As a high school teacher who has taught 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' several installments of 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,' and 'Frankenstein' as a means toward developing background research and annotation skills for “thick” texts - which seems to be anything from 19th century, apparently - I deeply appreciate this article. The first two I teach to 9th-grade students, and the last to 10th-grade students. The first days or weeks of the reading is a slog, and I slog along beside my students to ensure they're learning the skills. Those students who dig into the slog have consistently developed the skills needed to rise to the occasion of reading 19th century texts, and exhibit fair to strong comprehension after applying those skills.
There are many questions this article raises that I don’t have the time to address, but all of them I find of value, here. The humor mentioned regarding that first paragraph of 'Bleak House,' points to an excellent assessment measure - if one can recognize the playfulness of the writing, then one has certainly comprehended fairly well. For my students who learn the skills from the first two above mentioned texts, by the end of the letters in "Frankenstein" they no longer really need to look up many vocabulary words. Most authors use a fairly limited (even if expansive) vocabulary, and once the students embed that vocabulary the rest of the text only provides practice in comprehension by sight rather than by research, and that quickens their reading pace. I’ve even found some of that vocabulary finding its way into the essays of some of my more playful and astute readers. So, thank you, Wexler, for posting this. I look forward to more insightful articles like this one.
Teachers/professors are taking the lazy, easy way out by blaming the students. If you want students to comprehend the text, take time to review the historical context, the typical language/customs of the time, and read line-by-line in class if necessary. Many of them will rise to the challenge.
Important discussion. As a former high school English teacher and current reading specialist working with first and second grade intervention students, this is a topic I've been thinking long and hard about: Can We Inspire a Love of Reading (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/can-we-inspire-a-love-of-reading?r=5spuf)
"However, even pre-internet I always had a hard time getting into Hesse, so for many of us—including many of our students—it can be personal interest shaping our reading experiences rather than internet habits. Of course, it’s difficult to deny (and I don’t!) Wolf’s assertion that superficial reading characterized by spurts of searching and scrolling rather than sustained concentration can severely impact our ability to slow down and focus, which is necessary for understanding well-constructed sentences as well as well-developed features of the whole text. A colleague teaching Romeo and Juliet to his freshmen had such a difficult time gaining any traction with the text that after the marriage scene, he snapped shut the book, scanned the class, and cheerfully announced that they lived happily ever after."
There are some fabulous textbooks with accompanying suggestions for making the whole Shakespeare experience much more interactive. The Cambridge Shakespeare books are a really good start. For example, cutting up the 14-line prologue, dropping the lines on the floor (There has to be enough for each member of the class.), and asking the students to choose one, read it and then speak it to another member of the class. They can say the line as a joke, a threat, an appeal..., etc. It's not long before they're word perfect and then you can put it all together. The first scene in Act 1 can also be 'played' by splitting the class into two. Each of the two sections of the class now competes against the other by taking the part of a Montague or a Capulet facing off against one another in a 'freeze frame'. Someone takes a photograph of the 'frozen' scene and the class guesses who is playing which parts. It's something to get a Grade 7 or 8 class off to a flying start.
I am not an educator, just a parent that wants to make sure my child gets a more complete reading education than I did. This article brought up a lot of my own insecurities around how I was taught to read and how fear led me away from studying English in college.
We were only tasked with reading one novel in my high school, and that was The Great Gatsby. In my 2nd period class of 20 some seniors, I was one of two that read it. I remember enjoying figuring out the language, like a puzzle, and using SparkNotes to work backwards when something didn't make sense. I felt like a cheat for using SparkNotes (even though I now know I used it to supplement, like a good reader, at the time I felt like I should have naturally known what it all meant!), and not being able to discuss it in class with my peers made the spark extinguish before the flame could even begin.
I liked to write, and everyone thought I would become an English teacher, but I backed out because I was certain I wasn't good enough. What if I arrived in my first class and had to reveal that my favorite books were pun based fantasy novels! How could I face the embarrassment?!
