“Ms. H, these answers are all right here in the text.”

Let us pause for a monumental moment of celebration. All year long, I’ve been working with my seniors on their ability to infer, interpret, and analyze. It used to be that if the answer to a question was not fact-based or found right in the book at hand, my students could not handle it. After months and months of discussion training, open questions, and constantly asking students to find and explain their own truth, they are finally getting to be pros at thinking for themselves. (I think they might even like it!)

I realized this today when I gave my students a simple worksheet that featured background information about the history of African American oral tradition. It featured questions afterward that were more of a “reading check”–each answer could be found on the sheet without much trouble. As my students began to work on it, they were actually confused by it. One raised her hand and said, “Ms. Harter… these answers are all right here in the text.”

“I know,” I replied, “I’m just checking to see if you understood the reading.”

“Really?” she asked, “That’s it?”

More kids started to look bewildered and added things like, “So… this isn’t asking what we think; it’s just asking for the simple answer?”

“Yes,” I told them, cheering in my head. “But don’t worry, tomorrow will be back to normal with some nice questions that are impossible to answer in less than a paragraph.” They smiled and groaned–but I know they were secretly relieved.

I finally did it. They are finally starting to think and crave the opportunity to give and support their own ideas. HOORAY! Once you get there, you can’t go back. Once a mind is opened, it gets sick of simple data processing with no heart and no meaning.

How Contemporary!

Even though I’m on week five of the new semester already, it seems like it just kicked off yesterday. I’ve had many new transitions during this period, including a brand new room arrangement, new class decor, and a new committment to both giving the best and expecting the best from my students. While it’s been a transition, including the gaining, losing, and rearranging of students in my classes, I feel like it’s been a really great first five weeks.

One of the most major changes curriculum-wise has been the shifting of theme in my senior literature class. While semester one was British Authors, semester two is entitled Contemporary Authors. I’m lucky enough to teach at a school where I have a considerable amount of curricular flexibility, as long as I’m giving quality teaching that addresses state standards, so I decided to design an introductory unit that was writing-heavy rather than literature focused. If you follow this blog, you know that teaching writing is my first love; however, that’s actually not the main reason behind this switch. The reason was Reader Burnout. To put it simply, my seniors were exhausted from reading old, British texts that took several run-throughs to make sense of. After back to back texts like Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and some John Donne thrown in for good measure, English can start to look and feel like a foreign language for the average adolescent reader. By the end of semester one, I still had them with me… but barely. I was fighting hard to keep interest  alive, to take a metaphorical windshield wiper to those glazing eyes, but (fight as I may) I was not winning too many fans for the classical literature team.

As the new semester–Contemporary Literature–rolled around, I wondered, ‘Okay, these kids have dutifully read classics with me all year long. When do they get to read and write about things that they find interesting?’  After asking that question in my head, I found myself answering, “Tomorrow.”

I ended up revisiting a unit that I did last summer, about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, and transforming it for the senior level. As it happened, this was the ideal transitional move. Monomyth–a term coined by Campbell to describe the Hero’s Journey process of calling, struggle, and transformation–can be used to examine the form and characters that appear in texts across time, across cultures, and across genres. As we started talking about the structure, it gave the students a chance to showcase what they had learned in semester one, citing examples from classical texts we had already read. But the fun part was seeing the lightbulbs go on as they began to realize that similar plotlines and characters are featured in today’s books and films, relatively unchanged from their ancient roots. We had some phenomenal class discussion about the idea of the Collective Unconscious, and how humanity tends to share common nightmares, desires, and dreams. “There’s only one story, and we all know it by heart” became our motto to prove or disprove as we looked at varied examples from The Odyssey to Avatar.

Using that knowledge as a stepping stone, I set out to examine the most contemporary authors possible–my students. Over the course of the unit, my kids completed a rigorous creative writing assignment, which required them to implement the all stages of monomyth within an original plot, create a story setting and worldview, design archetypal characters, and showcase the effective writing skills that we had workshopped in class. And they worked hard. Even the slobbish slacker that always sits in back handed in a paper over ten pages long, smiling a goofy, proud smile as he handed it in (just one day late). Other kids created novellas that would have a freelancer with writer’s block simply salivating. Students that struggled to squeeze out ten sentences about The Exeter Book were now creating complex masterpieces. “Finally,” the class atmosphere seemed to say, “I get to make something cool on my own terms.”

