You know that feeling you get when you look at the syllabus of your English/Literature class at the beginning of the semester and there are 16 novels listed, meaning you’re going to have to buy each and every one of them and write an analysis on a French feminist science fiction novel you’ve never heard of?
Yeah, I know that feeling very well.
In fact, this feeling bothered me all through my years in school. Whenever there was a required novel, I would squirm at the thought of having to post-it every page of a work that I had no emotional connection to or that I barely understood in the first place.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love reading. In fact, the only way my mother could get me to eat when I was a kid was if she let me bring whatever book I had been reading to the dinner table. I would scour through books like it was nothing, excited to go back to the library and take out another one, often reaching the limit of books I was allowed to take out at one time.
This feeling of excitement soon left after required readings of large works of literature started in high school.
Soon, I had no time to read the novels I wanted to read because I had to read the one novel the whole grade was assigned to read, and it became tedious instead of enjoyable. I’ll admit, a few of those novels were supplemented online a little bit when they got so unenjoyable that I felt like I was going to pass out from boredom with every turn of the page. I hated doing this because I knew that these novels held a level of cultural importance that was important for me to be aware of, but the mundane tone that they took in addition to the dread of having assignments to go with these forced novels made it almost impossible to get through all of them.
I have always been an advocate of options when it came to reading. I feel as though if students were given an option of which books they could choose to read from a selected list, we would be much more passionate about them as a whole. I understand how this is not an easy task for a teacher or professor to pull off with an entire ensemble of students, but does this mean that we shouldn’t try something that could improve students’ interest and, therefore, grades?
Reading is something that I was once in love with and that I fell out of love with because of the formality of my education, but I want to once again feel a great passion for tearing through an entire novel, and I want to help my fellow students to experience a passion for it that they may have never felt in the first place.
