Why is To Kill a Mockingbird so difficult?

Kids don't read it because it's difficult--but why is it difficult?
To Kill a Mockingbird is the very text that William Broz used as his prime example in his article, "Not Reading: The 800-pound Mockingbird in the classroom."  Broz argues that most students who are assigned the book don't actually read it.  Broz doesn't mention the text's difficulty in his article, but I wonder if his students--and many others--aren't reading it not only for the obvious reasons (have other priorities; think they can get away with not reading; don't like reading, period; want to read other stuff; etc.), but also because the book is so difficult. I certainly find that the book is too hard for at least half of my ninth graders. But why?  The difficulty is not captured in the book's lexile score, which is about the same as The Fault in Our Stars, but students don't seem to have trouble reading the John Green book.  On the contrary, they gobble it up at astonishing rates.  What, then, makes Mockingbird so difficult?

It's not the vocabulary, sentence structure, or background knowledge
Mockingbird's difficulty is not because of its vocabulary, though that is not easy.  (Any book that uses "seldom", "assuaged"," apothecary", "Methodist", "strictures", "chattels", "piety", "stinginess", "Cornwall", "sustain", "impotent", "apparel", "dictum", "persecution", "Battle of Hastings", "read law" and "taciturn" in the first two pages is pretty difficult, but The Fault in Our Stars manages to use sophisticated vocabulary and still be accessible.)

It's not the sentence structure or the background knowledge that's required, although again, many young readers will be put off by a book whose second page contains the sentence "Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel."  

Instead, what makes Mockingbird so difficult is the jumps in time, continuity and logic. Nearly every paragraph requires the reader to make an inference or catch a subtle subtext--and to make these inferences not only so as to appreciate shadings of meaning, but just to follow the basic events of the story.

A sample chapter (seven types of ambiguity!) Chapter 25, which I read out loud to my classes last Friday, is a case in point.  The chapter has a series of very confusing time-shifts, and neglects to mention some key information.  I go through the confusing sequence below, but the specifics aren't so important--what matters is that there are at least seven separate times in the first half of the chapter in which the main plot information is unspoken and needs to be inferred.

1. The chapter starts in medias res, with Jem telling Scout to put "him" out on the back steps.  We don't know what or who is to be put out. A few lines later we learn that it's a "small creature," and that Scout does put him out, scooping him up, putting him on the bottom step, and going back to her cot.

2. Then, after a bit of scene-setting (it's September, they're still sleeping on the porch, etc.), we hear that a "roly-poly" is in the house.  It might occur to us to wonder if this is the creature Scout put out on the back steps, but we wonder, if so, what the thing is doing back inside.  

3. Putting down her book, Scout watches the roly-poly for a while, and then, feeling sleepy, she "decided to end things."  (Not all of my students realized that she was going to kill the bug.)  

4. Scout says, "My hand was going down on him when Jem spoke."  The next paragraph begins, "Jem was scowling.  It was part of the stage he was going through"...  Again we are thrown off balance: Jem "spoke," but what did he say?  We aren't told; we are supposed to remember the first line of the chapter, which was, "Don't do that, Scout. Set him out on the back steps."  But the narration goes on, not mentioning anything about Scout's scooping him up and putting him on the back steps, so we're not really sure.

5. Over the next few paragraphs Scout lies on her cot thinking about things, and soon, she says, she is "wide awake, remembering what Dill had told me."  What had Dill told her, we wonder; are we supposed to know?  

6. She goes on to describe a time Dill and Jem were walking back from swimming at the local swimming hole and get picked up in the car by Atticus and Calpurnia, who are headed to Tom Robinson's house.  Now, if we remember the previous chapter we may wonder if this is the time, the previous month, when Atticus and Calpurnia go out to tell Tom's wife that he has been shot, but we certainly are never told this straight out, and at least half of my students had no idea that this was the particular day that Scout is remembering.

7. Those students would have been confused, then, when Helen Robinson ("Who's Helen?" one of my students called out as I was reading) suddenly collapses just before she reaches Atticus.  Not only has Atticus not told Helen that her husband is dead, Harper Lee hasn't told us that Helen is collapsing because she sees the truth in Atticus's face--nor even that Atticus is there to deliver the news.

Conclusion: maybe we shouldn't assign it so widely?
To Kill a Mockingbird is a wonderful, intricately constructed novel, but it is often needlessly obscure, and I sympathize with those of my students who say they would never want to read it to themselves.  My 13-year old son was given the book a few years ago by his grandparents, and it has sat unread on his shelf to this day. In short, I think we should reconsider assigning it as widely as we do.

