I was book-napped this weekend. As an English teacher this is an occupational hazard. I often open a book, crawl into the pages and find that I cannot leave until I have reached the end of the story.
This time feels different.
The book in question - More Than This was written by Patrick Ness. He is a writer who asks important questions and then waits... leaving space for you to fill in some answers. Or ask more questions.
Book-napped as I was, caught under the duvet with a monster cup of builder's tea, I went with him for the ride. Arrogantly, I assumed that this young novel was not for me or about me. This was getting down with the kids, researching the world through a younger imagination, cutting and gleaning material for lessons on the way. Always, always a teacher.
More Than This starts at an end. The teenage protagonist is dying and by the end of page two he is dead. When he awakens on page three, he does not know where he is. Neither do we - and the rest of the novel is an enquiry. Patrick Ness invites us in and through his characters to work it out for ourselves and he does not give you all the answers. You realise after a while that you are asking yourself the same kinds of questions that you are reading about. Suddenly, this is not just entertainment. You are no longer a passenger but an active part of the metaphor. You are the story.
Putting the book down, you have a hangover of questions working through your system. The process of reading the book has changed things slightly, like an ink wash running across a blank sheet of paper. It is subtle but things will never quite be the same.
We no longer teach English through story. Our teenagers are being marshalled through a sanitised and edited tour of of the highlights without ever heading off the path to discover their own imaginative landscapes. I recently asked an A level English Literature class to audit their own reading for pleasure in preparation for a comparative literature project. Most of the books they read for their GCSE exam. A A level group! They had not worked out for themselves the rules of the story they were discovering for themselves. They had only followed the path I had given them. Not a bad thing in itself, but they are missing out.
Schools increasingly are the only place that our children are encountering books. I work in a city that is planning to close all of its libraries and in a school that does not have a library. The many books in my classroom come from charity shops and my own shelves and I give them away. The opportunities to find something you may never have come across before are limited. A book recommended by a teacher will never be as good as the same book you have found for yourself. As Anthony Horowitz, writer of the Alex Rider series, points out "The last thing we need is people banging on to children about how they should read. We just need to make sure that all schools have a library."
My students are not reading for fun. Maybe it is a teenage thing, but I worry...
Emphasis on results and a data driven delivery means reading for pleasure is disappearing from school. Secondary schools no longer have space for the questions that we train younger children to ask. The endless "why" that children ask when they come into the school system becomes "whatever" by the time they hit the high schools. Schools create this. The pressure to get that ever elusive C at GCSE means we only give the students the answers we want them to write. We pressure them in endless intervention sessions to write more, to write better, to write, to write, to write... without giving them time to think, to grow and to imagine. It's like setting off on an expedition without a map. We want them to be resilient and powerful thinkiers, but we are training them to just comply.
We are letting our teenagers down.
One of the pleasures of working with teenagers for me is the constant realisation that my point of view has ossified. I have to keep myself in check as I respond to my students because the world that my values form in my imagination is always and necessarily out of date. Their questions encourage me to reassess and re-evaluate the way in which I see things even as I challenge them to form their own internal landscapes. It's a valuable and productive exchange that we both seem to get a lot out of.
Reading Patrick Ness this morning crystallised something in my own mind. Without giving much away (because this is a book you should read and discover for yourself) I emerged from my duvet cocoon determined to show my students that there are other worlds out there. The English curriculum is limited and limiting. We get our students to jump through hoops to show the world how good our hoops are - not how amazing their jumping is. Our students need more than literacy and PEE paragrapghs, more than just Lennie and George.
Stories are amazing things, they tell you who you are. We need to hand them over to the next generation and we need to trust that they know how to use them. Who knows what we might learn?
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