JOANNE
PAYLING
Diary #15
Breaching the Culture Gates
Jim Trelease called me a Cultural Gatekeeper. I don't think he meant it as a compliment.
It happened like this. My classes were assigned their first independent reading, with an "accounting" due after the holidays. As a former librarian and an avid reader, I am a firm believer in pleasure reading, the more the better. As an English teacher, I know that the more my students read, the better they will read, and the better they will be able to express themselves, both verbally and in writing.
Unfortunately, this first semester has kept me so swamped that I haven't addressed the issue of reading a book outside of class. But, finally, the time has arrived.
Believing I was being very liberal by not requiring my students to read a novel of any specified length, I nonetheless stiffened when one girl asked if she could read Nancy Drew. I immediately replied, "No, that isn't good literature. Those books have been churned out in cookie-cutter format since I was young. No, please find something of higher literary quality." There, I'd done my bit for raising the bar and expecting the best, right? Wrong.
An advocate for Nancy Drew
That evening I stumbled upon a Jim Trelease website. Trelease writes convincingly in favor of children reading series books if they want to, both the commercial, multi-author ones like Nancy Drew or Goosebumps, and the higher quality series like Harry Potter or the Narnia Chronicles.
Why? Because
kids read them! What do we want kids to do? Read, right? Why deny them
the very books that are hooking them on reading? Trelease notes, "...Certainly
these books make a 'pleasure' connection with the child...humans seldom
do something over and over unless it brings repeated pleasures. Pleasure
is the 'glue' that holds us to a particular activity."
.
I was beginning to feel rather sheepish about my knee-jerk reaction to
Nancy Drew. Trelease was right. Reading has to be pleasurable or children
will simply refuse to partake. He further convinced me when he went on
to discuss the research of Dr. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, a professor of
library and information science at the University of Western Ontario,
Canada. His summary of some of her findings follows:
"A study of 11- and 12-year olds' reading habits showed they chose series books because they were easier to find and they already knew something about the book (the characters, setting). With this advance knowledge, they had a head start on the reading. Dr. Ross' research shows that young readers frequently complain about the difficulty in getting started in a new book, wading through the early chapters and characters. In a familiar series, this difficulty is averted. This 'instant start' instead of frustration plays a large role in luring that student into regular reading."
That certainly makes sense to me. Come to think of it, (shhhh, don't tell
anyone) I read every Bobbsey Twins, every Nancy Drew, and every Ramona
Quimby book written when I was young. As an adult I am impatiently awaiting
the fifth Harry Potter addition.
And here I am a teacher with a master's degree, still an avid reader, but having stretched my literary tastes to include favorites such as Jane Eyre, King Rat, Sophie's Choice, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, and The Screwtape Letters. Quite a disparate and literary list, that. Did my youthful mass market series reading harm me? I don't think so.
I kept reading what Jim had to say: "Ross found 'series books' to be the uncontested favorite of young readers for the last 100 years, but acknowledges they have long been the object of scorn by the cultural gatekeepers -- teachers and librarians."Uh oh. Guilty as charged. But not any more. The next day in class I announced that series books would be acceptable. And they are.
Do I wish all my students would select Dickens or Steinbeck or at least Paulsen or Creech? Sure I do. But perhaps by lightening the perceived burden of reading, some of my students will discover the joy of reading and become the lifelong learners we all want them to be.
It isn't so very hard giving up my role as Cultural Gatekeeper, after all.
