Rajat Bhageria's Blog, page 3
February 9, 2015
Seven Manners Through Which Schools Are Killing Creativity
Originally published on The Huffington Post
Ken Robinson’s TED talk “How Schools Kill Creativity” has been viewed millions of times and seems to have been the spark for an education revolution.
And yet, our education system is still broken…. The problem is that the change being suggested today is just so radical that too many educators end up changing nothing about their teaching style. Perhaps we are being a bit too optimistic by trying to “fundamentally” change the education system. Perhaps a grassroots movement to transform education will not happen in the near future. Many times, trying to fix small changes will lead to the most success. Here are some easily fixable manners through which schools are killing creativity.
1) Forcing students to ask to go to the bathroom
On the most basic level, think about how departmental high school is. Students have to ask to go to the restroom. Then the day they graduate, suddenly they are asked to live alone, pay off huge college loans, and feed themselves…. Most definitely there is a problem.
If you treat 18 year olds like children, make them stand in single-file lines, and punish them for expressing certain religious views, how can you expect them to put in intrinsic efforts to school?
Creative Environment at Google
Rather why not create a lesser version of environment of Google’s offices. Creative. Innovative. Of course, there will need to be more limitations than at Google–high school students are intrinsically less mature–but anything is better than the governmental nature of high school today.
2) Having a strict homework policy
Remember when you had to read 40 pages of The Great Gatsby on Tuesday, then take a quiz, then read another 40 pages on Wednesday, and then take another quiz…? If you fall behind even by 10 pages by the end of the week, you may accumulate 100 pages to read; and by then, reading is more of a chore than a delight.
Now, not every school utilizes this method, but enough do that it merits addressing. Rather, why not create a system where students have to read 100 pages–at their pleasure–after which there will be repercussions. This will allow students to truly input all their effort into the reading.
3) Teaching students to memorize rather than understand concepts
Everyone has heard the question: “when will I ever need this again?” Over and over, someone asks, and the teacher simply says, “I don’t know.” The only reason we still do force students to memorize those formulas is because a self-proclaimed-expert sometime in the past said that it is a good idea–without any reason–and everybody accepted it.
Instead, what we should be teaching students (especially in mathematics, biology, and history) is how to actively problem solve, by using activities such as inquiry labs. Not only would students be able to use these skills in their future jobs, but they will also be able to utilize them in everyday activities–such as finding the most efficient method to wiring the house.
4) Teaching Shakespeare instead of more contemporary authors
Why do we teach Shakespeare instead of teaching writing that more students can intrinsically relate to? Reading Shakespeare is a skill than not many students will use in the future; on the other hand, being able to critically read and think about modern press is an incredibly important skill in our world. Read my previous post, “Why Do We Force Our Students to Read Shakespeare” for more discussion.
5) Ruining a classic book by over-analyzing it
My physics teacher told me that he just reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and that he “actually” liked it. WHAT?. You cannot actually like classics can you? They’re the tools schools use to torture us, right? Right?
And truly, classics are great works. They are deep, thought-provoking, and fundamentally human books exploring the human condition. But over-analyzing Frankenstein, and being lectured excessively about the complex sentence structure doesn’t really teach students anything. All it does is invoke negative connotations about literature–which could easily be replaced with intellectual debate–into their heads.
6) Not teaching students how to program
Computer science is an extremely vital skill to know in our modern world; knowing how to program literally gives you the super power of being able to create something in your room and then see thousands of people all over the world use and benefit from it. Moreover, it teaches problem solving skills like no other. And yet, very few schools actually actively teach their students computer science. Why is that? Read my article “Should We Require Compter Science Classes” for more reasons regarding why every high school student should know how to program.
7) Teaching history rather than more practical social studies
I’ve learned about the Civil War eight times since kindergarten. I know the Civil War. I know the dates. The generals. The events. I can tell you the whole story behind the war. But who cares? Quite honestly, no one.
