Category / literature

by Cila Warncke

On Generous Writing

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Life never ceases to be difficult, to paraphrase Rilke. Amidst its slings and arrows, there is often little to comfort and guide.

Without generous writers, there would be almost nothing.

Among recent difficulties faced by myself, or someone I love: bereavement, major surgery, significant medical diagnoses, divorce, conflict with parents, conflict with children, unemployment.

These are not remarkable events, statistically. Yet, to the individual, they are as life-altering as Krakatoa. If anything, the cognitive dissonance of knowing the event to be universal versus the all-consuming personal experience of trauma makes it harder to cope.

We need wise friends to walk these dark halls. But unless we’re lucky, and our friends unlucky, we are not likely to find the necessary wisdom in our immediate social circle. Shared experience can as easily drive a wedge as forge a bond.

Into this gap step writers whose words offer perspective without judgment, comfort without reciprocity and infinite patience. They sit at our bedside in the small hours, walk with us, accompany us raging, glum, drunk, frustrated or frightened.

Their generosity lies in a willingness to delve into the most difficult parts of their lives and, through grit and creativity, distill their thumb-screwed wisdom into something readers can use.

Photo by Wai Siew on Unsplash

Imagine being lost at sea on a leaky boat. Most of us would consider feel heroic merely staying alive. But a writer would be thinking: how can I help the next person who finds themselves out here?

They would be jotting notes about tides and winds, describing how to make a fishing line out of dental floss, giving tips on bailing and load-balancing.

Although this sense of purpose may be sustaining, it does not mean the work is easy. The generosity of writers lies in their willingness to labor during their most difficult experiences to give hope to those caught in similar currents.

The following are seven books that exemplify this generosity: all by women, whose emotional work is routinely undervalued, on the page and elsewhere.

Seven Generous Books

The Elements by Kat Lister

Most couples in their 30s are settling into their first homes, thinking about kids; Kat Lister and her husband, Pat Long, did those against the ticking clock of his brain tumor, which was discovered before their wedding. They lived the few years they had together with uplifting, illuminating grace. When he died, Lister was left to navigate the anachronisms of young widowhood, a trial by water she recounts here with bold, Didion-esque honesty.

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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Generosity is not constrained by genre. While we may assume that memoir has the most to teach, the ruthless craft required of good fiction offers equal — or even greater — opportunities. This novel, which begs to be described by its titular adjective, unpicks grief, addiction, survivor’s guilt, and the complicated strands of rejection, assimilation, belonging and othering woven into immigration, racism and religion.

Buy

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

Perhaps the only thing more appalling than the death of a partner is losing a partner in mind, not body. Thomas’s memoir invites the reader into the Kafka-couldn’t-dream it surreality of life following her husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI). Along with grief, come care decisions, guilt, frustration, and no one to share the challenges.

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Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Read this with its fictional counterpart, Winterson’s debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, to fully appreciate her generosity and courage. By the time she wrote this memoir, Winterson was a revered literary figure and bona fide success story. To admit, from that height, to the haunting power of childhood trauma could have seemed an admission of weakness. Her vulnerability is potent and empowering.

Buy

Nomadland: Surviving American in the 21st Century by Jessica Bruder

Please read the book; the film (brilliance of Frances McDormand notwithstanding) does it no justice. Nomadland exhibits another form of authorial generosity: the willingness to put one’s life aside to bear witness to the lives of others that would otherwise go unrecorded. The crushing, mechanistic cruelty of late capitalism comes to vivid life through Bruder’s painstakingly reported account of life on the dusty, bald-tire fringes of the so-called American dream.

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A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Every time I pick up A Manual, I wind up reading it all the way through. Berlin’s autofiction is enthralling, terrifying, devastating on multiple levels. The writing is almost too sharp and bright to look at (forget window pane, this is prose as emergency flare) which is necessary magic given the gut-punch tales it tells. Stuff that in lesser hands, or played straight, would be unendurable, is transmuted into stories that soar and hover on the thermals of your mind.

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Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky

It is one of life’s slipperiest tricks that the things we’re taught to crave and cherish are (surprise!) headaches too. Marriage, at least happy marriage, is perhaps the quintessential sacred cow; the immutable good thing one should pursue without question. Thank goddess, then, for Havrilesky who seems to operate from the position that sacred cows are best served medium-rare. Her brave assertion of the inconvenient truth that true love and explosive exasperation are not mutually exclusive is a pinpoint of light in what might otherwise be a suffocating dimness.

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What are your life-boat books? Share in the comments!

by Cila Warncke

Flashback: My 2016 Reading Highlights

Joan Didion said it was a good idea to stay acquainted with the people you used to be, even if you don’t much like them anymore.

It’s good advice.

In 2016, life was changing so fast my head spun. I met my now-husband in December 2015 and the next year was spent jumping on planes to get to him, culminating in a move from Ibiza to Memphis, Tennessee. Small wonder it was a year of comfort-reading favorite books in snatched moments.

Here’s what I read, and why I read it.

***

If, like me, you have a voice in your head that tells you off for paying attention to your own life, for saving boarding passes and scribbled-upon napkins, for stopping to write love letters in the sand, ignore it.

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Happiness and creativity depend on valuing our lives. They depend on listening, watching, recording, remembering. It is easy to envy other people’s lives — so exciting! Such superior children/holidays/houses/jobs/wardrobes/sex lives! Such a torrent of fabulous Instagram photos and witty Facebook status updates. We get so caught up peering through the virtual window of our neighbours’ lives we forget to look at our own. We don’t see the pathos, adventure, and pleasure of our own existence because we’re not looking.

Two years ago I started a keeping a list of all the books I read. It seemed like a self-indulgent tic indicative of an unhealthy level of ego. Or, worse, a pointless exercise (who cares?) My delight in list-making narrowly trumped these niggles. Now a blue virtual post-it on my home screen contains a list of all the books I read in 2016.

The list reminds me not only what I’ve read, but how I read. It is a snapshot of the ebb and flow of time and energy. January 2016 was a book-heavy month, gobbling up a glut of Christmas goodies and biding a lot of time until my second date with the soon-to-be boyfriend. February was a respectable showing. March, the month I spent between London, Dominican Republic and Brussels, I read almost nothing. The next two months were spent in a miserable, unsuccessful attempt to assimilate into a receptionist job at an overrated luxury agrotourismo in Ibiza — it was bad enough I only read a book and a half. Finishing Anna Karenina took me through June. The rest of the year I read in fits and starts. What jumped out, reviewing the list, was how many books I reread. And, with the exception of High Tide in Tucson and Jane Eyre, not just for the second time.

