Early this summer I was interviewed by Rose Horowitch, an editor for The Atlantic. She told me that she had heard from a university professor that incoming students were struggling to keep up with the reading load. She explained that she was working on
I’m learning from kind, smart linguists and linguistic anthropologists that I’ve got some wrinkles to iron out in one paragraph. I’m working on it, but remember, full time teacher here. I’ve got some Julius Caesar papers coming in and I’m just starting the Odyssey, so editing this essay is not a top priority -students come first.
This is also why I’ve stopped responding to comments. I’m incredibly grateful for the support and hope the kind folks will continue to nudge the unkind ones to understand.
When I heard from a friend that the Atlantic article had referred to Percy Jackson as YA, I knew it was one that I could skip. But your terrific response should be required reading for all who had a hand in that piece.
Thank you so much. In a painfully ironic twist I spent the day teaching Julius Caesar and The Odyssey to different classes. Percy Jackson makes the odyssey more fun and I’M over any killjoy that says otherwise. 😊
My ten year old loves Percy Jackson, loves listening to Stephen Fry's retelling of the Greek myths and is consequently way more informed about all things Greek mythology than I will ever be. I think the either/or conversations about children and education are so reductionist and stupid.
The podcast Greeking Out by National Geographic is also fabulous for young kids. My 9 year old asks to play 20 questions sometimes using only characters from Greek mythology but I am hopelessly outclassed.
You mean because they're for younger kids? I remember them being popular when I was in middle school, I don't know if at the time I would have considered them YA or "kid's books" though.
You've given me so much to think about in this post! My brain is going all over the place.
I'm reflecting on what I ask my fifth-graders to read, and how I expect them to interact with me linguistically. I'm wondering if the reason I love Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote is because her translation makes the text more accessible than older, whiter translations.
I do agree that blaming standardized testing can appear to be a lazy argument. However, from my experiences in the classroom these last 20+ years, I can confidently state that teaching kids to decode isolated passages has atrophied students' stamina for reading short stories, poems, and novels. As a teacher, I acknowledge that I cannot compete with TikTok; I'm not an entertainer.
I love how you express a need to reframe our mindsets (I would argue for both teachers and students). What does it mean to engage with literature? What do I look for as a "successful" discussion? I think you are spot on: we must create a space for joy and curiosity, and do our best to help students to see the universal humanity in literature. I may not be able to convince them that Tuck Everlasting is better than TikTok, but I can provoke them into discussing the purpose of living.
Thank you for writing this! I really enjoyed reading your perspective.
Can I just… so funny you mentioned Tuck Everlasting because I haven’t thought about that book in DECADES but literally last week I had a student ask me if I “have any banned books” and could I recommend one. I laughed and said the entire shelving unit would have to go if we were in Florida, so what type of banned story did he want. He said something like Tuck Everlasting. Ultimately after sifting through a curated stack I made him, he opted for They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera.
I love it when things like that happen! It makes me feel like we’re connected.
They Both Die At The End is a great book. And, it warms my fifth-grade teacher heart to hear that your student used Tuck Everlasting as a guide for what he should read next! 🥰
LOVE "they both die at the end" and it was part of a curated YA and marginalized fiction section at a public university library where i worked! i know seeing people's recommendations like this really helped that librarian, who was a white leftist in his 30s, so just needed help getting into the ear of a younger and more diverse fiction audience. thanks for talking about books in this way!
Tuck Everlasting is incredible. You've probably already heard of her, but Lindsay Eagar's books have a similar feel to them. I would recommend Journey to the Bottom of the Sea or The Patron Thief of Bread to kids who enjoyed Tuck. 💛
That’s a good point! I’m tired of Harold Bloom always being the go-to literary scholar. When Grossman came out with her translation of Quixote, I found it more approachable than Bloom. I felt like she translated for the reader, not the literary scholar.
Wonderfully thought out and fantastically argued. One quibble — from a linguist. There really is no increase in distance between the vernacular of today and the one I ran my mouth off speaking over 60 years ago when I was I. High school. The change over time is hardly noticeable for speakers of standard English. For speakers of what I will now, after 50 years of awkward sets of initials , term “Black English “, this is exactly e same. In any case. Thank you for a superb rebuttal. Here's lookin' at you, kid,!
I BEGGED Horowitch to reach out to a linguistic anthropologist. Repeatedly.
