While reading chapters 1 and 5 of Pernille Ripp’s Passionate Readers, I found myself turning a critical eye on my own methods of teaching reading and literature or, I should say, my methods of teaching reading and literature to young adult learners. I make this shift in wording to reflect the shift in focus and mindset Ripp is calling for all English teachers to make in our classrooms. Out of these two entire chapters, what resonated with me most was Ripp’s reminder that “there is a difference between covering content and teaching students” (90-91). As I read through Ripp’s descriptions of the methods she used to employ to teach reading in her middle-school classroom but has since abandoned, I couldn’t help but notice significant similarities between her old strategies and the practices I used most often in my own tenth-grade classroom. These practices emanated from a focus on content above all else, even above the goal of encouraging and empowering students to love reading. Ripp’s list of the practices she implemented in her classroom, prior to using her students’ feedback to re-evaluate and reshape her methods, could easily have been a list of my own teaching practices. Just like Ripp, I told students what books to read, assigned packets of comprehension questions (most of which were embarrassingly simple, e.g. “Who discovers the conch shell the boys use to announce assemblies in Lord of the Flies?”), required that students write out a certain number of annotations as they read (and turn them in to be checked), and discussed the novels we read almost exclusively in a teacher-led, whole-class manner.
As I think about why these seem to have been my default teaching strategies, I remember that this is exactly what we did in my own high school English classes. While my classmates and I were provided ample opportunities to select our own books in elementary and middle school, this freedom was promptly withdrawn upon our entering high school. And as I look back, I wonder if that change in teaching strategies may be the reason why I can easily name several elementary and middle school English teachers who I loved but find myself at a loss to identify a high school teacher who was able to kindle my love of reading in the same way as those earlier classroom experiences, where my freedom and choice as a reader were nurtured.
As I reflect on my teaching choices, I can see that I placed much more emphasis on my students’ reading the books I selected than on their finding books that excited them and developing a regular practice of reading. I see that I approached my teaching with a strong tendency towards being in control, deciding unilaterally what and how my students read, wrote and discussed in my classroom. I am also realizing that this very urge to control, to tell my students what to read rather than allowing them freedom of choice, only required me to exert more and more control. Because I assigned books to my students without taking their interests into account, I also had to make them complete packets of comprehension questions and a prescribed number of annotations because I knew that they would not read the books I had chosen, unless they knew that not reading would hurt their grades. Thus, my decision to force my students to read particular books led to my goading them to do many other, less than meaningful tasks, just to demonstrate that they read the books they didn’t want to read in the first place.
Miss Harrell Reads 