Today’s high school students still need classical literature. The skills, cultural knowledge, and academic maturity gained by interpreting these texts are important, without a doubt. But let’s remember that reading and writing can be–and at times should be–purposefully new, exciting, and relatively free of prescriptive requirements. My first priority for my seniors is getting them college-ready. Still, a close second is getting them to understand that reading and writing are not only vital, but life-giving as well.

(Besides, even when creating something new, they can’t ever totally escape the incorporation of classical story structure. Little do they know, the same tools used by every canonical writer are already lurking in their young, unsuspecting brains. *Wink*)

West meets Midwest: A Collaboration Story

 Even with the huge variety of options that one has as an English teacher, it can still be hard to come up with ways of teaching that can shake adolescents out of their “I don’t care” coma. I mean, let’s be honest: most high school students are far more concerned with showing off and meeting new people than they are concerned about discussing literature. But wait! What if those two were one and the same? Now we’re getting somewhere.

This past October, at the WCTE State Convention, I attended a session that was given by two of my colleagues: “City Mouse Meets Country Mouse, or How Technology Brought our Classrooms Together.” The presentation gave highlights from a really unique collaboration between an urban teacher and a rural teacher in the same state. Both teachers had the same grade level, and one of the same texts. So, they decided to teach it together. They met ahead of time and “synched” their unit so that the same lessons would be taught on the same day to their respective classes. But the most important part of the unit was online book discussion, facilitated by the teachers through Goodreads.com, a social networking site built around books. With a private “room” just for these two schools, students from the city were able to offer their insights on the book, and the rural students could then respond, eventually branching out into full-blown, academic discussion between kids from totally different walks of life. I loved this idea for several reasons: (1) It was just plain cool, (2) It involved teacher collaboration, which I’ve wanted to learn more about, and (3) It gave the students exposure to some new faces, expanding not only their literary horizons, but their social ones as well. We all need to understand each other better, and it starts with common ground. When that common ground is a book, it breathes new life into the idea of  “required reading.”

I was dying to try this in my own classroom, but I wasn’t sure who to collaborate with. I really wanted to expose my students to another class outside of Milwaukee, somewhere that would expand their understanding of the world beyond their own backyard. Most of my friends teach in the city, so I tried to open my brain. Who did I know that taught somewhere… else? Then, it hit me. Of course! My cousin, about 7 years older than I, teaches English at a high school in rural Oregon. Now that’s  far away. I shot off an email, and, lo and behold, she teaches seniors, too. And she liked the collaboration idea.

Over winter break, after Grandma’s delicious Christmas dinner, Ms. W. and I were able to sit down on the couch together, face to face, and create an initial to-do list for a collaborative unit on Zora Neal-Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.  While we still have a couple months of preparation ahead, the cogs are turning and it’s looking like we’re going to be connecting kids not just between a rural setting and an urban one, but over whole regions of the country. I am so excited to give my students the opportunity to discuss a text with some new faces–ones that will seem different at first, but that will inevitably become familiar as they explore the text with other kids all the way across the nation. Wish us luck! You’ll hear more when the unit comes ’round.

The Perfect Assignment

As a teacher who is always trying to be innovative, creative, and just plain “not boring,” I try a lot of different types of lessons with my students. As a new teacher, I have a lot of lesson attempts that need fine-tuning, and a handful of utter flops. However, there is one strategy when it comes to literature lessons that–even in my short experience–has never let me down. It works with practically any fictional text and any age group. This strategy (which I definitely am not the first to come up with) is character letters.

In a character letter assignment, students write a letter to a character, usually for a very specific purpose. I think the secret of this assignment’s vast success lies in the fact that it’s very entertaining for students, yet very informative for the teacher. As I inspect textual references, tone, and reactions in their writing, I can tell quite a bit about how my students are understanding and interacting with their reading. Also, the products are often hilarious and spot-on.  Let me tell you just a little bit about how I’ve used this teaching method.

