Stop Trying to Teach Shakespeare (& Other Inaccessible Classics) to Teens & Preteens

I bet your jaw has dropped. “But Brooke, you’re an English major! You read Charles Dickens when you were 10 and were obsessed with Jane Austen in high school (and let’s be honest, all the way through college)! Surely you want to make sure that every student reads Shakespeare and the great classics of English literature! Especially at a young age!”

Hahaha – no. I don’t.

In fact, I think it’s a huge mistake and a major blow to literature that we try to teach incredibly difficult and often inaccessible classics to middle schoolers and high schoolers. I think it turns them off from literature and ends up stunting their analytical and paper-writing skills.

But this is me, so get ready to have my position explained and defended.

It Gets Better: Book Geek Edition

When you’re a book geek, there’s always a time or two – or two hundred – when you doubt yourself and your passion. When it seems like you’re the only one who loves books like this, and it’s holding you back from friends, from fun and adventure, and from being a happy and functioning human being like everyone else seems to have mastered.

Maybe it happens to others at different times, but for me, my first experience of this time came right as I entered adolescence, so it was mixed in with a lot of other growing pains. It meant that my general feeling of not fitting in or belonging anywhere was exacerbated every time I had to face rejection because I loved books.

To the book geeks out there: I promise you, it gets better.

Why I Don’t Get Along with People Who Don’t Read

If there’s anything I learned from adolescence, it’s that I need to be careful with generalizations, so keep in mind that I’m about to load a bunch of clarifications on that title.

But it’s true – when I run into someone who really, truly does not read, I don’t get along with them. I’m one of those people that brings up my love of reading pretty early on in conversation, and most people are okay with that. (I get some weird looks, but mostly politeness.) But when I run into someone whose response is along the lines of, “Ugh, God, I hate reading. Wouldn’t pick up a book if my life depended on it,” I know right off the bat that we’re not going to get along.

I’ll get to why in a second. For now, clarifications.

“Not What the Author Intended”, Eh?

I love Pinterest. It is fun, has a lot of variety, and can fit my mood whether I’m feeling like looking at funny pictures or planning the dream house that I’ll never be able to afford.

However, sometimes the Internet giveth, and sometimes it pisses off.

Ever seen this image?

A serious misunderstanding of how literary analysis works.

Science Shows That Great Literature Makes You a Better Person. English Majors Everywhere, Rejoice!

See why we’re nice, people? I say that we need to stop treating the Humanities and Sciences like mortal enemies, and Science comes out with a study justifying the intuition of English majors everywhere.

It turns out that reading literary fiction can make you more empathetic, more so than genre (or “popular”) fiction, nonfiction, or not reading at all. (Please click through on that link, if only because the title has a pun with it and WE ALWAYS SUPPORT GREAT PUNS.)

Cue the applause of English majors and book nerds everywhere. Thank you, Science. Now when someone sneers at me for reading Virginia Woolf out in public, I can feel superior in the knowledge that I’m making myself a better person.

Well, except for the fact that I’m about to go along and complicate things.

Why We’ll Never Stop Reading Books

You would think, for spending our entire lives subject to it, that people would get used to change. We think of our lives in structure, in routine, in consistency, but in reality we are constantly changing beings in a reality that constantly changes around us.

Yet a lot of people never seem to get used to change.

They sit as still as possible and roar in its face, as if by simply declaring that everything shall be the same, it will be. Or they curse every little change, as if this or that were the fundamental thread holding the world together. Or they try to outrun it by cutting and slashing at everything, saying that nothing will be the same, not even a little.

A recent example has been the collective meltdown of middle-aged America over the Millennial generation. They can’t seem to decide if we’re their saviors or the ultimate downfall of America, the world, and everything good about humanity. (Frankly, both options are wrong and annoying, and this is the same damn thing adults have done when confronted with a younger generation since the dawn of time. Heck, I’ll probably be doing it myself in a couple of decades.)

And one of the favorite go-tos (which always ends up being forwarded to me, although I’m not sure why) is to declare the death of books. There are always plenty of reasons – shorter attention spans, newer media, poor execution – and plenty of successors – tv shows, movies, the internet, smartphones.

I still call b.s.