Pretending to Read

We begin this column with a confession: I cannot make my students read.

This is embarrassing but true. It’s a particular concern because “students reading” is a pretty big part of my job. What I’ve discovered, though, after decades in the English-teaching business, is that the best I can do (and sometimes even this is a challenge) is to create an environment suitable for reading.

I teach mostly 10th graders, and some students, when it’s time for quiet reading, just won’t. Granted, many “nonreaders” will pretend to read, which is nice. Many nonreaders will even have a book open and turn pages on occasion, (also polite) and some even try to sleep.

But I cannot make a student read.

I know. I tried.

I tried for many years to “make” my students read, and in my younger and much dumber days I might even argue with the disrespectful student. I would get into a debate with them about the importance of reading, or the joy of reading, or the important joy of reading, and these conversations would sometimes escalate - if one of us had missed breakfast - into shouting and the occasional hallway conference. These meetings were rarely productive and did not result in them returning to class to read.

These arguments often did result in both of us being angry, though. They resulted in fraying the bond needed to perform our roles as teacher and student. Just as unfortunate if not more so, our fracas damaged the classroom as a whole. Heart rates went up while focus went down. The crucial calm needed to teach had vanished, replaced by anxiety, fear, or cynical bemusement, and often a toxic concoction of all three.

But this column is not really about reading, though, is it?

As the world’s last “superpower” - if that’s even a thing anymore - one might argue it’s America’s job to help make the world suitable for democracy. One may argue, as many policy-makers have done over the decades, that America needs to make the world peaceful by enforcing our values in far off places. Based on this logic, such an approach may have prevented 9/11 and might keep such a disaster from happening again.

“Fight them in their backyard,” we’ve been told, “so they can’t fight us on our porch.”

Unfortunately, we cannot “make” a nation a republic, regardless of the neighborhood, by throwing the first punch. We cannot enforce democracy.

We know. We tried.

We tried in Korea and then Vietnam. We tried again in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and whatever vulgarity is happening right now in Iran. Less publically, we’ve also tried to make nations into “democracies” in other places, too, but even those sneaky incursions were rarely effective, and the ones that were “effective” were hardly democracies, they were just now run by ruthless people financed by our own ruthless people. Again.

And again. And again.

So when it comes to geopolitics or classroom management, sometimes the question to ask is not “what is ideal” but instead “what is permissible?” This may sound cynical, but I am no cynic. (It’s hard to enjoy any job for nearly thirty years as a cynic; it’s impossible to do so in education.) But when teachers devote all their energy into “making” one student “read,” they often inadvertently keep all the other students who WERE reading from, well, you know, reading.

 Granted, this is a hard question to answer, because both teaching as a profession and America as a nation are founded on ideals. However, teachers who survive for decades with their idealism still intact eventually learn a hard truth: not every student who enters the room is there to learn their subject. Some students are there to learn patience, for example; some are there to learn good manners. (And some are there to learn that not all hills need dying on, and some aren’t worth a glance.)

This is not a call for isolationism in the classroom or on the world stage, of course. If a student is keeping others from learning, then yes, teachers should absolutely engage that student. Much more seriously, we often do need to call up arms to defend ourselves or our allies. However, by trying to “teach Iran a lesson,” so to speak, we’ve sown chaos in the entire region. Again. We’ve strained the world economy, alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies. We chose to waste our resources - our blood and our treasure - in an unwinnable “argument” when our best option may have been to let folks pretend to read and look out the window.