Younger readers in Harlem find the choices

by Lauren Kirchner
October 22, 2009

Photo credit: Lauren Kirchner

Asante Kahari is a bestselling author who would not recommend his books — especially if you are a teenager looking for something new to read. Kahari, author of Hustler’s Paradise and Homo Thug, writes in the emerging genre “urban lit,” pulp paperbacks published locally and then sold from tables on the streets of Manhattan.

These “street books,” as they are called, are long on drugs, sex and violence, and short on copyediting. In an interview by a table of books on West 125th St. on a late summer afternoon, Kahari acknowledged the books’ limitations. “I don’t think this model would serve to educate, only to entertain,” he said. And he does not think they are appropriate for children: “No, they would become subliminally seduced…it feeds the desire for money and fame.”

As New York City teachers started another school year this September, a controversial debate continues over how much leeway to give students in choosing books to read that will supplement, or even replace, traditional academic reading lists. An Aug. 30 article by Motoko Rich in the New York Times featured a Georgia middle-school teacher, Lorrie McNeill, who did not assign any books during the school year, and instead, encouraged her students to read whatever books they liked. She had the students keep journals about what they read, and she set aside 30-minute blocks for them to read their selections. McNeill explained that she believed the freedom she gave her students inspired a life-long love of reading that a stricter syllabus would not.

But what would happen if the students wanted to spend 30 minutes reading the New York Times bestseller L8R, G8R by Lauren Myracle, a Young Adult novel entirely composed of computer instant-message transcripts? Or 100 pages of Asante Kahari’s street book Homo Thug?

Charan Morris, a 10th-grade teacher at Vanguard High School in Manhattan, says that she would only encourage a student to read a book like these in certain situations, such as if she were working with a student who was very far behind the rest of the class in reading comprehension. “If a student is reading at a third-grade level and they’re in high school, and I’m trying to get a struggling reader to open up to the process and the experience of reading, then that’s one starting point,” Morris said in a phone interview in between parent-teacher meetings late one September evening. Otherwise, she said, she would encourage students to read more challenging material.

Michael Bannerman, manager of Hue-Man Bookstore and Café on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and West 125th Street in Harlem, says he worries about what would happen if teachers threw out traditional reading lists and gave students the freedom to read what they pleased. During the summer, though, children and teens should be encouraged to read freely and widely, he said in an interview in his bookstore one afternoon. For instance, he said, he was happy when teenagers crowded into his bookstore this past summer to buy the wildly popular vampire-romance series Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, because he knew that time kids spent reading was time they were not spending on the neighborhood’s streets. But he does not think that letting kids read “street books” or graphic novels on school time is the best idea. “Because, what you gonna do with that at the end of the year, or at graduation time?” he asked.

Bannerman added that books should ideally broaden students’ knowledge, take them out of their immediate environment and raise their expectations for adult life, and urban lit does not do that. “It glorifies the stereotypical ghetto life,” he said. “It makes it seem like [drug] trafficking is cool. When I read a book I want to travel to a different place, a different time. [Otherwise,] I could just sit on a stoop and watch the street.”

According to Dolores Perin, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College at Columbia University, the idea that students should be able to invent their own reading curriculum is controversial. “I would take a sort of middle road, and combine more traditional literature with books of the students’ own choosing,” she said in a phone interview. “Expanding the booklist is probably fine, but it would be a good idea to collect data and test these ideas along the way to see if they really do help.”

Perin dismissed the notion that the traditional canon is at any risk of being bypassed completely. “Most students and their parents would both like for them to read the classics,” she said. “I don’t think anyone wants to see them just go away.”

A majority of interviews with high school students in West Harlem supported Perin’s opinion. Sean Becton, an 11th-grader at James Baldwin School who sat with his friends outside Frederick Douglass Academy one recent afternoon, complained that his assigned reading was often boring (he especially disliked To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee). But when asked whether it would be a good idea to let students pick their own reading lists, he shook his head. “No, because then that gives you the opportunity to read less-educated books,” he said. Abayomi Are, an 11th-grader at Frederick Douglass, agreed that, if she and her classmates could read whatever they wanted, “it might get out of hand.”