Sure, we should have an idea of our national and international heritage. But every year throughout secondary school? Memorizing a bunch of facts doesn’t really help anyone.
What should be emphasized more though are the social sciences. Economics. Psychology. Finance. Not only are these more practical, but they will also help students who don’t attend college in the work force. Let me ask you: is it more important to know how to mortgage a home or know when the Defenestration of Prague occurred?
Sure the event was important….But how many of you actually know what it was about?
At the end of the day, the verdict is obvious: schools are killing creativity. But rather than just sharing articles and liking pages, let’s actually do something about it; educators, implement some of these ideas, and comment on how they go. Let’s bring on the education revolution, together!
The post Seven Manners Through Which Schools Are Killing Creativity appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.
January 12, 2015
Why Do We Force Students to Read Shakespeare?
Originally published on the Huffington Post.
English teachers seem to adore Shakespeare…. Students seem to chug through it…. Everyone else in society sits questioning why our English teachers force our students to read literature by a guy who lived 500 years ago, who writes in barely recognizable English, and whose plays are painfully predictable? Now don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed many Shakespeare plays throughout school (unlike the vast majority of my peers), but it seems counterproductive not to spend more time studying modern authors, modern advertising/print-making, and contemporary journalism. Not only would this latter scenario help students in this age more able to grasp the seemingly abstract culture of today, but it would also assist them in more technical fields such as business and engineering….
On the other hand, contemporary novels such as The Great Gatsby are modern enough that students will be able to appreciate the “slang” (i.e. contemporary language), contain enough complex & meaningful language to be worthwhile, and contain plot lines that students can directly relate to (after all, which occurs more often in our modern culture: an evil brother pouring poison into his brother’s ear to seize the throne–as in Hamlet–or a woman being arrested for prostitution and heroin accounts–as in more contemporary Let the Great World Spin?).
It seems that the only reason that students today read Shakespeare is that some person in a governmental institution a few hundred miles away decided that they should. And every one listened. With very little reason.
Why? The governmental officer may argue that Shakespeare is essential to understanding the literary influences of modern English, or that reading Hamlet helps students appreciate literary devices, or even something more absurd along the lines of “we’ve always done it, and it seems to work, so why not continue?” But what scientific evidence is there that reading Shakespeare helps students in the modern age survive the work environment, live without government aid, and achieve familial goals? Very little….
We have been teaching Shakespeare for decades, and sure it works, but unless we try something different, who’s to say the new system won’t work better? Without doubt, we cannot expect different results by continuing the same curriculum.
Truly, forcing students to do something in which they have so little interest will most probably result in students not reading or contemplating–the main goal of English–the books at all. On the other hand, reading more of the modern equivalent of Shakespeare will not only acclimate students to the literature that they will be immersed in every single day of their lives, but it will also be more relatable (and hence, students are more likely to fully read and contemplate the book).
Why? People care most about the things that intrinsically motivate them. On the other hand, they will most probably input little to no work or innovative thinking into something that they really don’t care about. For example, even though a poet may be able to sit down and do well on tests, she will probably do the bare minimum needed to succeed, whereas she will input blood, sweat, and tears while writing poetry.
And as shocking as it may be, since video-games/video/news of our modern age seem to stress the high amounts of violence/crime, students (even those in higher level classes) are more likely to sit up and listen for stories that they can relate to and find interesting. For instance, they are more likely to relate to a book if a love-torn couple rams a yellow vehicle into a woman and kill her (as occurs in the relatively modern The Great Gatsby), than if a love-torn woman just happens to fall into a river, drowns, and no one sees (as occurs in Hamlet).
Why? The latter scenario doesn’t happen very often today, but car accidents–especially those involving drunk couples–are not uncommon. The former is more relatable, interesting, and contemporary. Indeed, contemporary novels like Let the Great World Spin contain just as much literary benefits as the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet does, but the fact that students simply cannot relate to the latter as much as they will about the former seems to reject the hypothesis that Shakespeare is absolutely vital to our English curriculum. Why spend time doing something that many students will even not complete (let alone enjoy)?
