Approaching Literature in the Upper School

From Les Miserables to Faust to Heart of Darkness, the Rhetoric School reading list is ambitious. One of the goals of literature class at Regents is for students to learn to read well. Obviously, at the rhetoric school level, reading well is beyond sheer mechanics. “One of the challenges of Harkness-style discussions in the upper grades,” says teacher Justin Keller “is helping students learn how to approach a book. Are they looking to have an encounter, to be changed – or to see what they can extract from it? Those are very different things.” He points out that the tendency in our culture is not only to read less, but to read for entertainment. “The criteria for a good book in our cultural moment is often simply, ‘can I get an adrenaline rush out of it?’” Upper School Principal Christopher Webb notes that as teachers, the struggle is to help students get something deeper out of it, without devolving into “a way of reading the book where you’re trying to rip meaning out of it.” At the end of the day, this struggle is more about cultivating imagination than about proper analysis, like the difference between analyzing the rose and seeing the rose. I want to give students the space where they don’t always have to categorize something as useful, but where they can simply appreciate and observe something for its own sake,” says Mr. Keller.