At least they’re reading at the Bronx Academy of Letters
October 25, 2009 _While reading experts warn of a drop in child literacy and wonder what affect the web will have on the generation that has grown up with it, librarian Kelly Overton has amassed a room full of enticing reads for young students. Browse the library bookshelves at Bronx Academy of Letters, and you won’t find many classics. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison makes an appearance, as does The Bronx is Burning, a non-fiction classic about 1970s “baseball, politics and the soul of a city.” But most of the nearly 3,000 books in this newly renovated library aren’t exactly high brow. There are plenty of colorfully-covered Goosebumps, Manga Anime, Guinness Books of World Record, and graphic novels, though—books meant to nudge children, one pulp novel at a time, toward a love of reading and eventually, literature.
Leave the classics for the classroom and let the library be a place where kids can choose what they want to read, is Overton’s philosophy. Once an English teacher, “always giving orders, always telling kids how to act and what to read” wore her out. So in the four years she has been at Bronx Letters, Overton, the first librarian for this eight-year-old public school on Mott Haven’s Morris Avenue, has bought books like The Coldest Winter Ever by the rapper Sista Souljah, the Twilight vampire series by Stephanie Meyer, and Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How it Changed America—mostly at the prompting of 11- to 17-year-olds.
This is how you get them to love reading, Overton believes, and besides, “you have your whole life to read the classics,” she said, sitting at one of the library’s burgundy reading desks. This is the first year Bronx Letters has had a full-fledged library, bright with splashy new books and emblazoned with its gold and maroon school colors. “Adults go through trashy novels, too. You’re not going to read Chaucer every time.”
Three years ago, the high school’s head of the English Department might have taken issue with some of Overton’s purchases, namely the reams of urban fiction, a genre that’s hugely popular here, especially among young girls. Matt Pilarski, who also teaches ninth grade, said he didn’t think books like the prison romance novel Homo Thug were real literature and was “very opposed” to their often violent, graphic sexual content. “But then again, most literature has very controversial content,” he said. “I’ve really come around to [urban fiction].” And the books’ poor grammar? Call it dialect. “When you read Of Mice and Men, that’s a different dialect too.”
Freshman Dominique Sanchez, 14, is reading Of Mice and Men in class and thinks it’s “pretty good.” She likes her teacher’s theatrical chapter readings and smirks about a character’s odd penchant for petting things. But her eyes really light up when she talks about Glass by Ellen Hopkins, a 600-page novel that she barreled through in three days. “It’s interesting. It’s got romance, gossip, drama,” she said, about to check the book back into the library. “This library has good books,” she said. “When I was in middle school they weren’t good.” She breathlessly recited Glass’s plot—a teenage mom gives her baby up for adoption because of a crystal meth addiction, gets pregnant again and decides to keep the new baby—and concluded, “She’s just looking for love.”
“Yeah,” said her friend Marlene Jimenez, a little dubious. “By getting pregnant.” The main character in Marlene’s book of the moment, Someone Like You, is also pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child. “Reading books like that, I can really see what can happen,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m going to get pregnant when I’m married,” Dominique said. “And not do drugs.”
These dark themes—drug addiction, pregnancy, child abuse—are popular in the suburbs, too, Overton said. Kids like to read hyperbolically tragic books with protagonists whose “situations are way worse than their personal situations,” she added. “They want to think, ‘That person’s so stupid, I’d never do that.’ This is where they are as adolescents.”
Perhaps that is why works like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, and The Great Gatsby, which deal with issues like love and loss, do tend to be popular at Bronx Letters, according to Pilarski. Students may be reluctant to read them at first, but after getting into the text and undergoing the teaching equivalent of a “laser lights show” to drum up enthusiasm, he said, “at least 80 percent of them like it.”
His colleague, junior English teacher Christiane Clarke, held a seminar last spring based on the Great Books Program, which teaches books drawn from a list of 100 classic texts in the Western canon. Bent over the photocopied pages of Euripides’ tragic Greek play “Medea,” Clarke said he was very surprised when many of his students, unprompted, took the books home to share with their parents. “Maybe that tells you something about my assumptions,” he said. “I assume that most people don’t read that often, that most people don’t find academic literature that entertaining.
“I assume that the poorest congressional district in America has its own tastes,” he said, of the area in the South Bronx where Bronx Letters is located.
Overton, 37, with short, spiky blond hair, notes that allowing students some choice in what they read can also ease a social dynamic between students and teachers. Most Bronx Letters students live near the school or just down the 4, 5, or 6 subway line in the Bronx; teachers often don’t. “You have a lot of outsiders telling them what to read and they’re thinking, ‘I don’t relate to this at all,’” she said. Overton worked as a teen librarian for the Mott Haven Public Library before joining Bronx Letters, and saw how popular urban fiction was with older readers, too. Teachers may push for Hamlet while friends, older siblings, and parents read books like The Coldest Winter Ever, described by Publisher’s Weekly as “a cautionary tale protesting drugs and violence among young African-Americans in the inner city.”
Shannon Washington, a Bronx Letters senior, wrote in an email that she wasn’t a big reader “unless for school, but growing up my mother always read to me and preached to me about life.” Shannon, 17, said her mother went to a Catholic school that emphasized studying. “She would reccommend books like A Tree grows in Brooklyn and poems by Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Sister Souljah, The Coldest Winter Ever.”
Dominique’s parents, who are devout Christians, want her to read the Bible and stay away from vampire novels, she wrote in an email. “I was curious and wanted to know why.” So she did what any bookworm would do; she read them anyway.