Variations: Students can write in their own voice to a character, or from one character to another. You can assign student pairs to write to each other and respond back, still in their character roles. You can have students, individually or in pairs, create an instant message conversation between characters (they have a great time creating screennames and such). Students can read examples aloud to the class, while others try to guess which character is speaking and who’s being addressed. You can have students write diary entries in the voice of a character. The list goes on. Basically, the goal is to create an assignment that asks students to assume the role of a character and to react to that character and others as if they were real people. You’ll be surprised at the strength of emotion that quickly surfaces!

Examples: Here are some concrete examples of character letter assignments that my students have tried.

*Beloved. Write a letter from one character that lives in House 124 to another that also resides in the house. This should be a letter of apology or one that reveals a previously hidden emotion. Refer to at least one specific incident from the text. Your letter should be written so that it would be given to the recipient directly after this event.

*Hamlet. While examining the tragic form, we’ve learned that tragic heroes have a flaw that leads them to their doom. So what’s Hamlet’s problem? We’ve all been in the situation where we see a friend making some bad decisions that could create even worse consequences. Write a letter to Hamlet, telling him what he’s done wrong, and what might happen if he doesn’t set it right.

*The Pearl. We don’t see our protagonists say much to each other throughout the story. What would they say if they had the time? In pairs, assign one person to assume the role of Juana and one person to assume the role of Kino. Write a letter as your character to the other, explaining everything you want to say. Once done, exchange with your partner. Keeping yourself in character, write a response to what he or she has written.

*Pride and Prejudice. While most of the verbal sparring we see in the book takes place via conversation or letters, if Elizabeth were alive today, it’s likely she’d find a lot of her drama online. Pick any character from the novel and write an email from this character to another. This should be a serious message of at least two paragraphs. Please feel free to use modern English and online abbreviations to create a message that stays true to the way the characters interact in the novel.

Try it! As you can probably already tell, there are tons of different ways to transform this assignment type to your purposes. Try it out, and you’ll likely be delighted at the entertaining, heartfelt, and shockingly accurate character portrayals that your students create. Whether you’re working it into a complex unit plan, or just need something new to keep your kids on their toes, character letters are an awesome way to go.

Roll of Thunder, Hear Our Cry

I’ve been teaching a unit with my seventh graders based on Mildred D. Taylor’s novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. As I previewed the book, I found myself recoiling from the harsh depictions of racist violence, which are very true to what really went on in Mississippi in the 1930′s, ’40′s, and ’50′s. I wondered if my classroom–a racially disparate group of 12 year-olds–would be able to handle it. I’m not sure what I was so afraid of… I guess I felt like reading about those events really hurt me, and so perhaps it would hurt them, especially if they didn’t have the maturity to understand it. I was feeling similar to a group of parents who wanted to censor the book back in 2004, saying the content was too mature and disturbing for middle schoolers to be exposed to.

But then a little bell rang in my head. Why was I trying to shield these kids from the truth of what happened in history? If I did so, wasn’t I just playing accomplice to the thousands of sugared-over history textbook editions that have lain, guilty, in classrooms across the nation for decades? If I was nervous to talk so directly about racism in my classroom, with black kids and white kids, Latinos and Hmong, wasn’t that my own little contribution to racial tension in our own society? After this mental tug-of-war, I convinced myself that I would tackle it, and after an introductory explanation about the need for grown-up behavior, sensitivity, and reverence, we plunged in headfirst.

Best move ever. The responses from studying this novel have been the most heartfelt, complex, and complete responses I’ve gotten from my seventh grade. Not that it’s been without pain–for instance, when I was explaining how tar-and-feathering was a humiliating and excruciating “punishment” that whites inflicted on blacks for the most minor offenses, I was interrupted mid-sentence by a cocoa-faced, curly-haired girl with watery eyes: “But why would someone do that? Why would anybody ever think that was ok? What made them think that wasn’t wrong? It’s wrong!”  The only answer I could give her was, “I wish I knew the answer myself. To be honest, I really don’t know where racism or hate of any kind comes from. But it’s bad, bad, news and it’s really hurtful, isn’t it?”

