We’re reading Lord of the Flies. Or, we are supposed to be reading Lord of the Flies. Or, some students are reading the book. Or, we have checked out the book. Worst of all–many have not checked out the book after a week.
If we test them, they do not do well. They will say that the test is too hard, but it could be an oral test, or an essay test. Hard to do well when you don’t read.
So we don’t test them. We write commentaries and engage in Socratic seminars. We devise essential questions that rely on a base knowledge of the books. We give them projects, to be done in groups, and we all know how that works.
I could not read Heart of Darkness as a senior in high school. Too hard. I could not read A Passage to India. I was too immature for Forster. Somehow I got through Fathers and Sons and A Farewell to Arms, along with many classroom renditions of Shakespeare, where the teachers let us read just to kill time with our stellar performances.
When my teacher talked about the Forster and Conrad novels, I had no idea what she was talking about. I hadn’t read, so no words coming out of her mouth were going to mean anything.
Today, three of my English classes returned to the text to look at Chapters 2 and 3. It was a lesson in style analysis, where we looked at the author’s devices in creating character and setting, in this case. All the grunt work is designed so students can synthesize text and turn it into their writing, while using Golding’s words and ideas, too. Fair enough?
Here’s how it went.