When I taught English 11 Honors at Skyline High School in Salt Lake City from 2006-2015, the day each spring that many students anticipated—and some dreaded, no doubt—was when the senior AP Literature teacher visited our classroom to discuss the summer reading assignment, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. When I concurrently went to English 10 Honors classes to present their summer assignment, I explained that the purpose of the summer reading requirement was to prepare students for the rigor and challenge of college-level English courses, where students would be expected to read complete works of fiction independently and be ready to discuss those texts when they returned to class. Even though Skyline students did not necessarily welcome assigned reading over summer break, most understood its importance and considered it a reasonable expectation, especially for those who considered themselves college-bound.
As teachers, we also knew that the summer reading assignment was designed to prevent summer learning loss, a persistent problem that has concerned educators ever since Barbara Heyns' 1978 study, "Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling," revealed that academic gains made by students during the school year diminished over the summer for all groups, but most significantly for economically disadvantaged students. What was most surprising about Heyns' findings, however, was that low-income students were able to keep pace with their more affluent peers during the school year but only fell behind academically during the summer months when school was not in session. The result of Heyns' work—which was supported by subsequent studies—was the growth of summer enrichment programs, especially for low-income students to ensure that the achievement gap did not widen with each successive summer break.
When I began Literary Focus in 2022 as a summer enrichment program, I visited my former colleagues at Skyline to see if they would promote my program in their Honors classes. During that visit, I discovered that the district had eliminated all summer reading assignments the previous year because of equity concerns, a trend that has become commonplace in many districts. The rationale was that since some students might not be able to procure books on their own—and since districts were unwilling to purchase books for students to borrow during the summer—the best course of action was to eliminate the requirement altogether in order to maintain a level playing field.
My initial reaction to this decision was disappointment for the students. Skyline is one of the best academic high schools in the state and consistently produces AP Literature scores that rival those of private schools. From 2001-2005, I taught English at Rowland Hall, an independent school in Salt Lake City, and I knew that my best students at Skyline were the equivalent of, if not superior to, my top students at Rowland Hall. There were structural barriers at Skyline, however, that every public school teacher has to navigate—such as my routinely having over 40 students in a class at Skyline versus 15-18 at Rowland Hall—but we prided ourselves as a department on being able to deliver an education that was equal to that of a private school. The elimination of the summer reading requirement, however, was just another hurdle that Skyline students would have to overcome in order to compete academically with students from private schools such as Rowland Hall, where summer reading is still required.
The irony of the equity argument is that by eliminating summer reading requirements, school administrators are only exacerbating socio-economic divides between students. According to researchers Doris R. Entwisle, Karl L. Alexander, and Linda Steffel Olson, the achievement gap can be explained by the "Faucet Theory," which proposes that "when school was in session, the resource faucet was turned on for all children, and all gained equally; when school was not in session, the school resource faucet was turned off. In summers, poor families could not make up for the resources the school had been providing, and so their children’s achievement reached a plateau or even fell back. Middle-class families could make up for the school’s resources to a considerable extent so their children’s growth continued, though at a slower pace."
Since college-educated parents are more likely to understand the importance of summer learning loss, they are more likely to encourage their children to read over summer break—whether independently or through a structured summer enrichment program like Literary Focus—even if the school tacitly sends the message that summer reading is not important by not making it mandatory. As Heyns' study discovered, there will be an increased achievement gap between students from different socio-economic backgrounds if no one reads over the summer, but if students from more advantaged backgrounds do read, whereas their less-advantaged peers do not, that disparity will only increase. The best solution, then, is to mandate that every student read over the summer—and for districts to provide the necessary resources to make that happen.
Despite my disappointment in the district's policy, I also realized that the elimination of the summer reading requirement could be a boon for my program. When I met with the district's Director of Curriculum and Instruction in April 2022 to have my program listed as a summer enrichment option on the district website, I mentioned that I had also built comprehensive curriculum guides for each book that might be of value to district English teachers. The director then informed me that not only had the district eliminated summer reading assignments, but it was also actively discouraging teachers from teaching full-length books during the school year, preferring to build reading comprehension skills through the use of short excerpts instead. "If I had my preference," she said, "I would not have students read any full-length books in English class."
