Read Alouds for High Schoolers, Too!

One from the archives: Each of these little ones now have their own little ones they are reading aloud to!

I have a great time reading aloud to my grandkids (see "Grandmothering a Reader" part 1 and part 2). Just like I had a great time reading aloud to my 2 daughters (that's my husband reading to them above). I can hardly go online without stumbling over a study or blog or testimony about how important reading aloud is to children as young as babies in the womb. And when I Googled "read aloud" just now (to find out whether or not to hyphenate it), all the top hits focused on preschool and elementary, with a few venturing into middle school. Can I have just as much fun (to just as much purpose) reading aloud to my high school students? Yes. 

This week Thursday I read aloud to my 10th graders “Like the Sun” by R.K. Narayan. As we laughed and gasped together, we reviewed literary devices, built community, and prepared for the next challenge of reading. I read the story out loud just like I read to my kids and my grandkids: with expression, stopping to ask questions (what does this word mean? why did he say that? what do you think is going to happen next?), or sometimes just a meaningful pause to hear their response—a gasp or a guffaw or a comment. This is natural formative assessment. Their response says they got the foreshadowing, they’ve made a prediction, they’ve seen the dramatic irony. With 10th graders, I may stop and name those terms (not so much with 2-year-olds).  

It’s not a story I’ve used the last several years. I usually start with “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy. It’s simple. It’s memorable. It comes from the same Christian world view that my school does. It has an important message about the insidious workings of “how much is enough?” on our needy souls. And it’s really, really long. I’d just given up a couple of extra days to the previous writing time, as I’d had to make a call about learning over deadlines. 

So I chose this back-up piece. It’s simple. That’s how I want to start because the next 2 are going to be doozies: Franz Kafka’s surrealism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism. It doesn’t originate in a Christian world view, but it does address human relationships in the cauldron of truth vs. love. It uses the same folk-tale pattern of 3 and foreshadowing with dramatic irony while surfacing an important question: Is the essence of human relationships really tempering truth? What is truth, and what role does it play in relationships? Finally, the author is an important Indian author, the class is world literature, and I have an Indian student this year. (When I came to words I couldn't pronounce, I pointed at him, and he spoke the name of the king or the musical style.)

My first goal the first day was to introduce short stories as not just novels that didn’t grow up, but what we do as humans—we tell stories that resonate with our experience of the world. We may greet our friends with stories that confirm our view of the world as a terrible place or a wonderful place, but we often greet them with stories—either about how we overslept, missed breakfast, and were late to school, or else about how well we slept, how we’re looking forward to lunch, and how excited we are about the lab coming up. 

My next goal was to model how an actual short story does that—tells a particular story in a particular way for a particular purpose. Afterwards we had a discussion of what truth in relationships is. Set phrases (like “How are you doing?”) don’t always mean what they say (you aren’t supposed to answer that with a detailed description of your hangnail—it’s just a friendly acknowledgement of your existence). Even specific conversations have context and subtext: “How do you like my hair?” could be “I’m really insecure right now and I need you to reassure me” or it could be a request for critical feedback. And then there’s the context of positive and negative truths. At least as Americans, we think of “speaking the truth in love” as requiring us to articulate negative truths—you really did hurt me, play a bad game, or do something stupid. But do we always tell all the positive truths that frame our relationships? I look forward to coming to school each day because your smile makes me feel alive. I value your insights. I can always depend on you. So that when we have a negative truth to tell, our friend knows we truly have his best interest at heart?

For homework, students had to move on and apply the reading strategies and knowledge of literary devices to a tougher piece: Franz Kafka’s short story “The Bucket Rider.” We had an equally interesting time Friday wrestling with our understandings and questions regarding that story, but that’s another blog for another time. I guess my take aways right now are when I know my goals, (1) I can be flexible (giving more time for writing at the end of the previous unit, and substituting a shorter short story at the beginning of the next unit), and (2) I can sometimes just have fun (while accomplishing learning goals), thinking not “what do we have to get through in class today?” but “what do we get to do in class today?” Reading aloud can be an effective use of time—even with high schoolers!

How do you have fun—while accomplishing goals—with your students?