One of the most interesting  lessons we did involved using poetry to talk about how race interactions were more complicated than simply pitting whites against blacks. For this activity, we analyzed Jeremy’s friendship with the Logan children by connecting it with Countee Cullen’s “Tableau,” which I’ll post here–

 TABLEAU

Locked arm in arm they cross the way/The black boy and the white

The golden splendor of the day/The sable pride of night

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare/And here the fair folk talk

Indignant that the two should dare/In unison to walk

Oblivious to look and word/They pass, and see no wonder

That lightning brilliant as a sword/Should blaze the path of thunder.

Here are a few of my favorite student responses to the poem:

I say what happened in the poem was two kids (black and white) fighting against racism. They were signaling out that skin color does not effect a person’s feelings. And when the lightning struck and cut through the segregation, it burned all thoughts of hatred and led people to think. If God made different races for a reason of hope, why was it used as a reason for bad individuality, segregation, and downputting of someone of another skin type or race? All races form the reason of life. People, living, and being are the cause of the new age. In Roll of Thunder, segregation was at full cruelty. But every action has its own special consequence.

I love this poem because I think it is so true about white kids and black kids becoming friends, without anybody having the right to say anything. Countee Cullen is impressing with this poem. He’s awesome!!

I see hope in the poem where they don’t care what people are thinking about them. I think that it would be unfair if we couldn’t hang out with someone because of their race or their religion. It’s unfair to judge people because of the color of their skin and it’s rude and cruel.

I think the poem is trying to say “don’t care about what people think.” If you think or know what you are doing, have trust in yourself and go for it. They are trying to tell us even when it is hard, don’t give up because we’ve come a long, long way just to give up. In the book, the blacks are going through hard times. A couple nice white people are trying to help them go through that and say something like, “What is the difference between us?” but without words.

I’ll end this post with the wisdom of Mildred D. Taylor herself, in her response to the attempted censorship of her novel. Here’s a quote from her, courtesy of the National Coalition Against Censorship website:

“As a parent, I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words,” Taylor wrote. “But also as a parent I do not understand trying to prevent a child from learning about a history that is part of America… I must be true to the stories told.”

Thank you, Ms. Taylor, for reminding us that we have to look the world straight in the eye in order to form our own opinions of it. Even if we’re twelve years old.

P.s. Every day, I am greeted at the door by a different child that whispers to me, “Ms. H, can I read first today?” 

First Couple Weeks: Creating English Scholars

The first couple weeks of my teaching have been going very well. My three preps are so very different–it’s kind of amazing, and it makes every day a veritable potpourri of teaching variety. My writing lab class, which in content and student body is quickly becoming my best-loved hour of the day, is a creative, process-based elective for high schoolers. This is where I can create the curriculum of my dreams: a writing workshop where I can guide every step from inspiration to publication for my community of writers.  The seventh graders are a treat that is new to me–they still very young, confused, and playful, and an absolute breeze as far as classroom management goes. Everything is new to them. The seniors–low on motivation, high on sass, but smart as whips–are my special challenge and in some ways my other favorite. I am determined to be the teacher that, during this last, vital year, leaves the door open for Language Arts in the hearts and minds of these students as they enter the adult world.

With the seniors, I spent the first week centered completely around WHY we study literature in the first place. I know I certainly didn’t understand or even think about the reasons behind literary study as a high schooler. In fact, I avoided AP lit by taking a theater class instead. I just didn’t get it. And either did my current students. While there’s still a long way to go, I felt some glimmers this week, some hints that they are starting to think about the value of the written word, and that makes it all worth it.

My two best recommendations for “Why Literature” lessons:

1. Selections from Mario Vargas Llosa’s essay “The Premature Obituary of the Book: Why Literature?” This is, when approached from an open-minded point of view, a staggering argument for literature that students enjoy both debating and considering. It contains such gems as this, which made my literary geek heart swoon: Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanity’s multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

2. I had my students, in groups of four, come up with at least ten reasons why someone might want to study literature. Then, I fused all the good reasons together and published it, giving each student a copy and posting it, LARGE SIZE, on the wall. As I explained to them, “If I came to teach every day just to get paid and go home, I’d be a poor teacher. Just the same, if you come to school each day just to pass and go home, you’ll be substandard students.  To be good at something, you need to find a reason behind it. Here are your reasons for literature. Dig deep and find one, or more, that work for you, and you might surprise yourself by the wealth that you find!”