I know it's silly now, and it's something I am trying to correct with my own child. His school is using CKLA and his teacher read 5 books to the class, in addition to the books we read to him (adult swim at the pool is the perfect time for a mini reading break!).
I hope that Dickens doesn't go away. I think the challenge is important for empathy and for confidence. I know when I tasked myself to read the paragraph of Bleak House, I enjoyed parsing out the bit about the Megalosaurus, imagining the mud writhing down the hill like something threatening and alive, but ancient and inevitable. Even if "dead white guy" stories aren't the most valuable and relevant, the challenge is worth something.
I don't want my child or any child to be pulled away from something enjoyable because they didn't get the basic support they needed in school.
I graduated from high school in 1978, and yours was a very interesting comment on where kids are situated in their reading abilities today. I appreciate you trying to get support from the school because it seems the choices in front of kids now have distracted and distanced them from understanding novels and stories from the past. As for me, I have so many memories of different texts read in school. Moby Dick where the ship Rachel circled around Ishmael, its lost child, at the end. This ending and its meaning was pointed out by our teacher, Mr. Tippens. I had no idea it was a biblical source! He really brought things alive for all of us. There were other books, but the one I really remember was a reflection with a class friend on the best part of Walden: The description of ants and their fighting while being observed by Henry David.
Thank you, I'm glad you caught my meaning! High school was 20 years for me, but I think that really shows the progression. Moby Dick would not have been accessible for my class. We did study it, in an abstract way. We learned the opening line like a trivia question and learned why it was important. I memorized names and dates for my English class like it was a very specific History course. We would read exerpts here and there, but it was never deep enough to matter. As such, I know a lot about classic books, but I've barely read any. (I am trying to rectify this!)
That's how hard it was for me and my peers and that was before smart phones! Kids today have it so much worse, but I am glad for Natalie Wexler and for the countless books and podcasts that have started the movement among teachers and caregivers to do better. And for open exchanges, like this one, between strangers.
It's going to take a lot of intentionality, but I think we can get kids reading literature again. If not for fun, then at least for class!
In my work with educators, they are frequently asking for methods to scaffold texts to ensure comprehension. But this sentence stood out to me and resonates with my thinking, "What seemed to distinguish them from the problematic readers, at least in the researchers’ view, was that “they were comfortable with their confusion.”
How do we communicate to both teachers and students that it is okay to wrestle with the confusion?
I must say that I'm a little surprised by the choice of Bleak House as a research article. To spring this text upon low-intermediate students would pretty much guarantee the results. Students really need to be inducted into the language of nineteenth century novels with all their embedded clauses and phrases, not to mention the recondite vocabulary, the metaphorical language, and the knowledge of the period required. There are surely easier novels, short stories and informational prose texts on which students can cut their teeth before embarking on this.
One thing you didn't mention about Bleak House, Natalie, is the extraordinary way Dickens draws us into the novel. Although present and past participles abound, it takes just over a page (in my Penguin pbk edition) to get to the first main verb: "And hard by the Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery."
I agree. I have always loved to read, especially as a young person, but if my introduction to 19th century lit in school had had the title Bleak House and the sentence structure you illustrated, I might have run screaming out of the room.
Yes, I agree with both of you -- Bleak House was clearly not a good choice for an introduction to 19th-century literature for this group of students.
But the point of the article wasn't to just subject them to something ridiculously difficult and watch them flounder. The authors have all taught at a regional public university in Kansas (although it's not explicitly stated, presumably it was one of the universities used in the study). Two of them were English professors. According to them, Bleak House is a standard assignment in college courses--presumably including the courses at their public university.
If they're right about that (or they were when the study was conducted in 2015), the article makes an important point: professors can't assign a text like Bleak House and just assume their students will understand it independently, which is (again, according to the authors) what they were doing.
I am reminded of my sophomore year of college. Modern British lit -- Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge forward. We read mostly poems so the volume of reading wasn't necessarily a challenge. But I can vividly remember not understanding anything about what these writers were getting at, even thought I am a native English speaker.
End of the semester, I was studying for the final and the poems were vivid and wonderful and I understood them! I had been taught, and I learned!