Looking over my top ten rereads reminds me what I value and crave. The books on this list all offer, directly or through illustration, wisdom and encouragement to those trying hard to live by their own lights. From the esoteric musings of the Glass siblings to the tough-love advice of Cheryl Strayed, each book is, in its own way, a tonic. They were rocks in the fast-moving stream of a year where everything changed, stepping stones to a new life.

Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger

franny

The summer I was 15 I lived with my older sister and worked at Wendy’s. Every day on my break I hunkered down in store cupboard and read Franny & Zooey. To this day I’m not sure where I got the book, or why it grabbed me. What I do know is I’ve read it somewhere between 30-50 times, can quote entire sections of it verbatim, and reread it at least twice a year. In part it’s the reflection of myself I see in Zooey who says “I’m sick to death of waking up furious every morning and going to bed furious at night”, an echo of my relationship with my siblings in the narrator’s aside that the Glass siblings share a “semantic geometry where the shortest distance between two points is a fullish circle”, or descriptions like, “the Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table in Monte Carlo.” In part, because the wildly verbose, witty, strangely timeless sentences still reveal new flashes of character. The narrator says it is a “compound or multiple love story, pure and complicated” which is a fine description of the writing, too.

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

Ostensibly a book about writing, Bird by Bird is a wise, funny, heart-rending guide to living life when you don’t fit in a box. The combination of Lamott’s acerbic yet self-deprecating turns of phrase coupled with her palpable compassion is almost unbearable. I cry every time I read it, even though I’ve read it so many times I well up in anticipation. It makes me want to walk around hugging everyone and at the same time makes me want to be a blazing good writer. Every chapter is a gem, but “Jealousy” and “KFKD” are maybe the best things you’ll ever read on, respectively, the eponymous emotion and self-doubt. And her advice about avoiding libel charges is hilarious, priceless, and involves the memorable comparison of a penis to a baby bird in its nest.

letters

Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke

This I plucked off a library shelf in Tigard, OR on the strength of the fact that Lady Gaga has a Rilke quote tattooed on her upper arm — it reads in part, “confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write”. The line, it transpires, is from Letters To A Young Poet which is so rich in exquisitely worded wisdom it flays me. Rilke’s advice on sex, solitude, and seeking ones calling is so incisive it takes my breath away. And, as a poet, he makes every word count, crafting artful sentences that blow my mind on both a philosophical and aesthetic basis. I love it so much, I read it aloud and sent the recording as a gift to a friend.

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s trenchant analysis of what women writers need is as relevant today as when she delivered the lectures from which it was drawn in 1928. We may have “come a long way, baby” but women are still underpaid, overworked, and too often cut off from the privileges that enrich men’s prospects. Sexism may not be as crude as the beadle who ordered her out of the Oxford library, but it thrives in a thousand insidious ways that women internalise or ignore at their own risk. I also love Woolf’s dazzling prose, which gave us, “one can not think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed

This collection of Strayed’s advice columns written for The Rumpus’s Dear Sugar column breaks my heart wide open. I’m sobbing by the time I get through the second or third letter, whichever it is that is from the women who suffered a late-term miscarriage. It is hard to put my finger exactly on what it is about Tiny Beautiful Things that makes me gasp. Mostly, it’s Strayed’s unflinching willingness to examine the hardest things in her own life. She doesn’t rush through awfulness, or glide past suffering, she stays, unafraid to study it and claim who and what she is in the wake of it. This solipsism is unexpectedly comforting. By inhabiting and sharing her experience she makes it okay to inhabit and unpick my experience. Line by line, she demonstrates the potential for growth and change in every life. If one is willing to embrace an almost Stoic determination to live well by doing what’s right.

Endurance, Melissa Madenski

endurance

In 2015 I committed to memorising a poem per month, and did. Not all of them have remained word-perfect in my head, but it was an incredible experience with language. When you learn something by heart, you discover things. Cadence, repetition, punctuation, imagery all become vivid in an unpredictable way. I didn’t set out to memorise poetry in 2016 but I read a lot of it — including fantastic collections by Jack Gilbert and CP Cavafy. My favourite reread, though, was this slender chapbook by an Oregon writer. She lost her husband to an unexpected heart attack when she was in her 30s with two young children and the grief of that loss reverberates through Endurance. These are poems about learning to live with the worst case, not with resignation but with courage and, ultimately, joy. It’s another one I can’t make it through without tears, but they’re cathartic.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Of all the my rereads, this was the most fun because it was so different from my memory of it. I must have been 12 or 13 when I read Jane Eyre and I was bored witless. Years later, I read Wuthering Heights and hated it, confirming my prejudice against their weird, masochistic and wildly overrated Brontë sisters. Then on a whim I read Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall and liked it. And somewhere I heard that Jane Eyre was feminist. So I gave it another shot and fell in love. Bold feminism plus a terrific yarn? Brilliant. Free Kindle edition

Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg

I reread at least one or two of Goldberg’s books each year. Most often Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind, but this time I went for The Long Quiet Highway which is mostly about her study of Zen Buddhism over the years. Which of course means it is about writing, being, meaning, truth, acceptance, and everything else that matters. Writing is Zen; Zen is writing. Whatever we do is meditation if we allow it to be. The subtitle is Waking Up in America which is  nearly what I named this blog because that’s what I’m trying to do: wake up in a country I left 16 years ago; figure out what it means to be me in America in 2017, and how to do something good here.

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island has been a staple of my literary diet since I was 15 or so. I was a precocious reader, but not above devouring whatever I could get my hands on, and this yarn of seafaring and daring-do always hit the spot. Years later, when I moved to Ibiza, I started to think of it as treasure island — a supposed paradise guarded by dead men’s bones and half-crazed exiles. Overly dramatic personal parallels aside, it is a fantastically fun book and an excellent template for writers looking to craft a fast-paced, unforgettable story. Free Kindle edition

High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver is the most recent addition to my pantheon of southern American writers (Carson McCullers, Hunter S Thompson, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, etc.) and possibly the one I’d Most Like To Meet. Writing implacably reveals character and every word I’ve read of Kingsolver makes me think she is a Good Person, smart as hell, and cracking company on a night out. Her fiction boggles me and this book of essays is one of the finest, sharpest, most humane collections I’ve had the pleasure of reading. The title essay alone is worth the price of admission; Buster the stranded hermit crab may change your life.