Here’s our list… Is your reason on there?

THE POINT OF STUDYING LITERATURE

by English 12, Hours 3 and 6

1. To seek answers to unanswered questions.

2. To expand our imaginations.

3. To feel or express an emotion.

4. To reflect on the state of the world around us.

5. To expose ourselves to viewpoints outside our own.

6. To appreciate the artistry of great authors.

7. To learn passion.

8. To understand other cultures.

9. To improve our society.

10. To imitate the masters in our own writing.

11. To explore different value systems and philosophies.

12. To learn how to live or how not to live.

13. To stand out.

14. To approach important ideas.

15. To hear a good story.

16. To gain reading and critical thinking skills.

17. To think about something strange, deep, or interesting.

18. To learn about other historical periods.

19. To experience something we’ve never physically encountered.

20. To see ourselves reflected back to us, with both flaws and admiration.

21. For comfort or encouragement.

22. To be respected by others.

23. To expand vocabulary.

24. To escape into an alternate reality.

25. To read and write poetry.

26. To delve into the minds of greatness.

27. To teach others.

28. To maintain a set number of intellectuals in our society.

29. To learn different genres and styles of writing.

30. For inspiration.

31. To challenge ourselves.

32. To become more intelligent.

33. To learn about famous authors.

34. To learn about new or little-known authors.

35. To impress members of the opposite sex.

36. As part of a career.

37. To better visualize a thing, place, or idea.

38. Because it’s been studied for centuries.

39. To stay out of trouble.

40. To pass Ms. H’s class and graduate from high school.

Drawings: Critical Thinking with Texts and Making Connections to Literature

Below I’ll post two visuals I made to portray some very key but very tough-to-grasp literature skills: critical thinking with texts and making connections.

The first image shows a curious stick person fall “into” a text as he deepens his understanding with each new level of critical thinking, moving from familiarizing to analysis to independent, critical thought. ( I made this for my summer school freshman group as I asked them to analyze a chapter from our novel at each level.)

The second puts into picture the oft-cited connections between a text, oneself, and the world around us. (I made this today for my new twelfth graders who didn’t have a clue how to respond to the question “What are some ways that we can make connections to literature?”)

Click the images for a larger view. Enjoy, and remember to take care of your visual learners!

Shakespeare in the City

I recently completed my final unit with my senior class–Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While I was told that Shakespeare would be nearly impossible for my students to relate to or enjoy, I was determined to teach this play. My reasoning behind this was manifold. First and foremost, being aware of the reputation of Shakespeare as difficult and sophisticated, I wanted to give my students–students from an urban school identified as “in need of improvement” by the state–the chance to tackle a task that most degree-holding adults shy away from. I knew they were bright and I knew they could handle it, and I wanted everyone to know it. Second, I liked the idea of a unit where I could teach some acting skills as a form of understanding and expression. I am a huge proponent of instruction that allows students to move and play–it tricks them into loving what they’re learning and is immensely entertaining to watch! Third, I have a deep respect and love for the tragedy of Hamlet–it approaches so many important and universal questions. Is life worth living? Why are we here? Where’s the borderline between sanity and insanity? What is honor? What costs go along with revenge? What sacrifice is love worth? How do our choices create our ultimate destiny?

Throughout the unit, I gave my students a wide variety of support in addition to the original text which, yes, they did read in entirety. However, every day I gave them a different way of interacting with the play’s plot, characters, and themes: Modern language interpretations, pop culture references, video clips from both modern and traditional performances in film and on stage, non-verbal expression, fine art, graphic novels, music, non-verbal expression, character roleplay, creative writing, debate, and (of course) acting.

While initially intimidated by the antiquated language, my students soon embraced Hamlet. They connected readily to the ideas at the core of the play–the truth that we all have people who we love, we all have pain, and we all have tough choices to make. Hamlet is merely one man’s journey through the challenging life that we all must take part in. As we got further and further into the text, my students became adept at interpreting Shakespeare’s language and reinterpreting it in discussion. By the time we were reading the final scene, they were so into it that when a student stumbled over the words for a moment, the class couldn’t handle the suspense, yelling “JUST LEAVE IT! KEEP GOING! READ!!”

