I know, I know, some of you might hate that question, and you fight this battle with students all the time. You probably don’t appreciate another teacher asking that question. I’m not trying to be provocative to get your attention – although that’s a nice side benefit. I’m wondering if I can articulate an answer more than anything. It’s a challenge to me, not to you, dear reader. I’ve also been on the receiving end of this question, of course. I found that it occurred most often when I was teaching college. In middle school, students have been writing about literature their entire academic lives, and many of them haven’t (yet) stopped to ask why. It’s something you do in school. In college, and I think in high school, kids are starting to think more about the value of their education, and I think this question is more common as kids get closer to the “real world.” (I hate that, BTW. As if school is somehow not real.)

So let’s clarify. What are we asking, and why are we asking it? I think the purpose of the question when students ask it is, “What is the practical value of writing about fiction?” I think we’re going to set aside the various other genres that we ask kids to write about (print nonfiction, video, etc.) and focus on the literary. I think we’re also going to try to avoid any sort of debate about the politics of the canon – I don’t want to argue that some works of fiction are more worthy of attention than others, although I think that argument can be made. Let’s focus on “fiction,” broadly construed.

What’s the point, then, of asking students to write about literature? One common answer harks back to using this type of writing as a form of assessment. If kids can write an argument about a literary work, using appropriately selected evidence, then they understand it. It’s the best evidence of higher-level comprehension. Therefore, if you’re taking a college-level literature class, the best final assessment is some sort of literary argument. And, indeed, I can report that most of my experience with English courses at the college and graduate level includes this “final essay.” To English faculty, especially at the graduate level, this is often seen as practical and career-focused, since the emphasis on publication among faculty is prevalent and probably not going to change. This “trickles down,” I think, to other levels, where the “proper” way to teach English is to require literary argument.

I think that helps explain why the system functions as it does, and why teachers want kids to do this. But if this goal is based on professional English faculty and their career requirements and expectations, why does it make sense for all of our English students? Remember, of course, that this is a class that is essential to every level of education. No one can escape English class, so no one can escape literary argument.

So, again, what is the value to the student, who will probably never become English professors/instructors/faculty?

This might be construed as a rehash of the old Common Core debate about removing or discouraging the study of literature. I’m not saying that at all. I never would. Again, I’m not on the attack. I definitely think that kids should be reading and writing about literature. I’m just wondering how we justify that to our students.

I should throw in a story here. My absolute worst experience with writing about literature was my 12th grade AP English class. I should also add that I didn’t mind this experience at the time. It was a natural capstone to a very traditional and old-fashioned English education in a semi-rural Ohio public high school. We were given a large Summer Reading List with seven or eight significant titles (Tale of Two Cities, The Fountainhead, Fahrenheit 451, and others that I can’t remember), and then we would write an essay every week, on Friday, in class. We were allowed to use an outline prepared in advance, but we were expected to sit down and compose an essay (on a computer, which was helpful for me and my typing skills) in a single class period (50 minutes, I believe). Text evidence was important, and we were expected to have a clear thesis statement with clear paragraph structure and at least two pieces of text evidence for each paragraph. It was a five-paragraph essay. If you wanted to develop two ideas into two longer paragraphs, it could be a four-paragraph essay, but that was risky.

The results of this instructional practice were that we (the small group of honors students who were in that class and almost every other honors class at that high school together) would spend Thursday nights reviewing the book, developing some kind of claim that could be supported with evidence. We usually pre-selected the evidence, so that Friday’s class was spent writing out the connections between the claim and the evidence. After the second or third time doing this, it became kind of easy. The teacher’s expectations were clear, and the product of this – as formulaic as you might expect – demonstrated (or not) a good grasp of the text and its meaning. This was before the Internet was big, and this was before cell phones. I don’t remember anyone in my high school having a cell phone that they brought to school. (This was in the early 1990’s, when cell phones were bulky and expensive, and text messages had not become popular. Most of us didn’t know what e-mail was yet. I didn’t have an e-mail account until college.)

What was so bad about this? In college, I tried to duplicate this. I tried to pound everything I read into this box – a thesis statement with three parts, text evidence for each of these parts. The introduction and the conclusion were always the “funnel” – start general, get specific in the introduction. Then, in the conclusion, do the opposite. The problem was, of course, that the simplistic understanding of writing about literature led to simplistic writing. I wanted to resolve all of the issues in everything I read in five paragraphs. It also meant that I was artificially separating my thinking – and the text – into three pieces. The human body? Let’s divide it into three pieces. Any old pieces will do. Huckleberry Finn? Three pieces. Shakespeare and Merchant of Venice? Three pieces. William Blake? Three pieces. It was like making jello. I had one jello mold that I needed to use for everything, and everything I wrote about would need to fit into that. It actually didn’t help that we were given a placement test, and I tested out of first year composition. It would have been a good place to un-learn these bad habits. I slowly learned how to write about literature in a broader and more complex sense, but I still feel like I’m not very good at it. I wonder sometimes what kind of writer I might have been if I had followed a different path in college. . .