So we’ve hit a wall: sure there may be more benefits to reading modern literature than there are to reading Shakespeare, but how many teachers will actually change their course? Probably very few…. Why? They’ve thought Shakespeare all their lives; it would require them to input vast loads of work to design a new curriculum; and the modern institution seems to “work.” So why change? And how would we change?
Here’s a proposal: teach Shakespeare to the extent that all students are working to understand the material, but decrease the aggregate amount. Simultaneously, increase focus on modern advertising, difficult economic/scientific/opinion articles in media such as NYTimes, WSJ, HuffPost, and modern novels.
As time goes on, perhaps even the CollegeBoard will realize that perhaps they should focus more on modern applications than classical ones, and perhaps one day more of the novels high school students read can be similar to contemporary novels and works.
The post Why Do We Force Students to Read Shakespeare? appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.
January 4, 2015
December 30, 2014
October 4, 2014
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August 28, 2014
Why Don't We Start School Later?
Specifically, researchers found that the later the schools starts the day, the “better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.”
Also, teenagers who have eight hours of sleep and wake up around 9:00 “learn better and are less likely to be tardy, get in fights or sustain athletic injuries.” Jessica Payne—a sleep researcher at the University of Notre Dame—says, “Teenagers are losing the ability not only to solidify information but to transform and restructure it” because of lack of sleep. Research has even shown that teenager’s circadian rhythms—our internal clock—are offline because of early school start times (read more about this correlation in the journal Educational Researcher).
So what’s the controversy about? If additional sleep has all these benefits, why haven’t we changed the high school start times yet? “At heart…experts say, the resistance is driven by skepticism about the primacy of sleep.” Indeed, not enough people appreciate how important sleep is on the brain’s function.
And as such, people are afraid of implementing the idea. How would the logistics work out? But there is a simple problem to that as well. There is similar research that suggests that school times for elementary students should be earlier. So in the modified system where high school start times are later, busses simply have to switch their pickup of high school and elementary students. (See more about this topic in an article by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times).
About the Author
Like this post? Read Rajat Bhageria’s new book, What High School Didn’t Teach Me, a book he wrote after his senior year of high school that provides fresh perspectives on how schools are killing creativity, and provides a recent graduate’s perception on how educators can fix our broken education system; get a free copy of his new book by liking the book’s Facebook page.
Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO of CafeMocha.org—an online writing community that allows young writers to publish, share, and gain recognition for their creative writing around the world. He graduated from Sycamore High School in 2014 and is attending University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) this year. See his full portfolio at RajatBhageria.com
Why Don’t We Start School Later?
Specifically, researchers found that the later the schools starts the day, the “better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.”
Also, teenagers who have eight hours of sleep and wake up around 9:00 “learn better and are less likely to be tardy, get in fights or sustain athletic injuries.” Jessica Payne—a sleep researcher at the University of Notre Dame—says, “Teenagers are losing the ability not only to solidify information but to transform and restructure it” because of lack of sleep. Research has even shown that teenager’s circadian rhythms—our internal clock—are offline because of early school start times (read more about this correlation in the journal Educational Researcher).
So what’s the controversy about? If additional sleep has all these benefits, why haven’t we changed the high school start times yet? “At heart…experts say, the resistance is driven by skepticism about the primacy of sleep.” Indeed, not enough people appreciate how important sleep is on the brain’s function.
And as such, people are afraid of implementing the idea. How would the logistics work out? But there is a simple problem to that as well. There is similar research that suggests that school times for elementary students should be earlier. So in the modified system where high school start times are later, busses simply have to switch their pickup of high school and elementary students. (See more about this topic in an article by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times).