Small Victories with To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a required text for ninth grade at my school, but I have never had much success with it.  My students like the movie, but the text is much more subtle and sophisticated than its lexile score would indicate (more on that later).  Despite all my assignments, my lessons, our class discussions, our maps of Maycomb, too many of my students weren't really reading the book--a famous problem.  So this year I have ended up reading nearly the whole thing to them--out loud, in class, a chapter or two a day.  They have been doing writing and textual analysis at home, we've been talking about it in class--and I have been doing a lot of reading aloud.

I have played around a bit with how to manage the reading. After we'd done the beginning of the book aloud, the students seemed to be following it pretty well, so I assigned a couple of chapters as homework. When I gave reading quizzes on those chapters, over a third of the students failed, pretty much in line with my experience in past years.

So I went back to doing the reading in class. I did some more aloud, then tried having them read the book to themselves in class.  This, too, was a struggle.  A few students read it easily and quickly; many struggled to understand it.  I tried having students read it to each other.  This worked okay, but it was slow-going, the kids complained, and their comprehension wasn't great. Another thing I tried was allowing students who had done well on the previous reading quizzes to read the book on their own in the hallway while I read it aloud.  This worked fairly well, although there were a few students who used the time not to read, but to go get a drink or chat with their friends. These kids then failed the quick quiz I gave, and weren't allowed to read in the hallway the next time.

I wouldn't say that the book has been a great success this year, and some of the reading-aloud time has been plagued by students commenting loudly and distractingly on the book (A typical comment is the ever-popular "THAT'S SO RACIST!"), or whispering to each other about other things, or whatever.  Nevertheless, there have been some small victories.

1. I have a student in one of my classes who asks me nearly every day if we can "just do something chill today."  I always say, "I'm reading aloud to you.  We're having storytime; it doesn't get any more chill than that!"  She says, No, I mean play a game or something.  I say, Reading is fun!  This has happened three times; finally today some other students in the class backed me up and said they were enjoying listening to the book.
2. In that same class I have a student with some unique learning difficulties who finds it very difficult to understand the novel.  She is the only student in either class who has found it difficult to understand when I read it aloud. I let her read in the hallway, which sometimes allowed her to (barely) pass the reading quizzes, but when we got to the trial section of the novel I asked her to stay in the room and listen to it.  She was so anxious about failing the quizzes (until I knew this girl, I thought beating your breast in anguish was just an expression) that I let her skip the quizzes for a few days.  Then yesterday I handed her a quiz and she took it, saying "I think I understood it today!" As it turned out, she barely passed the quiz, but at least she passed, and at least--for the first time--she felt like she'd understood it. I was worried that the reading aloud was going to be a a terrible experience overall for her, but it doesn't seem to be so bad.  Maybe she's even learning!
3. Today a student in my other 9th grade class, a girl who has proclaimed many times that she hates reading but whom I have sometimes caught reading her independent reading book when she was supposed to be doing something else, announced, unprovoked, at the end of class: "I hate to admit it, but I think this book is really good!" When I said I thought so too, even if I had some misgivings, she said, "Well, I think I would hate it if I had to read it myself."  Then three other kids jumped in and said that they too only liked the book when I read it to them--but that they were liking it.

So I'm still not convinced that it's worth spending six weeks on To Kill a Mockingbird, and if I were to do it again, I would do things differently, but I do think what I'm doing this year is better than what I've done in the past.

Social class and reading

I've been worrying recently about the ways in which reading is social, cultural, and deeply influenced by one's social class.  Below are a few attempts to start to think this through.


Images of Reading: solitary, but also social

Reading is in many ways a solitary activity.  People tend not to read in large groups, and when they do (reading rooms; subway cars), reading often seems to wall off the self from the group.  When I think of images of reading, I think of those portraits of female readers, in which the reading is nearly always shown as an activity of almost circular self-sufficiency.  Here's a picture by Fragonard:

It's a lovely picture, and we like it partly because it makes makes us imagine what it's like to be the young woman. We want to be her because reading looks so pleasant, so private, so self-sufficient--not necessarily passionate, not necessarily joyful, but reasonable, calm, and, despite the pillow against which she is propped up so straight, wakeful.  We put ourselves in her place, we want to know what the book is about, we imagine such a wonderful self-sufficiency (perhaps we are enjoying the painting in the same way the young woman enjoys the book), and the picture is so much about at-one-ness that viewer and subject partly merge. 