Even though I was a bit shocked by the director's statement, this trend towards teaching only excerpts is not unique to Salt Lake City. As Michael Elsin-Rooney reports in a recent article for Chalkbeat New York, "As NYC Revamps Elementary Reading Curriculum, Some High Schools Follow Suit," high school superintendents across New York City are presently "urging, and in some cases mandating, that schools under their supervision adopt standardized English language arts curriculum"—such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's "Into Literature" program—that focuses "on shorter excerpts of texts rather than full books." According to Elsin-Rooney, New York City administrators believe that the advantages of teaching literature through standardized, pre-packaged curricula is to create "better quality control, a reduced burden on teachers to spend their time creating curriculum, and greater ease for district officials in supporting and monitoring schools."
In an article in Forbes, "The Atomization of Literature: How Standardized Testing Is Killing Reading Instruction," Peter Greene, a high school English teacher from Western Pennsylvania, claims that "the shift to excerpts in place of whole texts has been going on for twenty-plus years, coinciding with the rise of the Big Standardized Test as a means of measuring student achievement in reading." After the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies in 2001 and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010, school administrators began looking for strategies that would improve student performance on these standardized tests that determine not only the relative success of individual teachers, schools, and districts—but of school administrators as well. Greene argues that "a critical part of becoming a literate person" is to be able "to dig and reflect and examine and explore a full text. To take time to do all that and then craft a thoughtful response. This should be a major part of every student's education. The problem is that none of that—none of it—is on the Big Standardized Test."
As the pressure to improve student test scores has increased, textbook companies have sensed an opportunity to sell their pre-packaged curricula to district administrators who are desperate for a magic bullet that will remedy their students' poor performance on standardized tests. To make matters worse, literacy specialists such as Timothy Shanahan, the Founding Director of the UIC Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, have begun espousing "a more aggressive and intentional use of excerpts and shorter works," arguing that, in addition to test preparation, focusing on excerpts gives teachers more opportunity to explore "a plethora of authors across racial, ethnic, gender, and historical contexts."
In her article for Truth for Teachers, "3 Ways to Teach with Book Excerpts Instead of Entire Texts," Tia Butts, an ELA teacher from Maryland, says that using excerpts not only exposes students to "a variety of different writing styles," it also allows students with short attention spans to engage more effectively with the material: "Imagine the pain that a student feels when they are forced to read an entire book that they may not understand or just don’t connect to. At least if you incorporate reading excerpts, it’s likely that the next passage or reading may at least engage them if they weren’t super interested in the last one. Regardless, the alternation of different texts can allow them to take their attention off of one reading and know that there will be another one coming up soon."
The movement to teach only excerpts became even more pervasive during the pandemic in 2020. In Sharon Lurye's article for The Associated Press, "Not-So-Great-Expectations: Students Are Reading Fewer Books in English Class," Kristy Acevedo, a high school English teacher from Massachusetts, observed, "There was a trend, it happened when COVID hit, to stop reading full-length novels because students were in trauma; we were in a pandemic. The problem is we haven't quite come back from that." The pressure on teachers was magnified even further when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—dubbed "The Nation's Report Card"—found that students' reading comprehension scores had dropped 4 percentage points as a result of the pandemic, continuing a 7-point slide that began over a decade ago.
On April 9, 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) seemed to support this shift away from teaching full-length works when they released a Position Statement, "Media Education in English Language Arts," which asserted, "The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education." Instead of focusing on the study of literature, the NCTE proposed that "English language arts (ELA) educators at all levels must help learners develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for a life in an increasingly digital and mediated world." Since we "no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world," the NCTE recommended that media literacy—rather than the study of literature—should be the focus of ELA instruction to help students develop "the ability to assess the widely varying quality of the information, entertainment, and persuasion that surrounds them."
The repercussions of these new trends and policies are now being felt on college campuses nationwide. In Rose Horowitch's recent article in The Atlantic, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," she highlights how, according to the college English professors, many students "no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books." Horowitch's article begins with an anecdote from Nicholas Dames, an English professor at Columbia University, who recounts how a recent student in his Literature Humanities course, which is required of all first-year students at Columbia, came to his office overwhelmed by the amount of reading she was expected to do, such as having to read a complete work of fiction within a one or two-week time frame. The student told Dames that "at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover."
Many of my students at Literary Focus echo this claim. Out of curiosity, I often ask students from traditional schools what they are reading or have read recently in their English classes, and the vast majority say they have only read excerpts in class. In fact, the opportunity to read a complete work of fiction is one of the main reasons why students from traditional schools enroll in my program in the first place. While the decision to teach excerpts certainly has some benefits, the idea that you have to choose between reading excerpts or a complete work is a false one, in my opinion. Ultimately, I would argue that you can—and should—do both.