I appreciate your perspective and can only speak from what I see (and hear in the hallways). Please correct me where I’m wrong and point me toward resources. Unlike The Atlantic, I want the whole picture.
Hi, also a linguist. For reference, although I'm not a full time teacher, I have worked with kids and teens throughout my life.
Language changes - generally speaking - quite slowly, so slowly that we don't notice it as it's happening. Some stuff changes quickly, like slang, but on a macro scale language changes slowly over the course of hundreds of years. We don't have evidence either way at this time that the Internet slows or quickens the rate of change in language. This might not be something we're able to really know for many more generations. We do know that widespread literacy has almost certainly closed some gaps between dialects – at least in writing. Literate residents of Liverpool and Boston may sound different, but they still write "turn left on High Street" the same.
One thing that we do know is that adults have always thought kids talked funny. Slang can proliferate quickly, and then be forgotten just as quickly. I mean, remember when "swag" was a word you heard every day, and now nobody says it? Vocabulary is a malleable thing, but ultimately 'rizz' and 'banger' don't constitute a significant amount of language change to consider Gen Z/Alpha English a new dialect or variety of English any more so than 'gnarly' and 'bodacious' did. We could find an exaggerated sentence exemplifying the slang of the 1820s that is meaningless to both of us, but that doesn't mean they were speaking a radically different variety of English to you or me. Edgar Allen Poe's stories don't look or sound foreign, although they occasionally do sound old-fashioned.
Historically, periods of even radical change are still hundreds of years long. The Great Vowel Shift is one of these changes – it's what made modern English sound like modern English, which sounds very different from Middle English, and it's one of the major reasons why English spelling doesn't always reflect the pronunciation. (Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were both written before the Great Vowel Shift, which is part of why they can feel impenetrable to modern English speakers.)
More commonly, language difficulties in the classroom come from lack of exposure and lack of support outside the classroom. Socioeconomic status correlates strongly with academic success for students across age. If your classroom is largely students from working-class families, it's likely that the only exposure to academic or literary English is happening through school.
It's true that dialectal differences can challenge students – for example, students who speak African-American Vernacular English at home typically have a harder time in English class. It's certainly possible that this is the case for many or even all of your students. But AAVE and the challenges AAVE-speakers face with academic English are not new, and certainly not unique to the latest generation. (In fact, a lot of what is considered Gen Z slang are actually words that have been in use in AAVE for decades.) Similarly, being an L2 speaker of English presents challenges that L1 speakers don't often have.
All that said, there are some novel things happening to the English language on the Internet, for sure! I recommend the book "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch. Many of the unique features of 'internet English' are writing-specific (emojis, expressive vowel lengthening, punctuation) but a few are vocabulary and grammar related. (And there are cases of very quick linguistic change, but these are accompanied by some pretty extreme socio-cultural forces. Like, your people were conquered and now all your kids are speaking a mix of your mother tongue and the language of your conquerers kinds of forces.)
There was so much about that article that irritated me. Claim that a literacy problem is occurring in high school English courses--cite a study of third to eighth-grade educators, non-English-specific. Claim that students just aren't reading whole books--quote a teacher who says that when they ask what their first-years' favorite books are, they're books which aren't ones they would have read for school, meaning those kids are seeking out and reading entire books on their own. If this were an essay I had to edit for one of my own students, it would be severely marked-up.
I can't like this enough. While after 20+ years of secondary teaching I may have assigned fewer pages or different books or provided more choice, I never stopped teaching full-length texts. Most of the teachers I know or have spoken with across the country do/have done the same.
Also, one of my greatest frustrations with articles like this is that they flatten everything to make sweeping claims about American schools (and children), ignoring the decentralization of our system and the remarkable differences between schools (and children).
YES YES YES!! I spent so much time in the high school English classes just trying to create spaces to experience the joy of literacy. Sounds like this article is yet another example of teachers’ lived experience in the classroom being valued less than the insights of “experts.” I wonder how much could change if we actually started listening to teachers??