Thanks for this article. It does raise one of those continuing questions: as time goes on, what literature from the past do we continue to teach? At what point does that "great literature" seem not so great anymore? Or can be replaced by newer "great literature"?
One of my favorite books in high school was Catcher in the Rye. I warmed to Holden Caulfield's search for meaning in the world. But I've read that many students today hate the book and see Holden as a navel-gazing, self-indulgent rich kid who’s complaints about the world come off less like deep existential angst and more like privileged whining. I read and reread that book enough times to recognize the validity of that interpretation.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't read "classic" literature or "old" literature. We should just be mindful of the choices we make and the students we teach.
I was familiar with the Santos-Thomas piece but hadn't seen the other post on the Kansas study on "Holly's Substack"--thanks for the link. I agree with some of the critique there, and I don't think the study was particularly scientific. It can be confusing. E.g., Holly says the ACT scores given in the study were for all incoming freshmen at the two schools, not the 85 students in the study. But at one point the study itself says that the ACT scores WERE for the specific subjects ("The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4"). At another point, though, the study gives the same ACT score as the average for all "incoming freshmen at both universities." So which is it? Did both numbers happen to be the same? That seems unlikely.
Anyway -- I think Holly misses one of the main points of the study, as I see it, which is that professors can't just assign novels like Bleak House and assume students will be able to understand them on their own. It's not really about whether there's a reading crisis, or whether English majors think THEY can read. It's about college-level instructors needing to adjust their expectations to take account of reality.
As for which books to keep in the "canon" and which to discard and when -- yes, that's a complex question. But whatever books we decide to teach, we have a responsibility to ensure students can actually understand them -- and ideally, a responsibility to show why we think the books are worth reading. And of course we shouldn't discard books we've decided are worthy of reading just because students find them challenging to understand. It seems to me one of the core functions of schooling is to enable students to overcome such challenges.
I agree with you completely. Studies, studies. We have to work with the students we have in real time. If we've decided a book is worthy of study, we have to help them understand both the text and the reasons why it's worthy of study. The latter can be explicit, and/or part of the discussion of the book that comes out as the professors/teachers ask the thoughtful questions to help students make the connections and come to an appreciation of the book's importance.
And yes, that is absolutely the core function of schooling.
“a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains” - I’ve got to admit that this part had even me puzzled. Is it meant to be a description of his judicial wig and robes? But why “curtains” (a word that I wouldn’t necessarily expect a youthful midwesterner to be especially familiar with)? The word “lantern” also seems confusing. From the context it appears to refer to what I would call a skylight.
Oh, maybe -- I'm not a Midwesterner, so I don't really know. But still, I would think that by the time students get to college, even in the Midwest, they'll have encountered the word "curtains" enough that they know what it means.
Maybe - the linguistic differences that always caught me out were (obviously in retrospect) not the obvious ones like cookies, but the obscure ones like rutabagas :-)
I agree that reading 19th-century literature can be a deeply meaningful educational experience for well-prepared students, and many benefit from this. But not *everybody* benefits from this, and for a non-trivial fraction of students it is effectively impossible. It's not simply that it's challenging, or it's difficult at first, or they just have to work at -- no, in many cases it really is too hard for a student, and many will not be able to do it, despite all interventions. In that case, attempting to read a sophisticated work of literature like *Bleak House* will crush those students.
In learning science, it's well established that students only learn when challenged, but the challenge has to be appropriate for the level of the student. Learning is incremental, and an excessively difficult challenge will be at best ineffective and at worst harmful.
Teachers in the real world are understandably hesitant to embark on a project when they know in advance that many students in their class will not be able to handle it. I'm sympathetic to that! So while I share your enthusiasm for exploring these works with students who are capable of reading them, I'm also a little uncertain about how far to generalize this.
I agree that not all students need to read "Bleak House." But I do think more students would be able to read a Dickens novel (maybe a shorter and more accessible one) if they got better support in reading complex text, including novels from earlier eras, before they entered college. Or if not Dickens, then some other 19th-century author whose writing is perhaps more accessible.
