For some background, I was not an English major, though now I am an English Teacher. I took AP English Literature with Sister Mary Eileen Quinlan. I hated almost everything we read in that class, and, in fact, can't remember much of it, except, I will admit it prompted my continuing antipathy for Huck Finn. When I finished her class and passed AP Lit exam with a 5, I prematurely swore off of English for the rest of my career.
Does that mean I hate fiction? Quite the opposite. I love stories. I love a good strong plot that can pull me through the plodding nonsense that author's use as character development. I love poetry (though that may only be since I discovered Billy Collins and Mary Oliver). My senior year, when I should have been reading Thomas Hardy, instead I read every book in the oeuvre of trashy romance. I read Judith Krantz and Julie Garwood and Danielle Steele. Read everything other than what I should have been reading. I may have read five books a week. While I was busy reading bodice-rippers, I avoided nonfiction in high school.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived at my Alma Mater and I spent $800 on required reading for classes like World Politics and Beyond Sovereignty and Macroeconomics. I was pleased, knowing I could read books and no one would question whether or not I understood the symbol of the green light on the dock. Having been an avid reader, I had skills that I could transfer. I knew how to get through a book and fast. But I didn't know the ins-and-outs of actually understanding nonfiction. There's an art there, but I didn't know it then. I could survive the nonfiction. I could glean information, but I could not understand or really hear it sing.
In high school, I was also voted most likely to become a writer. I scribbled poorly realized stories and angsty poetry in my journals. Sister Eileen did a bang-up job getting me to be a fast writer and an analytical one. I could write a 5-page paper on Contemporary Russia in 60 minutes and still make it to happy hour. But when I made it to a composition class for pre-law students my second-year of college I realized how I had skated by, how weak my skills were when dealing with this specific type of nonfiction.
Flash-forward a dozen years and I was sitting in a conference room at the annual convention of CATE, California Association of Teachers of English. Some presenter asked, "Why do we spend so much time in English classrooms training kids to be English teachers? Shouldn't we teach them forms of reading and writing too?"
Ah. There it is. Nonfiction or at least a yeoman's explanation of why to teach it. The truth is more complex than we should teach nonfiction because it's good prep for college. We should teach nonfiction because some of the most passionate, beautiful, moving and insightful writing that is currently being published is nonfiction. Nonfiction can't only answer the question you are researching for your paper, but it can make you laugh, cry and wonder, just like fiction.
Recently, Sara Mosle argued that one of the most important reasons to teach nonfiction is to help our students have excellent models for good nonfiction. I don't disagree. How much nonfiction is a ridiculous red-herring. In fact, Mosle is most prescient when she states "What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing."
Mosle goes on to enumerate a list of good nonfiction which could be lifted from my Google history or NPR.
This blog, then, is to not only encourage you to read more nonfiction but to choose the good stuff, the nonfiction that can stand alongside the literature that is also taught in English classrooms. It's out there, I swear. Some days you just need to search a little more for it.
So welcome. Pull up a chair.
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