wanna-b-poet31:

mjalti:

confession from a College English Instructor: YES!  THIS! ALL OF THIS!

I have so many first-year college students who come into my English 101 class who have been force-fed “classics” that actively ignore queer people, disabled people, people of color, and women. And most of them HATE reading. I always ask what the last book they willingly read, and most of them look sheepish and say “It’s been so long” or “I don’t read much anymore” and it breaks my heart because by the end of the class I make it my life’s mission to get my students to see themselves in media, as well as see others unlike them in media. 

 I’ve had: 

• Latinx students look surprised when I ask them to read excerpts from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquéz and excited about reading for the first time in a long time.
• Students of color discover Langston Hughes for the First time and fall in love with “Dream Differed” 
• White students listen to Dr. King’s  “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and realize that they may be complicit as a white moderate and that MLKjr has more than 1 dream.
• Kids who don’t know what apartheid is read Nelson Mandela’s letters and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime to realize the impact is still being felt today.
• I’ve had queer kids hear Harvey Milk’s speech and read his articles to know that defiance comes in many forms. 
• I had one timid indigenous student ask if I had any recommendations of books by indigenous authors, so I changed my lesson plans and had the class read There There, and Asegi Stories and have them bring in a book written by an indigenous author from the library and share a review of it with a group in class.
• Had students read Ellie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust and then his interview with Oprah. 

ALSO: people with disabilities are harmed by the white guy “classic” structure. So I’m high key dyslexic and I know first hand that many of those classics can be alienating to read. Visibility matters because I’ve been told by some of my students that when I disclose that at the beginning of the semester they feel like they can approach my office hours more and be more open about their own learning disabilities. 

One girl told me that her high school teacher told her that if she can’t understand Moby Dick, she wasn’t cut out for College and like? THAT’s SO DAMAGING! How do you say that to a kid? This girl loves YA novels but was told it wasn’t “real” reading and being shut-down like that hurts a kid’s love of reading SO MUCH. So when I gave her the option to use audiobooks (and help her find free audiobooks) she was so happy that I had validated her struggle. 

TLDR: Dismantle the idea that the white classist, “classics” structure is the only kind of reading allowed in class.