The students in this study were all English majors. It seems reasonable to expect that someone who graduates with a degree in English will have read and understood at least one 19th-century British or American novel. If that's impossible for them, maybe they should be majoring in something else.
I love Dickens - and Bleak House is in my top 5 - but that opening is a bastard. Reading Chat GPT's summary meant I finally got the dinosaur reference :)
Thank you for writing. The 'it's the same skills' is the most frustrating, yet most prevalent, comment from English teachers everywhere. When you quoted that teacher I could imagine so many colleagues who have fallen back on the same lie when challenged. It's a total cop out and refuses to recognise how people actually learn.
I could read before I started School and had plodded through most of the so called Classic Novels before I was 11. Hence I now think of them as a total bore, which bothers people whose only contact with most of them lies in movie versions. Bleak House is simply a well written but long winded bore. To me anyhow. I was a weird child anyhow as when all the other 8 year olds were reading things recommend for their age group I was reading a large book from the local adult library about the history of printing.
I also was reading long before I started school, and when my parents let me out alone in the big world with a little pocket money -- say at around ten or eleven years old, around 1964 -- I went straight to the book section of our local department store and bought 25-cent paperback classics: the Brontes, Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Hawthorne -- you know.
I still have them.
When I reread them now, I'm thrilled all over again.
I mean, Middlemarch. It doesn't get much better than that.
Not sure I understand this study. I’m pretty well read, but it’s been many years since I read Dickens in whole.
I couldn’t do much better than these students. I guessed “-saur” pointed us to an extinct creature, but, really. These students should have been far more exposed to dinosaurs than I at the same age. So, not clear what that problem was.
I wouldn’t have guessed court-I’d have thought a college.
The length and complexity of the sentence is another matter.
Not teaching syntax and sentence construction is certainly a problem of the past 2-3 decades.
As a high school teacher who has taught 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' several installments of 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,' and 'Frankenstein' as a means toward developing background research and annotation skills for “thick” texts - which seems to be anything from 19th century, apparently - I deeply appreciate this article. The first two I teach to 9th-grade students, and the last to 10th-grade students. The first days or weeks of the reading is a slog, and I slog along beside my students to ensure they're learning the skills. Those students who dig into the slog have consistently developed the skills needed to rise to the occasion of reading 19th century texts, and exhibit fair to strong comprehension after applying those skills.
There are many questions this article raises that I don’t have the time to address, but all of them I find of value, here. The humor mentioned regarding that first paragraph of 'Bleak House,' points to an excellent assessment measure - if one can recognize the playfulness of the writing, then one has certainly comprehended fairly well. For my students who learn the skills from the first two above mentioned texts, by the end of the letters in "Frankenstein" they no longer really need to look up many vocabulary words. Most authors use a fairly limited (even if expansive) vocabulary, and once the students embed that vocabulary the rest of the text only provides practice in comprehension by sight rather than by research, and that quickens their reading pace. I’ve even found some of that vocabulary finding its way into the essays of some of my more playful and astute readers. So, thank you, Wexler, for posting this. I look forward to more insightful articles like this one.
Teachers/professors are taking the lazy, easy way out by blaming the students. If you want students to comprehend the text, take time to review the historical context, the typical language/customs of the time, and read line-by-line in class if necessary. Many of them will rise to the challenge.
Important discussion. As a former high school English teacher and current reading specialist working with first and second grade intervention students, this is a topic I've been thinking long and hard about: Can We Inspire a Love of Reading (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/can-we-inspire-a-love-of-reading?r=5spuf)
"However, even pre-internet I always had a hard time getting into Hesse, so for many of us—including many of our students—it can be personal interest shaping our reading experiences rather than internet habits. Of course, it’s difficult to deny (and I don’t!) Wolf’s assertion that superficial reading characterized by spurts of searching and scrolling rather than sustained concentration can severely impact our ability to slow down and focus, which is necessary for understanding well-constructed sentences as well as well-developed features of the whole text. A colleague teaching Romeo and Juliet to his freshmen had such a difficult time gaining any traction with the text that after the marriage scene, he snapped shut the book, scanned the class, and cheerfully announced that they lived happily ever after."