Teachers and students seem to agree that classic high school texts still have value. The challenge, of course, is to make them accessible to a young, 21st century audience. As Bannerman explains, “Take the diary of Anne Frank. Some kid growing up in the St. Nick projects [the housing on Harlem’s St. Nicholas Avenue], she don’t care about that.” He stressed that teachers should try to find books that are culturally relevant to children but that are also well written and feature positive role models. He said he likes to recommend The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream, a true story written by three men who grew up in tough neighborhoods of Newark but who went to medical and dental school together and then wrote a book about their success. A student needs to be challenged, Bannerman said, but the danger is that if the reading is too difficult, or simply feels too foreign, he or she may be discouraged from reading at all. “Kids can O.D. [overdose] on it if it’s too hard,” Bannerman said. “They might just say, I’m done with this junk. So you still have to have that balance.”

Shameeka McInnis, an 11th-grader at Frederick Douglass, recognizes the role of her teachers in making a classic book relatable. In an interview after school, she gave the example of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which she had to read in English class the previous year, and which she said she would not have been able to understand, or enjoy, if she had read it on her own. “We need some guidance on something like that,” McInnis said. “If a student just picks that up, they’re going to put it right down.”

Perin also added that what high school teachers might mistake for lack of motivation in their students is actually a lack of basic reading comprehension, due to deficiencies in their education at earlier levels. “It’s very hard to separate motivation and ability,” Perin said. “There’s no pill that can make students be motivated to do something they think they’re not good at. Most students want to do well, but they’re often so far behind.” To remedy this, she said, teachers need to be better educated about the process and the psychology of reading in order to be equipped with a variety of strategies to help students at every reading level.

Another Teachers College professor, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, says that she believes the best way to engage students of every reading level is through what she calls “culturally-responsive teaching.” By which she means “culture with a big C,” as in race and ethnic background, as well as “the small c,” as in popular culture, she explained in a phone interview. Sealey-Ruiz, who has taught high school, college and adult students in Manhattan for 17 years, described New York City’s public school curriculums as “very scripted,” but said that there is also definitely room in the year for teachers to incorporate additional texts to complement the syllabus in ways that will engage the students’ personal backgrounds. For instance, she said, “If you have to teach Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and you have black students or Latina students, why not also teach [Latin American author] Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street? That is just as much about the death of the American dream.”

Sealey-Ruiz also stressed the importance of teachers’ varying their teaching styles in order to keep the students engaged with the assigned texts. “I use small group discussion groups, large discussion groups, presentations, Socratic circles, fish-bowls,” she said. She avoids lecture, because her goal is to “put the student’s voice at the center of the discussion.”

Charan Morris also finds interactive teaching methods like these especially useful when her students are reading historical fiction or non-fiction, such as Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel. These books may at first seem alien to a contemporary Harlem teenager, she said: “You can’t really expect kids to get into these books if they don’t understand the historical context.” But, Morris added, by helping students first place the stories in context, and then by encouraging them to imagine themselves in similar situations, the books become vivid and meaningful to them. Morris likes to assign free-write exercises, such as the assignment to write a letter, as Anne Frank, to a teenager in New York City in 2009. When the students can embody the characters’ voices, Morris said, “they can place their imagination in the time period” of the narrative, and “start to step into the book.”

When asked what kinds of books she likes to read, Olivia Willis, 16, a student at A. Philip Randolph High School, answered simply, “I like real life stuff that we can relate to.” Her classmate, Jazzmine Johnson, said, “I like suspense, mystery, and books that are about hardships in people’s life.” Johnson doesn’t read street books, though; she said she likes “books that have less violence and more reality.” She said she loved The Sleeper Code, a Young Adult science fiction series by Tom Sniegoski about a man who unwittingly becomes an agent of the government while he is asleep. But she also enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel about a Dominican teenager growing up in urban New Jersey, which she read with her 10th-grade class last year.

Sometimes students discover new favorite books in roundabout ways. Jemina Norman, another 11th-grader at A. Philip Randolph, is currently reading Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. She did not find this classic British novel in her school library, or through a teacher’s recommendation. Norman explained, “I was reading Twilight, and the main character, Bella, was reading it. So I looked it up on Sparknotes, and it looked good, so I went and found it.” Asked if she would continue to seek out and read other similar works by the Brontë sisters, she smiled and said, “Definitely.”