Do you like to read? Do you ever read for fun on your own? If so, what are your favorite kinds of books? If not, do you remember a time when you enjoyed reading?
Now think about the reading you do for school. Do your teachers tend to assign whole books, or just excerpts from novels or nonfiction works? When was the last time you remember reading a whole book for school that you enjoyed or learned from?
In a recent essay for the Opinion section, Tim Donahue, who has taught high school English for decades, pleads: “Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives.” Here is how he begins:
In her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”
Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.
It’s easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok’s corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.
The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.
The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.
Later in the essay, Mr. Donohue describes today’s English classrooms and how they have changed from the past, when teachers assigned full books more frequently. He writes:
What might have been a full read of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.
Going mostly by summary and assumption, students get thumbnail versions of things. They see the Cartesian grid, the lines on a map that chart the ocean, but they “don’t see the waves,” as the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently said about the reality in which many seem to be living in now. They see “the metrics that can be measured rather than the reality that those metrics are simply trying to approximate.” He is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed about losing the “in-between, this connective reality.”
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
According to a survey linked in this article, only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day. Are you part of that 14 percent? If so, what do you read? If not, did you ever read for fun? What inspired you then, and how has that changed?
Do you agree with Mr. Donahue that there is value in reading whole books and fully “entering the life of someone you’ll never meet”? If so, have you ever had an experience like that with a book, whether in childhood or recently?
If you don’t think there is value in reading whole books, what experiences, for you, bring meaning? For instance, do you think digital interactions, like scrolling social media or playing video games, can be just as meaningful?
Do your teachers tend to assign whole works, or do they do as this writer describes and assign only pieces of a text?
In general, how have you felt about the reading you’ve been assigned in school? Have those works been relevant to you and your life? What books have you especially enjoyed? What books have you not enjoyed?
Have you had any memorable experiences discussing a work of literature in class? In the essay, Mr. Donahue describes a classroom conversation about a work of fiction and says that discussions like that can become a part of forming a teenager’s identity. Have you ever read and discussed a book in school that somehow became a part of who you are or changed how you think?
If you could recommend a book everyone your age should read for fun, what would it be? Why?
If you could recommend a book that every high school English teacher should teach, what would it be? Why?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
