What can we do to provide students enough background so we can assign more interesting, more sophisticated text?
One of the classic questions high school teachers hear from outside voices—parents, community members, “helpful” politicians—is “Why can't the kids read?” It's a fair question if you're outside of education, and the possible answers are wide-ranging and complicated (just like kids—imagine that!). And the answers are also differentiated in the same way our kids are; it depends on the kid and the learning history and the resources and lots of other factors.
But there IS one answer that I find cuts to the core of the question. Or rather, allows us to reframe the question as educators in a more useful way. It's an answer that might be true throughout many students' learning careers, but I find it becomes especially true when they walk into my AP Language and Composition course. The answer is, “They can do a lot of the technical part of the reading, but without any contextual knowledge of the world, they struggle to turn those passages into meaningful communication.” You might say, they can tell you what the author “said” but they can't really explain it to you.
In other words, many of our readers are capable of decoding the words and even explaining in the most literal sense what a given sentence means…but comprehending a text and interacting with it goes far beyond those first simple steps.
Let's take a look at the opening of one of my favorite texts we read with the kids early in the class. It's a piece about the sudden popularity of zombies in pop culture by one of my favorite culture writers, Chuck Klosterman:
Zombies are a value stock. They are wordless and oozing and brain dead, but they're an ever-expanding market with no glass ceiling. Zombies are a target-rich environment, literally and figuratively. The more you fill them with bullets, the more interesting they become. Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of The Walking Dead on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who watched the Season 4 premiere of Mad Men. This means there are at least 2.4 million cable-ready Americans who might prefer watching Christina Hendricks if she were an animated corpse.
Let's start by reducing the required contextual knowledge of the world down to a simple list. They have to know about: value stocks, the glass ceiling (in a new context), “target-rich environments” (a military phrase), two TV shows, AMC, the outdated concept of “cable-readiness” households, and who the heck Christina Hendricks is. That's EIGHT discrete concepts and references taxing a student's ability to make meaning and we're not even past the introduction.
This is an article meant for the average adult reader, perhaps circa the early 2000s. But the knowledge demands here are enormous for a teenager circa 2025—even one who reads at a college lexile level with ease.
We could ask them to look all of it up, but this article has five more pages! I could switch out the text for some YA reading, but that's not what adult readers read, and constantly “meeting them where they are” with content doesn't help them grow. I could also just provide them all the answers, but then they've learned eight discrete (and kinda weird?) facts like “Christina Hendricks is an objectively attractive actress who Klosterman uses here to make a slightly sexist joke.” None of this does much to make them better readers.
And those outsiders keep ASKING why they aren't better readers, so what are we supposed to do?
The trouble here is that by the back end of high school, we don't have time left to fix this problem the right way. I can (and do) provide lots of small fixes like the ones above. But this problem has to have better solutions on both my short AP Lang time table (June through May, assuming the kids are up for some summer work) and across the more epochal timeline of their high school experience.
Given my position in my district (I have an advisory role regarding K–12 English decisions), I hope to find some long-range solutions while also coming up with a better set of immediate strategies to help my incoming students as they start the race towards next year's AP exam. One starting point for me may be Kelly Gallagher's To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff, but I think my kids are going to need some very specific strategies for my class as well.
It's a tall task, but I'm excited to chip away at it: How do you deepen the contextual knowledge pool of readers within the course of a single school year?