Reading Despite Teaching (Or, "How the Hulk Led Me to Hamlet")

by Clay Burell

Published January 31, 2009 @ 12:01PM PT

Note: Posts and comment threads this month have been full of talk about "the decline of reading," and how to remedy it. In the Snark Attack post, I touched on another cause - "schooliness" in reading instruction - that is my top suspect.

I want to offer up a testimonial to my own road to literacy as a child, which happened despite school, not because of it. I think there's merit in remembering and sharing such things, and would love to read your own accounts of your own childhood paths to reading and literacy in the comments.

Reading Despite Teaching
(Or, "How the Hulk Led Me to Hamlet")

I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, we had a family Bible on dusty display; a lonely edition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet I found shoved out of mind in my father’s closet, and enjoyed; a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and another of The Great Books that I imagine some salesman twisted my parents’ arms to buy for the sake of their children’s educations and of 1950s middle-class respectability and which, oddly enough, we enjoyed rummaging through as children).

My schools had books in the library, which I recall using briefly in fifth grade to read a series of boys’ action mysteries and a few baseball dramas—but overall, school libraries meant homework, and homework meant no play, and play was fun and homework wasn’t. In short, I didn’t read books because I didn’t like what they were associated with: reports.

I did, however, read comic books. Devoured them. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Thor, Spiderman…these and other titles constituted my first library. I started reading them in grade school, under my big brother’s influence, and evolved into a connoisseur. I knew the names and styles of the authors and illustrators, the colorists, even the letterers. I suffered when my favorite titles underwent changes in writers or artists. Would the new team maintain the character subtleties and personalities I’d come to love from their predecessors? Could the new artist match the galactic or subatomic vistas the old one drew me into? Would Valhalla still sparkle? Would Daredevil’s deltoids still look so cool?

The first of every month was an event to pine for, because that was when the new issues hit the racks. I made pilgrimages three miles on foot to the nearest convenience store to buy or, funds being unavailable, steal the latest installments. Keeping them in mint condition was important: I would roll seven or eight comics into a cylinder and slide them very carefully into my sock and under my pants-leg, carefully walk to the cashier to pay for one other one, then hobble stiff-legged behind the store and uncoil my loot from my legs, checking for damage.

The hours of reading these books in my room once back home were my earliest experience of that reader’s pleasure known as “flow.” Everything environmental disappeared, everything personal, emotional, physical. I recall one month reading an episode of an obscure but brilliant title based on War of the Worlds called Killraven, which happened to be set on Lookout Mountain…in Chattanooga, my home town. I was elated to discover that my locale was known to the authors, that it had significance, that I belonged to a larger world.

Better still, it was the only comic I recall ever reading that attained such aesthetic heights that I wept and wept: Old Skull, the bald, brawny, but kindly and simple sidekick to Killraven—very much a sort of loyal Kent to Killraven’s Lear—enjoys an idyllic moment appreciating butterflies and childishly chatting to squirrels by a mountain stream (my mountain!). It is lyrical perfection, it brings fond laughter, and the illustrations are so lovely…I remember the artist’s name, P. Craig Russel, and his ornate and elegant art nouveau signature on the title page of every issue, and I haven’t seen or discussed these books since the late ‘70s…and then there is a sound from the forest that breaks Old Skull’s reverie, and out steps a Martian who breaks all conventional comic serial rules by killing a main character. Old Skull died on Lookout Mountain, and I wept on its foothills.

My neighborhood friends (also Killraven fans) and I could not get over our amazement at all of this. We often discussed the stories from the Marvel Universe, but this was the high point. (It turns out Old Skull could be killed because Killraven’s circulation was so low, attempting as it did to pioneer new territory in comics, that it was discontinued with this issue.)

I would hope that the pedagogical implications of my formative experience with reading are self-evident: My public school’s curriculum and pedagogy failed to make me a reader. I became a reader despite, not because of, book reports and assigned readings. This is the strongest personal confirmation I can offer of the value of free voluntary reading time at school, and of letting the students bond with whatever literature reading appeals to them. The experience of flow is part of what lifelong readers read for; it constitutes one of the central aesthetic pleasures of reading (traditional aestheticians describe it as ‘absorption’ of the self by the work of art; politically suspect as this may be, I think it's an essential stage of aesthetic development); and I believe it should be the primary aim of reading classes. Once students have experienced that, their desire to repeat that experience will motivate them to read for the rest of their lives. I soon graduated to science fiction in high school, and dropped comics altogether in college in favor of a new Valhalla containing my new gods: Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wilde, and Nietzsche—all owing to my start in comics. Only after reading for flow creates the reading habit will exercises in critical reading and writing about/of literature be significant for them, as opposed to aversive exercises to be dashed off as quickly as possible in order to do other, ‘fun,’ things.

The fact that I remember the authors and artists of these comics, and was critically aware of their stylistic differences without ever doing homework about them, further suggests that even critical reading skills develop independent of instruction. The fact that I remember Old Skull’s death scene so vividly—more so than most books I was ever assigned in my education, college included—almost thirty years later is a revelation even to me. And traditionalists, take note: as a child, I very likely would have enjoyed writing a report on this scene, if only I’d been invited. I never was.

As a side note: how significant was my personal-local connection to the story I described? This encounter in text with my own soil and sky—could this be why I haven’t forgotten it like I have practically all the other comics I read? This can’t be known. But there’s no doubting the intensifying effect this local-cultural connection had on my relation to the text. This points yet again to the vital importance of student choice and relevance in reading curricula.

Finally, my public school teachers probably had no idea that their desperate attempts to make us students engage in sincere reflection about books through book reports were so futile because we were naturally reflecting on our own cultural texts in authentic social reading groups—normally in the woods in our neighborhood. If my goal as a language arts teacher is to make good book-reporters of my kids, then I should keep assigning book reports; but if I want to make them lifelong readers who read like we adults do—we read books and discuss them with others—I’ll allow authentic book chats in class.