There are some fabulous textbooks with accompanying suggestions for making the whole Shakespeare experience much more interactive. The Cambridge Shakespeare books are a really good start. For example, cutting up the 14-line prologue, dropping the lines on the floor (There has to be enough for each member of the class.), and asking the students to choose one, read it and then speak it to another member of the class. They can say the line as a joke, a threat, an appeal..., etc. It's not long before they're word perfect and then you can put it all together. The first scene in Act 1 can also be 'played' by splitting the class into two. Each of the two sections of the class now competes against the other by taking the part of a Montague or a Capulet facing off against one another in a 'freeze frame'. Someone takes a photograph of the 'frozen' scene and the class guesses who is playing which parts. It's something to get a Grade 7 or 8 class off to a flying start.
This was a fascinating article, thank you.
I am not an educator, just a parent that wants to make sure my child gets a more complete reading education than I did. This article brought up a lot of my own insecurities around how I was taught to read and how fear led me away from studying English in college.
We were only tasked with reading one novel in my high school, and that was The Great Gatsby. In my 2nd period class of 20 some seniors, I was one of two that read it. I remember enjoying figuring out the language, like a puzzle, and using SparkNotes to work backwards when something didn't make sense. I felt like a cheat for using SparkNotes (even though I now know I used it to supplement, like a good reader, at the time I felt like I should have naturally known what it all meant!), and not being able to discuss it in class with my peers made the spark extinguish before the flame could even begin.
I liked to write, and everyone thought I would become an English teacher, but I backed out because I was certain I wasn't good enough. What if I arrived in my first class and had to reveal that my favorite books were pun based fantasy novels! How could I face the embarrassment?!
I know it's silly now, and it's something I am trying to correct with my own child. His school is using CKLA and his teacher read 5 books to the class, in addition to the books we read to him (adult swim at the pool is the perfect time for a mini reading break!).
I hope that Dickens doesn't go away. I think the challenge is important for empathy and for confidence. I know when I tasked myself to read the paragraph of Bleak House, I enjoyed parsing out the bit about the Megalosaurus, imagining the mud writhing down the hill like something threatening and alive, but ancient and inevitable. Even if "dead white guy" stories aren't the most valuable and relevant, the challenge is worth something.
I don't want my child or any child to be pulled away from something enjoyable because they didn't get the basic support they needed in school.
I graduated from high school in 1978, and yours was a very interesting comment on where kids are situated in their reading abilities today. I appreciate you trying to get support from the school because it seems the choices in front of kids now have distracted and distanced them from understanding novels and stories from the past. As for me, I have so many memories of different texts read in school. Moby Dick where the ship Rachel circled around Ishmael, its lost child, at the end. This ending and its meaning was pointed out by our teacher, Mr. Tippens. I had no idea it was a biblical source! He really brought things alive for all of us. There were other books, but the one I really remember was a reflection with a class friend on the best part of Walden: The description of ants and their fighting while being observed by Henry David.
Thank you, I'm glad you caught my meaning! High school was 20 years for me, but I think that really shows the progression. Moby Dick would not have been accessible for my class. We did study it, in an abstract way. We learned the opening line like a trivia question and learned why it was important. I memorized names and dates for my English class like it was a very specific History course. We would read exerpts here and there, but it was never deep enough to matter. As such, I know a lot about classic books, but I've barely read any. (I am trying to rectify this!)
That's how hard it was for me and my peers and that was before smart phones! Kids today have it so much worse, but I am glad for Natalie Wexler and for the countless books and podcasts that have started the movement among teachers and caregivers to do better. And for open exchanges, like this one, between strangers.
It's going to take a lot of intentionality, but I think we can get kids reading literature again. If not for fun, then at least for class!
In my work with educators, they are frequently asking for methods to scaffold texts to ensure comprehension. But this sentence stood out to me and resonates with my thinking, "What seemed to distinguish them from the problematic readers, at least in the researchers’ view, was that “they were comfortable with their confusion.”
