In the past few months, there has been much rending of cloths and gnashing of teeth over the decline in classroom book reading (see here, here, here, and here, for example). Heck, I penned my own lamentation, weeping over how few whole books teachers assign.
In the pages of the New York Times, Dana Goldstein notes that this phenomenon isn’t just standard adult-grumbling about young generations. The average number of books assigned per year really has dropped.
The accused are numerous. Karen Vaites blames publishing companies, who hawk excerpt-heavy textbooks for a tidy profit. It’s probably safe to lay much blame at the algorithmic feet of social media and AI. Others harangue standards-based reform. And I cast aspersions at teacher professional organizations that explicitly encourage English teachers to decenter book reading from their classes.
However, I come here today not to sift and winnow between the causes of reduced reading loads or suss out whether there really are fewer books in English classes. Rather, I want to push back on the pushback a bit.
My book-loving credentials are in order. I spent my time in schools as an English teacher and an administrator in the classical education world. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Odyssey—I lived and breathed these books for years. I read them out loud with students, savored the language, assigned chapters, assessed comprehension, broke down beautiful lines and metaphors, and tested and measured student understandings.
But I assigned writings other than novels, too: speeches, poems, short stories, and essays. These have as much value as a complete book.
I agree with Doug Lemov and others that longer works—plays, novels, epic poems—ought to be the core of any English class. Length allows for more complex characterization and plotting, demands more of students, and facilitates coherent, extended units. But shorter works have their own value.
For example, with my sixth graders, I included a unit on Romantic poetry—think nature and short lyrics, not roses and hearts. I couched it between more difficult novel-length studies as something of a curricular reprieve. Short works break up the year and pace out the rigor. After finishing a final exam and before picking up another dense, heavy novel, we spent just a few weeks delighting in verse.
Over the course of studying a novel, students experience one author. Through a unit on Romantic poetry, students read Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Longfellow, Shelley, and others. They encounter compelling metaphors, rhythm and rhyme, complex language, and beautiful images in condensed, accessible bites that could get overlooked in the waterfall of text in a novel.
It’s also worth reading many short works simply because they are great in themselves. In the lead up to Halloween every year, I had my seventh graders read Edgar Allan Poe. They let out an “eewww” in the final lines of Annabel Lee. They winced at the thought of the Pit and the Pendulum. They fell silent at the haunting image of party-goers falling, one by one, into a bloody seizure as humanity goes extinct at close of the Masque of the Red Death.
Edgar Allan Poe—though I’ll be the first to admit that his prose is at times needlessly verbose and turgid—crafted a compendium of mythological imagery akin to the images of Sisyphus or Icarus. The beating heart of guilt under the floor boards, an unstoppable scythe swinging ever closer to bring death, a chained man bricked into a tomb—these are literary images that stand the test of time.
Plenty of other short works have equal value. What would a high school education be without A Letter from Birmingham Jail or What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? Should we not introduce Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes to our students that their verse might be a companion to them? Should we keep Gettysburg, I Have a Dream, or Washington’s Farewell from students because they’re each only a few pages long?
To be fair, I know that no one who penned the aforementioned protest over the decline of book reading in classrooms would argue that students should only ever read books. But seeing as the pendulum of education policy and fads ever swings too far, it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge the benefits of short works. As a happy medium in discipline would settle somewhere between “suspension for checking the clock” and “here’s a bag of chips for punching your teacher,” so the literature classroom should settle between “no novels” and “only novels.”
Fundamentally, the English classroom exists for twin purposes: improve literacy and introduce students to the best that has been thought and said. An English classroom that includes no novels or only excerpts fails miserably at that dual purpose. But the villain here is the complete lack of novels and the tendency to include only excerpts. Short stories, poems, and speeches—these are not the bad guy in this storyline.