I think, part of it has always been that we don’t self-advocate. For fear or because we’re too busy or too burnt out or because we can’t support our argument without violating someone’s privacy or because the truth is so frustratingly, obviously weird that no one would believe us anyway… we all know the truth but it stays within our profession. Like, we roll our eyes at trash like this article but ultimately how do you even begin to push back?
thank you for writing this and sharing your thoughts in your own words!
the section about social media and cell phones reminds me of the parallel moral panic that blames social media for all of teens’ mental health issues. having been a teen on social media not that long ago, I can say firsthand that social media was not the only thing that made us depressed and anxious. the things that contributed to our poor mental health have yet to be addressed: pressures on teens to perform in school, sports, and extracurriculars have just gotten worse since 2020, and misogyny among teenage boys seems to be getting worse too.
witnessing people older than me say “it’s because you’re always on that phone” to today’s teens drives me bananas, because it strikes me as a reductive and convenient way to avoid addressing the deeper causes of poor teen mental health. same goes for the “it’s the phones” take re: teen literacy — a lazy and too obvious explanation for a complicated phenomenon.
also, bringing it back to reading, The Atlantic article creates an impression that everyone in the past was an attentive and voracious reader who sought out literature that would enrich their minds, and it’s the youths of today who are uniquely uninterested in literature. have we forgotten that novels were once considered trashy? Shakespeare was bawdy comedy meant to be seen onstage while eating and drinking in the stands! and as much as I love Les Miserables, I’m certain that not every Victorian reader was reading every single word—skimming the long tangents about Waterloo and the Parisian sewer system is a time-honored tradition among Les Mis readers.
to act like everyone in the past loved to read capital-L literature and the kids nowadays don’t is simplistic and overly reductive. ultimately it’s an argument totally beneath a publication of The Atlantic’s caliber.
It's not just the kids that are not committing to reading thick times...I panicked at the headline/theme of the Atlantantic article. Don't I have at least a year of unread Atlantic issues? The actual box of started and unread library books on the nightstand. The window sill of three book fairs worth of novels, untouched. The precious and thoughtful gifts from my reading muse, sampled and tasted as appetizers not yet full savored as the intended feasts. I used to dive headfirst into books and stay underwater, swimming through words and paragraphs and chapters like a pearl diver with a tightly focused brain like a pearl diver's efficient lungs. So why can't I finish a novel in a week? Why did I stop reading?
Except I didn't stop reading. Substack has my word count just under a million for the year so far, and that doesn't include at least two newspapers some days, poetry, Google articles, and dozens of columns, newsletters, and op-eds on other websites. If it isn't a book is it reading? Of course it is. And given the number of responses I've composed, my online activity might actually be more engaging - or less, depending on one's perspective about the internet's tendency to warp reality. The reading muscles are still there just exercising in a different gym.
This is brilliant and so true! As someone whose education school professors insisted we understand historical panics about youth and new technologies (Aristotle was worried written language would destroy their memory! Radio and comic books were supposedly letting the devil into American houses! Blackboard use instead of handheld slate use would lead to anarchy in the classroom!), I find it so important to remind everyone to un-clutch their pearls when faced with a new narrative like this. Absolutely dead smack on about code-switching, too--this is leading me to consider a brief reckoning with this topic in my college class soon. Thank you so much for this piece, and sorry the Atlantic used you as a straw man in their latest panic.
I've never had someone else put into words how I feel about chaucer. I can read Shakespeare all day but when we got to Chaucer I literally wanted to die. I've been listening to Shakespeare (and later reading it) since kindergarten. Beowulf and the Odessey held my attention because of the myths, but I also hated Les Mis despite loving the play (or perhaps because of that.) it's nice to have an explanation for that feeling when I just attributed it to just sort of not being good enough to slog through.
Even this Gen-Xer finds so much of the 19th century literary canon boring and uninteresting. It took the Lost Generation and 20th century masters to get me excited about literature. Though I plodded through some of the classics, I don't waste time on them now. Good for you for making this excellent argument.
After 35 years in a range of literature classrooms, I can only bow to you in respect and honor. Thank you for not merely a rejoinder but a near-manifesto of how canons politicize, how educators work, and how kids think.
Hi
I’m learning from kind, smart linguists and linguistic anthropologists that I’ve got some wrinkles to iron out in one paragraph. I’m working on it, but remember, full time teacher here. I’ve got some Julius Caesar papers coming in and I’m just starting the Odyssey, so editing this essay is not a top priority -students come first.
This is also why I’ve stopped responding to comments. I’m incredibly grateful for the support and hope the kind folks will continue to nudge the unkind ones to understand.
All my gratitude,
CMST
When I heard from a friend that the Atlantic article had referred to Percy Jackson as YA, I knew it was one that I could skip. But your terrific response should be required reading for all who had a hand in that piece.
