study them thoroughly as a way of entering into the rest of Dunne’s work—at the student’s leisure. Interestingly, this method looks a lot like my naïve vision of graduate school. My friend felt our method encouraged the mediocre to rise, the interesting to fall. I’m frankly not so sure he was right, as a number of brilliant friends thrived in that atmosphere.

I did not. The experience nearly put me off literature altogether. In my darkest moments I imagined a satanic conspiracy to drain the lifeblood out of literature and any love we had for it. More likely, the English department was justifying its existence (i.e. funding) to forestry or engineering by demonstrating how hard we worked, how we suffered.

I survived, of course. Eventually the bad taste the experience left in my mouth faded, and my love for reading and writing for its own sake returned. But I sometimes wonder how many students walk around with that bad taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives, how many kids we turn off to literacy. Which begs the question: How best can we turn kids on to reading and writing?

So here are a couple of questions. What good is reading fiction and poetry? What does it do for us? And—maybe most relevant for kidswrite4kids.com, what good does writing the stuff do? How can we turn reluctant readers and writers on and keep them that way? How do we motivate kids to love literature for its own sake?

If you send your thoughts to this blog, I will post the best. Let’s get a conversation going.