But the picture is more complicated, and the apparent solitude is less solitary, than it might seem. It is also less self-sufficient, and it is embedded in a pretty distinct social and cultural context.  First, and most obviously, such a celebration of privacy, such solitary self-sufficiency in a young woman,  may seem, as in Vermeer paintings, to have (that pillow!) an erotic tinge. The young woman in Fragonard's picture is both attractive and quite fetchingly dressed, and if reading might seem a solitary activity, she is less alone than she thinks, for both painter and viewer may play the role of peeping Tom.  

(Here's one, by Renoir, in which the inherent eroticism of the subject is a bit more obvious:

!)

The eroticism of the picture is merely the most obvious way in which reading is never completely solitary.  These young women, like reading itself, are also clearly of a certain class--or rather, are distinctly not of a certain class--that is, they are not poor.  The woman in the Fragonard painting is probably richer than Renoir's subject--by Renoir's time, reading, or leisure, had filtered down to the middle class---but both have had time in their childhoods to learn to read, someone to help them learn, and maids and servants to clean the house, shop for and cook the food, put on their dresses, tie their ribbons and plump their pillows.  While their servants were doing such work (you might argue that Renoir's girl looks like she might have to do some housework herself, but then Renoir is an inveterate fantasist), these non-poor women enjoyed available books to choose from, an undistracting space and continuous leisure time in which to read the books they choose, and friends with whom they could discuss the stories.  In nearly every way, reading was an upper-class pursuit. 

Reading and social class in To Kill a Mockingbird 

The situation is similar in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book paints a wonderful picture of an apparently self-sufficient childhood culture of reading.  Jem, Scout and Dill don't need school--Harper Lee seems deeply skeptical of the idea that reading can be taught--and the children's summer world, a combination of unsupervised outdoor play and passionate engagement in Tom Swift and Tarzan books, seems as beautifully self-sufficient as Fragonard's idyll of solitary reading.  Anyone should be able to read, it seems, and when the book's villain, Bob Ewell, is asked by the book's hero, Atticus Finch, whether he can write, Mr. Ewell is indignant, but in the joke he makes (or should I say the joke the author has at his expense), we are given to understand that his level of literacy is despicably low.  "Of course I can write," Mr. Ewell says.  "How do you think I sign my relief checks?"  We laugh, but we understand that the Ewells probably can't read, as we would think of reading, and that their illiteracy is a part of their separateness, their subhumanness.  According to Atticus, it's not even worth making the Ewell children go to school, because the Ewells are the Ewells and will never change.

I'm dwelling at length on to Kill a Mockingbird because it presents such a clear picture of a good reading culture and such a clear picture of the all-important social divisions.  In Maycomb, one is almost completely defined by one's family and one's class. Jem, Scout and Dill are good readers, but nearly every other upper-class character, that is to say, everyone who lives on the town's "main residential street," is also a member of the reading club: even the mean, racist Mrs. Dubose kicks her morphine habit with the assistance of a Walter Scott novel; and even Boo Radley likes to cut out newspaper articles for his scrapbook.  

The poor farmers, on the other hand, who occupy the next rung down on the social ladder, may be literate, but they are not readers.  Of the farm children who make up most of her class at school, Scout tells us that "the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature."  The Cunninghams and their neighbors were not raised by lawyers who are professional readers and writers, they did not see their parents sitting in the armchair reading every night, and they were provided neither the books nor the time to read even if by some form of extra-sensory perception they had somehow gotten it into their heads that reading was a worthwhile pursuit.

The social groups who occupy the bottom two rungs of the social hierarchy, the African-Americans and the poor white trash, are mostly illiterate--not only immune to imaginative literature, but hardly able to read or write at all.  Bob Ewell may be able, barely, to scratch out his name, but his son Burris, who at eight or nine years old has only spent two full days in school, can't spell his, and his nineteen-year-old daughter Mayella, the best of the bunch, has only been to school for two years and can read and write only as well as her father.  Most of the African-Americans in the town are also illiterate; of the large congregation in the First Purchase church, only four or five, including Calpurnia and her son Zeebo, know how to read.