In our courses at Literary Focus, we analyze the opening paragraphs of every novel to establish the narrative point of view and to consider the possible thematic seeds that have been planted by the author. When we begin Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, we analyze how the third-person omniscient narrator seems to feel about the unnamed woman walking into town—who we later discover is the novel's protagonist, Janie Crawford—in comparison to the townspeople who sit on their front porches and watch her. Students use the following matrix to organize their thoughts and structure their arguments concerning the narrator's tone towards each:
The short passage is very much like one that students would find on a standardized test, and as we progress through the novel, students will analyze different excerpts and passages to determine the significance of various literary elements that Hurston employs—such as characterization, symbolism, style, and setting. When it comes time to assess students' reading comprehension skills, we construct our reading quizzes to simulate the type of multiple-choice questions that students will find on a standardized test, where students are instructed to choose not the "right" answer, but the "best" one based on their interpretation of the text:
Our choice of excerpts is not limited solely to Hurston's novel, however. When the narrator describes the townspeople on the porch as the "bandar log," she is making an allusion to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). Students will read an excerpt from Kipling's work and discuss why this allusion to racist stereotypes would have been problematic for Hurston's contemporaries during the Harlem Renaissance—and why it should still be problematic for us now. To understand the perspective of leading Black intellectuals during Hurston's time period, we will read an excerpt from Alain Locke's 1925 essay, "The New Negro," and discuss why Hurston's focus on rural, uneducated characters in the Deep South might have led to the negative book reviews she received from critics such as Locke and the novelist Richard Wright, who claimed that Hurston's novel was not "serious fiction" since it contained "no theme, no message, no thought." To better understand Hurston's background and philosophy, we will read excerpts from Hurston's Biography and her 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," to compare and contrast her attitudes about racism and discrimination with those of her contemporaries.
Part of our analysis of the novel is to determine whether the claims made by Hurston's critics are valid. For instance, when we analyze an excerpt depicting Sam Watson's playful argument with Lige Moss concerning nature versus nurture, we consider why someone like Wright would believe that Hurston was employing a "minstrel technique," the goal of which was to make "the 'white folks' laugh." We will consider whether Wright's criticism is fair and reasonable, and we will also consider how Hurston might have responded to his criticism, using the following matrix to create arguments that reflect each perspective:
In trying to determine Hurston's thematic intent—or lack thereof, in Wright's estimation—we also analyze the narrator's description of Mrs. Turner, a light-skinned restaurant owner in the Everglades who befriends Janie because she has even lighter skin than her own. After discussing the term "colorism," we will consider the negative comment that Mrs. Turner makes about Booker T. Washington. Students will then read an excerpt from Washington's 1895 speech, "The Atlanta Compromise," and contrast it with W.E.B. DuBois' philosophy on racial progress outlined in his 1903 essay, "Of Booker T. Washington and Others." Students will consider why someone like Mrs. Turner would favor DuBois' philosophy and why someone like Janie would defend Washington's. Ultimately, students have to determine how Hurston wants us to feel about Mrs. Turner—and, by extension, both philosophers—as we examine the following passage and how it relates to her overall theme:
Through the study of Hurston's novel, we connect her theme not only to the leading Black intellectuals of her time, but also to the modern Feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. Students are introduced to Feminist Theory before reading an excerpt from Howard University professor Jennifer Jordan's 1988 essay, "Feminist Fantasies in Their Eyes Were Watching God," which questions Janie Crawford's status as a feminist icon in American literature. Whenever students read an excerpt of literary criticism—which they do for every book we teach—they are challenged to find ideas that they agree with, ideas that they find interesting (but are not sure they agree with), and ideas that they definitely disagree with. They use the following matrix to record their thoughts, which they then share with their classmates during class discussion:
When it comes to writing essays, we use the same format as the AP Literature Exam to simulate the test-taking experience, choosing a poem related in theme to the major work for the AP Poetry Analysis, an important passage from the middle of the work for the AP Passage Analysis, and an actual AP Literary Argument prompt from a previous AP Exam. For Their Eyes Were Watching God, we use Maya Angelou's 1978 poem, "Still I Rise," for the AP Poetry Analysis, Janie's internal transformation during Joe Starks' funeral for the AP Passage Analysis, and the AP Literary Argument prompt from the 2005 AP Literature Exam:
Despite our focus on developing the skills necessary to be successful on the AP Literature Exam, we never lose sight of the ultimate goal, however, which is to gain the benefits of reading a full-length work of fiction. When we analyze Maya Angelou's poem, for instance, we do so knowing that we are going to compare and contrast the theme of her poem with Hurston's novel concerning the nature of power, especially for Black women. When we analyze Janie's internal transformation during Joe's funeral for the AP Passage Analysis, we can only understand the significance of her change based on the life she has previously led. Without the context of Nanny's expectations for her, we cannot understand why she agreed to marry Logan Killicks or why her subsequent marriage to Joe Starks is so unfulfilling when compared to the life she imagined for herself under the blossoming pear tree outside of Nanny's house. If we limit ourselves to reading only excerpts, students will never see how those excerpts fit into the totality of Janie's experience.
