I have been an educator now for over 42 years, but I haven’t been an English teacher in almost 25 years—a bittersweet aspect of my career.
Since most of my teaching load now includes first-year and upper-level writing courses, what that means is I haven’t taught literature in a very long time.
In my courses, I do include poetry related to the course content—specifically I share “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes, and “Good Bones,” Maggie Smith, in most courses, and often include Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in education courses—but I am relieved of teaching literature and requiring students to partake in the literary technique hunt.
Instead of analyzing these poems for meaning, I ask students what the poems are saying and how does that matter to them and their experiences.
I am a poet and avid reader so I dearly miss sharing literature with students, although I admit that my high school students initially were not as excited as I was, especially when we started the poetry unit, steeped in the music of alternative group R.E.M.
Having taught teenagers in the rural South for almost two decades—most of the 1980s and 1990s—I can assure you that many young people loved reading and literature (song lyrics adjacent to poetry certainly as well). But formal schooling forced that love to wither or be pushed aside, hidden from the classroom.
I recall many students over the years carying around huge tattered paperback books, but barely passing or even failing English.
That was also me as a teen, reading and collecting comic books while devouring science fiction novels on my own even as I balked at assigned novels and textbook anthology reading.
So when I scrolled past an Instagram clip (above) of Mark Forsyth lamenting the fate of poetry in school, it rang true (see full interview below):
I think poetry, poetry has a problem these days, which I think it gets ruined in school, it gets ruined in education. People think of a poem just as something you have to write an essay about.
While we are currently experiencing yet another moral panic that kids today can’t read and don’t read, we are likely failing to address one of the most harmful experiences students have with poetry and reading—formal schooling.
In fact, the “science of reading” movement is centering decoding and phonics, whitewashing the curriculum, and contributing to the text excerpt analysis fetish that has consumed schools dedicated to raising text scores for over four decades.
Concurrently, conservatives are banning and censoring books, reducing student access to reading anything.
As truisms go, all the adults pointing their fingers at kids today and what they are or aren’t reading have failed to recognize the three fingers pointing back at them.
If there is anything wrong with poetry or reading, it isn’t the children, it isn’t young people.
See Also
The Things Schools Ruin: Poetry Edition
Formal Schooling and the Death of Literacy
Kids can’t read anymore. Does it matter? (with author Jason Reynolds)
If you want to help with the costs of keeping my public work open access and free, please DONATE.
