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Mr. Marineau, I Regret to Inform You That You Didn’t Ruin My Life, or: If I Taught High School English

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By Geo Ong

I used to hate reading. In high school, I had a string of English teachers that did quite a job of having their students hate reading forever. My 10th grade Language Arts teacher Mr. Marineau was the most notable. Despite his last name, this man vehemently hated all things French and everything else that challenged the American male psyche. He once stopped a lecture to interrogate me in front of the entire class as to why I had on black nail polish.

‘What does your father think about you painting your nails?’

‘He doesn’t care,’ I told him. ‘My father’s not judgemental.’

Needless to say, Mr. Marineau wasn’t the ideal candidate to introduce me to The Great Gatsby. When Mr. Marineau taught The Grapes of Wrath, he wouldn’t quiz us on character analysis or what the turtle in the road represented but what the sign read on the guy’s truck on page 23. In that class, I read out of fear and it made me hate reading. (Mr. Marineau wasn’t the only unfit instructor. Perhaps I struggle with Shakespeare to this day because his work was taught to me by a track-and-field coach who’d refer to the bard as Bill.)

So there I was, a battered youth, walking into my final English class in the last year of my high school career and being told on the first day that there would be lots of reading in the aptly-named Mr. Poe’s class. The difference? Each student gets to read whatever he or she wants to read. After that, I began to like reading and never looked back.

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Thankfully for Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, I eventually went back to their books, but those two should count their lucky stars. How many American students go back to the books they hated and/or fake-read in high school? How many American students, after hating literature in high school and taking the general-education English requirement of most university-level schools, pick up another novel to read for fun?

Unfit instructors have always been part of the problem in turning young students away from reading. The insisted influence of television and the internet are also among the usual suspects. But forget about the kids for now. What about the curriculum? What about the books themselves?

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If I taught high school English, I wouldn’t teach Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby, or The Grapes of Wrath. I wouldn’t teach The Scarlet Letter (which I myself still haven’t mustered the gall to reread), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or anything by Hemingway. WHAT? WHY?? Because these works are too important.

I hear the argument: This is why those works are taught to American high schoolers. Because they are important! Well, wait five years – hell, even three – and ask those same high schoolers exactly why those works are important and a large number of them won’t be able to tell you. Why? Because they didn’t care back then. They weren’t paying attention, they weren’t reading, and they were too busy complaining about having to read such boring material. (The word ‘material’ was usually substituted with another word.)

And you wonder why readers are so rare these days.

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My hypothetical Urchin curriculum has nothing to do with underestimating the intelligence of American high schoolers. Student demographics vary accordingly. But there is too large a percentage of high schoolers who are convinced that reading is a chore. My curriculum is directed toward them. My curriculum is about getting the non-interested interested.

So in my class, let’s scratch the above works from the syllabus. Instead, kids, we are reading novels filled with sex, drugs and violence. Instead of The Scarlet Letter, we’re reading Lolita. Instead of the short stories of Hemingway where nothing ever happens, we’re reading the short stories of Flannery O’Connor where everyone dies all the time! Instead of Brave New World, we’re reading The Handmaid’s Tale. (Can you imagine the discussion between the boys and the girls in class during that one?) And just for kicks, let’s throw in some journalism with Hunter S. Thompson and some poetry with Charles Bukowski. The kids will love it.

And those great works of literature we tossed out? If my experiment would work, those kids would encounter Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway eventually - in the future, and hopefully on their own. How so? Because in high school they learned to love reading.

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I would like the opinions of credentialed educators because I am not one. I am however a bookseller, and I speak with kids multiple times every day, and I see their disinterest, their aversion, their unbridled and unjust hatred of books, and it makes me angry. I’ve dealt with the frustrated parents who can do nothing but roll their eyes whenever a reading suggestion is followed by ‘How many pages is it?’. These teenagers, bratty little bastards some of them are, deserve a fair chance at understanding and appreciating great literature. And most importantly, these books deserve a fair chance at getting read.



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