Speaking of reading (and writing)

[sabotabby]

Dear every journalist who writes an article on this subject:

No, Grade 11 English courses do not typically do Shakespeare. They're definitely not doing Dickens anymore. This is not the 1950s. This is not even the 1990s. I'd say if you did a straw poll you'll find a lot of schools where they are now debating swapping out Hunger Games for Indigenous authors.

Most schools are already not doing Shakespeare because the language is too challenging for the kids. In my friend's son's Grade 11 university-level class, they did not even assign a single book. I'd estimate a good half of Grade 11 English courses are doing easy YA because the new philosophy is that if you make kids read something hard they will be turned off reading forever.

 

And yet every single news story about the Indigenous lit course references "swapping out Shakespeare," because rather than doing even the most cursory investigation, the writer assumes that nothing has changed since they went to high school. That, or these articles are being written by an extremely racist AI.

Here's CBC in 2017. Globe & Mail in 2017. Vice in 2020. Durham Region, 2022. CBC again in 2019. National Socialist Post in 2017 being typically fashy about it. The Record in 2021. Ottawa Citizen in 2020.

 

It's just an incredibly unwieldy way of admitting that you've never voluntarily read any fiction since you yourself left high school. Or bothered to investigate what students are actually learning.

No love,
Miss Tabby

P.S. Yes, this is a good move and should have been done years ago, across so-called Canada. I am celebrating the actual votes in at least two school boards that I know of so far. I am just deeply tired of the deliberately inflammatory and kneejerk framing.

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

I'm going to be that guy who says it's also not a bad thing to give kids reading material more relatable and relevant to their lives [like Indigenous authors] and less reading material by old dead white dudes whose work was full of racism, classism and sexism. [I'm not saying we should "cancel Shakespeare" but also you can't really teach old books anymore without having to explain to kids how we've progressed since then and if you're just trying to get kids to read, Shakespeare and his problematic-ness is more suitable for history lessons than literacy.]

[sabotabby]

So I can hold forth about this at great length, but I don't think relatability should be a consideration. This alas puts me at odds with both the conservatives and the progressives in the school system.

The purpose of literature in English classes is threefold, and each of these three points may be contrary to another point. They are:

1) Foster a lifelong love of reading
2) Teach kids to analyze literature critically
3) Create a shared body of cultural knowledge

(I believe you can hit all three aims with Indigenous literature by the way. Or with Shakespeare. But you're not going to succeed at all three with every text and every kid.)

Progressives overemphasize 1) and conservatives overemphasize 3). No one wants to talk about 2), because that's the one that actually threatens the social order. I also think that progressives don't want to accept that not every kid will graduate their compulsory schooling with a love of reading and literature, any more than I graduated with a love of phys. ed. Teaching a more diverse set of texts goes a long way to ensure that each of these goals is met, but I also do believe that you should force kids to read challenging, difficult books that they find boring, at least at higher levels.

[ex_flameandsong751]

I also think that progressives don't want to accept that not every kid will graduate their compulsory schooling with a love of reading and literature, any more than I graduated with a love of phys. ed

...You have some points, especially this. [I hated phys ed]

[altamira16]

We should cancel Shakespeare because Falstaff is a drunk. We should cancel Shakespeare because you shouldn't kill yourself kids when your first love doesn't work out. We should cancel Shakespeare because of Antisemitism.

Ok, so we shouldn't cancel Shakespeare, but it is being treated like one of the people below said. Basically, if there is Antisemitism, it is being discussed in class.

[altamira16]

What? We did A Midsummer's Night Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and MacBeth in high school in the 1990s. I think that is all we did. I read the Merchant of Venice, but I don't remember why. Did we have it for a class or did a friend say it was funny?

When we were reading the unreadable, we were reading James Joyce.

[sabotabby]

Hah yeah, we got James Joyce in 11th grade. Only the Dubliners, though, which is comparatively easy.