About the Author
Like this post? Read Rajat Bhageria’s new book, What High School Didn’t Teach Me, a book he wrote after his senior year of high school that provides fresh perspectives on how schools are killing creativity, and provides a recent graduate’s perception on how educators can fix our broken education system; get a free copy of his new book by liking the book’s Facebook page.
Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO of CafeMocha.org—an online writing community that allows young writers to publish, share, and gain recognition for their creative writing around the world. He graduated from Sycamore High School in 2014 and is attending University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) this year. See his full portfolio at RajatBhageria.com
The post Why Don’t We Start School Later? appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.
July 26, 2014
How to be a 16/17/18 Year old Entrepreneur
Many young people ask me how they could become “entrepreneurs”–that is, people who have started their own company?
If that is you, first of all congrats on deciding to start something new!
But you might have the question backwards: You start a business because you have a great idea that you think can feasibly make you money, not because you want to start a business for the sake of it.
So here’s the first step: determine a problem. For my startup CafeMocha.org–that I founded at 16–the problem was the schools are killing creativity by making students memorize useless factoids, rather than letting students do things they really love to do–such as write stories and poetry.
Next: find a solution to the problem. Honestly, everyone can come up with reasons why something doesn’t work. But not many can come up with a solution. For me, the solution was to create an online writing community (similar to the photography community of flickr) so that young students could write to their hearts desire and inspire other students to follow their passions.
Then, just get to it! But you have to believe. If you don’t believe in your idea, nobody honestly will. Right now, nobody cares about your startup. You have to make them care and notice it. But to make them care and notice it, you have to think that you’ll make it work. You have to believe in your idea. You have to say, yes–this is the best idea ever and then pursue it like crazy.
The only way your startup is going to be successful is A) you have tons of money that you can constantly input into finding users and engaging them or B) you dedicate all of your time and passion into your company.
And although this may seem rash, at the end of the day though, the fruit is sweet: you produce something that never existed before and is now being used by thousands all over the world! Let the Creativity Flow!
The post How to be a 16/17/18 Year old Entrepreneur appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.
What High School Didn't Teach Me Excerpt
Let me introduce you to one of my high school friends, who I will henceforth refer to as Jamie to protect his identity. As a student in my accelerated (read as “honors”) English class freshman year, Jamie was one of those students who absolutely devoured books. He was a zealot. While the teacher was arranging her notes for the day and all the other students were curiously scrutinizing their phones for text messages with their backs bent, Jamie would start reading his DK Big Book of Planes. And he didn’t stop. When the teacher started talking, he simply reached into his pockets, pulled out his iPod and white Apple headphones and started listening to some 90’s rock music, and continued to read. When he didn’t have anything to read, he would retrieve his composition notebook and start writing dystopian sci-fi stories. They were spectacular—almost professional in my eyes.
This trend continued throughout high school, and by the time we were seniors in AP Literature and Composition—arguably one of the hardest high school courses because of it’s subjective nature—Jamie really didn’t care much about the class. He didn’t listen to any discussions (let alone participate), and didn’t even read the vast majority of the assigned material. And yet, when he sat down to take the English aptitude tests, he consistently scored almost perfectly, whereas students who followed the teacher’s departmental plans and were equally intelligent, struggled to score higher than a measly C (keep in mind that this is a test which only requires around a 58% to pass).
Something’s not right is it? Students who actively participate in school are “supposed” to do well, right? Right? Wrong.
Students who are intrinsically motivated to do something, whatever subject it may be, will do the best. Truly, people will input the most effort and will make the most innovative leaps while partaking in something they are fundamentally interested in, not while working for grades, money, or even college acceptances. Indeed, in Jamie’s case, while everybody else was working away to earn that A or B, Jamie was reading and writing because he loved reading and writing, not because he was forced to do something to fulfill the teacher’s requirement. So why don’t we mold our classes to that standard?
Quite frankly, why don’t we create an education system in which every student is intrinsically motivated just like Jamie was? Not only would students achieve the true goal of English and school—to debate literature and actively discuss the human condition— but students would also gain something more meaningful from the study of our past literary than a measly A on their transcript. They might have to actually think rather than simply memorize the plot of a book, take a test, and then forget everything—as many currently do.
Why do we force our students to read Shakespeare?
English teachers seem to adore Shakespeare…. Students seem to chug through it…. Everyone else in society sits questioning why our English teachers force our students to read literature by a guy who lived 500 years ago, who writes in barely recognizable English, and whose plays are painfully predictable? Why not spend more time studying modern authors, modern advertising/print-making, and contemporary journalism? Not only would this latter scenario help students in this age more able to grasp the seemingly abstract culture of today, but it would also assist them in more technical fields such as business and engineering….
But nevertheless, Shakespeare aside, some of the books that are taught in our modern English classes are in fact vital to the growth and development of scholars; specifically, novels such as THE GREAT GATSBY are modern enough that students will be able to appreciate the “slang” (i.e. contemporary language), contain enough complex & meaningful literature to be worthwhile, and on the fundamental level contain plot lines that students can directly relate to (after all, which occurs more often in our modern culture: an evil brother pouring poison into his brother’s ear to seize the throne, or a woman being arrested for prostitution and heroin accounts?).
Shakespeare isn’t Worth Teaching
In the former case (that of Shakespeare), the ROI (return on investment) seems to be significantly smaller than the ROI of reading modern literature. In other words, it seems that the only reason we are reading Shakespeare is because some person in some governmental institution 400 miles away decided that we should. And every one listened. With no reason.
Why? The governmental officer may argue that Shakespeare is essential to understanding the literary influences of modern English, or that reading Hamlet helps students truly appreciate literary devices, or even something more absurd along the lines of “we’ve always done it, and it seems to work, so why not continue?” But what evidence is there that reading Shakespeare helps students in the modern age survive in the work- place, live without government aid, and achieve familial goals? Very little….
Now one argue that most people who are in the level of classes that read Shakespeare in high school (i.e. AP/Honors students), probably won’t be on the brink of barely surviving (as previously proposed). But, it is precisely those students who are will be on that brink that will also probably read Sparknotes / Cliffnotes, and perhaps not read the play at all, therefore gaining little to nothing—outside perhaps the ability to “get away with a BS essay”….

Truly, forcing students to do something in which they have so little interest will most probably result in students not reading or contemplating—the main goal of English—the books at all. On the other hand, reading more of the modern equivalent of Shakespeare (e.g. The Great Gatsby) will not only acclimate students to the literature that they will be immersed in every single day of their lives, but it will also be more relatable (and hence, students are more likely to fully read and contemplate the book).
Why is this phenomenon valid? Humans will innately do what they are most interested in with the most fervor, will reason/debate the most, and will input the most available resources. On the other hand, they will most probably input little to no work or innovative thinking doing something that they really don’t care about. And as shocking as it may be, since video-games/video/news of our modern age seem to stress the high amounts of violence/crime, students (even those in higher level classes) will be more likely to sit up and listen if a love-torn couple ram a yellow wagon into a woman and kill her (as occurs in THE GREAT GATSBY), than they will be if for some unseen reason a love-torn woman just happens to fall into a river, drowns, and no one sees (as occurs in HAMLET).
Why? The latter scenario doesn’t happen very often today, but car accidents— especially those involving drunk couples—are not uncommon. The former is more relatable, interesting, and contemporary. Indeed, contemporary novels like Let the Great World Spin contain just as much literary benefits as A COMEDY OF ERRORS does, but the fact that students simply won’t care about the latter as much as they will about the former seems to reject the hypothesis that Shakespeare is absolutely vital to our English curriculum. Why spend time doing something that students will simply not spend time doing?