What books to you read over and over? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Culturally Responsive Teaching

The following presentation on culturally responsive teaching was written for, and delivered at, Le Sallay Academy’s January 2023 conference on blended learning.

The term culturally responsive teaching was coined by Geneva Gay. It entails crafting and delivering curricula that is relevant to students’ lived experiences. The aim is to engage students with material that is “personally meaningful” in order to pique their interest and motivation to learn (Gay, 2002).

My interest in culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy (which I didn’t have the time to get into in this talk) springs from the cultural homogeneity of my own education. As a high school student and undergraduate I read, mostly, books, stories and poems by white male Europeans.

Students deserve better. They deserve to be introduced to a rich, multicultural world of literary experiences and they deserve to see themselves represented in what they read. As a teacher, its my job to think about students’ intersecting identities: nationality, language, gender, ethnicity, class, faith, etc.

This presentation focuses on language as a form of cultural and self-identity, and the importance of representing multiple Englishes within an English Language Arts curriculum. This was highly relevant because the students in this class hailed from several countries and spoke more than a dozen languages.

Including world Englishes within a literature/language arts program is something I feel strongly about because, 1) it’s good for students and 2) it’s fun. Some of the fabulous things about the English language are the richness of its vocabulary (much of it borrowed from other languages), how its (relative) grammatical simplicity sparks creativity and the way it has been adapted/refined/altered by linguistic communities around the globe.

There are more great presentations from the conference available at the Le Sallay website.

Culturally Responsive Teaching in Blended Learning: A Case Study

Share your thoughts and ideas on CRT/CST in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Reimagining Normal

Foto de Mercedes Mehling en Unsplash

A new reality

Recently, I binge-watched Netflix’s relationship reality show The Ultimatum: Queer Love.

If you haven’t seen it, the show features five lesbian couples that split up and reshuffle. One partner in each wants to get married, the other isn’t sure; the show is a chance to figure out now, forever, or never.

The premise is whatever but it was transfixing to watch a show where queer was the default. There was none of the usual exception signaling or tokenism of shows with only a few queer participants/characters; no hetero normativity. Instead of being Other the participants just were.

Soapy plot-lines aside, it was cool and refreshing to see queer women flirt, do their make-up, argue, shuffle around in slippers, make romantic gestures, walk their dogs, pitch fits, drink too much.

It should NOT be revelatory that queer people are human too, but, watching The Ultimatum, made it clear that what we are presented with as normal is in fact (hetero)normative. This doesn’t reflect reality but constructs an image that we are taught to accept as real.

Resisting the norm

Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization, the process by which ideas or ways of being come to be taken for granted, is pertinent. As educators, we are immersed in normalizing messaging, as are our students. They can be as invisible and pervasive as the air we breathe. Like tainted air, they are dangerous. Sociocultural imperatives about normalcy or (worse) naturalness — often deployed around subjects like sex, gender, social roles, economics, etc. — have the potential to do massive harm. Even when they seem innocuous, they put a subtle curb on imagination.

Resistance is the only antidote. According to Foucault scholar Dianna Taylor, “Refusing to simply accept what is presented as natural, necessary, and normal – like the ideas of sex and the norm itself – presents possibilities for engaging in and expanding the practice of freedom.”

Positive normalization

Humans are neophobic, shying away from the unfamiliar. This calls for conscious effort to challenge unhelpful or restrictive norms with positive normalization, i.e. not of a particular way of being but of an open, curious approach to life.

Replacing an old norm with a new norm simply shuffles the exclusion tiles. What we need, and we as educators should model, is normalizing acceptance, inquisitiveness and respect towards what is unfamiliar but not harmful.* Nobody is obliged to embrace someone else’s way of living, but a good education should provide them with the self-awareness and self-confidence to live and let live.

*By all means, resist and reject ideas and actions that harm oneself or others.

Foto de “My Life Through A Lens” en Unsplash

What I try to normalize in my classes

  • Making mistakes: Students are under mad pressure about grades, achievements, performance, etc. This fuels counterproductive perfectionism and alienates kids from their greatest learning tool: mistakes. As I wrote in ‘On Screwing Up‘: “You can’t learn what you already know… Existing expertise may gratify the ego, but it doesn’t grow the intellect.”
  • Asking for help: Along with making mistakes, it is critical to encourage students to ask for help. Teachers are not (or shouldn’t be) remote judges, hovering only to instruct and assess: we should be there to solve the problems before we grade the answers. We have to resist the Anglo-American individualist tradition and remind kids that asking for help is a sign of intelligence, not weakness.
  • Discussing problematic language: As a literature teacher, problematic language is an all-the-time issue. How do we understand Jean Toomer’s use of the n-word in Cane? Is it ever acceptable to use the r-word? What about swearing? How do we get better at remembering people’s pronouns? Teachers cannot protect students from problematic language, nor prevent them from using it. What we can do is explore why words or phrases are problematic, how they got to be that way, and what using them really means. We can educate students about the power of words and help them understand what their word choices say about them, and how their use of language affects others.
  • Talking about intersectional privilege/disadvantage: There is no contradiction in urging students to treat everyone they meet as a unique individual and teaching them about how individuals are shaped by intersectional privilege or disadvantage. It is fact, not indoctrination, to articulate that white females have different experiences than white males, cis people different experiences than trans people, people of color different experiences than white, etc. Yes, people are more than the sum of their identities, but those identities matter and by understanding them we gain greater understanding of those around us — and ourselves.
  • Fluid gender and sexual identities: The majority of literature portrays a limited range of gender and sexual and identities. There is no getting around that, although the canon is growing joyously year by year. What I can do as a teacher is A) bring in as much LGBTQ+ literature as possible and B) teach texts in context, i.e. the couple in Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ are a man and a woman not because that is ‘normal’ but because it reflects the gender roles and romantic partnerships of that time and place. Typing that, I see how reductive it sounds. Yes, it is an imperfect approach, but it at least opens discussions about how gender roles and sexual identities have changed over time.

