As a middle school librarian who considers it MY first and foremost responsibility to instill a love of reading in my students (and who centers literacy above technology and research at every turn), I fully support every word of this ❤️ Also, can we have more NFL players reading on the sidelines please? That seems to move the needle ….
Sara, this is so so good. Can I just offer that the texts I remember most and still love to this day came from my drama classes. We did table reads of plays each semester (Shakespeare, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Lynn Nottage etc.) and this speaks to your point about reading in other classes. Likewise, I read INTO THIN AIR as extra credit for Earth Science class, and as you know Jon Krakauer is on my Mt. Rushmore.
Thanks so much for your thoughts on this! As an avid reader myself it’s hard to understand why not everyone loves it, but as you said the classroom is not filled with little “me”’s. And I never thought about the aspect of other subjects teachers not being expected to make the kids love that subject, so true!
I’ve never been a teacher but as a parent have always wanted my kids to love reading. I was so excited when they both seemed to love reading (although the older one more so). Then my youngest suddenly stopped reading altogether about the time she turned 15. She is my sportsy daughter and is much more focused on sports which is fine - but it was just surprising to me because she used to really enjoy reading. I’m just trying to remember that everyone is different and she doesn’t have to love reading to be ok, lol. She just turned 17 now and while her older sister is still an avid reader, my youngest hasn’t read through a book voluntarily in the past two years! But I figure she’ll find what works best for her and might even come back to it some day later on.
That's such a good point...it's really difficult for us as avid readers to understand why someone wouldn't want to!! I'm sure your daughter will come back to books at some point, but teens are so so busy!!
I still think it is the parent’s job to guide a student. No teacher is going to make a student love anything, unless that student wants to pursue that interest, i.e reading, math, etc…
As an elementary teacher I feel this - the kids who read at home, or even just listen to parents read aloud, have richer vocab, imagination, connection building skills and are often funnier too! Idk if it's correlation with other family values or causation but parents are usually the deal-breakers, no matter how good the teachers are!
Thank you for writing this. I agree with every word! I was a high school English teacher many years ago and I took 15 years off to be a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom and piano teacher. Now I'm back in the classroom, teaching middle school English. I could write several diatribes about how it's the phones, it's TikTok, it's so many things....but it really does boil down to the fact that we have a bunch of individuals in our classroom, some who will become readers and some who won't, and that fact is not new. I have the unusual position of being a new teacher all over again while knowing some adults I taught many years ago. Some of them tell me I made them love Shakespeare! Some tell me I made them understand literary analysis and how to apply an analytical eye to other forms of art. Others tell me they're still mad 18 years later that I made them read Lord of the Flies! The biggest change, of course, is attention span and the fact that we're so distanced from NARRATIVE now. Most kids don't even watch TV shows with an ongoing story. They watch 30-second videos. I could talk about this all day.
You the one with actual parenting experience! I know things said in childlessness count for nothing haha! And obviously it's harder because all our social lives are online too
Brilliant! Definitely agree with what you said about libraries too. I used to volunteer at my kids' elementary school library and thought about getting my masters in library science. The teachers there said don't bother unless you want to be a glorified IT specialist. I'm sure it's not like that everywhere, but I think shows a trend that's part of a bigger pattern.
Yes! I think it's like that in many places and while I think that's an important role too, so many school librarians enter that role because they love books, not necessarily technology. We should be harnessing that! We put a lot on librarians' plates and often undervalue them.
Oh dear! That’s not the case at all in my district and library, but I know it is elsewhere. I’m sorry 😞 The day I have to focus more on technology than literacy is the day I plan my exit from the library.
I’m behind in my newsletter reading because life has been LIFING, but Sara, this was excellent. Thank you for getting on your soapbox, because I always love what you have to say when you’re up there. 💜
I agree with so much of what you write here, especially the bit about librarians. Helping kids love reading IS literally my job -- yes, we librarians do other things as well, but the literacy piece is where we excel. My favorite part of my job is helping a student who doesn't love to read find the books they like!
As a side note, I also had a hugh school teacher named Mr. Pucci -- he taught French and Italian!
I relate to so much of this, especially the part where you posit that teens are too busy to read, not that they loose their love of it. I’ve for sure experienced that with my 17 and 19 year olds. They also lament shorter attention spans when phones and quick TikTok fixes are more exciting. However they both still love a good story, and my youngest especially is really enjoying the discussions she’s having in AP lit…they are helping rekindle her joy of reading and really digging into a text. I remain so thankful for everyone working with students…it’s such a hard job, especially now.
