Catering to the Teenage Reader

Jay Matthews:

As a child, I always enjoyed reading. But when high school teachers began to demand that I analyze what I read, I resisted. Was it really necessary to drag symbolic modes out of the lively dialogue of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," or painstakingly dissect all the relationships in "The Great Gatsby"?

In the Outlook section of the Aug. 24 Post, Nancy Schnog, an English teacher at the private McLean School in Potomac, rushes to the defense of reading-for-fun adolescents like me. She suggests the traditional way of teaching her subject should be discarded -- a notion that occurs to her after she sees stacks of works by Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston on a bookstore table labeled "summer reading." She also questions her own decision to ask her students to read British Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge for two weeks after a month's study of American transcendentalists.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 10, 2008 10:33 AM
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