What would you like to normalize in your classroom (or world)? Share in the comments!

by Cila Warncke

Seven Lessons from the School Year

My full-time teaching year has just wrapped for the summer. After the hectic, emotional final weeks and days, it is time to pause and take stock.

This was my second year as World Literature and English Language teacher at Le Sallay Academy. In my previous life, as a music journalist, we bandied the phrase ‘difficult second album’. Nobody mentioned there would be a ‘difficult second year’ in teaching. Now I know.

We should embrace the difficult, Rilke advised. He is right.

Part of the difficulty of the year was my egotistical/oblivious assumption that everything would run on tracks — after all, I’d done it before. That made some things easier, sure. But nowhere near everything.

Each year, each class, each assignment, each student is a new opportunity and learning curve. Rather than expect (naively) to rewind and press play, it is better to figure out what works in broad terms, and use that as a springboard for the next fresh start.

Because I’m a geek and like mnemonics, I boiled down seven key lessons from the past school year into the word ACCLAIM — something all teachers want (right?). And all students deserve.

Adapt

I like planning, making lists, ticking things off. When preparing lessons, I get a kick out of an orderly progression. What feels like orderly progression to me, though, can seem incomprehensible or plain boring to my students. One of the important things I learned this year was that to be effective meant to adapt. Sometimes, this meant tossing out a whole assignment; sometimes it meant an in-class pivot when an activity sank like undercooked souffle; sometimes it meant adding materials or exercises to ensure an individual student had what they needed to succeed.

One example of an individual adaptation that benefited the whole class was when student said they were struggling to follow the plot of All Quiet on the Western Front. This alerted me that the dense, gun-smoke swirl of memories that carry the reader from the battlefield to the intimate reaches of Paul’s life were a lot for a less-experienced reader to follow, so I created a chapter by chapter summary/study guide that included plot points, key characters and vocabulary lists. By reading the summary in advance of the chapter, students were able to track the main events of the novel, learn vocab and better understand the narrative arc.

Challenge

Adapt works both ways: sometimes it is appropriate to summarize and simplify; sometimes, students need to be challenged. Doing this right, means they should be at the edge of — or just beyond — their comfort zone, but in a situation where they have tools to address the task.

For example, my sixth grade students learned what Shakespearean sonnets are, then wrote them. This challenge worked because we defined everything: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, volta, etc. Once they understood how a sonnet was constructed, we read humorous contemporary examples that showed how the form, however strict, could be applied to any topic. Then we worked through each student draft together, line by line, counting syllables, testing rhymes, reinforcing by repetition while also having fun.

Co-create

Students are only going to be participants in their learning if they are allowed to participate. For me, this means letting go of my ideas about perfectly formatted assignments and visually pleasing presentations and letting students co-create with me, and with each other.

Midway through the year we trialled collaborative Google Slides presentations, where students contributed their efforts to a single presentation. Initially, I created the presentation and turned them loose on it. By the end of the year, they were setting up the joint presentations themselves.

For final writing projects, there was a co-creation element, as students were given the option of choosing a set question or pitching their own big idea. Most students choose to come up with their own topics, with me as a consultant to ensure their ideas were appropriate to the scope of work.

Link

One of the things I love best about teaching literature is tracking ideas, themes and debates across epochs and regions. Without this connectivity, literature would just be words on a page — who cares? Only by helping students identify and explore the links can they truly appreciate the scope and magic of the written word. This is critically important at the ages I teach: 11-15. Kids are teetering towards independence, trying to understand the world they find themselves a part of; they haven’t yet claimed their literary heritage. So it is imperative to make explicit connections they might not see otherwise: historical, economic, social, topical.

For instance, when studying Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, my students read Jeanette Winterson’s essay, ‘Love(lace) Actually’ which links Shelley with pioneering machine-maker Ada Lovelace with Alan Turing, and Frankenstein’s monster with modern technology. We also dipped into The Heart of Darkness for another example of a frame narrative, establishing thematic and stylistic links to anchor the text in broader conversations. Also, I introduced Romanticism by showing them Meatloaf’s ‘I Would Do Anything for Love’ video. Let’s just say, there were no new Meatloaf fans after that. Maybe you have to be a child of the 80s to dig that OTT?

Aim

Have a target. Make sure students know what it is and how to hit it.

This is a work in progress for me, but I can confidently say that classes run more smoothly when everyone knows what we’re doing and why. Sometimes the why might sound arbitrary, e.g. we’re reading this book because it is a great example of X (notwithstanding all the other perfectly good literary examples) but even so, it is worthwhile to articulate the class aims and repeat as needed.

As a student, I hated fuzzy assignments or vague grading standards. How do you know what you’re supposed to be doing if the aim is undefined?

As a teacher, I want to protect my students from that frustration, and myself from their excuses (‘but I didn’t understand…’). Clear, concise goal setting, including deadlines, frees up everyone’s brain space to focus on what matters. For example, each classes final writing project was scheduled, broken down into steps with individual deadlines and students were given the rubric and grading standards in advance. (This might sound over-prescriptive, but middle school is where structure needs to happen so students can break free of it in secondary and further education.) Obviously, how (and to what extent) students hit the aims varied, but they had a clear, fair, impartial structure to work within.

Iterate

My expectation that year two would be easy was based, in part, on the assumption that I could wholesale reuse materials and texts from the previous year. That was lazy thinking.

This year was better was when I rejigged, or even started from scratch. Though working with the same broad themes and literary time periods, there was massive opportunity to iterate and improve. For example, instead of using Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling as a main text, I selected a handful of stories and wove them into reading Grace Lin’s stunning novel When the Sea Turned to Silver, which weaves Chinese folklore into a zesty YA adventure story. My students were far more immersed in the novel than the would have been in the stories alone, and they were able to see the link between Songling’s 18th century work and contemporary Chinese writing and traditions.

Model

This year, I’ve been more open about my geekiness, quicker to say how crazy in love I am with an author or text. Do my students think I’m weird, or maybe should get out more? Possibly. But they also seem to respect my passion for literature and language, even if they don’t understand or share it.

To me, this is what modelling is all about. How can I persuade students to love words, or to push themselves on an assignment, if my example is meh?

If I want students to be excited about books, I need to be excited about books. If I want them to take risks, I have to take risks. If I want them to make and learn from mistakes, I need to make and learn from mistakes. If I want them to discover joy, I need to embody the joy that awaits discovery.

