Spoiler alert: Stop worrying about spoilers

The reports broke a few weeks ago, and personally I was not surprised at all. "Spoilers" is a misnomer, because knowing the end of a story ENHANCES enjoyment of the work rather than spoiling it, according to a study by two UC San Diego professors published by Psychological Science. As a group, English teachers go berserk at the thought of Cliff Notes and their equivalents being widely available for free online, for fear that students will vitiate the reading process by jumping to a synopsis or summary of the book being read by class.

Aside from the regressive practice of having the entire class read the same thing at the same time, the over-emphasis on revelation on story or plot points keeps students frozen at the lowest level of the reading experience. It teaches students not to enjoy reading, but to endure it in order to get to the important thing -- What happened at the end? Reading becomes a means, not an end in itself.

The threat is not the use of supplemental materials in connection with reading, but their being used as a substitute for real reading. And focusing your reading assessment on having the students know what happened not only cripples and reduces the reading experience but is an open invitation to cheat. It's like the NCLB cheating scandals -- when you place huge stakes on something which CAN be arrived at by cheating, of course people will cheat. Your assessments (and the government's assessments of schools) need to be conducted in such a way that cheating is impossible.

Ancient cultures knew this. The stories of Odysseus, Jason and Oedipus were told over and over and always ended the same. I suspect the same was true of Gilgamesh, not to mention Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. The essence of the oral culture was not surprise endings, but the art of the teller, the beauty, harmony and expressiveness of the verse, the telling details, the vividness of character. Scheherazade didn't stay alive with O. Henry plot twists, but through the artfulness of her storytelling. An Athenian wouldn't think of going to a play for which he didn't know the ending. Likewise, mostly, for an Athenian. Stories were all about the mythos, the definition of the culture that produced the story, its values and aspirations. One is not supposed to be surprised by one's own culture. It's the water you swim in all the time. It's renewing, enriching, inspiring, rejuvenating. Perhaps sometimes cautionary. But never startling, except in the way that all deep truths are startling.

And as teachers of reading, we should be teaching the appreciation of how stories are told, not the content of the stories. We should be dealing with deep thematic content, subtext, structure, style, language, syntax, diction and the relationship of the story to mythos, not What Happens Next.

Bad news. Sooner or later, this is going to require students to write at length and in detail. Which means that you're going to have to read it. And if you don't craft the task well, this could be quite tedious, especially if you have three or more sections doing the same thing at once. (I would love to be able to teach the same course in different order to different sections some time.) But if you're not prepared to read a lot of student writing, much of it substandard in a lot of ways, and make a lot of comments and endure the rewriting process with them, perhaps you're in the wrong racket. Because no matter the value of alternate assessments for different learning styles and different intelligences, the bottom line is the student's ability to decode and encode ideas and emotions from and into written language.

Stories -- they can be told with gestures, with pantomime, with pictures. Stories are not literacy. So if we use stories to advance literacy, let us focus on the literate aspects of that expression, not on the crude lineaments of narrative.

And in the spirit that spoilers make reading better, let me recommend a very fine site, The Book Spoiler. You can even be paid for submitting your own detailed synopses of books, spoilers and all.

You can take your hands off your ears and stop shouting "La la la" now.

Another great movie teacher

Why didn't any of the advertising or promotion for the film Precious (2009) say that it was, in part, a film about an inspiring teacher as well as the liberating power of literacy?

As far as I can remember the publicity for this film when it opened last fall, it was all: overweight girl--sexually abused--expecting second baby--Monique plays horrible mother--terrible circumstances--escapes into fantasy, etc., etc., etc.

Were they trying to cover up the fact that most of the running time of the film she is enrolled in a successful alternative high school program with an extremely hard-working and empathetic teacher and a supportive community of similarly troubled, but striving young women? Was that shameful? Frankly, I avoided the movie at first because it was advertised as a depression-fest about people treating each other terribly, and only caught up with it on video this spring.

But the story (both novel and film) is about a young woman who escapes and transcends her environment, mostly through the power of the written word. Shouldn't we have been insisting that everyone, especially disadvantaged young women, see this movie? Even today, searching for an image on-line to illustrate this post, most of them show the star, Gabourey Sidibe, scowling, being taunted or otherwise looking miserable. There were no pictures available showing the class working together, learning, reading, writing, discussing, which, as I said, takes up much of the action of the film.

And what's wrong with a story about a great teacher who changes a child's life? Is that bad box office now? Do we only show teachers if they have drug problems or are abusing the children?

Not only does this teacher have an effective student-based literacy program, encouraging personal writing in a way that is difficult in a conventional middle-class schoolroom, but she goes above and beyond finding a halfway house for a student and even inviting her into her own home to show her another model for a happy, loving home.

The film underlines a point I try to make with students and parents all the time. Reading is the only real way we can get inside another person's head. Yes, we can watch movies and TV, but when you see a person's face, you cannot see what their eyes see. Only the word can do that--imperfectly, to be sure, but without an intervening medium or interpreter. The word goes straight from the writer's brain to yours and sets off explosions that cannot be stopped.

And all the publicity and discussion about this film will not tell you that Precious has a hopeful ending--not that all the problems are fixed, or that the title character's future is assured, but that she has a future, and the knowledge that she is loved.

Because no one will talk about this--teaching is an act of love. Why do it at all, if not for love?