Thank you so much. In a painfully ironic twist I spent the day teaching Julius Caesar and The Odyssey to different classes. Percy Jackson makes the odyssey more fun and I’M over any killjoy that says otherwise. 😊
My ten year old loves Percy Jackson, loves listening to Stephen Fry's retelling of the Greek myths and is consequently way more informed about all things Greek mythology than I will ever be. I think the either/or conversations about children and education are so reductionist and stupid.
Thank you! Also, details about Stephen Fry?? I would listen to that man read the directions for playing monopoly.
Percy Jackson is for kids and teens.
Percy Jackson is not an author.
No one said he was.
See how that comment was edited? The original comment was "Percy Jackson writes for kids and teens."
😂 me too! He’s written four: Mythos, Heroes, Troy and he just released Odyssey. They’re great and he reads them beautifully. They’re all on audible.
The podcast Greeking Out by National Geographic is also fabulous for young kids. My 9 year old asks to play 20 questions sometimes using only characters from Greek mythology but I am hopelessly outclassed.
You mean because they're for younger kids? I remember them being popular when I was in middle school, I don't know if at the time I would have considered them YA or "kid's books" though.
You've given me so much to think about in this post! My brain is going all over the place.
I'm reflecting on what I ask my fifth-graders to read, and how I expect them to interact with me linguistically. I'm wondering if the reason I love Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote is because her translation makes the text more accessible than older, whiter translations.
I do agree that blaming standardized testing can appear to be a lazy argument. However, from my experiences in the classroom these last 20+ years, I can confidently state that teaching kids to decode isolated passages has atrophied students' stamina for reading short stories, poems, and novels. As a teacher, I acknowledge that I cannot compete with TikTok; I'm not an entertainer.
I love how you express a need to reframe our mindsets (I would argue for both teachers and students). What does it mean to engage with literature? What do I look for as a "successful" discussion? I think you are spot on: we must create a space for joy and curiosity, and do our best to help students to see the universal humanity in literature. I may not be able to convince them that Tuck Everlasting is better than TikTok, but I can provoke them into discussing the purpose of living.
Thank you for writing this! I really enjoyed reading your perspective.
Can I just… so funny you mentioned Tuck Everlasting because I haven’t thought about that book in DECADES but literally last week I had a student ask me if I “have any banned books” and could I recommend one. I laughed and said the entire shelving unit would have to go if we were in Florida, so what type of banned story did he want. He said something like Tuck Everlasting. Ultimately after sifting through a curated stack I made him, he opted for They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera.
I love it when things like that happen! It makes me feel like we’re connected.
They Both Die At The End is a great book. And, it warms my fifth-grade teacher heart to hear that your student used Tuck Everlasting as a guide for what he should read next! 🥰
LOVE "they both die at the end" and it was part of a curated YA and marginalized fiction section at a public university library where i worked! i know seeing people's recommendations like this really helped that librarian, who was a white leftist in his 30s, so just needed help getting into the ear of a younger and more diverse fiction audience. thanks for talking about books in this way!
Tuck Everlasting is incredible. You've probably already heard of her, but Lindsay Eagar's books have a similar feel to them. I would recommend Journey to the Bottom of the Sea or The Patron Thief of Bread to kids who enjoyed Tuck. 💛
... also to adults who enjoyed Tuck. Me! I'm the adult who reads kid lit. 😄
How is Edith Grossman less white as a translator?
That’s a good point! I’m tired of Harold Bloom always being the go-to literary scholar. When Grossman came out with her translation of Quixote, I found it more approachable than Bloom. I felt like she translated for the reader, not the literary scholar.
"we’re starting The Odyssey tomorrow and have some eyeball puns to sharpen before we hit chapter nine."
Nobody saw that one coming.
I see what you did there. And I like it.
Wonderfully thought out and fantastically argued. One quibble — from a linguist. There really is no increase in distance between the vernacular of today and the one I ran my mouth off speaking over 60 years ago when I was I. High school. The change over time is hardly noticeable for speakers of standard English. For speakers of what I will now, after 50 years of awkward sets of initials , term “Black English “, this is exactly e same. In any case. Thank you for a superb rebuttal. Here's lookin' at you, kid,!
I BEGGED Horowitch to reach out to a linguistic anthropologist. Repeatedly.
I appreciate your perspective and can only speak from what I see (and hear in the hallways). Please correct me where I’m wrong and point me toward resources. Unlike The Atlantic, I want the whole picture.