A major difference between high school in the 90s and now is that when we were in school, you read more than one book. These days, it's not expected that kids read more than one book a year (and many don't even read that much), so the debate on which book it should be becomes very fraught. But we had five years of high school so it would be a Shakespeare play + two or three novels a year, and minimal time spent on standardized tests or learning how to read infographics.

[dewline]

Hamlet, MacBeth, Julius Caesar...along with 1984, Animal Farm, The Diviners or The Stone Angel (not sure which), Inherit the Wind, and a couple of others.

[minoanmiss]

*groans at those journalists*

I actually personally love Shakespeare, in part because being dragged through a fundie church gave me a leg up on the language. And I had fun talking to the kids in the school where I worked in the oughts about Macbeth and with my friend's now-22-year-old son about Hamlet when he was 16. But the "schools are throwing out Shakespeare in favor of some Random Indigenous Scribblings" formulation is so fucking bigoted and obvious I cannot even.

[sabotabby]

I love Shakespeare too. And if teachers do, we have three other years to teach him in. Which is three more years than is currently used to read Shakespeare.

[conuly]

E's class did Oedipus Rex last year.

She grew up on Greek mythology and found it amusing that she was the only one who knew the punchline before her classmates. She quite enjoyed saying things like "I'm not saying he's bad, no spoilers, but he's a real mother----er".

And come to think of it, she definitely *did* do Julius Caesar either last year or the year before. I remember, because I was shocked and appalled that her teacher agreed to let her write an essay on the subject of why ambition is not always bad. This is not a good essay topic when you have to tie it in to Julius Caesar, and I do not know what her teacher was thinking.

I'd ask A what they did in school, but they've always been really chary with that sort of information, even back in kindy.

[sabotabby]

I poll my kids and about half of them each year have done any Shakespeare at all. Granted, my kids are not a representative sample, but the power dynamic no longer really exists in schools for teachers to force kids to read something they don't enjoy reading.

[minoanmiss]

She quite enjoyed saying things like "I'm not saying he's bad, no spoilers, but he's a real mother----er".


*cackles*

[dissectionist]

Me to Elder (who just graduated): Did you do any Shakespeare in high school?
Elder: We did the anti-Jewish one.
Me: What?
Elder: The one with the Jewish guy and the pound of flesh.
Me: *confusion*
Elder: The one with the merchant… Merchant of Venice!

(So then I lost half an hour to a rabbit-hole of reading articles about that particular play.)

Younger just finished his grade 9 English yesterday. They read Fahrenheit 451, a graphic novel called Persepolis (autobiography about the Islamic Revolution), and several short fiction stories. I know next year is Macbeth but I’m not sure what else they’ll do in addition.

I don’t know how relevant this is to the usual TDSB curriculum (Elder was in TDSB, Younger is in private school now). I’m all for adding in more Indigenous lit.

[sabotabby]

Oh yeah, what year did we do Merchant of Venice? I think Grade 12. I know it was Romeo and Juliet in Grade 9, Midsummer in Grade 10, and Hamlet in grade 11, so it must have been, because we totally did do it. Some of the other classes did Othello, so I guess that was the year the teachers got to choose between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism.

Persepolis is a good one to do—it's a pretty meaty text. Fahrenheit is too, especially in the current political climate, even if people absolutely miss the point poor Ray was trying to make.

[altamira16]

Some of the images in Persepolis are about the people who are disappeared and tortured during the Islamic revolution, and the houses of people they know getting bombed.

[grimjim]

My recall of high school Shakespeare was that most kids weren't really into it. I have to wonder how much of the reactionary reaction is grounded in a cycle of abuse. "If I had to suffer through Shakespeare in high school, kids today had better suffer too, lest my suffering have been pointless!"

[sabotabby]

It's definitely that amongst the parents. Teachers/school boards have different reasons. But that's also the reactionary impulse for maths, I think.

