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.

Newsflash: famously bad teacher who read aloud to students turns out to be famously good teacher!

Many years ago in Leafstrewn, there was an English teacher who was also the basketball coach.  This teacher liked to read aloud to his classes.  For years I have heard stories from some of the old-timers in my department, including some very close to me, about how this guy would sometimes spend the whole year reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud to his ninth grade class.  It was always implied that this was terrible teaching. If I said I was trying some reading aloud, they might say, Well, at least you're not doing what the Basketball Coach did, and reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud for an entire year!  Snooze-a-rama! What a bad teacher!

Today, some other colleagues and I were having lunch, and someone mentioned reading aloud.  My friend Robert said that his partner, Kate, who attended Leafstrewn back in the day, had never had an English class as important to her as the one in which the teacher just read aloud the whole year.

I said, "You mean the Basketball Coach?! Kate had him?!"

Robert said that yes, Kate had had him, and he had indeed read A Tale of Two Cities aloud to his class the entire year--and it had been great.  That year, he said, Kate was new to Leafstrewn, having come from a little private elementary school, and she knew nobody and was miserable.  She had been put into the Basketball Coach's low-level English class, and every day little Kate and the twenty other students in the class (all hulking basketball players, in Robert's telling) would come in, open up their Dickens, and listen to the coach read aloud.  With ten minutes left in the period, he would stop, and they would discuss what he had read.  According to Robert, this class sustained Kate--she loved the book, she liked the discussions, she got to know the basketball players--for many painful months, until she was able to make friends. She still thinks of it as one of the best English classes she ever had--and she graduated, as an English major, magna cum laude from Cornell.

So, the famously bad teacher is also a famously good teacher, and the distinction between natural and unnatural is again unclear. My own takeaway is this: if, as per the Common Core, we want to get kids reading more complex texts, maybe we should be reading aloud more? If we do it for our own children, why not for our students?

$150 million of Gates money later, we're still clueless

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reports that Bill Gates has given over $150,000,000 to promote and develop curriculum for the CCSS.  This is a lot of money. But we are still mostly clueless.

Yesterday my curriculum coordinator was asked what our department was doing to align our curriculum to the Common Core, and she didn't have a quick and easy answer, because there is no quick and easy answer. The Common Core English Standards demand an ability to read complex texts, ability to make coherent arguments grounded in evidence from text, and an increased familiarity with academic language and "content-rich non-fiction."  The most important things students need to be doing, in other words, is meaningful reading and writing--just what we should have been doing before.  The only new thing here is the emphasis on "informational texts," but the best way to learn to read non-fiction is to read a lot of any old text: I am pretty good at reading informational texts, but I read hardly any non-fiction as an adolescent; Malcolm Gladwell is a master of reading, synthesizing and writing informational texts, but the main thing he reads now, just as, no doubt, when he was in high school, is junky airport fiction. Again, the main job of English teachers should be ensuring that their students are doing as much meaningful reading and writing as possible.

Things may look different in other subjects.  The math department at Leafstrewn has apparently done all sorts of work on Common Core "implementation."  This is probably appropriate; in math, you have to decide which skills to teach when. In English, we should be doing similar things over and over again, just with different texts, and different types of writing.  Trying to teach to the Common Core's "Shifts" (yes, the word is capitalized--it is, in the eyes of the Common Core people, that important) is, as I have tried to show, very likely a mistake, since it will lead to a narrow focus, boring curriculum, and not enough reading.  What we need is reading and writing--provide kids with books, time, and a humane, caring community in which they can do their work.

Getting kids to read complex texts: challenge, not difficulty; engagement before challenge

I've been thinking about complex texts recently, not only because there's been a lot of talk about the Common Core's call for increasing text complexity, but also because my ninth grade classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and my Juniors are reading Song of Solomon. Both texts are pretty complex, and too difficult for some of my students (most, in the case of my ninth graders) to read comfortably.  I've been dealing with the problem by doing a lot of reading aloud--which has been great--but I've also been mulling over a kind of reverse Jane Fonda principle: Less pain, more gain.