At the conclusion of the novel, when students write the AP Literary Argument, they have to consider Hurston's overall theme, which the AP refers to as "the meaning of the work as a whole." When students contemplate the significance of Janie's transformation and the challenges that she has had to overcome from the beginning of the novel to the end, students intuitively will contemplate their own life's journey and how forces—both internal and external—may try to limit them from becoming the people they want to be and from living the lives they want to lead. Teaching only excerpts deprives students of that opportunity.
To further encourage student empowerment, we also assign a final project—which we call the Authentic Assessment—that asks students to apply the lessons learned from the literature to some real-life situation. For Hurston's novel, we have students imagine they are receiving an award and must select their Personal "Walk-Up" Music to play over the loudspeakers as they ascend the stage, similar to the :30-second snippets that Major League baseball players play when they go to the plate to hit or come out of the bullpen to pitch. Students will create a Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation—or whatever other digital format they would like to use—to explain why the music and/or lyrics are so important to them and reflect the type of person they are or aspire to be.
Ultimately, we emphasize with students that the study of literature is not just about developing reading skills; instead, it should be a transformative experience, where we can no longer see ourselves, others, or the world around us in quite the same way after reading the work. As Ariel Sacks notes in her article for Education Week, "Why We Shouldn't Teach Literature with Excerpts," a literary work is, first and foremost, a work of art. Sacks compares reading an excerpt to studying an isolated section of a painting: "Yes, we can study a corner of a painting, but we would almost never do so without first viewing the painting as a whole. Without seeing the whole, we miss out on the experience of the art as it was intended. And we are at a gross disadvantage in analyzing even the details we see in one corner, because we don’t know what purpose they serve in relation to the whole."
To understand the significance of any literary work, students not only need to read the entire text, they need to spend time thinking deeply about the characters and their situations. They also need to bounce ideas off their classmates and teachers to create an understanding and interpretation that is deeply personal and unique to them. As the characters grow and evolve over the course of a novel or play, we learn vicariously through their experiences of what to do—and, perhaps, what not to do—in our own lives. To deprive students of that opportunity by just teaching excerpts is doing our students a grave disservice, especially when we consider the present mental health crisis in our country.
There is a reason why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)—in conjunction with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Children's Hospital Association (CHA)—declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health in 2021, citing the "soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality" in today's students. This emergency declaration is also a call to action, mandating that we, as a society, "identify strategies to meet these challenges." As English teachers, one strategy is to resist the directives of those administrators who seem more focused on improving test scores than enriching student lives. We also need to resist educational leaders like those at the NCTE who want us to "decenter book reading" in order to develop "students' identities as digital consumers, creators, distributors, and inventors."
Even though the NCTE wants our classes to reflect the "heavily mediated worlds" in which our students live—a world that is reflected in "the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds, the news broadcasts we watch on demand, the podcasts we binge, and the films, TV series, and live events we stream through the ever-growing list of digital platforms"—I would propose that we do the exact opposite. Rather than have our courses reflect the fragmented, disconnected world that we experience online, we should re-commit our time and energy to teaching full-length works of fiction that serve as an antidote to those feelings of dislocation and isolation that our screens have inflicted upon us—and especially upon our young people who know of no other way of living or making sense of the world.
If we want our students to rediscover a sense of what makes life meaningful and worth living, our classrooms should serve as a respite against the noise and nonsense that surrounds them. In an article in Slate, "The Loss of Things I Took for Granted," college professor Adam Kotsko concludes his essay by saying, "What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose—for no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people." The English classroom is our last best chance of giving students the skills and opportunity to make that choice—not just for themselves but for every generation that follows.
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