[frandroid]

As an adult cultural immigrant to English Canada, I'm glad that the common corpus is going away because then people can stop assuming that I should have read it. lol.

[sabotabby]

Oh come on, you can fake having read books. I do it all the time.

[greylock]

As someone who studied Shakespeare and Dickens in the '90s, and hated it, I fall on the side of it being important to study.

But, I may be out of touch, I reckon kids should learn the broad strokes of the dominant religions - and I'm an atheist.

I'd say if you did a straw poll you'll find a lot of schools where they are now debating swapping out Hunger Games for Indigenous authors.

They study Hunger Games?

That, or these articles are being written by an extremely racist AI.

They are not. Work is looking to replace us with AIs. Idiots.

Admittedly, I don't recall if I have ever read any 'Indigenous' authors from anywhere (well, aside from the UK), and I am sure I would have hated it in high school as much as all the stuff I was forced to read back then.

But I've always found it more useful to understand Shakespeare and Dickens since leaving school.

[sabotabby]

The main reason The Classics get studied in school is two-fold: The books are public domain and there are copies already in the cash-strapped school, and English teachers are familiar with them and don't want to/don't have time to become familiar with a new book.

But there is no set curriculum for any year. Schools that have the budget have been quietly replacing Shakespeare and The Classics with "relatable" YA novels for years. "They swapped out 1984 for Hunger Games" does not a good headline make, nor does "They swapped out Hunger Games for the Marrow Thieves."

I'm of the opinion that you could cover the same content with Marrow Thieves as you can with Hunger Games and 1984, with the bonus that it's better written than the former and no less well-written than the latter, and it's more relevant for kids to learn about the local dystopia of residential schools than it is to learn about fantasy dystopias happening to white people or the internecine conflicts of the USSR.

But anyway, students living on stolen land should not be able to graduate 12 years of public schooling without reading a single book by an Indigenous author, as happened to me back in the day.

[lilysea]

Heck, when I was at high school in the 1990s the poetry textbook we read and analysed included several poems by Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly known as Kath Walker), an Aboriginal Australian political activist, artist and educator, who campaigned for Aboriginal rights.

and the preamble to her poems, and her poems themselves, included mention of racism and injustice.

And that was the mainstream poetry curriculum book for all public high schools that year.

The same standard mainstream poetry curriculum book for all public highschools that year also included a poem by British poet Wole Soyinka, "Telephone Conversation"

The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey--I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

[sabotabby]

We read a memoir about Japanese internment and some poems and short stories, but almost everything else was by white authors. Unless you count Ondaatje as a POC?

[lcohen]

this is meant as a data point, not a disagreement with anything that you say above. but i went with a friend's younger kid to a production of "as you like it" that was performed by a youth theater that specializes in shakespeare, and they found ways to make shakespeare rock without changing a word of the language. just saying things in a way that you could imagine someone saying "girl, he's so fine" right before extolling orlando's appearance, or whatever. making the sword fight into a sing off. making the songs 60s peace songs instead of renaissance ballads. the kids, admittedly self-selected for wanting to interact with shakespeare seemed to be having a great time but so did all their friends in the audience. and it wouldn't work for every kid, but i love reading and i couldn't finish Divergent or whatever the name of that book was--i was too bored. (i am trying to think of the name of the book her class just finished reading--it was about black kids in gangs, it was hugely relevant, and they all loved it. i should ask her.)

[sabotabby]

The critical thing is self-selection. And of course how it’s taught. But on a pragmatic level, most of my Grade 11s and 12s are struggling to decode modern English. It’s a spiral too—English teachers select easier texts to avoid turning students off, and so students don’t develop the skills to slog through more difficult texts, so teachers give them easier texts, etc.

Of course for a certain number of kids, the opposite is the case. I balked at reading YA garbage in grade 9–both the subject and reading level were not interesting to me to the point where it caused psychic damage. I imagine Divergent would do the same.