Ted Nellen at Edward Reynolds Westside High School. Photo credit: Sarveen Abubaker

It means different things to younger people

Sam Walters* hates Hamlet. If he had his way, he would never have wasted time reading the play in high school. “I don’t like reading very much and I don’t like Shakespeare. The only line I like is ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’” the 11th grader said during his school lunch break.

Speaking in computer room 227 on the second floor of Edward Reynolds Westside High School on 102nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Walters did not hesitate when asked what his literary leanings were. He detested assigned texts like Hamlet, any book that was “full of stuff on government laws” and things like Obama’s Back to Education speech, he said, but was forced to read and write about them.

“I don’t know why we have to read things we don’t like. If I had a choice, I would go for a book like Walter Dean Myers’s Beast, which I can relate to,” the tall and well-built teenager said, looking older than his 18 years despite the schoolbag on his back.

Beast was a love story but not the usual “happy ending” kind, he explained. It was a young-adult novel about a Harlem teenager who was forced to leave behind his girlfriend when his family moved and returned to find that she had begun to do drugs. The book charted the boy’s struggle to rescue his girlfriend but the story ended in tragedy, he said.

“I identify with the book because I am going through a break-up now. So if I have the choice to read such a book, my commitment, my drive to read and write about it will be greater,” he said. “I hope you get what I mean.”

But did he think he knew enough at 18 to pick all the right books and make all the right choices without help? “I guess you’re right. Then it should be half and half. The teacher should pick some texts and we should be allowed to pick some,” he said, before walking toward his English teacher, Ted Nellen, who was working on a Mac in the room.

Nellen, who has been teaching for the last 35 years, said he was all for giving students the choice to pick their own texts. “I can’t say what the rest of the teachers do but that’s the system I have been following for quite a while now,” the 60-year-old teacher said, adding he had read The New York Times story on the “reading workshop” proposal that could revolutionize the way literature is taught in American schools.

According to the “reading workshop” proposal, students should pick their own literature texts, discuss them individually with teachers and one another, and keep detailed journals on what they read. There is no consensus among English teachers yet but variations of the approach are apparently catching on. In New York City, many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of the reading workshop.

Nellen said students tended to read more when given a choice. For instance, if he asked them to pick one story from the Classic 50 Short Stories, they would read four or five before picking the best one and happily do their assignment. But if he made the choice, there would be a hundred questions on how long the story should be or how they should peg it and so on.

“If students can choose their own clothes, their own music, their own friends and what they eat, why can’t they choose their own texts?” Nellen asked. “And they make their choices in spite of what parents and teachers tell them. Not that I am happy all the time with their choice but I have to trust them and hope that maybe I have taught them well.”

Nellen said making a choice was a big responsibility. It made students think they were accountable for their decisions and inspired them to do their assignments well. It would also help them later in life because they would have learned to decide for themselves, fail at times, recover and manage their own freedom.

“When students have the ownership of their choices, they do the best they can,” he said. “Impose your choice on them and they say ‘I hate that book.’”

Nellen said he was not suggesting that students should pick all the texts. Some classics would have to be assigned for common study so that students could learn “how to deconstruct a piece of literature.” After that, they could use the same tools to analyze texts of their choice. “The idea is to teach them how to think,” he said.

Dave Washburn, the principal of August Aichorn Center, a special ed high school on 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, had a more cautious position. He said allowing students the right of choice was fine but not all were equipped to take an informed decision. “Kids in (Advanced Placement) English read a lot, they know a lot, so they can explore other novels by Dickens,” he said. “But when a student’s mind is a blank slate, it is up to the teacher to guide him.”

Speaking at the Starbucks Coffee outlet on 111th Street and Broadway, he said his experience showed that students often picked books that their friends had chosen. Some opted for Romeo and Juliet because they were excited that Juliet was 13. Others went for the same play because Shakespeare was “brand-name literature.” “Other teachers allow students to choose, personally I don’t,” he said.

That would not amuse Jennifer Peterson,* another of Nellen’s students, who had to plod through Romeo and Juliet because it was an assigned text. “I want the choice to read what I want because I don’t understand the books that they choose,” the 17-year-old said. “I don’t like that Romeo and Juliet stuff, what do you call it, because the language is so different.”

Her favorite subject was literature, Peterson said, and she loved reading biographies. The last one she read was Mama’s Girl by Veronica Chambers. She said she also loved A Child Called “It”, the story of an 8-year-old boy who was continually abused, starved and beaten up by his mother because he looked like her ex-husband who had deserted her. (“It” is Dave James Pelzer’s memoir of childhood abuse.)

“You want to know who “It” is by?” she asked as she headed to class. “Hmm… I don’t remember. I only read the book, I don’t pay attention to the author’s name.”

*Sam Walters and Jennifer Peterson are not the actual names of the students. The school did not want their names revealed.