How do we communicate to both teachers and students that it is okay to wrestle with the confusion?
I must say that I'm a little surprised by the choice of Bleak House as a research article. To spring this text upon low-intermediate students would pretty much guarantee the results. Students really need to be inducted into the language of nineteenth century novels with all their embedded clauses and phrases, not to mention the recondite vocabulary, the metaphorical language, and the knowledge of the period required. There are surely easier novels, short stories and informational prose texts on which students can cut their teeth before embarking on this.
One thing you didn't mention about Bleak House, Natalie, is the extraordinary way Dickens draws us into the novel. Although present and past participles abound, it takes just over a page (in my Penguin pbk edition) to get to the first main verb: "And hard by the Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery."
I agree. I have always loved to read, especially as a young person, but if my introduction to 19th century lit in school had had the title Bleak House and the sentence structure you illustrated, I might have run screaming out of the room.
Yes, I agree with both of you -- Bleak House was clearly not a good choice for an introduction to 19th-century literature for this group of students.
But the point of the article wasn't to just subject them to something ridiculously difficult and watch them flounder. The authors have all taught at a regional public university in Kansas (although it's not explicitly stated, presumably it was one of the universities used in the study). Two of them were English professors. According to them, Bleak House is a standard assignment in college courses--presumably including the courses at their public university.
If they're right about that (or they were when the study was conducted in 2015), the article makes an important point: professors can't assign a text like Bleak House and just assume their students will understand it independently, which is (again, according to the authors) what they were doing.
I am reminded of my sophomore year of college. Modern British lit -- Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge forward. We read mostly poems so the volume of reading wasn't necessarily a challenge. But I can vividly remember not understanding anything about what these writers were getting at, even thought I am a native English speaker.
End of the semester, I was studying for the final and the poems were vivid and wonderful and I understood them! I had been taught, and I learned!
That is part of the process in a class, yes?
Readers might consider checking out these 2 articles-- the first, a response from Carrie M. Santos-Thomas, one of the teachers interviewed for The Atlantic article you linked to in your first sentence. https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty And then this article which digs into the Kansas study. https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/how-to-not-step-on-a-rake
Thanks for this article. It does raise one of those continuing questions: as time goes on, what literature from the past do we continue to teach? At what point does that "great literature" seem not so great anymore? Or can be replaced by newer "great literature"?
One of my favorite books in high school was Catcher in the Rye. I warmed to Holden Caulfield's search for meaning in the world. But I've read that many students today hate the book and see Holden as a navel-gazing, self-indulgent rich kid who’s complaints about the world come off less like deep existential angst and more like privileged whining. I read and reread that book enough times to recognize the validity of that interpretation.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't read "classic" literature or "old" literature. We should just be mindful of the choices we make and the students we teach.
I was familiar with the Santos-Thomas piece but hadn't seen the other post on the Kansas study on "Holly's Substack"--thanks for the link. I agree with some of the critique there, and I don't think the study was particularly scientific. It can be confusing. E.g., Holly says the ACT scores given in the study were for all incoming freshmen at the two schools, not the 85 students in the study. But at one point the study itself says that the ACT scores WERE for the specific subjects ("The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4"). At another point, though, the study gives the same ACT score as the average for all "incoming freshmen at both universities." So which is it? Did both numbers happen to be the same? That seems unlikely.
Anyway -- I think Holly misses one of the main points of the study, as I see it, which is that professors can't just assign novels like Bleak House and assume students will be able to understand them on their own. It's not really about whether there's a reading crisis, or whether English majors think THEY can read. It's about college-level instructors needing to adjust their expectations to take account of reality.
As for which books to keep in the "canon" and which to discard and when -- yes, that's a complex question. But whatever books we decide to teach, we have a responsibility to ensure students can actually understand them -- and ideally, a responsibility to show why we think the books are worth reading. And of course we shouldn't discard books we've decided are worthy of reading just because students find them challenging to understand. It seems to me one of the core functions of schooling is to enable students to overcome such challenges.