This is validating! And it's so interesting to know that your kids recognize this in themselves...so self aware! I really believe AP English classes are incredible. Even for students who don't love the subject, I think the AP classes are tremendously valuable in terms of what they focus on and how they approach reading and writing. I'm so glad to hear your daughter is benefitting from it!
Wow I really enjoyed this Sara! And I have never thought about the narrative around English Teachers being responsible for an adults love for reading -- but that same attitude is not applied to Maths teachers or language teachers?! Do you think it might be a gendered assumption too? That (very broad stroking, very big generalisation) there are on average more female English teachers than men?
This is such an interesting question, Martha! I hadn't thought about it, maybe because the department I taught in was pretty equally split in terms of male and female teachers. And the male teachers were BELOVED. But I think you might be onto something. I think the entire field of English is somewhat "feminized" in that we associate more with feelings and intuition than math, science, history, etc. I'm going to keep thinking about your questions!
Excellent article, Sara. I wish we could get away from all the fingerpointing and our very strong desire for their to be one "cause" for our complex challenges. Teachers are so often sacrificed and it is unfair and inaccurate. Parents, too. It's never just one thing, take 3 steps back and one can see that there is so much more to picture.
YES! I don't many people like confronting complexity, hence the fingerpointing. There are so many things making education challenging right now and we have to consider them all if we're going to make things better.
This is an important and glorious essay and i need to be less tired to fully appreciate it. Cheers to you and thank you in advance for what i will glean on a second reading!
I find this really interesting because I am highly attuned to concerns about reading, writing, and critical thinking in our education system (and, by definition, the workplace once students end up there). Most of what I hear about this in my own life is from teachers themselves, especially high school and college level who feel that the problem is in place well before students get to them.
For me, personally, I am concerned about how the entire educational system is structured and how effectively it is integrating source material (including books!) and writing and thinking (all of which are intricately intertwined!), and the gaps in those areas are well established by the time they ever get an English teacher who is specialized. And yes to culture, parenting, tech/entertainment, and other huge influencing factors here.
To be honest, even just two of things you list as your goal as a high school English teacher (long-term)-- "...write clearly and effectively within their chosen field, and apply the critical and analytical thinking we did in my classroom..." -- are the gold standard right there to me. If I felt confidently that most teachers shared those goals and were effective at and empowered to work toward them (duly noting it remains a very difficult task across a wide population of students) I would feel wonderful! This is exactly what I want as a parent and a citizen and an employer. Those are the skills that are at the heart of teaching and learning in my mind, and that is what all teacher training, teacher management, curriculum, policy, funding and all other educational supports should be in place to create as an outcome on the humanities/english/social sciences front (I'll leave scientific method and math and SEL for someone else to spiral about).
As a (related) aside, I just learned that our middle school english teachers are contracting out the grading and feedback of written work and I'll be honest, despite not being a teacher myself (although I'm married to a professor who considers his personalized feedback on written work to be the most intensive and meaningful of his teaching tools) I am aghast. I do wonder, ultimately, if in service to making the job more manageable in the day to day to day of the present we are undermining the case for why we need a human teacher in the classroom at all (and I know plenty of venture capital has been flowing for a long time toward the end of the answer to that being no). I'm worried. I don't think my kids are getting a great education even in an excellent, well resourced public school system, and I don't see any reason to expect it to get better.
Thank you for this response, Jessica! Yes I'm biased but I completely agree that those big picture goals are the most important aspects of education hands down. I wish we could restructure schools so that literature and composition were two different classes and so other subjects focused more on these goals as well. Perhaps we also need to rethink some of our short term learning objectives as well (how important is it really to be able to recognize a chiasmus beyond the AP Lang exam?).
That's interesting that most of what you hear is now saying this trend begins before high school. That makes sense to me especially coming out of the pandemic. I stopped teaching in 2020 and I know things have changed drastically since then. I worry about our educators...it is such a tough time to be a teacher. Basically, I am in total agreement that we need to rethink a lot about education, I am just so tired of how much flack English teachers in particular get.
As for grading outsourcing...that blows my mind! I have never heard of such a thing. Is it outsourced to humans or AI? Either way, I cannot imagine doing my job if I wasn't consistently reading student work and providing feedback. Grading is a huge burden, but I'm inclined to agree with your husband that thoughtful feedback is one of the most useful teaching tools. I would always create assignments that either encouraged or fully required students to read my feedback too, and they were almost always given the opportunity to rewrite, which is very useful for learning. This is another reason to make reading and writing two separate classes rather than a combined language arts in middle school. Reading and writing are too important to get shortchanged!