The vast importance of modelling hit me when I realized that I remember a mere handful of books I read prior to high school graduation: To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade, The Odyssey and something by Shakespeare in 12th grade. That is it. And I love literature and lived for those classes. So, realistically, even my most engaged students will remember between one and zero of the books they are assigned.

What I do remember about literature classes? My teachers and how damn much they cared about words and writing, and how those models encouraged me to believe these were things to cherish and celebrate.

That’s what I want for my students. Any year I succeed in communicating that will be a good year.

What are some of the key things you learned this year, as a teacher? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Revision with Elisabeth Dahl

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.

In this week’s conversation, Elisabeth Dahl (no, no relation) discusses the transformative power of words, with a special focus on teaching revision.

Photo courtesy Elisabeth Dahl

‘I worry for people who don’t write’

Author, illustrator, editor, educator: Elisabeth Dahl’s writing experience spans genres and professions. The through line quickly emerges in conversation – a deftness with, and delight in, words that is as contagious as a yawn. And a knack for detail that brimfills anecdotes with life and color.

The Baltimore, Maryland native grew up near Johns Hopkins’ main campus, where she completed her undergraduate degree. She returned to the city as an adult, and lives a few miles from the hospital where she was born.

“As a child, I loved school right from the start,” she writes in her online bio. “By the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, one thing had become clear: Analyzing stories and crafting sentences lit me up in a way that history, math, and the rest did not.”

Speaking on the phone, Dahl credits this to her high school teacher Joyce Brown (with whom she still exchanges emails). “She approached us as if we were college students. When we started [James] Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we spent 20-30 minutes talking about his decision to use ‘the artist’ instead of ‘an artist’. To think this was even a question! It would have been one thing to debate writer versus artist, but to look at the article – the versus an – was incredible. As it turns out, [Ms Brown] led us to understand it made quite a big difference.”

Understanding the big differences a small lexical choice can makes is a sine qua non for a writer-educator. “I’m a better writer because I’ve taught writing,” says Dahl, who worked for Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth for the better part of a decade. “I was still making the same mistakes emerging writers were making: the stakes weren’t high enough, or I was padding the stories. Seeing these problems [as a teacher] was sort of teaching myself at the same time. It helped me incorporate the lessons into my own writing.”

Textures of language

For Dahl, a reciprocal relationship between teaching and literature was established early; her mother and grandmother (with whom they lived until Dahl was eight) were elementary school teachers who made reading a central part of her young life. They also gifted her with a fascination for the stories embedded in artifacts and moments. Her favorite space, as a child, was her grandmother’s walk-in closet. “It smelled like mothballs but had its own, not just aroma – aura. It had a history. It was a special occasion if I got to try on old dresses, like the one my mother wore to her junior prom. There was a scarlet red [dress], like what a Spanish dancer would wear, with tiers, strapless. It didn’t look like any of the other clothes in there. Jane Eyre had her red room; I had this red dress.”

The aural and visual qualities of words beguiled her: “I liked that if you said a word like ‘fork’ or ‘salad’ 25 times to yourself, it became nonsense, weird, you could almost hallucinate about it”. Another female relative, an aunt, was a graphic designer. Tracing pages in her books on hand-lettering introduced Dahl to the “tactile aspect” of language.

These formative experiences of words and stories as real and imaginative, concrete and abstract, primed Dahl to thrill to the challenge when Ms Brown assigned Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. “A light had turned on. I remember standing in her empty classroom, during a free period, talking about it with her, totally energized. I [still] don’t know if I know what the story means,” she says cheerfully. “But I love it. It’s like a Rorschach test.”

Inspired by Ms Brown’s example, Dahl prioritizes space for students to encounter epiphanies by “helping them get a new perspective, become a better observer, or express themselves better. As a teacher, you’re another voice in this person’s head. You have to take it seriously. You don’t know the other voices in their lives, all you can do is be respectful and help them grow.”

But why learn to write any more – aren’t there machines for that?

“Because to have a good relationship with writing is to have a good relationship with your own mind, your history, the world around you,” Dahl responds. “I worry about people who don’t write regularly. The memoir I’m working on has taught me so much about things I’ve been thinking about for 54 years. By laying out the words, revising the words, reconsidering the words, I’ve developed new attitudes towards certain moments, and people. It’s wonderful to be able to do that.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On Revision

How do you create an open, accepting environment where students think beyond the binary of right/wrong?

One assignment I designed is based on Amelia Gray’s short story ‘Monument’. In it, the people of a town came to clean up a graveyard, then something changes, and they start destroying the graveyard, almost like Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. I had students pick a character and rewrite the [third-person] story in the first person. We talked about what that changed, what opportunities it created, what it shut down.

This helped them realize that a piece of writing is many, many choices. It loosened students up. It was an act of playing around, like they might approach improv.

How do you push students beyond ‘good enough’?

Try to present revision as an opportunity. What if you wrote in a different point of view? What if you sprinkled some of these details throughout the story?

For students who are good but could be better, I call upon their sense of a challenge, their curiosity, intrigue. If a student is a tennis player, or pianist, say, I remind them how many hours they spend on the court or at the keyboard. Writing requires the same. It’s a lot of time, a lot of effort, yes.

I always tried to teach that we’re all on the same continuum. We’re writing. We’re writers. Getting started, revising, these things are always challenging.

How can students develop a feel for revision?

They need to be reading, copying out passages as a way of internalizing what good writing is. I encounter people who say, ‘I know I could write a novel’, then you ask what they are reading and they ‘don’t really read’. That’s never going to work.

How does revision differ between fiction and non-fiction?

With non-fiction you have to think about fact checking, accuracy, but the process is not all that different. You’re still asking about tone, voice, consistency, how the narrative is laid out, what is the best way to tell the story, whether you’ve grabbed the reader…

How do you approach teaching revision with different age groups?

With younger students, don’t talk down to them. With all ages, nurture their curiosity about where a piece of writing might go. Again, trying to relate writing to other endeavors, whether playing sports, or working at a grocery story. Remind people that revision isn’t just something we do in writing. We’re always revising things, always being asked to spend more time perfecting or altering, it’s part of being human.

What is a sign that the process is working?

When students say, this went a different direction, or, the character surprised me by doing this. That is exciting. It shows they are engaging on another level, not just trying to bang out the essay or the story.

