At the end of January, I accepted a part-time job teaching two English classes at a small private religious school in addition to my full-time work as a private tutor. One class, a mixture of seventh- and eighth-graders, had just begun reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a Newberry Award winning book that’s been a standard of middle school English classes since the 1990s, when I taught it at another religious school. Then, the students responded enthusiastically to the novel’s critique of “sameness.” They connected it to A Wrinkle in Time, which many had read on their own, and class discussion needed only a little guidance from me. It was, in teaching terms, an unqualified success.
This time, it was an unqualified slog. These students hated the book. They disliked the community in which the book is set, and concluded that it was not worth reading even though the community’s wrongness is Lowry’s point.
Unfortunately for them, their dislike didn’t get them out of reading it. The marking period was ending in three weeks, and the previous teacher had not left any grades. I didn’t think it was fair for their entire grade to be based on one test, so I set up a series of four essays: two first drafts and two revisions. Students would submit a first draft, and I would grade and comment on it. They would revise their drafts and resubmit them for a second grade (worth twice as much as the first one to reward improvement). This process would occur for each essay, so that every student would have four grades, the lowest of which would be dropped.
The first drafts, which I thought might take two class periods at most, trickled in over the next week. One mother wrote to me that the students “feel like they’ve been taken out of the little baby pool and thrown into the deep end without the transition in the middle…they simply don’t feel like they have the tools to do that without very elevated stress levels and anxiety.”
Yes. Exactly. You need to throw kids into the deep end if they think they already know how to write and refuse to engage in critical analysis. The book isn’t too hard for them; it’s taught in middle schools nationwide. They were exposed to its ideas, albeit reluctantly, and the expectation is that they should be able to write about them in a short essay that includes an argument and one or two examples that support it. That’s it. No research required, and no quotes necessary.
When the dust cleared ten days later, eight of the nine students had earned grades ranging from A+ to B-. Only one student, “Pat,” earned an F, but it was an F richly earned. Here’s Pat’s introduction to the second revised essay:
“The Giver was written by Lois Lowry and the title of it brings many discussions to the table (yeah right)*. Why do you think the book is called The Giver, not the receiver? Based on my opinion, both names are horrible and this book should have never been written. Also, at least Giver sounds better than receiver.”
The student who can’t or won’t learn math risks innumeracy, but the student who can’t put together a written argument risks being unable to understand the difference between a good argument and a bad one. And that’s a set-up for being led astray by those who might not have your best interests at heart. As it happens, though, I don’t have to make this argument on my own. We’re reading Animal Farm now, and we’re just at the point when the two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, are arguing over whether it’s a good idea to build a windmill: “The animals listened first to Napoleon, then to Snowball, and could not make up their minds which was right; indeed, they always found themselves in agreement with the one who was speaking at the moment.”
My students hate the book.
*The parenthetical comment is the student’s, not mine.
Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D. (she/her), is an award-winning writing coach and private English tutor. Her book, History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing, won a silver medal in the teen category from the Nonfiction Authors Association and was a young adult nonfiction finalist in American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards. You can reach her at elizabeth.breau@gmail.com.
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