John Thompson Reviews David Denby’s “Lit Up”

Is it possible to teach great literature in our digital age? John Thompson reviews David Denby’s latest book, “Lit Up,” which assays that question.

Thompson writes:

“David Denby’s Lit Up is the story of one New Yorker movie and literary critic embedded in three schools, witnessing teachers and students as they wrestle with 24 great books. Denby spent a year with sophomores in New York City’s innovative Beacon High School, and then he learned in depth from 10th graders at another affluent school, Westchester County’s Mamaroneck H.S., and Hillhouse H.S. in the inner city of New Haven, Connecticut.
http://us.macmillan.com/litup/daviddenby

Lit Up explains two distinct but interrelated challenges to teaching literature in America today. First, we all live in a “hyper-media age” where 46% of 16 & 17 year-olds report they read from books daily, but where 92% of them are online every day and 24% are almost constantly in front of a screen of some sort. At Beacon, only 3 of the 32 excellent students were “real readers.” At Mamaroneck, Denby learned of the estimate that across wide swathes of North America, students only read about 20% of their literature assignments and how kids “faked their way through,” cribbing answers from various other sources. In other words, Denby was staring unblinkingly into the 21st century where, “If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.”
Second, schools operate in an era of “reform” where education is often said to exist for creating “skill sets.” Classrooms operate within “the increasingly dominant American notion that only things that could be quantified mattered.” Especially in the inner city, the threat to meaningful teaching and learning – the ethos of test, sort, reward, and punish – is always encroaching. Teachers struggle to get kids caught up in narrative, in stories, in ideas, and to arm them with “the intellectual and moral strengths that would enable them to succeed – or at least survive.” At any time, however, this labor of love can be undermined by top-down, data-driven reformers who feel entitled to “experiment with the real-life humans.”
And that brings us to the special challenge of teaching literature in the inner city where one student said, “Books smell like old people.” In the class featured at Hillhouse, only 5 of 23 students live with their fathers. Only one was read to as a child.
Denby explains that Lit Up is actually a prequel to his 1996 Great Books. His first education book was “a physically placid, middle-aged adventure story.” Denby wrote it because he was “jangled by too many media images rattling around in my brain.” He wanted then and wants now for “my head to rattle with other things as well.”
Twenty years after Great Books, “in media-sozzled America,” Denby hears a student estimate that he spends up to 238 hours involved with digital media during a 168 hour week. Talk about multitasking!
Denby says that the Internet “informs, informs, informs; connects, connects, connects; but … it dissolves deep concentration, maybe even dissolves the self.” Reading, however, “patches it back together.” He and Maryanne Wolf agree that, “Reading is a bridge to thought.” They agree that what is read online doesn’t “imprint” so adults have to teach kids how to “monitor themselves and control their wandering impulses.” (emphasis is Wolf’s) Denby adds that we must teach students to read books but we also need to teach them to read on the screen.
One of the first issues observed by Denby was that students had trouble visualizing authorship of books. Part of the problem is due to textbooks that have multiple authors. More worrisome, as Andrew O’Hagan says, they live with the Internet which is a “new ether” that is “haunted by ghostwriters.” The Web is a creation of the “they,” not a place where teens can learn how to discern an author’s voice, much less follow a narrative and respect literature’s “journey within.”
Early in the book, Denby sees how much of a challenge is cut out for teachers. Even in affluent schools, students have a propensity to give up when the reading gets hard. Many Beacon students saw reading as a chore. At first, kids were not “reading the book” but “reading themselves in the twenty-first century.” But, Spoiler Alert!, Lit Up chronicles triumph. Denby concludes, “Teenagers, distracted, busy, self-obsessed, are not easy to engage … To keep them in the game the teachers I watched experimented, altered the routine, … They kept kids off balance to put them back in balance.”
Beacon’s teacher, Sean Leon, could be “as angry as a biblical prophet” when pressuring his students to transcend themselves. But, Leon was lavish with his praise, and he took a standard “best practice” used for making kids stay on task and applied it to a much more important task – relationship-building and team-building. He used the practice of “cold-calling,” or asking questions before announcing who the question will be directed toward. He didn’t do so for monitoring attentiveness but for asking students to learn each others’ names.
Leon challenged the kids to stay off their digital media for two days. According the 32 students, 14 made it through the fast. One got so restless without digital media that he had to do pushups. Another had her mother put on music because she couldn’t do housework without it. Three compensated by reading a book.
Like many English teachers, Leon stressed the theme of the individual and society. Like other educators in Lit Up, he used the normative teenagers’ obsession with themselves as an entry point to reading transcendent concepts. “Instead of fighting their absorption,” great teachers “nurtured and deepened student fascination by turning it toward art.” The rock on which Leon and his students built a great class was a truth that should be obvious to all. “Challenge a mumbling or ironically self-deprecating American fifteen-year-old, and you will find someone looking for answers or at least ready to ask questions.”
Even as Leon prioritized self-exploration, he surprised Denby by jumping into discussions on the meaning of life to teach sentence structure. Leon could not keep from doing so because “he was an English teacher.”
The educators at Mamaroneck also proved that “nonreaders, or grudging readers,” could be “gently but firmly pushed into becoming readers – real readers, not functional readers.” “With persistence, pressure, and subtlety,” teachers pushed toward the goal of “the endless chain that made a reading life and that made a man and a woman, too.”
At first, Jessica Zelenski, couldn’t get the inner city kids in Hillhouse to read at all. At times, the “brass-lunged” Zelenski even resorted to shouting to get them moving. She knew from experience that at first the students wouldn’t read at home, and she adjusted her instruction to fit her class’s circumstances. Denby described how “Miss Zelenski let the ragged class move back and forth ….” He then noticed the same pattern as he had seen before, “Students came into the tenth grade with an ardent and detailed belief in fairness.”
As was the case with Mr. Leon at the more affluent Beacon, Zelenski “combined literature with ethical inquiry.” The lessons at Hillhouse worked by bringing up the “complications of morality” and they “extended the concept of fairness into a changed understanding of life.” Even if a book that worked at Beacon bombed for Zelenski, “her humanist principles of literary study had taken hold.” As Denby notes after one such lesson, “It may not have been literature that the students were expounding, but they’d learned to master one of literature’s gifts, the ability to get out of themselves and to enter other people’s lives.”
This review focuses on how the “ceremony of teaching and learning charmed and fascinated” Denby. It was gratifying to read his observation, “For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience.” But, Lit Up is equally wise in celebrating how and why teenagers learn. That will require another post.