​Dahl recommends:

The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. She explores, in a graphic novel, growing up, the truths that were presented to her and the truths she had to discover later. It was fascinating, her level of honesty. I get most of my books out of the library, but I went straight to the book store and bought that one for full price.

A classic you love to teach?

‘Why I Live at the PO’ by Eudora Welty. It’s an unreliable narrator story, very subtle, hard to pull off. Every time I read it, I see new things.

A book about writing every writing student should read?

On Writing by Stephen King. Although I’m not a King fan, this book is so good, especially if students are interested in writing books and getting into publishing. It is full of good advice, very practical.

A book + film adaptation combo you love?

Ian McEwan’s Atonement – that was a great movie and a very good book.

A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

Ann Patchett. She co-owns a book store called Parnassus Books in Nashville; she has a wonderful personality, she’s smart, she’s a good writer.

Your perfect writing space?

My house, where I live and write, is suburban, there are beautiful trees but always people walking past. I like to have people around.

If you could publish anything, what would it be and why?

It would be nice if the memoir I’m writing eventually becomes a book. What got me started was realizing how much I loved reading memoir. There is something about a well-crafted, honest memoir that stands out; they are always engaging.

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by Cila Warncke

On Reading Like a Writer

This is an article I wrote several years ago, based on interviews with three brilliant, inspiring writers. It is worth revisiting.

_____________________________________________

boat

“It is impossible to become a writer without reading,” says Paul Hendrickson, writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and award-winning author of numerous books including Hemingway’s Boat.

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There is a relationship between quality of reading and quality of writing. And a distinction between reading for pleasure and reading like a writer. The difference involves attitude, approach and appreciation. Michael Schmidt, poet, professor and author of The Novel: A Biography recommends reading, “with eyes wide open, full of anticipation.”

With this in mind, here are seven ways to read like a writer:

1. Compulsively

“You can’t be a writer unless you have a hunger for print,” says Nick Lezard, Guardian literary critic and author of Bitter Experience Has Taught Me. “I was the kid who sat at the table and read the side of the cereal packet.” In Nick’s case, the lust for literature paved the way for a career as a book reviewer. But regardless of the genre or field to which you aspire, all writers are readers first.  And “it doesn’t matter whether the medium is the side of the cereal packet or a screen,” Nick says.

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2. Slowly

Cereal-packet readers tend to wolf words like they do breakfast. This is a trait writers should train themselves out of – at least sometimes. Paul defines reading like a writer as slow reading: dawdling on the page, delving, soaking in the style and rhythm. Don’t read everything this way, though. “I don’t read the newspaper ‘like a writer’,” he notes. “I don’t have time. Nobody does.”

3. Broadly

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Time is of the essence for the reading writer, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore everything apart from the classics. There are, to borrow Orwell’s term, good bad books. Nick mentions Ian Fleming as an example of compelling though less-than-literary fiction. Paul gives a nod to Raymond Chandler, saying writers can learn from his “hardboiled, imagistic lines.”

4. Selectively

That said, don’t make the mistake of reading widely but not too well. “Reading crap is no good for the eye or ear,” says Michael. “Read only the best, and read it attentively. See how it relates to the world it depicts, or grows out of.”

Nick, who has read his share of bad books as a reviewer, concurs: “If you just read books like 50 Shades of Grey or Dan Brown, you’re going to wind up spewing out a string of miserable clichés.”

 5. Attentively

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You get the most out of good writing by reading it with real attention. Michael advises writers to pay heed to metaphor, characters’ voices, how the author develops those voices and how they change. He recommends Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children as a rewarding subject of attentive reading: “There is a strong sense of development, nothing static there. I can think of no better pattern book for a would-be writer.”    

6. Fearlessly

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Reading like a writer means going out of your comfort zone. When Nick was in his teens he tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses. “It was a struggle,” he recalls. “It took me a year or two. But that’s how you [learn] – you find stuff that’s above your level.”

7. Imaginatively

Reading above your level is valuable, in part, because it challenges your imagination. Paul talks about savoring the terse beauty of poetry and imagining “everything that’s between the spaces of the words, the spaces of the lines.” By observing the work of your own imagination you gain insight into how writers evoke images and emotions.

You don’t have to read every book (or cereal box) like a writer. But the more you immerse yourself in words and cultivate these seven skills, the better your writing will be. “If you are writing a potboiler, imagine how wonderful it will be if the work you produce is actually a proper novel,” says Michael. “Read the best, and read the best in your elected genre.”

lighthouse

Writers’ Recommended Reading:

Ulysses – James Joyce
To The Lighthouse –Virginia Woolf
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway 
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
New York Review of Books

by Cila Warncke

10 Sex Affirmative Books for English Language Arts

Following on from my previous post on the importance of affirmative sex education, here are 10 books English Language Arts teachers can reach for to open conversations about love, relationships, gender and sexuality.

These works were chosen because they treat sex with the openness, thoughtfulness, honesty and sensitivity it merits.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

This brief, moving book touches an many aspects of life: education, self-discovery, solitude, family relationships, etc. but Rilke’s comments about love and sex shine. Don’t be satisfied with conventional definitions of what a relationship ‘should’ look like, he advises. Instead, seek to develop yourself as an individual so you can truly respect and cherish the individuality of another person. It is humane, wise, timely wisdom framed in sublime prose.

Get it here

Frankly In Love by David Yoon

This YA novel centers on Frank Li, the teenage son of Korean immigrants, who finds himself trying to navigate the challenges of new love while wrestling with contradictory cultural expectations. Fast, good-humored and, well, frank, it highlights the importance of being honest with oneself and others — in life and in love.

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Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler

With a nod to Demi Lovato, this novel explores how issues of class and privilege complicate the already complicated issues of love and sexual identity. Are Lara and Jasmine really falling in love, or are they just cool for the summer? And what happens if Lara chases the hunky Chase…? A touch frothy, but heartfelt and affirmative of love, wherever one finds it.

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Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison

This Bildungsroman set in a well-to-do Pacific Northwest community hit home with me (though the community I grew up in wasn’t quite so well-to-do). In addition to being a welcome, thoughtful discussion of class, poverty and family tension, it has a romantic twist that is sure to get students talking.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Smith’s beloved coming-of-age tale set in early 20th century Brooklyn is refreshingly forthright about sex. It handles both positive and negative aspects of love and sexuality (including an attempted sexual assault) with a calm directness that can set the tone for open, non-judgmental classroom conversations.