For their final projects, my students staged full scenes from Hamlet in the original Shakespearean wording, using what they learned about verbal and non-verbal expression to convey character emotions, motivations, and thoughts. They did not let me down. Each performance was heartfelt and spot-on–the Elizabethan English rolled off their tongues in a fresh, genuine fashion, like a mixture of rap and lullaby. It was an English teacher’s paradise. And they were very proud of tackling and succeeding at such a formidable literary challenge. I can’t tell you how much glee it brought me to have conversations like this with other staff members walking past our door:

“Uh… What are you all doing in there?”

“We’re rehearsing scenes from Hamlet.”

“What?”

“You know, Shakespeare’s famous play.”

“Really?   …   Oh.”

With their devoted, standout performances, my students obliterated the normal expectations of their school. I was in awe of them.

Moral of the story? Shakespeare’s still alive. And while it is a stretch for today’s students to connect with his words at first, it is possible. And really teaching it well is fufilling, meaningful, and very, very fun.

Our Dark World–How much is too much?

It’s funny—people refer to high school students as “children.” Developmentally, yes, I suppose that’s what they are. But really, it’s not so simple. High school students of today have many adult concerns. They have jobs. They have serious relationships. They have sex lives. They encounter drugs, alcohol, and violence. They live in a confusing world where depression, eating disorders, and suicide are at a peak. They risk high stakes failures and successes. They live in a high pressure world where they are expected to simultaneously fill the roles of a sophisticated adult and a sheltered juvenile. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops. High school is not a more advanced version of the younger grades. It’s more like the real world. It’s a dark place. And, (apologies for the morbidity) the real world can be a dark world.

It’s no wonder, then, that today’s young adult literature reflects this. Take a title I read recently for the high school crowd: Looking for Alaska by John Green. Mind you, this is a fantastic book. It’s written with wit and beauty, wired with suspense and movement. I ask you to consider the content, though. The main characters, all 16-17 years old have realistically portrayed encounters with the following:
*unprotected sex
*persistent drug usage
*resisting authority
*heavy cigarette smoking
*depression/suicide
*moral ambiguity
*grief
*low self-esteem
*the fact that sometimes answers, closure, and comfort never come

All right. The point of this list is not to point out how shocking Alaska is. Rather, it’s to give a concrete example of what is going on inside most young adult lit today. Reading for young adults is filled with darkness, sorrow, and harsh reality. Of course, there are the bright spots as well. And the writing in this genre just gets better and better. But is the weight of the content getting too heavy? Sometimes I wonder if literature pushes us closer to the darker side than we really need to go. The question here really is this: Regarding adolescent reading material, how dark is too dark? There are two sides to my thoughts on the matter.

Point 1. Literature should not present a watered down version of life. If literature is indeed a pathway to truth, is it not more powerful, more genuine if it portrays the human condition in an honest way? I mean, if there is suffering in life, it doesn’t pay to give young adults literature that presents an overly-sunshiny vision—one that they know is false and therefore somewhat “fluffy” and pointless. If we want to motivate people to read, reading has to be alive, and that takes full disclosure about the world around us.

There should be a point. There should be some pain. There should be the chance to travel to the deepest, darkest recesses of what it means to be human. Evil, darkness, fear, loss: these things are what we least understand, but words can help us to explore these shadowy corners of our psyche. Reading can help us turn serious things around in our minds, contemplate them, discuss them, and hopefully understand them a little more. Part of me wants to believe that realism in literature helps ground us and prepare us for the hard times that are unavoidable in our individual lives and larger communities. Students are affected by the problems of the world, so why not offer them reading material that addresses the realities of those problems?

Point 2. On the other hand, there are times when the dark aspects of life become oppressive. You have a bad day at work, then have a spat with a friend over something meaningless. Then, you turn on the news, jump online, or check out a newspaper headline, only to find updates on war, economic hardship, scandal, and violence. Then, you start wondering why the heck we’re all here, anyway. It can get, well… demoralizing. After all that, who really wants to curl up with The Bluest Eye or The Grapes of Wrath? I know that last winter, when I was feeling pretty harrowed just by everyday life, my assignment to read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking nearly put me over the edge. Books do make us feel. And that includes making us feel pretty bad.