Hi, also a linguist. For reference, although I'm not a full time teacher, I have worked with kids and teens throughout my life.
Language changes - generally speaking - quite slowly, so slowly that we don't notice it as it's happening. Some stuff changes quickly, like slang, but on a macro scale language changes slowly over the course of hundreds of years. We don't have evidence either way at this time that the Internet slows or quickens the rate of change in language. This might not be something we're able to really know for many more generations. We do know that widespread literacy has almost certainly closed some gaps between dialects – at least in writing. Literate residents of Liverpool and Boston may sound different, but they still write "turn left on High Street" the same.
One thing that we do know is that adults have always thought kids talked funny. Slang can proliferate quickly, and then be forgotten just as quickly. I mean, remember when "swag" was a word you heard every day, and now nobody says it? Vocabulary is a malleable thing, but ultimately 'rizz' and 'banger' don't constitute a significant amount of language change to consider Gen Z/Alpha English a new dialect or variety of English any more so than 'gnarly' and 'bodacious' did. We could find an exaggerated sentence exemplifying the slang of the 1820s that is meaningless to both of us, but that doesn't mean they were speaking a radically different variety of English to you or me. Edgar Allen Poe's stories don't look or sound foreign, although they occasionally do sound old-fashioned.
Historically, periods of even radical change are still hundreds of years long. The Great Vowel Shift is one of these changes – it's what made modern English sound like modern English, which sounds very different from Middle English, and it's one of the major reasons why English spelling doesn't always reflect the pronunciation. (Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were both written before the Great Vowel Shift, which is part of why they can feel impenetrable to modern English speakers.)
More commonly, language difficulties in the classroom come from lack of exposure and lack of support outside the classroom. Socioeconomic status correlates strongly with academic success for students across age. If your classroom is largely students from working-class families, it's likely that the only exposure to academic or literary English is happening through school.
It's true that dialectal differences can challenge students – for example, students who speak African-American Vernacular English at home typically have a harder time in English class. It's certainly possible that this is the case for many or even all of your students. But AAVE and the challenges AAVE-speakers face with academic English are not new, and certainly not unique to the latest generation. (In fact, a lot of what is considered Gen Z slang are actually words that have been in use in AAVE for decades.) Similarly, being an L2 speaker of English presents challenges that L1 speakers don't often have.
All that said, there are some novel things happening to the English language on the Internet, for sure! I recommend the book "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch. Many of the unique features of 'internet English' are writing-specific (emojis, expressive vowel lengthening, punctuation) but a few are vocabulary and grammar related. (And there are cases of very quick linguistic change, but these are accompanied by some pretty extreme socio-cultural forces. Like, your people were conquered and now all your kids are speaking a mix of your mother tongue and the language of your conquerers kinds of forces.)
Thank you! Thank you. This is why I begged her to interview a linguist.
There was so much about that article that irritated me. Claim that a literacy problem is occurring in high school English courses--cite a study of third to eighth-grade educators, non-English-specific. Claim that students just aren't reading whole books--quote a teacher who says that when they ask what their first-years' favorite books are, they're books which aren't ones they would have read for school, meaning those kids are seeking out and reading entire books on their own. If this were an essay I had to edit for one of my own students, it would be severely marked-up.
I can't like this enough. While after 20+ years of secondary teaching I may have assigned fewer pages or different books or provided more choice, I never stopped teaching full-length texts. Most of the teachers I know or have spoken with across the country do/have done the same.
Also, one of my greatest frustrations with articles like this is that they flatten everything to make sweeping claims about American schools (and children), ignoring the decentralization of our system and the remarkable differences between schools (and children).
A related piece I wrote about why it's so easy to lie or mislead or misinform about schools: https://annelutzfernandez.substack.com/p/truth-telling-about-schools-is-hard
Perfection! It’s exactly what I’ve been unable to articulate for decades thank you! Bookmarking to find it later!
YES YES YES!! I spent so much time in the high school English classes just trying to create spaces to experience the joy of literacy. Sounds like this article is yet another example of teachers’ lived experience in the classroom being valued less than the insights of “experts.” I wonder how much could change if we actually started listening to teachers??