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Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Baldwin is perhaps my favorite writer on sex; certainly, the rare (American) author who understands and treats sex as the physical act of love. This short novel is appropriate for older teenagers, say 16-18, and explores the tragic consequences of prioritising social conventions over human relationships. To paraphrase Baldwin, the protagonist’s problem isn’t his homosexuality, it’s that his capacity for love has been crippled by his anxiety about what people might think.

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Genderqueer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Contemporary writers are creating a robust canon of books about gender identity and nonconformity. I love this graphic memoir for its matter-of-fact tone and authenticity. It highlights that gender identity is fluid and finding one’s path isn’t necessarily a linear journey — nor does it need to be.

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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

Lest you get the wrong impression about the back-to-back graphic memoir recommendations, let me quote one of my students when asked if he liked graphic texts: ‘No!’

He and I share the view that other people’s pictures get in the way of the (superior) moving pictures in our heads.

That notwithstanding, Persepolis 2 is an evocative, eye-level portrait of Satrapi’s struggles with language, culture, love and sexuality after she moved from Iran to Germany. This is a particularly strong choice for children who have immigrated or come from a cultural/familial context that distinguishes them from their classmates.

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Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker

For younger readers, this is a charming, uplifting novel about a trans girl coming into her own. Details like Zenobia stressing out about which restroom to use add verisimilitude and the plot touches on vital issues like deadnaming, cyberbullying and the importance of community without ever feeling preachy.

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When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

Sometimes, I read a book and think, wow, that was brilliant.

Sometimes, I read a book and think, wow, that was brilliant and I really want to be friends with the author.

When I Grow Up… is in the latter category. His poems about growing up as the child of immigrants, cultural tension, sexual identity, homophobia and the search for love are surpassingly deft, raw, funny, tragic, playful and defiant. They also communicate (don’t ask me how) a deep, fundamental good-personness. In a perfect parallel universe, Chen and I would go for drinks.

Get it here

What texts would you add to a literary discussion of love, gender and sexuality? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

Let’s Talk About Sex Education

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Last year, for the first time, I taught about gender and sexuality in literature. My kneejerk reaction was, I can’t talk about sex to teenagers. Arrggh!

On reflection, this reaction had everything to do with my hangups (to use a good old-fashioned word) and nothing to do with my students’ needs.

This is a common problem in sex education, with the current brouhaha in the United Kingdom serving as an example.

British prime minister Rishi Sunak has, according to the Guardian, “asked the Department for Education to “ensure schools are not teaching inappropriate or contested content” in the subject of relationships, sex and health education… Sunak confirmed the review… after a Tory MP, Miriam Cates, said children were being exposed to sex education classes that were “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate”.”

Numerous Tory MPs are on board, one of their complaints being that young people are being taught about oral sex — a classic case of adult prudishness being prioritized over teen well-being.

Chambers et al. (2004) is quoted by Leung et al., 2019 saying Britain’s “value-led approach [to sex education] merely reflects the interests and principles of stakeholders, while overlooking the actual needs and wellbeing of youths.”

Sex ed in the internet age

Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together think not discussing oral sex, or any other sexual act, proclivity or topic, is going to prevent kids from knowing what it is, discussing it, watching it and even doing it?

Children are handed internet-connected screen devices almost as soon as their chubby baby fingers can hold them, in many cases.

Statista data show that 58% of British children own a smartphone by age 8; by age 12, that jumps to 93%. You can bet the farm they aren’t just using it to watch Sesame Street.

Sexuality isn’t a switch that flips at puberty. Sexual behaviors and curiosity are apparent in early childhood.

This might make grown-ups uncomfortable, but our discomfort isn’t useful. Parents and teachers have a duty to help kids navigate this vital part of life.

If we don’t step up, the internet will.

Student needs versus teacher discomfort

In an op-ed, 25-year-old journalist and editor Sasha Mistlan writes (re: Andrew Tate and the importance of proactive sex education): “My friends and I didn’t get any proper education about sex, consent or relationships until we were 13, by which time we had learned it all from internet porn and lads’ mags.”

How can educators ignore this need?

I am a literature teacher; the biology of the birds and bees are beyond my remit. But it isn’t the birds and bees that students need to know about.

They need models of relationships and ways of relating that affirm sexuality as an important (but not overwhelming), natural part of adult life, and of sex as a source of joy and connection. They need love stories with happy endings. They need, also, stories that are unhappy or ambiguous; stories that show mistakes and heartbreaks as a navigable part of human sexual experience, not reasons to drink poison.

However awkward I may feel, students need a safe space for curiosity and discussion. Because lord only knows, they are talking about sex outside the classroom.

Sex positive education

Does the phrase ‘sex positive education’ make you a little uncomfortable?

It does me.

But what does the alternative imply? Sex negative education doesn’t prevent young people from having sex.

Data from the worryingly puritanical United States show that even students who promise to abstain from premarital sex… don’t.

Research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics found: “Five years after the pledge [to abstain from sex], 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and anal and oral sex variables. Pledgers… did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers used birth control and condoms.”

Scaring teenagers away from sex has never worked; ignoring sex in the hope teenagers won’t notice it is ludicrous.

The best, bravest, least-comfortable option is to say: hey, sex is a huge part of life, however whenever wherever and with whomever you do it (or don’t), and it can be one of the most joyous parts of life, or one of the most damaging. Let’s talk about how to make it joyful, empowering, pleasurable, safe and beautiful.

Affirmative literature

As a literature teacher, I can do my part by teaching texts that articulate the delights and challenges of sexuality and sexual identity, and working with my colleagues in health, science and psychology to create a safe, affirmative atmosphere for conversations about love, sex and gender.

This requires making careful choices about what my students read. Many of the canonical ‘love stories’ of European literature are anything but — think Wuthering Heights or Romeo and Juliet where ‘love’ and violence are inextricably mixed.

The search for affirmative literature requires looking beyond the cano and seeking stories that reflect a variety of experiences, cultures, orientations and gender identities.

Next week, I’ll share a list of powerful literature that treats sex with the openness, thoughtfulness, honesty and sensitivity it merits.

