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No More Crime and Punishment: Engaging Your Modern Students with Classic Literature by Meredith Sizemore
In the last decade, there has been conversation amongst teachers about replacing classic literature with modern texts and encouraging free-choice reading in the classroom. I’ve personally witnessed the transition between being a high school student to teaching high school students. However, in 2003, when I entered high school, I was different from most high school students today: I loved literature. I swooned for Shakespeare’s language in Hamlet, I was thrilled by Ray Bradbury’s futuristic world in Fahrenheit 451, and I cried for Lennie in Of Mice and Men.
Today, most high school students think reading classics is a Crime and Punishment. I’ve heard students’ reasons range from, “It’s too hard,” to “It’s just old,” to “It’s boring.” Teens would much rather be reading something that is relevant to their generation and their current interests. They’d rather be thrilled by zombies, vampires, and cancer-ridden kids than War and Peace. While free-choice reading and contemporary young adult (YA) literature certainly have their many benefits, there are still required state, county and school canons to be read, and therein lies the dilemma for today’s teachers.
Most importantly, when it comes to teaching classics, teachers need to stop feeling like we have “to drag” our students through these novel studies, or that we just have to get them “to survive.” I’ve been guilty of this sentiment—we all probably have at some point—but it’s time to change our attitude and our methods. I recently read Dave Burgess’ book, Teach like a PIRATE, and it has changed my teaching career. Without writing an entire book review on it, I can tell you that there is essentially only one concept that can alter your classroom approach to classics: engagement.
This Brave New World of engaging classic literature is about taking something old and making something new, creating modern-day connections, interpreting meaning, and some times, just being a little silly. With time, and a lot of enthusiasm, many of my students have recanted their Pride and Prejudice over classics, and they are actually reading.
One of my Teach Like a PIRATE inspired lessons includes fashioning Huckleberry Finn’s raft out of desks, having my students all pile on board, then hosting an intimate conversation about racism. It takes a few moments for the silliness of the activity to wear off, but once we’re all squished together and talking about racism past and present, a somber and respectful ambiance hovers over my little Robber Gang. This lesson sets the tone for the rest of our novel study; students are constantly reflecting back to our discussion and how it plays out in Huck and Jim’s evolving relationship.
A second example is a box car simulation for my unit on Night by Elie Wiesel. I do this by herding my ninth graders into a tiny book closet, turning off the lights, and demanding they stay still and silent for a whole minute. When the minute ends, the prisoners emerge single file, silent and wide-eyed. Back inside the safety of my classroom, we unpack the fear and the discomfort of this experience and relate it to Wiesel’s haunting memoir. Students frequently cite this day as the most memorable lesson of the year and choose Night as one of their favorite books.
The point of all this has been to not just “entertain” students, but to make them want to be in class and to want to read the assigned texts. Most importantly, the students are connecting to texts and deciphering meanings. As Kylene Beers and Robert Probst write in Notice & Note, “Meaning is created not purely and simply from the words on the page, but from the transaction with those words.”
By creating these engaging lessons for classics, I’ve simply opened the door for my students to make important transactions between their lives, their world and classic literature. As teachers, that’s our job: to open the door, to invite in and to involve our students.
If we could let our students read only (or mostly) their beloved YA literature, maybe we would. However, there is still a lot to be learned from classics and from the past. So let’s stop making our students Les Misérables. Let’s give them reasons to love classics; let’s give them engagement.
Meredith Sizemore is in her third year of teaching English in Augusta County, Virginia. She primarily teaches ninth grade. In her free time, she’s planning a wedding to the love of her life and reading books like crazy!
Nerdy Book Club 
Meredith, I am so glad that you wrote this. I have been debating on doing “Tom Sawyer” with my advanced 7th graders and you just answered that. I will have them keep a constant eye on comparing the incidents in the book to today’s modern incidents, almost like a game. I am going to purchase “Teach Like a Pirate” and read it over Christmas break. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
Well said! Yes, it isn’t about some false dichotomy between classic or contemporary, choice or shared texts. It’s all about how we engage students. Thank you for bringing this conversation to the table.
