Why Johnny Won’t Read: Part 5, by Dean Smith

 Dr. Dean Smith blogs on Wednesdays.

 As part of a study to determine which students were actually reading the assigned texts, I conducted a study comparing three ability groups: AP/Honors, Academic, and General. I wanted to know who was doing the reading and who was merely reading SparkNotes.

 The AP/Honors group did read SparkNotes, but they also read the novel. They used SparkNotes to make sure they weren’t overlooking something and to help them identify the symbols, motifs, themes, etc. This left two groups.  The academic classes and the general classes.  Who wasn’t doing the reading but relying on SparkNotes instead? 

 I could have argued for either group.  I figured that maybe the general classes were relying on SparkNotes, but I found out that they weren’t.  Why not?  Because they’re not going to read anything.  They don’t read the novels, and SparkNotes is just another damn thing to read.  It was the academic classes who cheated like bandits.  All they did was read SparkNotes, and they were passing all of the quizzes because of it, but they never read the novels.   

             Just for fun, I took this study up to the university level and worked with a group of students taking an introductory gen-ed literature course.  I didn’t want to look at a class with a bunch of English majors; I wanted to look at a class with a mixed bag so could see what the average “academic” student was doing.  

             I ended up with the same results with the exception of one thing that I hadn’t taken into consideration.  The professor had chosen a mix of what I’d consider young adult novels and classics: Girl with a Pearl Earring; Love Medicine; Catcher in the Rye; House on Mango Street; The Things They Carried; The Golden Compass; Frankenstein; The Reader; and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.  

             In short, just like my AP/honors students, the English majors in the class tended to read more of the novels than the non-English majors; no surprise there.  The contemporary novels were more popular than the classics in so far as the amount of the novel actually read.  In conjunction with this, the easier novels as measured in Lexiles were more apt to be read than the more difficult novels.  

             And when it came to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, nobody read it.  The prof was flabberghasted (I didn’t tell her ahead of time what the results were.  She found out on the last day of class at the same time the students did.)  “But we had such great discussions” (this is an actual quote).  What was their response?  “SparkNotes.”

             Here’s what I hadn’t taken into consideration.  The two books that were read the most were The Reader and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.  Why?  Because of sex.   The Reader involves the awakening of a young man by an older woman, and boy oh boy is he awakened, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is a collection of short stories that basically focus on repressed sexual fantasies. 

             I had to laugh when I realized what these two books were about, but there is a good point in all of this.  We can’t bring The Girl in the Flammable Skirt into a high school classroom, but there is something to be said about introducing contemporary literature that the students would find more relevant and more interesting.  And there’s a lot of good young adult literature out there.