That African-Americans, and poor Whites, are still less literate than the upper classes is completely to be expected.  The Fragonard picture was painted about 250 years ago.  To Kill a Mockingbird takes place less than a hundred years ago. Cultures usually change very, very slowly.  Burris Ewell was younger than my grandfather; his grandchildren could be my students. We, like them, are living with the inheritance of centuries and centuries of social divisions.  For centuries in Europe, only the clergy knew how to read. In England, your crimes were treated much more leniently if you could prove you could read (they'd ask you to read Psalm 51, the "Neck Verse," and if you could read about God's mercy, then the powers that be would offer mercy as well).  In the American south, education for slaves was prohibited by law. This was all very, very recent, and since we are still living in a culture shaped by this history, we can most effectively make progress by accepting that our work is not only "instructional," not only about "skills," but is primarily social and cultural. 

Family, Peers, and School

The point I am laboriously making here is that reading is not only solitary, and it is not a "skill" that can be isolated, taught and tested in the way that perhaps long division can (though I wonder);  no, reading is social and cultural, and we teachers of reading must keep that uppermost in our minds.

We often assume that all parents want their kids to succeed, to become readers, but some of them probably don't.  There's a funny and horrifying scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck's absent, illiterate father comes back to find that while he's been away his son has learned to read.  Pap is upset:  "Looky here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better'n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't before they died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it -- you hear?"

When Huck reads a bit, Pap knocks the book across the room and warns Huck that if he catches him at school again, he'll beat him.  The scene is funny partly because Pap's attitude is so counter to all the middle-class bromides (Stay in school, etc.), but it's also funny because it expresses something real: there is a real anti-academic feeling in a lot of people.  Sure, nearly every parent genuinely wants his or her child to succeed in school--but a lot of them have mixed feelings.  They may have hated school themselves.  A part of them may feel that they didn't succeed and don't want their kids to succeed.  I had mixed feelings about school myself, and I know I have transmitted those feelings to my children.

It's not only parents, but peers, who work against creating a culture of reading.  In To Kill a Mockingbird, the only two readers in the First Grade classroom are Scout and the teacher, and even if they could work together it would be difficult for them to move the great mass of the rest of the class. The greatest obstacle to student success is often the students.  Not the student, singular, but his or her peers.  It takes more than one person to create a culture--and a teacher is only one person.  True, she has a vested authority, but she is competing against a score of other people, many of whom are not yet initiates into the society of readers.

This is a huge, and potentially growing problem

In the United States, despite the constant talk of our weak performance and the "crisis" in education, the situation is roughly what it's been like for decades.  The rich kids do very well, even by international standards, and the poor kids don't.  Recent results on the OECD's PISA tests make this clear: in 2009, US schools with less than 10% poor kids had reading scores averaging 551, significantly better than the scores in any other country (schools with more than 75% of students receiving Free or Reduced Price Lunch averaged 446, significantly worse than Turkey), but US poverty rates are among the highest in the OECD.

In any case, US schools with few poor kids do very well, and this has been clear at least since 1972, when Christopher Jencks and his colleagues published their magisterial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (and every year other writers like Richard Rothstein and Gerald Grant make the same obvious point). Oddly, it was also in 1972, or thereabouts, that the economic fortunes of the bottom 50% took a turn for the worse.  Median wages, adjusted for inflation, peaked in the early 1970s and have been flat or declining since, even as the incomes of the upper-middle-class have grown quite a bit and the incomes of the rich have grown enormously.

This inequality has large educational effects.  Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) gave a talk recently on inequality that has been getting a lot of press (David Brooks, whom I usually loathe, wrote a somewhat reasonable column about it this week).  The basic idea is that poor kids grow up in dramatically different environments, and are given much, much less attention and fewer resources (like books!) than their higher-SES peers.  The inequality among children, according to Putnam, is getting dramatically worse.  I look forward to Putnam's book, but we teachers should be taking this stuff into account every day, trying to provide, in school, the cultural and social education that our students are missing outside of school.

We can't make up for cultural gaps by mechanical means.  Instead, we should be doing just what the Deweyan teacher in To Kill a Mockingbird is trying and failing to do: we should be reading to our students--but reading them stories they like.  We should be modeling our love for reading and thinking. We should be providing them with books to read, and time in which to read them.  We should be fostering student discussion in lit circles and the like.  What we should not be doing is what we too often are doing: giving our students the educational equivalent of Scout's classmates daily chores: drudge-work, like feeding hogs and chopping cotton, that keeps them from the valuable, mind-growing work of leisure-reading.  School should look like this:

...or even like this:

To Kill a Mockingbird and Literacy

To Kill a Mockingbird has its problems.  An article last year about students who don't read the assigned texts was titled, "The 800-Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom".   It's too hard for many students, and many students don't read it.  I don't love the way it seems to solve the problem of racism by substituting classism, in which the elite White people of Maycomb are mainly good and enlightened, the country farmers are good at heart if not always fully enlightened, the obedient and/or crippled Black people are good, and the people who are bad include the powerful, uppity, separatist Black person (tall, strong Lula, who is a "troublemaker" with "fancy ideas and haughty ways") and the great villain of the novel, Bob Ewell, whose evilness is directly linked to his class status as poor white trash.  I also don't love the way the book glorifies the she-asked-for-it rape defense.