Suggest your favorite teen-appropriate, sex-affirmative story, poem or film in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Reading Aloud to Older Students

Reading aloud is like breast feeding: everyone agrees it is vital for the very young, but past a certain age it gets side-eye.

There is ample research on how reading aloud supports early literacy (Wiseman, 2010; Lennox, 2013, etc.).

What about reading to older students though?

Should story-time, like nursing, be confined to the earliest stages of life, or should it continue beyond the point kids can autonomously digest texts?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If primary function of reading aloud is to support literacy, research shows that reading to older learners “boosts their reading comprehension, increases their vocabularies, and helps them become better writers. In fact, students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves” (Blessing, 2005).

Zehr (2010) reported that, “teachers found by trial and error that reading aloud worked for adding interesting content or making literature come alive for students. And some educators say they read to their classes to model good reading, such as by asking comprehension questions as they go along.”

It is always gratifying when research supports my predilections, but I’ve been reading to older students — including adult learners — for as long as I’ve been teaching. Partly, it’s a failure of imagination: I loved being read to, cannot imagine anyone disliking it.

To be clear: my childhood pleasure in hearing books aloud had nothing to do with lack of independent reading skills. I could read by age four and would compete with myself to see how many pages I could read in a day. My record was 1,000. It was a 1,000 pages of the Paddington Bear series — not War and Peace — but the point is I read like a my life depended on it.

The pleasure of being read to was something else. Books I could (and did) read myself were still a joy to hear being read by my older sister, or one of my parents. We also tuned in to read-aloud radio programs, memorably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Jeeves and Wooster.

***

What makes reading aloud so marvelous? And why should it be part of every literature and language teacher’s repertoire?

To get another perspective, I interviewed Andie Yellott, a lifetime English teacher, former Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Writing Program supervisor and parent of a child with dyslexia.

  1. Should reading aloud be continued beyond reading competence?
    Yes. Absolutely. When my son was in fourth grade, I would go in for one hour during lunchtime and read to his class. It was the highlight of the week, they told me. They loved it. They always wanted one more chapter.
  2. How did reading aloud support your son with dyslexia?
    He could not have gotten through school without me reading to him. I read everything, even the godawful high school health book. One of the advantages to reading aloud is you can stop and springboard off into other paths, other conversations, which you wouldn’t do if the kid was reading alone. And if you want a kid to do well on a standardized test, read, read, read.
  3. How did reading to your dyslexic son facilitate his communicative abilities?
    He’s got a huge vocabulary. I’d read to him, stop, ask what a word meant, try to figure it out contextually. Reading aloud to him made a difference. He thought he couldn’t write; now, he’s one of the best writers I know.

Like Yellott, I’ve had lots of student enthusiasm for reading aloud. It is more than just fun, though. Reading aloud supports specific skills, depending on whether the teacher or learner is reading aloud. Here are six benefits observed in my classrooms.

Photo by Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Teacher-led Reading

Improve pronunciation

Native and non-native speakers alike struggle with the whimsy of English pronunciation. In extreme cases, this can lead to students understanding spoken words but not being able to identify them in print, or vice versa. Reading aloud while students follow along in a text is a straightforward way to ensure that kids are matching the right groupings of letters to the sounds they hear. This is especially important for those who struggle with reading and/or are learning English as an additional language.

Build vocabulary

When students are reading independently it is difficult to gauge how well they comprehend individual words. Students may grasp the main idea of a text but miss important vocabulary. As Yellott said, reading aloud is an opportunity to identify and define unfamiliar words in context. While reading to my students, I pause frequently to check comprehension. If they don’t know a word, we search for context clues, then look up the definition to verify our deduction. This is also a great opportunity to reinforce knowledge of parts of speech, e.g. ‘this is the noun fly; what does it mean when we use it as a verb?’

Create community

Reading is too often solitary and functional, the vegetable kids have to eat before dessert. We need to remember: independently reading printed texts is a novelty. For most of homo sapiens‘ time on the planet, stories were oral. People gathered around fires, or beneath fearfully and wonderfully made cathedral ceilings, to listen to a bard/priest/storyteller. Being read to was the only way most people could experience books until the advent of mass public education, which wasn’t all that long ago.

Reading aloud in the classroom reclaims the power of the story to articulate fears, hopes and desires; to delve and reveal. Students who have a chance to respond verbally to a book: express how they feel, ask clarification questions and debate it with their peers, are axiomatically more engaged than those who skim it in lonely silence.

Learner-led Reading

Correct decoding errors

Even competent readers often make decoding errors such as ‘stared’ for ‘started’. If a student is reading silently, there is no chance to identify and correct these slips that, as they accumulate, affect comprehension. Younger and/or less able readers are more likely to make these mistakes, so reading aloud is an ideal tool to support their literacy.

Understand punctuation

If Emily Dickenson was right and “a word is dead./When it is said” then spare a thought for punctuation. Students can learn the function of commas, colons, etc. through direct instruction but that doesn’t automatically translate to competent — much less creative — usage in their writing. One of the best (only?) ways to understand the delicious possibilities of punctuation is to read aloud. By treating the punctuation as a kind of score — lift the voice here, pause, slow down, shout! — students develop the ear for punctuation that every good writer must have.

Improve verbal fluency and confidence

We tend to think of fluency in the context of learning an additional language, but it isn’t just language learners who need to practice this skill. Learning difficulties, lack of a richly verbal home life and shyness are a few of the reasons native speakers may struggle to express themselves fluently in their language. For students who struggle to articulate, whether because they are acquiring the language or for some other reason, reading aloud takes the pressure off of deciding what to say, and allows them to focus on how to say. Reading well-written texts gives students a chance to see how successful communication sounds; they can practice pronunciation, enunciation and tone without the risk of error. Ideally, they can inhabit the voice of the text and, in bringing it to life, experience the possibilities of their own voice.

Parting thought

In Sense and Sensibility the ‘sensible’ (i.e. sensitive) sister Marianne falls in love with Willoughby in part because “he read with all the sensibility and spirit” his rival lacked. In Jane Austen’s time, to read aloud well and fluently was a mark of refinement and good taste. As our world becomes more digitized, text-driven and fragmented, reading aloud is due a renaissance. Anyone can jab out a text; to read a book with eloquence and feeling, though? That’s magic.

How do you feel about reading aloud to older students? What benefits/challenges have you observed? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke