Luke, I love your nuanced analysis of text complexity! I often would note when telling parents not to overly rely on Lexile, how A Wrinkle in Time is rated at 740, but has really complex themes and characterization, suitable for older kids. Your Mice and Men example does the same thing!
I’m interested in your take— if some kids are coming into the high school classroom having been taught using only short passages from textbooks, might the teacher be justified in choosing a high interest text like Trevor Noah’s to get kids past the “reading real books is boring” hurdle that’s been placed before they arrive, and then ease them into more rigorous texts? Might there be interesting complexity in concepts about how to structure a memoir? It’s also very topically interesting to read now that white men who grew up in South Africa during apartheid (Musk, Thiel) have such power shaping the US today. Those discussions could be rich and rigorous, right?
All those wonderings aside, I’m all for your main point, which is to build students’ capacity to read rigorous, complex texts.
Hey Ruth! So many interesting questions, as always, and of course, on example cannot capture the spectrum. I guess I would offer two (somewhat contradictory!) ideas:
1) We only have 9th graders for...36 weeks? Then 9th grade is over. If we don't get them the important 9th grade foundations in that time, we've missed the window. So I'm just pushing for more intentionality here. Even if their skills haven't developed, their intellectual capacity has. It might take more support, slower reading, etc., but 9th graders can broadly handle 9th grade text. I think that's a good starting mindset.
That said...
2) Teachers have some texts they basically can't imagine teaching without. Some of them serve a purpose (you named some worthy ones) and others are just central to the identity of a educator or a place. You can definitely supplement with plenty of rigorous nonfiction, read quickly, and not "waste time". In fact, when I teach annotation or sentence construction for the first time, I think it's useful for me to scaffold it on a more "gettable" piece so we can focus our attention more fully on the new skill.
And I'll confess, I snuck an debatably under-complex text in to start my year, too, because I couldn't imagine living without it 😝 🤷🏻♂️
I have appreciated a lot of your work on here—but hard disagree on this one. And takes like this are making our work harder as English teachers, in my experience over 14 years.
Born a Crime has an immensity of complexity. You can zoom in on any book (including the "canon" texts you mention here, like Of Mice and Men) and find moments that are "lighter" in complexity, but the literal page before the one you cite is an extended metaphor describing the neighborhoods of Soweto that establishes the idea of prioritizing hope even without the substance to build that hope upon. The "s***ing" analogy also is much more complex given the apartheid context, and the early chapters of this book overall lead to a much-darker second half, beginning with the biblical allusion in Chapter 9—a chapter that, in the words of one former sophomore at the end of the course, "showed me what a book is capable of doing."
Admittedly, you hit a nerve, as right now as an ELA teacher I'm getting pelted by folks screaming about "text complexity" but then doing exactly what you're doing here: propping up easy examples without, it seems, an actual appreciation for the complexity that exists in the text itself. How you teach a text is where the complexity lives, from Noah to Shakespeare (seriously: watch how Shakespeare is actually being taught in many classrooms and tell me that it is a "complex reading experience"), and this comes down to supporting and then trusting teachers to bring the complexity of the text to their students.
That's hard work, though. And it's much easier to buy "curriculum with text complexity" (i.e. excerpts), which is happening in states all over the country right now. Not saying that you're in support of that—but your argument here is exactly what they're employing to take good, important books out of classrooms.
(Again: love you work. But also have strong objections here.)
I’m grateful for your thoughts — text selection is pretty personal and I think a few points deserve surfacing:
1. Arguments about complexity can be weaponized in ways that lead to damaging curriculum decisions.
2. Born a Crime does contain meaningful points of complexity, especially in its knowledge demands. It is not — as I wrote about Riordan — a book written "merely to entertain."
For the record, I do like Born a Crime, I just find that it fits more naturally in a strong 7th-grade sequence than as a sophomore (or even early college as the publisher suggests!) anchor text. I re-read the extended metaphor on the neighborhoods of Soweto after reading this as well and agree that's powerful, but still far less demanding than a few of its peer texts on the same topic.
Luke, I love your nuanced analysis of text complexity! I often would note when telling parents not to overly rely on Lexile, how A Wrinkle in Time is rated at 740, but has really complex themes and characterization, suitable for older kids. Your Mice and Men example does the same thing!
I’m interested in your take— if some kids are coming into the high school classroom having been taught using only short passages from textbooks, might the teacher be justified in choosing a high interest text like Trevor Noah’s to get kids past the “reading real books is boring” hurdle that’s been placed before they arrive, and then ease them into more rigorous texts? Might there be interesting complexity in concepts about how to structure a memoir? It’s also very topically interesting to read now that white men who grew up in South Africa during apartheid (Musk, Thiel) have such power shaping the US today. Those discussions could be rich and rigorous, right?
All those wonderings aside, I’m all for your main point, which is to build students’ capacity to read rigorous, complex texts.
Hey Ruth! So many interesting questions, as always, and of course, on example cannot capture the spectrum. I guess I would offer two (somewhat contradictory!) ideas:
1) We only have 9th graders for...36 weeks? Then 9th grade is over. If we don't get them the important 9th grade foundations in that time, we've missed the window. So I'm just pushing for more intentionality here. Even if their skills haven't developed, their intellectual capacity has. It might take more support, slower reading, etc., but 9th graders can broadly handle 9th grade text. I think that's a good starting mindset.
That said...
2) Teachers have some texts they basically can't imagine teaching without. Some of them serve a purpose (you named some worthy ones) and others are just central to the identity of a educator or a place. You can definitely supplement with plenty of rigorous nonfiction, read quickly, and not "waste time". In fact, when I teach annotation or sentence construction for the first time, I think it's useful for me to scaffold it on a more "gettable" piece so we can focus our attention more fully on the new skill.
And I'll confess, I snuck an debatably under-complex text in to start my year, too, because I couldn't imagine living without it 😝 🤷🏻♂️
So...everything in moderation, right?
I have appreciated a lot of your work on here—but hard disagree on this one. And takes like this are making our work harder as English teachers, in my experience over 14 years.
Born a Crime has an immensity of complexity. You can zoom in on any book (including the "canon" texts you mention here, like Of Mice and Men) and find moments that are "lighter" in complexity, but the literal page before the one you cite is an extended metaphor describing the neighborhoods of Soweto that establishes the idea of prioritizing hope even without the substance to build that hope upon. The "s***ing" analogy also is much more complex given the apartheid context, and the early chapters of this book overall lead to a much-darker second half, beginning with the biblical allusion in Chapter 9—a chapter that, in the words of one former sophomore at the end of the course, "showed me what a book is capable of doing."
Admittedly, you hit a nerve, as right now as an ELA teacher I'm getting pelted by folks screaming about "text complexity" but then doing exactly what you're doing here: propping up easy examples without, it seems, an actual appreciation for the complexity that exists in the text itself. How you teach a text is where the complexity lives, from Noah to Shakespeare (seriously: watch how Shakespeare is actually being taught in many classrooms and tell me that it is a "complex reading experience"), and this comes down to supporting and then trusting teachers to bring the complexity of the text to their students.
That's hard work, though. And it's much easier to buy "curriculum with text complexity" (i.e. excerpts), which is happening in states all over the country right now. Not saying that you're in support of that—but your argument here is exactly what they're employing to take good, important books out of classrooms.
(Again: love you work. But also have strong objections here.)
I’m grateful for your thoughts — text selection is pretty personal and I think a few points deserve surfacing:
1. Arguments about complexity can be weaponized in ways that lead to damaging curriculum decisions.
2. Born a Crime does contain meaningful points of complexity, especially in its knowledge demands. It is not — as I wrote about Riordan — a book written "merely to entertain."
For the record, I do like Born a Crime, I just find that it fits more naturally in a strong 7th-grade sequence than as a sophomore (or even early college as the publisher suggests!) anchor text. I re-read the extended metaphor on the neighborhoods of Soweto after reading this as well and agree that's powerful, but still far less demanding than a few of its peer texts on the same topic.
I appreciate the note!