Replacing Shakespeare with Modern Newspapers:
So we’ve hit a wall: sure there may be more benefits to reading modern literature than there are to reading Shakespeare, but how many teachers will actually change their course? Probably very few…. Why? They’ve done it all their lives; it would require them to input vast loads of work to design a new curriculum; and the modern institution seems to “work.” So why change? Here’s a proposal: teach Shakespeare to the extent that all students are working to understand the material, but decrease the total amount. Simultaneously, increase focus on modern advertising, difficult economic/scientific/opinion articles in New York Times/Wall Street Journal/The New Yorker, and modern novels such as LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
And as time goes on, even the CollegeBoard will realize that perhaps they should focus more on modern applications than classical ones, and perhaps one day more of the
novels high school students read can be similar to contemporary novels such as LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
Problem: The letter grade that takes dominion everywhere:
Another major problem with our current English system—and education system on the whole as you will later see in the Mathematics and Social Studies Chapters—is grades. Everything is run by grades—an external motivator—and so students are really never able to develop intrinsic motivation. As such, they never develop interest in the material or input creative effort.
Consider, if you will, the same class freshman English class I introduced in the introduction of this book. In this class, we often read novels to “enhance” our critical reading skills. But that enhancement rarely occurred.
For example, while reading ROMEO AND JULIET, we discussed plot summary of every chapter in class (including very little discussion about the textual meaning), took a multiple-choice test on the plot, and then moved on to the next book. I didn’t remember anything by the time I had to re-memorize the plot for the final. And this more or less occurred throughout every year of high school.
Everything was grade-oriented. So even if the homework for the night was to go online and memorize an act of the play, I had to do it. Did I learn anything from it? No. It was completely busy work. But my teacher and my peers were pushing me for one reason: to “earn” an A. So I did. I chugged though. Still, the more busy work I had to do, the more interest I lost in the actual material. After some time, I frankly didn’t care to analyze the effects of the family feud in the plot since I was too busy memorizing the name of the Friar that Romeo sees.
And as such, my reading comprehension skills didn’t really improve. I was truly so worried about my grade that I didn’t care about my writing—the true matter I should have focused on since I would be using the skill for the rest of my life.
Solution: Increasing the Possibility of Intrinsic Motivation:
So what’s the solution? In theory it’s simple: develop intrinsic motivation for English in every student’s mind.
Now you may think this is a utopian dream that’s never achievable… How could we ever create an English system in which grades don’t matter and everyone has intrinsic motivation for the material like Jamie? After all, many students simply don’t listen or “try” for the sake of not listening….
Perhaps the main method is by making all the required readings and assignments relatable to the students. If they can relate to the assignments, thematic problems, and ideas, they are significantly more likely to develop intrinsic interest for the assignment.
Secondly, ensure that students have choice in the books they read. So when choosing a required reading book, let the majority of students pick which of five books they want to read. Indeed, currently, not many people are interested in a book that they had no choice in picking; however, if we move closer to the ideal of a “book someone reads for fun,” by letting students pick it, there is a better chance a higher percentage of the class demonstrates intrinsic interest for the book.
(REMEMBER: GET YOUR FREE COPY OF THIS EBOOK HERE: http://eepurl.com/ZLu75)
What High School Didn’t Teach Me Excerpt
Let me introduce you to one of my high school friends, who I will henceforth refer to as Jamie to protect his identity. As a student in my accelerated (read as “honors”) English class freshman year, Jamie was one of those students who absolutely devoured books. He was a zealot. While the teacher was arranging her notes for the day and all the other students were curiously scrutinizing their phones for text messages with their backs bent, Jamie would start reading his DK Big Book of Planes. And he didn’t stop. When the teacher started talking, he simply reached into his pockets, pulled out his iPod and white Apple headphones and started listening to some 90’s rock music, and continued to read. When he didn’t have anything to read, he would retrieve his composition notebook and start writing dystopian sci-fi stories. They were spectacular—almost professional in my eyes.
