Query: What will happen if you, students, get to choose your own book for school and you have a routine of reading, unplugged, together in a community every day for a few weeks? What will happen if you enter into a routine of free writing daily by hand?
Theory: You will increase your stamina and pleasure reading, and also become better observers of your day, eventually taking pleasure in getting down thoughts, ideas, observations and experiences; these improvements will, in turn, position you to heighten your concentration, curiosity, empathy, and critical precision.
Methods: Daily reading in class, daily writing at home.
For the next three weeks, until the end of 2024, I have suspended all our curriculum, all my planning, our thematic approach and all projects for my 11th grade classes, and I’m asking students only to read, only to write.
Can I read Percy Jackson?
You can read whatever you want.
Can I read a book I’ve read before?
I mean it. I’m not dictating what you read.
A few events inspired the change. There have of course been articles and rants, professors describing students who can’t get through a book or sustain focus into complexity, and a recent study capturing a precipitous drop in young adults who read for pleasure. In addition to the raft of articles, I brought these students material charged with my interest in local history and indigenous cultures and their adaptations—and I brought close some places students might visit, raised high the role of salmon in our ecosystem and ways of life here, touched place names and the visible history nearby, invited exploration in curated websites, archival photographs, and museums that allow entry into stories of where they live and how others have lived there; my heart was deeply in, and when credit not curiosity drove student efforts, I felt it as a hurt. I met a few students on a Sunday at the Ballard locks to breathe the air and the live rot of our co-existence with nature, to witness the engineering holding together our bargains with commerce and industry, but I came away feeling empty, with no hush or joy of connection.
For a while now, I’ve seen more transactional hoop-jumping than curiosity and learning, more fragmented attention than intellectual joy. And I’m still spending every period nagging and managing phones.
After school the other day, I complained in the hallway to my colleague Reid—who now, in this moment, sits across from me in this coffee shop as we write in parallel, an event emerging from the same conversation—about how to tend to over-scheduled, distracted, phone-addled students whose approach to civic engagement, learning, and the ruminative demands of reading, writing, and shared Socratic dialogue is to scroll-scroll-scroll.
So, our homework in our journals is to write about what we’re reading?
No, you can write whatever you want.
Are we supposed to write about class?
You’re just supposed to write. At least a page a day.
What if we write lyrics to songs we’re listening to?
You can do that. Sounds boring to me, but if that’s what you choose to do.
What if we just…
Look, there’s no trick here. Read in class, whatever you want. Write a page a day, about whatever you want. I’m only enforcing the routine. If you get bored, go back to our brainstorming, or write about your day, or write about your frustrations with this assignment, or about your boredom; maybe try those websites. Let’s just see what happens.
The morning after talking in the hallway with Reid, I was in the middle of a run when I wondered if maybe, as their Literature and Writing teacher, I wasn’t giving students what they needed most from me, which may well be an invitation to get engrossed in a book, in imaginations, in their own thoughts, instead of all these skills and conversations and texts. What if they just read? Would I get in trouble? I’m winding down here anyhow…
I want to see students getting absorbed in the reading of physical books, improving stamina and concentration and quietude, sharpening curiosity and empathic generosity for other points of view.
I want to see students writing in physical journals, gathering and training the swarm of daily thoughts and observations, deepening how they move through the world and building upon thoughts and feelings.
Because the goal is absorption and willing habit, I will give students broad freedom of choice, holding students accountable only for the routine. We will spend the rest of 2024 turning down the volume and seeing what they hear.