Loved reading this! At the start, I was thinking specifically of the Atlantic and appreciated the name check, lol.
My high school English courses were divided into British and American literature, sophomore and junior year. I was an avid reader and creative writer and I thrived in both classes. I had an English teacher who encouraged my writing (and provided a reference for a university poetry competition I later placed in!) But she wasn't warm and cuddly a la Robin Williams, and I remember knowing even as a teenager how hungry I was for a bond like that. For a while I felt like I missed out, that had I had that mentor-type bond with her I would've "done more."
But as I got older I realized how untrue that was. Did I need that "bond" to become a better essayist? I used her essay outlines into graduate school, would I have done that "more" if we'd bonded? Would I have loved those novels and poems more if we'd been closer? That was a relationship I would've liked as a young person, but I didn't need it to be taught (and taught well!) by my English teacher. You articulate all the ways we romanticize English as a subject and profession and as much as we'd all like to think we're immune to those thoughts and images, we're not. I wasn't!
I loved hearing about your experience in English class! It is so true that many of us expect our teachers (especially our English teachers!) to be everything for us. It's also a challenge because of course personality comes into play. We may have a fantastic teacher but, for whatever reason, our personalities clash. I'm glad you had an English teacher who helped you so much into college and beyond. Sounds like she was doing good work!!
This is what I’ve been thinking recently- such a well articulated argument. Some students will never enjoy reading too in the same way that some people will never enjoy running. Imagine if there was a ‘running for pleasure’ initiative. I, for one, would not be on board if it was suggested that ‘in order to love running, you should just do more’! But all students can get on board if they can see the value of it. Other subjects are rarely discussed in the same way. Great post.
As a middle school librarian who considers it MY first and foremost responsibility to instill a love of reading in my students (and who centers literacy above technology and research at every turn), I fully support every word of this ❤️ Also, can we have more NFL players reading on the sidelines please? That seems to move the needle ….
Yes!! Lots more of that!
Sara, this is so so good. Can I just offer that the texts I remember most and still love to this day came from my drama classes. We did table reads of plays each semester (Shakespeare, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Lynn Nottage etc.) and this speaks to your point about reading in other classes. Likewise, I read INTO THIN AIR as extra credit for Earth Science class, and as you know Jon Krakauer is on my Mt. Rushmore.
I think it's so cool that your teachers did this! And clearly it worked!!
Thanks so much for your thoughts on this! As an avid reader myself it’s hard to understand why not everyone loves it, but as you said the classroom is not filled with little “me”’s. And I never thought about the aspect of other subjects teachers not being expected to make the kids love that subject, so true!
I’ve never been a teacher but as a parent have always wanted my kids to love reading. I was so excited when they both seemed to love reading (although the older one more so). Then my youngest suddenly stopped reading altogether about the time she turned 15. She is my sportsy daughter and is much more focused on sports which is fine - but it was just surprising to me because she used to really enjoy reading. I’m just trying to remember that everyone is different and she doesn’t have to love reading to be ok, lol. She just turned 17 now and while her older sister is still an avid reader, my youngest hasn’t read through a book voluntarily in the past two years! But I figure she’ll find what works best for her and might even come back to it some day later on.
That's such a good point...it's really difficult for us as avid readers to understand why someone wouldn't want to!! I'm sure your daughter will come back to books at some point, but teens are so so busy!!
I still think it is the parent’s job to guide a student. No teacher is going to make a student love anything, unless that student wants to pursue that interest, i.e reading, math, etc…
As an elementary teacher I feel this - the kids who read at home, or even just listen to parents read aloud, have richer vocab, imagination, connection building skills and are often funnier too! Idk if it's correlation with other family values or causation but parents are usually the deal-breakers, no matter how good the teachers are!
I totally believe this too, Joanne! But I also hope that teachers can be equalizers for the kids who don't come for literacy rich homes!
Thank you for writing this. I agree with every word! I was a high school English teacher many years ago and I took 15 years off to be a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom and piano teacher. Now I'm back in the classroom, teaching middle school English. I could write several diatribes about how it's the phones, it's TikTok, it's so many things....but it really does boil down to the fact that we have a bunch of individuals in our classroom, some who will become readers and some who won't, and that fact is not new. I have the unusual position of being a new teacher all over again while knowing some adults I taught many years ago. Some of them tell me I made them love Shakespeare! Some tell me I made them understand literary analysis and how to apply an analytical eye to other forms of art. Others tell me they're still mad 18 years later that I made them read Lord of the Flies! The biggest change, of course, is attention span and the fact that we're so distanced from NARRATIVE now. Most kids don't even watch TV shows with an ongoing story. They watch 30-second videos. I could talk about this all day.
Yes, attention span is a huge factor! If I ever become a parent I think I'll be the biggest luddite when it comes to devices 🙈
I tried for a while, but my kids are on screens a LOT (they're 16 and 10).
You the one with actual parenting experience! I know things said in childlessness count for nothing haha! And obviously it's harder because all our social lives are online too
Brilliant! Definitely agree with what you said about libraries too. I used to volunteer at my kids' elementary school library and thought about getting my masters in library science. The teachers there said don't bother unless you want to be a glorified IT specialist. I'm sure it's not like that everywhere, but I think shows a trend that's part of a bigger pattern.
Yes! I think it's like that in many places and while I think that's an important role too, so many school librarians enter that role because they love books, not necessarily technology. We should be harnessing that! We put a lot on librarians' plates and often undervalue them.
Oh dear! That’s not the case at all in my district and library, but I know it is elsewhere. I’m sorry 😞 The day I have to focus more on technology than literacy is the day I plan my exit from the library.
I’m behind in my newsletter reading because life has been LIFING, but Sara, this was excellent. Thank you for getting on your soapbox, because I always love what you have to say when you’re up there. 💜
Thanks, Deedi! I'll be climbing back up here sometime soon I'm sure lol
I agree with so much of what you write here, especially the bit about librarians. Helping kids love reading IS literally my job -- yes, we librarians do other things as well, but the literacy piece is where we excel. My favorite part of my job is helping a student who doesn't love to read find the books they like!
As a side note, I also had a hugh school teacher named Mr. Pucci -- he taught French and Italian!
Yes!! Librarians are heroes! We need them!
I relate to so much of this, especially the part where you posit that teens are too busy to read, not that they loose their love of it. I’ve for sure experienced that with my 17 and 19 year olds. They also lament shorter attention spans when phones and quick TikTok fixes are more exciting. However they both still love a good story, and my youngest especially is really enjoying the discussions she’s having in AP lit…they are helping rekindle her joy of reading and really digging into a text. I remain so thankful for everyone working with students…it’s such a hard job, especially now.
This is validating! And it's so interesting to know that your kids recognize this in themselves...so self aware! I really believe AP English classes are incredible. Even for students who don't love the subject, I think the AP classes are tremendously valuable in terms of what they focus on and how they approach reading and writing. I'm so glad to hear your daughter is benefitting from it!
Wow I really enjoyed this Sara! And I have never thought about the narrative around English Teachers being responsible for an adults love for reading -- but that same attitude is not applied to Maths teachers or language teachers?! Do you think it might be a gendered assumption too? That (very broad stroking, very big generalisation) there are on average more female English teachers than men?
This is such an interesting question, Martha! I hadn't thought about it, maybe because the department I taught in was pretty equally split in terms of male and female teachers. And the male teachers were BELOVED. But I think you might be onto something. I think the entire field of English is somewhat "feminized" in that we associate more with feelings and intuition than math, science, history, etc. I'm going to keep thinking about your questions!
I loved your goals about how what you want your students to remember in 5 years, Sarah.
Thank you!
Excellent article, Sara. I wish we could get away from all the fingerpointing and our very strong desire for their to be one "cause" for our complex challenges. Teachers are so often sacrificed and it is unfair and inaccurate. Parents, too. It's never just one thing, take 3 steps back and one can see that there is so much more to picture.
YES! I don't many people like confronting complexity, hence the fingerpointing. There are so many things making education challenging right now and we have to consider them all if we're going to make things better.
This is an important and glorious essay and i need to be less tired to fully appreciate it. Cheers to you and thank you in advance for what i will glean on a second reading!
Thank you!
I find this really interesting because I am highly attuned to concerns about reading, writing, and critical thinking in our education system (and, by definition, the workplace once students end up there). Most of what I hear about this in my own life is from teachers themselves, especially high school and college level who feel that the problem is in place well before students get to them.
For me, personally, I am concerned about how the entire educational system is structured and how effectively it is integrating source material (including books!) and writing and thinking (all of which are intricately intertwined!), and the gaps in those areas are well established by the time they ever get an English teacher who is specialized. And yes to culture, parenting, tech/entertainment, and other huge influencing factors here.
To be honest, even just two of things you list as your goal as a high school English teacher (long-term)-- "...write clearly and effectively within their chosen field, and apply the critical and analytical thinking we did in my classroom..." -- are the gold standard right there to me. If I felt confidently that most teachers shared those goals and were effective at and empowered to work toward them (duly noting it remains a very difficult task across a wide population of students) I would feel wonderful! This is exactly what I want as a parent and a citizen and an employer. Those are the skills that are at the heart of teaching and learning in my mind, and that is what all teacher training, teacher management, curriculum, policy, funding and all other educational supports should be in place to create as an outcome on the humanities/english/social sciences front (I'll leave scientific method and math and SEL for someone else to spiral about).
As a (related) aside, I just learned that our middle school english teachers are contracting out the grading and feedback of written work and I'll be honest, despite not being a teacher myself (although I'm married to a professor who considers his personalized feedback on written work to be the most intensive and meaningful of his teaching tools) I am aghast. I do wonder, ultimately, if in service to making the job more manageable in the day to day to day of the present we are undermining the case for why we need a human teacher in the classroom at all (and I know plenty of venture capital has been flowing for a long time toward the end of the answer to that being no). I'm worried. I don't think my kids are getting a great education even in an excellent, well resourced public school system, and I don't see any reason to expect it to get better.
Thank you for this response, Jessica! Yes I'm biased but I completely agree that those big picture goals are the most important aspects of education hands down. I wish we could restructure schools so that literature and composition were two different classes and so other subjects focused more on these goals as well. Perhaps we also need to rethink some of our short term learning objectives as well (how important is it really to be able to recognize a chiasmus beyond the AP Lang exam?).
That's interesting that most of what you hear is now saying this trend begins before high school. That makes sense to me especially coming out of the pandemic. I stopped teaching in 2020 and I know things have changed drastically since then. I worry about our educators...it is such a tough time to be a teacher. Basically, I am in total agreement that we need to rethink a lot about education, I am just so tired of how much flack English teachers in particular get.
As for grading outsourcing...that blows my mind! I have never heard of such a thing. Is it outsourced to humans or AI? Either way, I cannot imagine doing my job if I wasn't consistently reading student work and providing feedback. Grading is a huge burden, but I'm inclined to agree with your husband that thoughtful feedback is one of the most useful teaching tools. I would always create assignments that either encouraged or fully required students to read my feedback too, and they were almost always given the opportunity to rewrite, which is very useful for learning. This is another reason to make reading and writing two separate classes rather than a combined language arts in middle school. Reading and writing are too important to get shortchanged!
I’m in the process of finding out re: the outsourced grading. For sure it is using a rubric with canned comments tied to “categories” of feedback.
Loved reading this! At the start, I was thinking specifically of the Atlantic and appreciated the name check, lol.
My high school English courses were divided into British and American literature, sophomore and junior year. I was an avid reader and creative writer and I thrived in both classes. I had an English teacher who encouraged my writing (and provided a reference for a university poetry competition I later placed in!) But she wasn't warm and cuddly a la Robin Williams, and I remember knowing even as a teenager how hungry I was for a bond like that. For a while I felt like I missed out, that had I had that mentor-type bond with her I would've "done more."
But as I got older I realized how untrue that was. Did I need that "bond" to become a better essayist? I used her essay outlines into graduate school, would I have done that "more" if we'd bonded? Would I have loved those novels and poems more if we'd been closer? That was a relationship I would've liked as a young person, but I didn't need it to be taught (and taught well!) by my English teacher. You articulate all the ways we romanticize English as a subject and profession and as much as we'd all like to think we're immune to those thoughts and images, we're not. I wasn't!
I loved hearing about your experience in English class! It is so true that many of us expect our teachers (especially our English teachers!) to be everything for us. It's also a challenge because of course personality comes into play. We may have a fantastic teacher but, for whatever reason, our personalities clash. I'm glad you had an English teacher who helped you so much into college and beyond. Sounds like she was doing good work!!
This is what I’ve been thinking recently- such a well articulated argument. Some students will never enjoy reading too in the same way that some people will never enjoy running. Imagine if there was a ‘running for pleasure’ initiative. I, for one, would not be on board if it was suggested that ‘in order to love running, you should just do more’! But all students can get on board if they can see the value of it. Other subjects are rarely discussed in the same way. Great post.