I Think It’s Okay Not To Teach Whole Novels In High School

There’s been a lot of discussion recently lamenting the fact that students are reading fewer novels in class these days (see The NY Times article, Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class).

I talked with some of my old high school colleagues, and we all agreed that we didn’t think it would work very well in most of our classes to teach novels.

I think it would be fine in my old International Baccalaureate classes, and I believe they do that in IB English (I only taught IB Theory of Knowledge).  But my old colleagues and I can’t imagine  trying to teach a whole novel to our regular ninth-or-tenth-grade classes and ensure that they actually read it.  I would guess at least half of the class would use AI/Cliff Notes, instead.

And I don’t think this is a recent development – I believe I felt the same way twenty-three years when I first began teaching high school.

One of my colleagues suggested that it might work with with a shorter, very well-chosen one that was read in class with audio support and a lot of discussion.

But this doesn’t mean that our students don’t/didn’t or won’t read whole novels or books – independent reading was/is a mainstay of our school’s English classes, and our students read a lot of books.

And when I was teaching, many of my students also participated in self-run book discussion groups.

More power to teachers who can make it work in their classrooms, though.