I Don't Read Very Well

We were discussing Chapter Seven of A Separate Peace in Freshman English last week when suddenly one of my students raised his hand and said, ‘Mr. Clark, I haven’t really read any of this book.’

     I can’t say I was surprised. In the six and a half years I’ve been teaching, there have been many students who have let me know, directly or indirectly, that they haven’t actually read the books they’re supposed to be reading. And they weren’t only freshmen. The funniest example came a few years ago when one senior chose to write about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on his final exam. He praised it highly ‘except for the slaughterhouse scenes, which were too gory.’ (There are no gory scenes in the slaughterhouse, but it sure sounds like there ought to be, doesn’t it?)

     Actually, it isn’t funny at all. It’s hard to teach literature to non-readers. Oh, most of them pass the courses. They’re smart enough to pick up essential information from class discussion, or they read Cliff Notes, or they cheat. They’re not dumb. They just can’t read. In another burst of candor, a girl once complained that she didn’t like the book we were reading because ‘the print is too small and the words are too big and there aren’t any pictures.’

     Whenever this happens, I thank the student for his or her honesty. I make suggestions about how to stay awake while reading. I try the strategies in books on reading comprehension like Strategies That Work or Mosaic of Thought. In fact, I spent last Thursday in a workshop on reading comprehension. It was fascinating and I’m eager to try some new ideas. But even there, the instructor agreed that for students who never learned the basics of reading -- ‘decoding’ is the term used by experts -- strategies for deeper understanding are useless.

     That’s the problem with the boy in Freshman English, I think. I ask each student to stand up in front of the class and read a poem at least once in the quarter, and when he did, he struggled to sound out the words. He got them all right, but there was no fluency. It’s like trying to hit a golf ball by thinking hard about each separate movement. I can assure you from bitter experience that it doesn’t work. It has to flow.

     So what do I do? He’s not the only one in class with this problem. When I asked one of the girls why she hadn’t been handing in the writing assignments that go with each chapter, she admitted, ‘I don’t read very well.’ And another boy wrote a note on his last assignment: ‘Can you help me? I’m not getting this.’

     I’ve offered to stay after school for special tutoring, but they won’t come. I could reconfigure the class into a group of fluent readers who work mostly on their own, while I spend more time with the slow readers. But I don’t know how to teach decoding. It’s a specialized skill. Or I could read the book out loud, stopping to ask questions and model my own reading strategies. I’ve done it with The Odyssey, and I’ll do it again with Romeo and Juliet. But reading aloud won’t help anyone learn to decode.

      One obvious solution is to give those students who have trouble reading a complex novel  something easier to read. But the funny thing is, even those students get something from this book. When we talk about it, they say smart things. Sometimes they understand it best of all.

     I want all my students to be able to submerge themselves in a book, not just because it’s a skill they’ll need for the rest of high school and college, but because I believe it is a matter of life and death. A Separate Peace shows how fear makes us hurt the people we love best, and how often we act on impulses that we regret for the rest of our lives. This is stuff they need to know, and they need to know it now, as adolescents, before one of those impulses wrecks their futures. I’m not sure that a book with bigger print and shorter words and pictures will teach it to them.