Yes, unless teachers promote literature relevant to students

Browsing in Barnes & Noble one afternoon, I found myself drawn to the "Summer Reading" table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.

It's the time of year when I'm reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in the United States. "The percentage of 17-year-olds," it reports, "who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled" in the past 20 years.

If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives — teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube — and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature.

But it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit: the high-school English classroom and, all too often, English teachers like me, able and well-intentioned as we may be.

"Butchering." That's what one of my former students called English class, and the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes; the essay assignments that require students to write about a novel for which they have no passion. One parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after taking AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."

Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels.

Last year the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a monthlong study of American transcendentalists, it became clear they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy.

One junior, who had forcefully projected his boredom in my classroom, started an e-mail dialogue with me. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."

You may think this is a kid geared for history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."

A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer.

When students have to write about a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both them and the teacher.

The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy into the process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.

We'll have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. That means an end to business as usual — abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on quizzes, and adding science fiction or nonfiction to the reading list.

We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.

Nancy Schnog recently joined the English faculty at the McLean School in Potomac, Md. She wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.