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| From
the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Field Notes
Middle-school readers hate open-ended endings. They are sure that The Giver ends the way it does because Lois Lowry got tired or ran out of ideas. They often reject historical fiction as “old-fashioned” or “too sad.” Students are capable of dismissing a whole Holocaust unit in two words: “Too sad.” An eighth-grade girl I’m currently tutoring panned Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever as “so sad; everyone died.” But the flip side of the middle-school personality is their unalloyed enthusiasm when they latch on to something they like. They loved Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief when I decided to try it as a class novel two years ago. It became so popular with both boys and girls that I lost control of the book. Everyone raced through the reading and finished way ahead of schedule. They clamored for the sequel, The Sea of Monsters, which was then still in hardcover; I could only afford a few copies, so students kept a list on the board of who got it next. When I scored a couple of advance galleys of the third entry, The Titan’s Curse, they were beside themselves with excitement. Not that every book has to run the gauntlet of middle-school popular opinion, but it does seem that there are enough good books out there that we teachers might actually, occasionally, assign ones that kids want to read. When you hit on a book like The Lightning Thief, you’re helping to turn kids on to reading. When the series is exhausted, students will be back asking, “What else can you recommend?” In other words: You got it right with this one; I’ll trust you to help me find another. And just as they are quick to complain about a poorly chosen class novel, they are also quick to explain what they like in a book: strong plot, quirky characters, mystery, a sense of magic, and a voice that speaks right to them, especially an irreverent almost-teenager’s voice such as Percy Jackson’s. They can point to the class novels they have liked over the years, all having some combination of those traits: Number the Stars; Holes; Maniac Magee; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963. My eighth graders usually like Of Mice and Men, even if they do have reservations about someone who shoots his best friend in the head. And they like To Kill a Mockingbird, The House of the Scorpion, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. I know, I know — how is Night not “too sad”? But somehow the power of an eyewitness account by a boy about their age, the mystery of how Elie will survive, and the brevity of the book trump the “sad” factor. It’s especially important to remember kids’ tastes when designing summer reading lists. We want to promote enthusiasm for reading, not kill it, and I have learned that requiring a particular book for summer reading doesn’t work. Last summer, we asked all students in sixth through eighth grades to read Richard Peck’s A Year Down Yonder to prepare for an author visit in September. Using one simple measure, the assignment was a success: almost everyone did indeed read the book. However, A Year Down Yonder as a book that would bolster our sense of community in the middle school and lead to deep discussions and school-wide activities? Nope. That didn’t happen. Not because of the particular book chosen, but because it was read for school, during summer vacation, with all of the reactions I might have predicted. The strong readers — or at least the dutiful students — read A Year Down Yonder, and many other books as well. Other students gave it a grudging perusal and judged it to be “not their kind of book.” And some students did the familiar school fake-out, giving it a few glances the night before school started, then joining the chorus of complaints about not getting to read what they wanted over the summer, somehow forgetting that they hadn’t read anything else anyway. We never could discuss it effectively, since so many in the community hadn’t read it well enough (that is, nongrudgingly enough) to discuss. Adults are just as bad, though. Our headmaster asks teachers to read a book each summer — Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach — and we act just like the students, with the same range of dutiful reading, pitiful whining, and outright fakery. So I’ve discovered what I should have known all along: it’s better to let summer be summer and encourage kids to read up a storm and follow their own reading enthusiasms. A Year Down Yonder is too good a book to require as summer reading, knowing the reception such required reading receives. If as a teacher you want to read a book together — in school — read it in class and do it right, with good discussions and activities that involve students in reading, writing, thinking, and imagining. Or do it in school as a community-wide read, letting it be voluntary and accompanying it with innovative activities that fire up the enthusiasm of those who have chosen to participate. My next summer reading list will have no required books, only a large choice of books so good that students will actually want to read during vacation. The Twilight series, The Hunger Games, and Brisingr — the hottest books with my students at the moment — will be on the summer reading list. The book I might have put on as a requirement — Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton — I went ahead and taught in my seventh-grade class recently. It’s such a good book that I wanted to teach it well, and students loved it. But they might not have loved it had they been required to read it during the summer. And A Year Down Yonder? I’ll be teaching it again soon.
From the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
hen
it comes to assigned reading, middle-school kids can be an ornery
lot. They’re quick to complain, and they assume you’re
interested in their every opinion. If they decide they don’t
like a book, it’s a bad book; they don’t consider the
many reasons for liking or not liking something. To cover not having
done the reading, Johnny joins in the group dismissal of a book;
better to sound opinionated than appear lazy. Abby likes getting
absorbed in a long, involving read; Katie complains it’s too
long. Sam read the book in front of the TV while texting Sally;
thus he only gathered only the vaguest of what-happened-next information
from the book. He doesn’t like it because he doesn’t
know enough about it to really have an opinion. 
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