This trend continued throughout high school, and by the time we were seniors in AP Literature and Composition—arguably one of the hardest high school courses because of it’s subjective nature—Jamie really didn’t care much about the class. He didn’t listen to any discussions (let alone participate), and didn’t even read the vast majority of the assigned material. And yet, when he sat down to take the English aptitude tests, he consistently scored almost perfectly, whereas students who followed the teacher’s departmental plans and were equally intelligent, struggled to score higher than a measly C (keep in mind that this is a test which only requires around a 58% to pass).
Something’s not right is it? Students who actively participate in school are “supposed” to do well, right? Right? Wrong.
Students who are intrinsically motivated to do something, whatever subject it may be, will do the best. Truly, people will input the most effort and will make the most innovative leaps while partaking in something they are fundamentally interested in, not while working for grades, money, or even college acceptances. Indeed, in Jamie’s case, while everybody else was working away to earn that A or B, Jamie was reading and writing because he loved reading and writing, not because he was forced to do something to fulfill the teacher’s requirement. So why don’t we mold our classes to that standard?
Quite frankly, why don’t we create an education system in which every student is intrinsically motivated just like Jamie was? Not only would students achieve the true goal of English and school—to debate literature and actively discuss the human condition— but students would also gain something more meaningful from the study of our past literary than a measly A on their transcript. They might have to actually think rather than simply memorize the plot of a book, take a test, and then forget everything—as many currently do.
Why do we force our students to read Shakespeare?
English teachers seem to adore Shakespeare…. Students seem to chug through it…. Everyone else in society sits questioning why our English teachers force our students to read literature by a guy who lived 500 years ago, who writes in barely recognizable English, and whose plays are painfully predictable? Why not spend more time studying modern authors, modern advertising/print-making, and contemporary journalism? Not only would this latter scenario help students in this age more able to grasp the seemingly abstract culture of today, but it would also assist them in more technical fields such as business and engineering….
But nevertheless, Shakespeare aside, some of the books that are taught in our modern English classes are in fact vital to the growth and development of scholars; specifically, novels such as THE GREAT GATSBY are modern enough that students will be able to appreciate the “slang” (i.e. contemporary language), contain enough complex & meaningful literature to be worthwhile, and on the fundamental level contain plot lines that students can directly relate to (after all, which occurs more often in our modern culture: an evil brother pouring poison into his brother’s ear to seize the throne, or a woman being arrested for prostitution and heroin accounts?).
Shakespeare isn’t Worth Teaching
In the former case (that of Shakespeare), the ROI (return on investment) seems to be significantly smaller than the ROI of reading modern literature. In other words, it seems that the only reason we are reading Shakespeare is because some person in some governmental institution 400 miles away decided that we should. And every one listened. With no reason.
Why? The governmental officer may argue that Shakespeare is essential to understanding the literary influences of modern English, or that reading Hamlet helps students truly appreciate literary devices, or even something more absurd along the lines of “we’ve always done it, and it seems to work, so why not continue?” But what evidence is there that reading Shakespeare helps students in the modern age survive in the work- place, live without government aid, and achieve familial goals? Very little….
Now one argue that most people who are in the level of classes that read Shakespeare in high school (i.e. AP/Honors students), probably won’t be on the brink of barely surviving (as previously proposed). But, it is precisely those students who are will be on that brink that will also probably read Sparknotes / Cliffnotes, and perhaps not read the play at all, therefore gaining little to nothing—outside perhaps the ability to “get away with a BS essay”….

Truly, forcing students to do something in which they have so little interest will most probably result in students not reading or contemplating—the main goal of English—the books at all. On the other hand, reading more of the modern equivalent of Shakespeare (e.g. The Great Gatsby) will not only acclimate students to the literature that they will be immersed in every single day of their lives, but it will also be more relatable (and hence, students are more likely to fully read and contemplate the book).