This makes me think of my students—is it fair of me to expect them to endure a semester of depressing (and powerful and brilliant) reading on top of whatever hardships they already have to bear just from their daily lives? Without a doubt, these kids already know the world is dark. So why hammer the point home to an extreme degree? Literature can also serve to inspire and humor our lives, and this purpose is surely important. Seeing the potential for light despite the darkness is perhaps the most important thing we can learn from art. That’s one of the eternal underlying themes of more literature across cultural traditions—that light and dark will always be locked in combat, but that light can still win out. Well, postmodern literature may not allow us that comfortable vision, but I think that we need to keep it alive for the sake of all of our sanities, especially that of our youth. If we want them to inherit and lead a peaceful, harmonious world, we have to start by helping them believe that such a world is possible.

Verdict: There’s no need to water down the world for young adults. They know what’s going on. But we have to feed them a literary diet that includes hope and humor every once in a while.

“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone straight from knowing nothing to believing nothing.” –Maya Angelou

We can’t have that.

True confession: I am a reading elitist.

I recently had an argument with my brother and my boyfriend about the “worth” (or lack thereof) of videogames, literature, and videogames as literature. This was a two-against-one battle, and I quickly realized that my stance—literature is important, and videogames are a waste of time—was quickly getting beaten and bloodied by my very unliterary, technophile adversaries. I got upset, perhaps unreasonably so, and abandoned the debate without saying my final say. Now that I’ve had the chance to reflect on the discussion, I think I can say some words on the subject.

For me, there are two kinds of texts in this world: semantic and aesthetic. SEMANTIC texts are those which are used as tools for thinking about the nature of the universe. They come in an amazing array of forms, but they all make us think about ideas and ideologies—things bigger than ourselves—and how they interact with our own lives. Semantic texts prevent us from going through life as automatons that complete the surfacy motions of the day to day grind without ever looking outside or within. In contrast, AESTHETIC texts are those which are experienced solely for beauty or entertainment. Afterward, they are easily dismissed and forgotten. They pass through our consciousness as meaningless daydreams. THE CATCH: the difference between these two is mainly distinguished by the viewer, not intrinsic to the text itself.

A piece of literature, to me, is a fine example of a semantic text. As such, the reading of literature is an important act. (Here, I’ll consider “literature” to be any crafted piece of writing that provokes the reader to think in a new way, to reflect on his/her own life, and to reflect on his/her own society.) Literature makes us real—questioning, doubting, angry, dazzled, puzzled, inspired human beings. It’s intense. It’s mind-blowing. It’s cool.

You know what else is cool? Videogames. Well, maybe “computer games” is a better term. We’re talking Halo. We’re talking Diablo II. And we’re definitely talking World of Warcraft. These games are fun, stimulating, addicting, and social, but they are a way lower rung on the ladder of important things than literature. They are aesthetic. Scripted. Predictable. Void of meaning.

But wait! Didn’t I proclaim that anything can work as a text? And didn’t I say that whether a text is semantic or aesthetic is in the eye of the beholder? According to all that, maybe… just maybe… computer games ARE literature!

Take Fable, for example. Fable is a game with an insane amount of writing and design put into it, which someone crafted with great care. Considering, also, that a player in Fable can do pretty much whatever they can think up (making actions that tend toward evil, good, order, chaos, or anything in between), the game certainly reflects the human condition. One could analyze the workings of the game or the shifting of the plot as decisions are made and relate it to life. Yes, Fable could be a literary experience. I guess I should be more wary about what I dismiss as a wasteful pastime.

HOWEVER, I still believe that most people who play computer games do not approach them as semantic texts. Rather, they are looking for an escape from thinking about the world. Readers are guilty of this as well. Fans of cheesy romance novels and weakly told horror books are also to blame for preferring the aesthetic over the semantic. Bottom line? The best way to not waste our time is to become literary people who try to find meaning in the manifold texts we encounter.

All that said, for goodness’ sake, pick up a book every once in a while. They are the original, intended semantic texts. They have a wealth to teach us.