Assigned Reading: Sell It

I feel like linking our reading of The Sound and the Fury to a question about assigning students readings that are likely to lie outside of their interests assumes that The Sound and the Fury lies outside of our interests. The Sound and the Fury is so right smack-dab at the center of my interests (American literature, America in general, family, time, the pain of the past, etc) that it makes me a little sad, in a class of future English teachers, that our reading The Sound and the Fury could be seen as representative of what it will be like to assign our own students readings they may not at first find interesting, or even find a chore all the way through.

But I think it’s the first assumption that’s a problem, the assumption that the reading we assign will fall outside of our students’ interest. If a teacher truly believes that reading will fall outside of their students’ interest, don’t assign it. But why assume right off the bat that a student won’t find something interesting, just because it is set in another time period or place or the language is complex or it isn’t about someone with a life very similar to their own? Why assume that our students’ interests will be that narrow? I know I sound naïve right now. I am not saying I expect my students to be chomping at the bit to read Hemingway or Shakespeare or Hughes. I am saying I will act as if I do, because I want to sell it.

Some think it is important to acknowledge that students wouldn’t naturally read many of the books we assign them. I’m not sure I agree. I think when teachers announce that they know a text is “dense” or “a slog” or “not what’d you’d read on your own” students begin to believe just that. I wouldn’t want to read a book like that either. In our own class’s reading of The Sound and The Fury I have found it somewhat disheartening to hear so many of our classmates speak negatively of the experience, or even question who Faulkner was writing for. How are we going to get our students excited about reading if we’re not excited ourselves?

Here is what I know: in my own schooling, any time a teacher vocally held the assumption that our class wouldn’t like a book or would find it hard or boring, that assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy (10^th grade English: Beowulf and Chaucer. Chaucer I came to love later with an enthusiastic college professor. Still waiting on the Beowulf). Yet, with many of the most challenging texts I have ever read in a class, when the teacher presented the text as something to be excited about, something that would enrich our understanding of literature and the world, something that may be hard but is beautiful and worth it, somehow those books seemed to lie very much within my interests.

I know I love literature more than the average bear, so my “interests” might be a good bit more accommodating when it comes to reading than my future students, but I also know I’ve got no shot unless I believe I can make them interested. Every book I assign my students, I will start with all the reasons they want to read it. I will assume that it does fall within their interests, insofar as I believe their interests include their own life and family and coming to some understanding of the world around them. If I present the book that way, and do a good job leading them through it, there’s a good chance that will become the truth. Of course that won’t happen every time, but that’s why we’ve got to sell it—if we don’t, it probably won’t happen at all.