Thank you for this important post. I love the Huck Finn activity.
An enlightened democracy needs an awareness of its own past AND the ability to make decisions about its future. A well-conceived English/Language Arts class contributes to both of those goals.
Engaging students in reading doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. We need to help students engage with the canon, AND we need to help students engage in a reading life where their personal choices are respected.
Meredith, please, I am begging you, submit a proposal for presentation at the VSRA Conference in Richmond, March 12-14. This is exactly what Secondary teachers need to hear. Penny Kittle, Donalyn and others will be there. You must share your strategies and enthusiasm. Go to the website http://www.vsra.org and look for the proposal form. It is your duty as a VA educator!
Hi Brooks- I ended up writing a proposal and submitting it on Sunday! Thanks for the encouragement!
Such an important reminder to keep improving as educators. I heard just this week of a teacher, 35year veteran, say “I’ve been teaching long enough, I don’t need to do anything different.” What?! This attitude floors me. She might be he same, but certainly her students are not. Meredith, you are so on target here. Classics or contemporary, we must engage our students and get them moving as readers and writers. We must have the energy and the know how to do that, and the ideas and enthusiasm you share are helpful. Thank you.
I love the way you’ve written this post in an engaging manner with the classic titles sprinkled throughout! I applaud your efforts to relate the classics to students in a way that will engage them in the text and leave lasting impressions. It leaves me, as a middle school teacher, with something to think about.
However, with your use of Night, I feel an urgency to share an important resource with you that I learned of early in my career when I was able to visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on an educator’s trip. The USHMM has a fabulous resource for teachers with guidelines on teaching about the Holocaust. It can be found here: http://www.ushmm.org/educators/teaching-about-the-holocaust/general-teaching-guidelines
The piece of it that I reread every year before starting my unit as a reminder to myself is this: “In studying complex human behavior, many teachers rely upon simulation exercises meant to help students “experience” unfamiliar situations. Even when great care is taken to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson and, even worse, they are left with the impression that they now know what it was like to suffer or even to participate during the Holocaust. It is best to draw upon numerous primary sources, provide survivor testimony, and refrain from simulation games that lead to a trivialization of the subject matter.”
I simply want to share this as a caution as it was something I wasn’t aware of before my trip and having these guidelines shared with me.
Thank you for saying this and for sharing the information and the resource. I was a little uncomfortable with some of the ideas presented in this post. (How [let alone why] would a teacher go about “simulating” the events in Beloved, for example?! Or The Bluest Eye? All Quiet on the Western Front?) There have to other ways to engage 21st century students in historically significant books.
I’m all in with you, Gary. No one said no classics, many of us simply advocate for a better balance of choices and classics that encourages all students to find books they love. All students need to read much more that we have asked them to in the past, and we need to respect their individual interests as readers. I want a balance in classrooms that have for far too long titled towards just what the English teacher loves.
Of course anything we teach should be grounded in passion. Engagement, not compliance, is the answer… as Daniel Pink says in Drive. Our language communicates our values and beliefs about students, about the reading they choose, and about their potential. Thanks for reminding us, Meredith.
The good news is that engagement, I think, isn’t a fixed thing. There is a beauty and a power in learning to engage with the things we must do (or read). Meredith, many in our generation do have that “Lug lug lug — I have to teach F451” attitude, and my, how quickly and clearly our students can sense that negativity and internalize it as normal. “Well,” students of today are learning, “our teachers just have to teach this — I guess we just ‘have’ to read it.” I think your approach is magnificent — let’s figure out how to draw kids in to the required texts, not as our dreaded duty but as cherished calling.
You’re both complying and engaging. Both are choices, and they need not contradict one another.
One large goal in my practice these days is figuring out how to coach my kids toward what David Conley calls ownership of learning. Part of that macro-skill is helping them figure out how do they, as learners, engage — in the fullest sense of that word — with what’s in front of them right now. This will help them not simply with assigned texts, but with… well, all of life as it exists today and is likely to exist in decades to come.
Rock on, Meredith — solid post!
This was wonderful and helpful and right up my alley. Thank you.