It's not my favorite book, and I wish I wasn't required to teach it, especially to my "Standard" level ninth grade classes.  Nevertheless, in the past couple of days I've found myself thinking a lot about what the book says about reading and school.  Like many of our culture's most beloved books, To Kill a Mockingbird gives a picture of reading and of school (and of explicit instruction in particular) that is as interesting as any broadside in the great education debates.

First, To Kill a Mockingbird shows us a group of young people with a deep culture of reading. When Dill first introduces himself to Jem and Scout, he states his identity in the following way: "I'm Charles Baker Harris.  I can read." Jem, Scout and Dill are left to their own devices most of the time, and many of their activities relate to the books they read.  They share adventure novels (Tarzan, Tom Swift and the like), they act out their plots, and when in the first chapter Dill wants to get Jem to run up and touch the spooky Radley house, he does it by offering to bet "The Gray Ghost against two Tom Swifts".

This culture of reading is independent of school.  As in a lot of other books (the autobiographies of Ben Franklin, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Henry James, etc., and novels like Tom Sawyer and Ramona and Beezus), we see children whose reading is deep and sustaining in the absence of explicit instruction.  What has happened is that these children have been inducted into the society of readers (what a wonderful passage in Crevecoeur calls an "extensive intellectual consanguinity"); once in that society, they have not needed much extra guidance.

How are they initiated?  Not through explicit instruction.  Mockingbird is bitterly satirical about school--mocking the idea that reading can be taught at all.  As Scout tells it, when on the first day of school her teacher, Miss Caroline, "discovered I was literate, she looked at me with more than faint distaste.  She told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore, it would interfere with my reading."

The joke here is many-layered.  First, Miss Caroline sees "reading" as something that should be entirely within the purview of school.  Second, she imagines that reading must be "taught."  Third, her notion, that teaching will interfere with reading, is true, but not in the way Miss Caroline imagines.  It isn't Atticus, but Miss Caroline herself whose teaching will interfere with Scout's reading.

For, as Scout sees it, Atticus has never "taught" her.  He is too tired in the evenings, she tells her teacher, to do anything but sit in the livingroom and read.  But Miss Caroline can't believe it.  "You tell your father not to teach you anymore.  It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind.  You tell him I'll take over from here and undo the damage."  When Scout tries to protest, Miss Caroline cuts her off: "Your father does not know how to teach.  You can have a seat now."

So, either Miss Caroline does not know how to teach, or else "teaching" itself is suspect.  The novel implies the latter, but it's not a simple picture.  For in fact Miss Caroline is not just an old-fashioned teacher with a ruler.  She is also a representative of a new way of teaching that Jem identifies as the "Dewey Decimal System."  This too is a multi-layered joke.  On the one hand, Jem is confusing John Dewey, the philosopher and education theorist, with Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a strict and systematic library classification system, and Miss Caroline's teaching seems somewhat strict and systematic.

On the other hand--and this is where the joke gets complicated, this is where the book raises a challenge to us as teachers--Miss Caroline is really, to some extent, a teacher in the progressive tradition of John Dewey, who believed that learning was largely social and that the teacher should be a member of the community rather than a purveyor of facts in the mold of Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind--and yet her  attempts to guide and model rather than command and instruct are always falling short.  Harper Lee has us laughing at Miss Caroline's reading of The Wind in The Willows, which no one in her class understands or cares about.   She is trying to lead the kids to reading, but she's failing.  Her failure is contrasted with Atticus's success: at the end of the section on school, Atticus reads to Jem and Scout about a flagpole sitter, the kids are rapt, and Jem heads out to the yard to try it himself.

Our challenge as teachers, like Miss Caroline's challenge, is to try to initiate our students into the culture of reading--to get them to join that extensive intellectual consanguinity. Why does Atticus succeed and Miss Caroline fail?  How can we do what Atticus does?  Can school even work that way?