Back to the topic. I learned, in my academic experience, that writing about literature was a formulaic process not unlike a boring game you play with other people that you don’t like. The rules are arbitrary, and they might even change from one game to the next, depending on who’s playing. The goal is to have “fun,” but that goal is subjectively defined. The process has benefits, but those benefits are not clearly articulated, and the severe academic consequences make those benefits secondary.

Added to that, literary argument is not a commonly sought-after job skill. How many times have you been asked to write about fiction using carefully selected text evidence?

The answer, of course, is NEVER. Unless you write book reviews or you’re a college professor, why would you be asked to do this?

I think the whole question – the whole idea of challenging what we do in the classroom by saying, “When will we ever use this?” is a trap. I think the answer is just as complex as the task we ask of students. I think that being able to answer the question requires the exact skills that writing about literature requires. Therefore, ironically and frustratingly, the people who ask this question struggle to understand the answer. That’s another feature of this trap.

The answer to this question reminds me of the answer to a similar question – “when are we ever going to use algebra?” Or, “when are we ever going to use geometry?” The question is ridiculous. Well, sure, if you’re remodeling your house, and you want to calculate how much paint you need, or what angle to trim the boards at, or how much space you need between tiles and where to start placing them, you might need it, but what if you just pay someone to do the job for you? That’s a losing battle, and I don’t think that’s the answer.

I think a lot of teachers hate this question because it presumes so much. Here are some things that kids – or anyone who asks this question – assume:

• I understand all of the possible jobs available, and I understand all of the skills and requirements of those jobs. And THIS is not one of them . . .
• No one ever does anything strange or unexpected in their life or in their job, and if they do, then nothing they know or learn will help them.
• Nothing ever changes. If it does, it changes in ways that no one will expect or understand, and everyone will be equally confused and adapt in the same way and at the same rate.
• Thinking and learning are very narrow, simple, and superficial, and mostly amount to remembering and applying simple facts. Nothing that you learn can be transferred or applied to other contexts.
• Most things in the world are simple and can be explained via Google or YouTube, or are too complex and difficult for normal people. So no one should bother learning these things.

I could keep going. All of these are ridiculous. When I get a question like this, as a middle school teacher, my most common response goes something like this:

“Are you serious? You don’t even know what you’re going to be like TOMORROW. How could you possibly know what you’re going to use or need by the time you’re an adult? You’re going to be so different by the end of the year that you won’t even remember asking me this question, or you’ll look back and think it was stupid to even ask.”

Or I make it personal:

“When I was your age, I didn’t know anyone who owned a cell phone, my computer had a screen with two colors and no Internet connection, I didn’t know what e-mail was, the Internet hadn’t really been invented yet, you didn’t have to take your shoes off at the airport, my dad read the newspaper almost every day and I read the comics all the time, and there was no way to connect video games to other players. Do you think things have changed since then? Do you think new jobs, and new skills, are important now that weren’t important then?”

The value in writing about literature isn’t in the exact nature of the task. We don’t treat English class as a job training class – we don’t expect kids to run out of our class into a publishing company and say, “I’m ready to write detailed book reviews with precisely cited text evidence in MLA format!” Why would we? By the time they are ready to “run out into the world,” what kinds of skills will they need? We can’t prepare them for a specific job, mostly because they don’t have any idea what they want (or they might, but they’re probably wrong, since the person they will become is much different than the person they are in school, as a young person) and because we don’t really know what jobs will be most desirable and available when they graduate. Since those things are changing all the time, we teach kids the more valuable and useful skills that help in any career. Like managing the details and nuances of complexity, the interplay of the specific detail (words and sentences) within a larger structure (a novel), situated in a specific context (a genre and a historical moment). It doesn’t get much more complicated than fiction, does it? In fact, I can’t think of many things that are more complicated. Perhaps engineering, or perhaps medicine. But those things aren’t accessible to kids the way that books and stories are. Heck, how remarkable is it that we can take something that kids might really enjoy or continue to do outside of school on their own as an adult, like read a book or watch a movie, and connect it to a complex cultural apparatus that they may never completely understand, but that they will interact with and that will have an effect on their lives.

So yeah, fiction. While we can’t promise that they will be writing about fiction as a career, we can promise that the kinds of thinking that writing about fiction demands will be useful in any career they choose to pursue. To be able to comprehend a large text, make a claim or observation about that text, find evidence for that claim or observation, and then connect that observation both to the micro-level detail and the macro-level context, is enormously useful, enormously challenging, and enormously rewarding. It’s just about the hardest thinking we can ask a kid to do.

Can you tell that I’m about to start teaching a unit on writing about fiction?