I agree with you completely. Studies, studies. We have to work with the students we have in real time. If we've decided a book is worthy of study, we have to help them understand both the text and the reasons why it's worthy of study. The latter can be explicit, and/or part of the discussion of the book that comes out as the professors/teachers ask the thoughtful questions to help students make the connections and come to an appreciation of the book's importance.
And yes, that is absolutely the core function of schooling.
“a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains” - I’ve got to admit that this part had even me puzzled. Is it meant to be a description of his judicial wig and robes? But why “curtains” (a word that I wouldn’t necessarily expect a youthful midwesterner to be especially familiar with)? The word “lantern” also seems confusing. From the context it appears to refer to what I would call a skylight.
Youthful Midwesterners wouldn't be familiar with the word "curtains"? That one seems pretty straightforward to me!
Don’t they say drapes?
Oh, maybe -- I'm not a Midwesterner, so I don't really know. But still, I would think that by the time students get to college, even in the Midwest, they'll have encountered the word "curtains" enough that they know what it means.
Maybe - the linguistic differences that always caught me out were (obviously in retrospect) not the obvious ones like cookies, but the obscure ones like rutabagas :-)
I agree that reading 19th-century literature can be a deeply meaningful educational experience for well-prepared students, and many benefit from this. But not *everybody* benefits from this, and for a non-trivial fraction of students it is effectively impossible. It's not simply that it's challenging, or it's difficult at first, or they just have to work at -- no, in many cases it really is too hard for a student, and many will not be able to do it, despite all interventions. In that case, attempting to read a sophisticated work of literature like *Bleak House* will crush those students.
In learning science, it's well established that students only learn when challenged, but the challenge has to be appropriate for the level of the student. Learning is incremental, and an excessively difficult challenge will be at best ineffective and at worst harmful.
Teachers in the real world are understandably hesitant to embark on a project when they know in advance that many students in their class will not be able to handle it. I'm sympathetic to that! So while I share your enthusiasm for exploring these works with students who are capable of reading them, I'm also a little uncertain about how far to generalize this.
I agree that not all students need to read "Bleak House." But I do think more students would be able to read a Dickens novel (maybe a shorter and more accessible one) if they got better support in reading complex text, including novels from earlier eras, before they entered college. Or if not Dickens, then some other 19th-century author whose writing is perhaps more accessible.
The students in this study were all English majors. It seems reasonable to expect that someone who graduates with a degree in English will have read and understood at least one 19th-century British or American novel. If that's impossible for them, maybe they should be majoring in something else.
I love Dickens - and Bleak House is in my top 5 - but that opening is a bastard. Reading Chat GPT's summary meant I finally got the dinosaur reference :)
Thank you for writing. The 'it's the same skills' is the most frustrating, yet most prevalent, comment from English teachers everywhere. When you quoted that teacher I could imagine so many colleagues who have fallen back on the same lie when challenged. It's a total cop out and refuses to recognise how people actually learn.
I could read before I started School and had plodded through most of the so called Classic Novels before I was 11. Hence I now think of them as a total bore, which bothers people whose only contact with most of them lies in movie versions. Bleak House is simply a well written but long winded bore. To me anyhow. I was a weird child anyhow as when all the other 8 year olds were reading things recommend for their age group I was reading a large book from the local adult library about the history of printing.
I also was reading long before I started school, and when my parents let me out alone in the big world with a little pocket money -- say at around ten or eleven years old, around 1964 -- I went straight to the book section of our local department store and bought 25-cent paperback classics: the Brontes, Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Hawthorne -- you know.
I still have them.
When I reread them now, I'm thrilled all over again.
I mean, Middlemarch. It doesn't get much better than that.
Not sure I understand this study. I’m pretty well read, but it’s been many years since I read Dickens in whole.
I couldn’t do much better than these students. I guessed “-saur” pointed us to an extinct creature, but, really. These students should have been far more exposed to dinosaurs than I at the same age. So, not clear what that problem was.
I wouldn’t have guessed court-I’d have thought a college.
The length and complexity of the sentence is another matter.
Not teaching syntax and sentence construction is certainly a problem of the past 2-3 decades.