Note: This protocol is for longer works of fiction and nonfiction. Essays, poems, and short fiction and nonfiction are required to be read in full.
The Invitation
In his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt explains his approach to reading as follows:
I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.
We can use aspects of this idea to navigate the first 30-40 pages of any novel or longer work we read in our makerspace. Each time, we can use a specific protocol to learn more about how you read, what that means for your learning, and where the threshold lies between forcing and inviting you to read.
Ultimately, you will decide to continue any longer text that is assigned to you, or you will decide to choose another work of equal literary merit. You must read, but what you read will be your choice.
Making an Informed Choice
After the first 30-40 pages of an assigned text, you must answer these three questions, which will posed to you most often through discussion and writing prompts:
- What does it mean “to get [a] story going,” and how has that happened here?
- What does it mean to care about what happens to a character, and which character(s) do you care about so far?
- What does it mean to enjoy a story, and to what extent are you enjoying this one?
These questions center you, the reader, and invite us to discuss the assigned text as a group. You can see an example of how this looks in the 2018 unit for A Long Way Gone in English 10.
After answering these questions, you must then carefully consider how the assigned text meets the criteria of a work of literary merit. To do this, you must work or have worked your way through the following post in its entirety:
Any assigned text will meet these criteria in full. That is why it is assigned: It will do all of these things for you, and it has been vetted by teachers and students repeatedly. An assigned text will be a good text.
That does not mean it is the right text for you. This is the choice you have been given.
To make that determination takes tremendous self-awareness and careful thinking, however, starting with a clear sense of why we read. Your choice must be deliberate, either way. You must study or have studied this:
Then you can begin to go through the criteria for literary merit. You can load the post or use this printable, two-sided PDF:
In brief, your choice must
- teach you something about how you read;
- serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
- be well-written enough to teach you how to write.
If you are able to find, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, a suitable and more interesting alternative to the assigned text, you should read it.
You will always be required to justify your choice in the kind of reflective and metacognitive writing that supports the best decisions, and you will always have the freedom to change your mind, if the first 30-40 pages of your choice don’t pan out as you expected.
This is about choice. It’s also about assiduousness — about persevering to read something that takes time, takes focus, and rewards both.