It's a little bit like the moment you stagger off the roller coaster.
There's a dizziness, a slight disorientation, a fizzy feeling in the belly, as
if you've multiplied the effects of the Cyclone or the Blue Streak or the
Twister by gulping too much cold Diet Pepsi too fast on a summer afternoon. When
you look up from a good book, the world's edges dissolve. Reality, thoroughly
outclassed, slinks away.
Reading doesn't always do that, of course. Depends on the material.
Sometimes it's just road signs and the backs of cereal boxes. But if what you're
reading happens to give you that dizzy fizz, you know you're in for the ride of
your life. Unlike that roller coaster, though, confined as it is to the closed
loop of a rattling track, books never leave you in the place where you started
out. You're somewhere else, somewhere far down the road at dusk, and when you
look back, all you can see are the distant lights of the amusement park, and the
faint, fast-receding sounds of the life you knew.
It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s famous quote about knowing when something is “poetry”: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
I've recently been thinking a lot about how the act of reading happens in English classrooms in high school. How many teachers help create that dizzy fizz? What kind of teaching of novels encourage that kind of personal and intense relationship with books in which "reality, thoroughly outclassed, slinks away."
I know that in my classroom there has a been a dizzy fizz beginning and I do something "teacherly" that smothers it. What DO we do with literature in the English classroom with novels? I know that my own teaching has veered widely in the past ten years -- close readings, thematic readings, Advanced-Placement-Style new critical readings, readings for ideas, readings that focus on the historical period, readings that focus on what the novel means for us today, readings for style, and -- sometimes -- a mixture of everything. Sometimes that dizzy fizz has gone flat.
Is there a "best" kind of reading for 14-18 year olds? Are there ways of treating texts that gets i the way of the dizzy fizz? Should high school be the place for a different kind of reading? Does NCLB's focus on assessment and "comprehension" get in the way (or obscure) other kinds of more fizzier reading?
