Literature Class as a Book Club

Recently, my husband and I joined my father-in-law and his girlfriend for dinner. As we sawed into our steaks and sipped the wine, our conversation made the usual rounds: work, family, friends, health. After dinner, my husband and his father split off to go talk music while Sharon and I remained at the table. She turned to me excitedly and chirped, “So what’s your English class going to be like? A book club?” Her tone jested, though simultaneously expressed a hopefulness: I could appreciate both sentiments. On one hand, it’s an insulting notion that English teachers merely lead book clubs, a notion that severely downplays the preparation and thought that goes into each lesson. We don’t just kick back and read books, we use books as vehicles for teaching an enormous range of skills that span everything from vocabulary and literary devices to critical thinking and human empathy. Sharon knows this, and this is why she protected her question with the disclaimer of a half-smile; however, her eyes sparkled suggestively, as if to say, “What if?”

When I consider how I learned to love reading, which is of course the absolute first step to learning from reading, it was in fact through situations that mimicked a book club scenario. Believe it or not, I’ve never actually belonged to or attended a formal book club (does this disqualify me from being an English teacher?), but I have engaged in numerous discussions about literature, some having been completely organic and spontaneous social interactions, and some having been staged in a classroom (though equally genuine nonetheless). Why did these experiences, which occurred in very different circumstances and venues, all appeal to me as genuine, and therefore worthwhile, educational, and enjoyable? More importantly, how can I harness that quality and infuse my teaching with it?

As I explore this question, I can assert one thing with absolute certainty: I did not learn to love reading by taking what I call “gotcha quizzes”. These are the mechanisms by which teachers audited students with what felt like benign trivia questions to ensure that they had simply done the reading. I hated these. When I knew that these quizzes were coming, my reading experience was a joyless one, one in which I felt like I was hunting frantically with my eyes for inane details that my teacher may ask me about. This experience is the exact opposite of a genuine exchange between both the author and the reader and between the student and the teacher. This experience is completely contrived and creates a power dynamic that would leave Paulo Freire reeling.

"For crying out loud, STOP asking questions that you already know the answer to!"
 

My new colleagues suggested that I study and use the strategies proposed by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. As I rummaged through the book, I was pleased with the authors’ emphasis on building a problem-posing classroom in which students learn to be mindful and attentive readers rather than blank-fillers and multiple-choice-answer-circlers. Beers and Probst present six so-called “signposts” for students to look out for, and suggest questions related to each signpost that they can ponder as they read. For example, the “Words of the Wiser” signpost appears when “a wiser and often older character offers a life lesson of some sort to the protagonist” (72).  When a student finds an example of this in the text, they are prompted to ask themselves, “What’s the life lesson and how might it affect the character?” (79). All signposts have their own detailed descriptions and related anchor questions, and all seemed like they would be easy enough to recognize in the wild, so to speak.

I imagined that I would challenge students to find examples of these signposts in their assigned reading, along with unfamiliar vocabulary words that they encounter and instances of figurative language; they could then bring these artifacts to our class discussion. Now THIS would be a book club English class, in which students would experience a bona fide literary round table, a truly honest learning experience that does not rely on canned (or even planned) questions. Naturally, however, I would actually always need to have my own (open-ended and authentic) questions ready, for even Beers and Probst suggest that the teacher “put conversation prompts or questions on note cards and distribute them to a few students” to pitch to the class “when there is a lull in the conversation” (30). Being that I had multiple books to comb through this summer in preparation for teaching at my new school, I decided that I would approach each text as if I were a student hunting for signposts. My resulting questions could help fill the void on those quieter days.

As I worked through first The Great Gatsby and then The Grapes of Wrath I found it easy to circle vocabulary words that may stump my students, and I found it easy to identify instances of literary language that would lend itself to thoughtful analysis writing. As for the signposts, I often found myself caught up in terse arguments with myself: “Does it count as a ‘Words of the Wiser’ if a minor character, rather than the protagonist, is receiving the advice?” “What if something is very clearly being emphasized but it is only repeated once? Does it still count as an “Again and Again” signpost?” “What if something happens that does not fall under any of these signposts, but it inspires a question that I’d like to explore?” These questions made me feel almost as tense and confused as a “gotcha quiz”.

This exercise taught me a couple of important lessons. For one thing, it is crucial to preemptively complete any exercises that I expect students to complete. This allows me to stumble upon, acknowledge, and plan beyond any obstacles that may inhibit them. Furthermore, I learned that no matter how appealing and sound a teaching strategy may appear, students should always be provided with tools and choices rather than a so-called surefire approach to a task as complicated and personal as text interaction. Not all students would hem and haw and split hairs over the definitions of these signposts the way that I did, but some most certainly would. My educational experiment ultimately lead me to conclude that I will teach my students how to use the strategies presented within Notice and Note while reading, but I will also not limit them to these strategies. Within a literature class, the goal is not to test a student on the definition of a term that was created by a former teacher, published in some book written for fellow educators. The larger picture shows a classroom that coaches students to be inquisitive, interested, and diligent readers. These readers can independently pose thoughtful questions and answer them collaboratively with other readers. These readers can simultaneously enjoy a complicated text while auditing and mending their own confusion regarding that text. These readers would love reading so much that they may, of their own volition, form and lead a book club.

Sharon, to answer your question, yes: I will do my very best to make my English class look like a book club.

Works Cited

Beers, Kylene and Robert E. Probst. Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2013. Print.