Ask a Teacher: Do Teachers Like the Classics?

Q: Do teachers like the classics?

A: Well hello, there. It’s Mr. Jung, and I’m writing from my mahogany desk in the private library, just past the snooker room. This is where I retreat after long days of fox hunting and tea, to get down to the real business of life: contemplation of the greatest that has been thought and written. Yes, the classics.

This is the stereotypical image of those who read and enjoy the classics, right? Well, let me tell you, in some ways my ideal life is basically a moth-eaten stereotype. I don’t even know what snooker is, but I want a table on which to play it. Do teachers like reading the classics? I don’t know, but I certainly do.

However, if my evenings were spent reading only a Victorian gentleman’s idea of the classics, I’d go crazy. He’d have Shakespeare, sure, but despite what you may have think, the classics change more often than we’d like to admit. And this is a good thing. William Jennings Bryant may have once been considered classic (he was America’s first "great" poet), but there is no reason for high school students to read him now, unless they want to try and juggle boredom with his verse and discomfort with his casual racism.

If I were stuck in that gentleman’s library, I’m sure I could get by for awhile on the better third of his collection. But I don’t want to read just Dickens day in and day out, even though Dickens is frankly a genius. I want to read Zadie Smith alongside Dickens, you know? And this is the way classrooms should work. I don’t assign things because they are "classics," I assign them because I like them and I’m pretty sure that the class will find them engaging and useful. Not everyone will like them—that’s the way life goes, but there is an argument to be made in favor of reading for use, and finding something to like in this kind of reading.

When I talk about reading for use, I mean reading to develop context (historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic) even in the absence of enraptured page-turning. The problem is that classics can only be classics in retrospect; they have to be old, and that often means readers have to shake off their current cultural assumptions and try and make an effort to meet a ghost. Sometimes you can channel this spirit through the scribbles on paper, and sometimes you can’t. But in the latter case, it can be really great to take seriously the question of why the classic in question ever became a classic in the first place.

Still, most of the classics I read are great, and I wish more people would read them, too. Maybe then I’d have more to say when I leave my apartment. Dickens, Joyce, Woolf, Donne, Meyer (kidding), you name it: for some reason, we sometimes collectively get things right. It might take a century or two, but hey, nothing is perfect. Common cultural reference points can get us asking big questions about how we make our time here worthwhile, and in these discussions, classics can build a common vocabulary.

But man, all that sounds so weighty. That’s what I hate about even using the word "classics." To get back to the original question, I love reading “older, well-known books” because they’re often a blast. Last summer, I read War and Peace, and it was a total page-turner. In the first few chapters, we hear about an innocent Russian prank: some tipsy lads tie a policeman to a bear back-to-back, and throw the pair into a lake. All I can say is, that’s classic.

What's your favorite classic?

Mr. Jung teaches college writing in Chicago, where he lives with his fiancée and their growing collection of street maps.

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