Engagement, not difficulty
Learning should be challenging and interesting, and our students should be engaged, but we should not be giving them reading that is difficult for them.  Here's a rule of thumb: the more difficult the task, the more engagement is required.  The first thing we teachers should be thinking about, then, is engagement and interest--not difficulty.  The more students are engaged, the more they will be able to tackle difficult tasks.  This principle--of putting engagement before difficulty--is very important when you're thinking about reading.

The heart of the Common Core ELA standards is the requirement that students be able to read complex (i.e. difficult) texts independently.  This is a wonderful goal, but school tends to go about it in the wrong way. If we want kids to read texts of increasing complexity, it is important that they (1) be able to read them, and (2) be interested in what they are reading--and if a text is so difficult that the student finds it painful, it is very important that they not try to persevere with that text.  Too often, students get the worst of both worlds: they are not very interested in what they are told to read, and the reading is too hard.

The first thing we need to do is get kids reading a lot
Less skilled readers do not need "challenging" texts.  Less skilled readers do not need to be pushed, as so much discussion around the Common Core implies, to read more complex and difficult texts.  What they need is what all kids need: to read a lot of books they are interested in, books they can read, over many, many years.

The way readers become able to read complex text is by reading a lot of text that is not difficult for them.  My son is a very good reader, and he reads quite a lot, but he has never forced himself--or been forced by anyone else--to read books that were difficult for him.  He is lucky, but he is like most of our highly skilled readers.  Most highly skilled readers grew up hearing lots of adult talk, were provided with lots of high-interest books from an early age, and were not forced to read books that were too difficult for them.  In school, kids like my son never encounter text that is painfully difficult.  His Science textbook may be kind of boring to him, but for him, unlike many other students in his class, it is not too difficult.  When he gets to ninth grade, he may be somewhat bored when he is asked to reread books he's already read (To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, etc.), but those books will not be for him, as they are for so many others, too difficult for him to read comfortably.  Good readers get better not only because they choose to read more in their spare time, but because the assigned reading they receive is at their level.  Forcing kids to read difficult text will not work.

Books that are hard may be manageable if kids are really interested
Good readers often try books that are diificult for them.  If the books are too hard, they drop them.  That's what I do, that's what you do--and it's what my son does.  My son has, for a long time, been really interested in books about Black athletes; when he was nine or so he started reading the new biography of Willie Mays, a book written for adults.  It was tough, but he kept at it, off and on, for nearly a year, and finally he finished it.  No one forced him, but he did it.

In the same way, one of my ninth-grade students has spent the last month very slowly getting through the first two hundred pages of Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher, a painful memoir about anorexia and bulimia.  My student usually races through books she's interested in, but this one is moving very slowly.  That's okay; she's enjoying it, and she's very proud of being able to read it.

But if the kids want to drop them, or aren't reading them steadily, they should drop them
Again, isn't this what we all do?  Sure, sometimes it's good to push yourself, but you need to want to push yourself.  If you don't want to, you'll do what I did when I was assigned Proust in a college French literature class: you won't read it.  That' wasn't terrible (I read Remembrance of Things Past in English, and I loved it), but I certainly would have gotten better at reading French literature if instead of being assigned Proust, I had been allowed to read easier books.

Over the past several months, my son has tried lots of books that sounded really interesting to him but that ended up being too hard for him to read comfortably.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Guns Germs and Steel, and David Remnick's book about Muhammad Ali, King of the World, are a few examples. He loves history, and he's been very interested in the lives of Black athletes, but these books were just too hard.  He could read them, but only with difficulty, and he felt he wasn't getting enough out of them to continue, so he dropped them.  That's okay; he'll read them some other time, and, more importantly, dropping Jared Diamond allows him to read Walter Dean Myers.

Challenge, not difficulty
In a sense, difficulty is always bad.  We learn best when we are in the zone, in the flow, whatever you want to call it.  You can't experience flow when something is difficult. Challenging, yes, interesting, yes, complex, sure--but not difficult.

[In my next post I'm going to look at some of the curriculum that's being developed for the Common Core Standards, to see how that curriculum looks in terms of text complexity, likely student engagement, and reading volume.  Stay tuned.]