Why is this phenomenon valid? Humans will innately do what they are most interested in with the most fervor, will reason/debate the most, and will input the most available resources. On the other hand, they will most probably input little to no work or innovative thinking doing something that they really don’t care about. And as shocking as it may be, since video-games/video/news of our modern age seem to stress the high amounts of violence/crime, students (even those in higher level classes) will be more likely to sit up and listen if a love-torn couple ram a yellow wagon into a woman and kill her (as occurs in THE GREAT GATSBY), than they will be if for some unseen reason a love-torn woman just happens to fall into a river, drowns, and no one sees (as occurs in HAMLET).
Why? The latter scenario doesn’t happen very often today, but car accidents— especially those involving drunk couples—are not uncommon. The former is more relatable, interesting, and contemporary. Indeed, contemporary novels like Let the Great World Spin contain just as much literary benefits as A COMEDY OF ERRORS does, but the fact that students simply won’t care about the latter as much as they will about the former seems to reject the hypothesis that Shakespeare is absolutely vital to our English curriculum. Why spend time doing something that students will simply not spend time doing?
Replacing Shakespeare with Modern Newspapers:
So we’ve hit a wall: sure there may be more benefits to reading modern literature than there are to reading Shakespeare, but how many teachers will actually change their course? Probably very few…. Why? They’ve done it all their lives; it would require them to input vast loads of work to design a new curriculum; and the modern institution seems to “work.” So why change? Here’s a proposal: teach Shakespeare to the extent that all students are working to understand the material, but decrease the total amount. Simultaneously, increase focus on modern advertising, difficult economic/scientific/opinion articles in New York Times/Wall Street Journal/The New Yorker, and modern novels such as LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
And as time goes on, even the CollegeBoard will realize that perhaps they should focus more on modern applications than classical ones, and perhaps one day more of the
novels high school students read can be similar to contemporary novels such as LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
Problem: The letter grade that takes dominion everywhere:
Another major problem with our current English system—and education system on the whole as you will later see in the Mathematics and Social Studies Chapters—is grades. Everything is run by grades—an external motivator—and so students are really never able to develop intrinsic motivation. As such, they never develop interest in the material or input creative effort.
Consider, if you will, the same class freshman English class I introduced in the introduction of this book. In this class, we often read novels to “enhance” our critical reading skills. But that enhancement rarely occurred.
For example, while reading ROMEO AND JULIET, we discussed plot summary of every chapter in class (including very little discussion about the textual meaning), took a multiple-choice test on the plot, and then moved on to the next book. I didn’t remember anything by the time I had to re-memorize the plot for the final. And this more or less occurred throughout every year of high school.
Everything was grade-oriented. So even if the homework for the night was to go online and memorize an act of the play, I had to do it. Did I learn anything from it? No. It was completely busy work. But my teacher and my peers were pushing me for one reason: to “earn” an A. So I did. I chugged though. Still, the more busy work I had to do, the more interest I lost in the actual material. After some time, I frankly didn’t care to analyze the effects of the family feud in the plot since I was too busy memorizing the name of the Friar that Romeo sees.
And as such, my reading comprehension skills didn’t really improve. I was truly so worried about my grade that I didn’t care about my writing—the true matter I should have focused on since I would be using the skill for the rest of my life.
Solution: Increasing the Possibility of Intrinsic Motivation:
So what’s the solution? In theory it’s simple: develop intrinsic motivation for English in every student’s mind.
Now you may think this is a utopian dream that’s never achievable… How could we ever create an English system in which grades don’t matter and everyone has intrinsic motivation for the material like Jamie? After all, many students simply don’t listen or “try” for the sake of not listening….
Perhaps the main method is by making all the required readings and assignments relatable to the students. If they can relate to the assignments, thematic problems, and ideas, they are significantly more likely to develop intrinsic interest for the assignment.
Secondly, ensure that students have choice in the books they read. So when choosing a required reading book, let the majority of students pick which of five books they want to read. Indeed, currently, not many people are interested in a book that they had no choice in picking; however, if we move closer to the ideal of a “book someone reads for fun,” by letting students pick it, there is a better chance a higher percentage of the class demonstrates intrinsic interest for the book.
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