I think, part of it has always been that we don’t self-advocate. For fear or because we’re too busy or too burnt out or because we can’t support our argument without violating someone’s privacy or because the truth is so frustratingly, obviously weird that no one would believe us anyway… we all know the truth but it stays within our profession. Like, we roll our eyes at trash like this article but ultimately how do you even begin to push back?
thank you for writing this and sharing your thoughts in your own words!
the section about social media and cell phones reminds me of the parallel moral panic that blames social media for all of teens’ mental health issues. having been a teen on social media not that long ago, I can say firsthand that social media was not the only thing that made us depressed and anxious. the things that contributed to our poor mental health have yet to be addressed: pressures on teens to perform in school, sports, and extracurriculars have just gotten worse since 2020, and misogyny among teenage boys seems to be getting worse too.
witnessing people older than me say “it’s because you’re always on that phone” to today’s teens drives me bananas, because it strikes me as a reductive and convenient way to avoid addressing the deeper causes of poor teen mental health. same goes for the “it’s the phones” take re: teen literacy — a lazy and too obvious explanation for a complicated phenomenon.
also, bringing it back to reading, The Atlantic article creates an impression that everyone in the past was an attentive and voracious reader who sought out literature that would enrich their minds, and it’s the youths of today who are uniquely uninterested in literature. have we forgotten that novels were once considered trashy? Shakespeare was bawdy comedy meant to be seen onstage while eating and drinking in the stands! and as much as I love Les Miserables, I’m certain that not every Victorian reader was reading every single word—skimming the long tangents about Waterloo and the Parisian sewer system is a time-honored tradition among Les Mis readers.
to act like everyone in the past loved to read capital-L literature and the kids nowadays don’t is simplistic and overly reductive. ultimately it’s an argument totally beneath a publication of The Atlantic’s caliber.
It's not just the kids that are not committing to reading thick times...I panicked at the headline/theme of the Atlantantic article. Don't I have at least a year of unread Atlantic issues? The actual box of started and unread library books on the nightstand. The window sill of three book fairs worth of novels, untouched. The precious and thoughtful gifts from my reading muse, sampled and tasted as appetizers not yet full savored as the intended feasts. I used to dive headfirst into books and stay underwater, swimming through words and paragraphs and chapters like a pearl diver with a tightly focused brain like a pearl diver's efficient lungs. So why can't I finish a novel in a week? Why did I stop reading?
Except I didn't stop reading. Substack has my word count just under a million for the year so far, and that doesn't include at least two newspapers some days, poetry, Google articles, and dozens of columns, newsletters, and op-eds on other websites. If it isn't a book is it reading? Of course it is. And given the number of responses I've composed, my online activity might actually be more engaging - or less, depending on one's perspective about the internet's tendency to warp reality. The reading muscles are still there just exercising in a different gym.
This is brilliant and so true! As someone whose education school professors insisted we understand historical panics about youth and new technologies (Aristotle was worried written language would destroy their memory! Radio and comic books were supposedly letting the devil into American houses! Blackboard use instead of handheld slate use would lead to anarchy in the classroom!), I find it so important to remind everyone to un-clutch their pearls when faced with a new narrative like this. Absolutely dead smack on about code-switching, too--this is leading me to consider a brief reckoning with this topic in my college class soon. Thank you so much for this piece, and sorry the Atlantic used you as a straw man in their latest panic.
> But we have to be intentional about teaching young people how to read for fun versus how to read for academic purposes
Dang, I wish I knew how to do this. o_o
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Couch it as code-switching. They do it with their speech…
Also I’d like to point out that professors aren’t trained to teach. They’re just expected to.
And no shade whatsoever to them. They deserve the training that will make it fun for them to be in the classroom!
I've never had someone else put into words how I feel about chaucer. I can read Shakespeare all day but when we got to Chaucer I literally wanted to die. I've been listening to Shakespeare (and later reading it) since kindergarten. Beowulf and the Odessey held my attention because of the myths, but I also hated Les Mis despite loving the play (or perhaps because of that.) it's nice to have an explanation for that feeling when I just attributed it to just sort of not being good enough to slog through.
It was the opposite for me! But then, there is a lot of sex in Chaucer… and I read it in the original.
Did you read Chaucer in middle English or translation?
Even this Gen-Xer finds so much of the 19th century literary canon boring and uninteresting. It took the Lost Generation and 20th century masters to get me excited about literature. Though I plodded through some of the classics, I don't waste time on them now. Good for you for making this excellent argument.
After 35 years in a range of literature classrooms, I can only bow to you in respect and honor. Thank you for not merely a rejoinder but a near-manifesto of how canons politicize, how educators work, and how kids think.