LETTING THE STUDENTS CHOOSE WHICH BOOKS TO READ.

LETTING THE STUDENTS CHOOSE WHICH BOOKS TO READ. This article in the New York Times reports that some teachers are experimenting with letting their students (seventh to ninth graders apparently) choose which fiction books they will read. There are enough teachers doing this that the Times calls it a “movement.” I am delighted with the movement. Since I took my survey course in English literature in high school I have thought that it would be better for each student to pick one writer or one work from each period and spend time on that than to spend a whole year on cursory exposure to famous names. Of course, some of the assigned books back in the day were unfortunate. SILAS MARNER and THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE have lots of British dialect words that will never be encountered again. A cynic might say that those books had been chosen with a view to vocabulary quizzes. A benefit not mentioned in the article is that the best kind of teaching shows the students how to teach themselves. Learning how to pick out a book that you will enjoy reading is an enormously valuable skill.