This year the John Champe English department will be reading and discussing Workshopping the Canon. I’m excited to learn Mary E. Styslinger’s approach to teaching and supplementing classic texts; last year in AP Language & Composition, I taught several canonical American works. Since it was my first time teaching the course, I tried to keep data on students’ satisfaction with different works. What follows is an analysis of that feedback.
I was inspired to teach texts from the American canon by my AP Summer Institute instructor, who claimed to teach ten classic American texts during her course each year. Her students didn’t read the book at all in class and there were no lessons attached to the books. She would give a (very difficult) test at the end of the novel, then hold a Socratic discussion the next class. The point was to increase students’ reading stamina (especially works 19th century and later) and increase their scope of literary references they could use on the test. I entered the school year in August 2018 ready to adopt this model.
During the fall semester my colleague and I assigned four books: The Catcher in the Rye, Puddin’head Wilson, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Great Gatsby. At the conclusion of each work (once the test and Socratic were complete), I asked students in each class (a total of 52 students) to offer their anonymous opinion about how they enjoyed the work, using the AP measuring-stick of 1 to 9, with 9 being the best.
The average rating for J.D. Salinger’s ode to the horrors of being a teenager was 6.333, with a median score of 7. During the Socratic discussion, most students indicated that they were pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoyed the book and sympathized with Holden. Close to a quarter of students were not as charmed. Overall, I was optimistic about the experience. My colleague and I decided to challenge our students with the next work, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.
They hated it. Students gave Twain’s comic tale of mistaken identities an average score of 4.2, with a median of 3. During the Socratic, a minority of students said they enjoyed it much more than Catcher, and throughout the year would single it out as their favorite work. But most of them hated it. And while their distaste in the book was pretty unified, their reasons were varied: the plot was corny, the dialogue was difficult to understand, the narrator was ponderous. I think part of their ire was due to time-management: many waited until the weekend before the test to cram the whole book, and many were thrown off by Pudd’nhead’s intricate plot and considerable cast of characters. I should mention that our test asked students to identify quotes from the book, who is speaking, to whom they were speaking, and the significance of the quote itself. Judging from the test scores, they did indeed read the book. They just didn’t like it.
I read the novella for the first time that summer, and I was truly surprised at the overwhelmingly negative response. I told my students to be happy I hadn’t assigned Huck Finn. Then again, I wonder if they would have found that much closer to Catcher in the voice of the narrator, the unpredictable unspooling of the plot as Huck and Jim travel along the river.
My colleague and I decided to pivot to theater.
A perfect play for a class focused on the art of rhetoric, A Raisin in the Sun was received much more warmly than its predecessor. My students scored Lorraine Hansberry’s play an average of 6.66 with a median of 7, slightly higher numbers than Catcher. While I told students to base their rating solely on their experience reading the work, not the length (it can be pretty easily read in one sitting), I’m pretty sure some liked it for its relative brevity. That said, the Socratic discussions for this book were particularly enriching. Very few students at Champe are lifelong residents of Loudoun County. They found much to identify in the characters’ struggles to play nice in that cramped apartment, the questioning of racial identity, the lengths one will go in pursuit of a dream.
We continued that theme of dream-seeking with our next book.
For this survey I only received forty responses — I must have given it close to a holiday when I had a lot of students absent. The responses I have, though, offer a pretty compelling case for Gatsby’s persistence in the American canon: my students gave Fitzgerald’s extremely relatable novella about rich Ivy League graduates traipsing around post-World War I Long Island an average score of 6.66 with a median of 7.
I blame the movie. I think the scores would be much lower if students didn’t have the DiCaprio film to guide them and color their perception of the themes. I’m ambivalent about Gatsby’s vaunted status in the canon. But you can’t argue with success; the Socratics for this book were passionate and engaging, students investing a lot of emotion in the merits of Daisy, Tom, and the rest of the gang.
That was the final book we read as a whole class. During the spring semester our three books were lit circles — memoirs, issue books, and classic American novel. Students wrote analysis papers in place of a reading test, and created presentations in place of whole-class Socratics. The out-of-class papers were especially productive in boosting student performance on their in-class timed writes. This year we will probably follow a similar model for most of out-of-class reading. I have respect for the methods of my AP summer instructor, but for what we have to accomplish, with the classes of our size, you have to prioritize the workload you place on your students (and yourself).
I have an open mind about what books we should teach, how we should teach them, and why we should teach them. One of my biggest arguments for reading classic texts is to have as full a view of our culture as possible. Just as skills are progressively built upon in science and math, a healthy appreciation of literature, I believe, requires a sturdy foundation in the classics. A book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Modern works often reference and comment, implicitly or explicitly, on works that came before it. And while not all classic texts are going to touch your soul, at the very least it should cause you to ask the question: what made this a classic, and why is still considered a canonical text?
I hope Workshopping the Canon will provide extra support for providing students with a fulfilling reading experience in my class.