Ask a Teacher: Why Do Teachers Assign Old, Boring Books?

Q: Why do teachers always assign old books, often really boring books, for students to read? Wouldn't assigning more modern, interesting books show students the joys of learning? I know I got turned off from Shakespeare after being assigned Macbeth seven years in a row. (This is, sadly, not an exaggeration.)

A: I’m sorry for your repetitious assignment; that suggests to me that either you moved around a lot (I did too, which means I never read The Giver in school, but slogged through The Little Prince twice) or your teachers didn’t do a lot of communication between grade levels.

As to why teachers assign the books that they assign, the truth is fairly complicated. The answer you’re likely to get from most English teachers is that the books you’re reading are classics. Ideally, that means that they’re well-known books that are widely considered to be among the best ever written, and that they have some amount of cultural significance. These are books that get referenced all the time, all over the place, even outside of your English classes. There are countless common words and phrases that come from Shakespeare, and dozens of popular movies and stories, from 10 Things I Hate About You to The Lion King, retell Shakespeare’s works. Political discussions almost inevitably include words like “Orwellian,” referring to the political atmosphere of George Orwell’s 1984, and political satirists and commentators refer pretty frequently to Swift’s A Modest Proposal or Heller’s Catch-22. There are just some examples of literature that have become essential background knowledge for people entering adult society in the western world. If you aren’t familiar with them, then it’s a bit like leaving high school without knowing your times tables or that the Earth revolves around the sun. You can probably get by, but you’re at a disadvantage compared to most everyone else.

Of course, most literature enthusiasts will admit that not every “classic” book is all that great. We all can list at least a couple that we found just as terminally boring as you do (for me, it’s The Pearl and The Old Man and the Sea). Much though I’d like to say that the only reason Dickens is considered a classic writer is because he got paid by the word, the truth is that some people really quite like his work. And some people in your class, whether or not they might admit it, might really like the books that you find so boring—and hate your favorite books. Different people have different tastes, and there’s no good way for a teacher to cater to thirty different students’ wildly different tastes while also making sure that they all have the same learning opportunities.

Besides that, you’ll almost certainly find that, as you get older, your taste in books (and movies, and TV shows, and almost any kind of entertainment) will change—you probably don’t spend a lot of time these days watching the shows that entranced you as a toddler, for instance. Many of us adult types look back at the things we liked as teenagers and wonder what we were thinking (see also: fashion choices). Books that seem deep and meaningful when you’re fourteen often seem shallow and simplistic when you’re older. Meanwhile, books that you couldn’t even understand in high school might someday speak to you on a very personal level. One of the wonderful things about books is that you can never have the same reading experience twice. Read any book that you’ve read before, and you’ll notice new things, understand things differently, and have a different impression than you did the first time. It’s not because the book has changed—chances are it hasn’t—it’s because you’ve changed. And you never stop changing.

Context matters too. I love the Harry Potter books, but I probably wouldn’t enjoy them as much if I had to read a certain number of pages each night and write up my thoughts on a deadline. Being forced to do something—even something you might choose to do on your own—often changes the experience, and usually for the worse. The class has an effect as well; I hated Frankenstein when I read it in high school, but in college it became one of my favorite books. The difference, I think, was mostly in how the classes approached the story. How a story is taught can make a whole world of difference.

There are, of course, more pragmatic reasons as well. Teachers are busy adults, and as such, they don’t often spend their free time catching up on the latest hot book from the Young Adults section. If they don’t know the book, then it’s hard for them to teach it in class, even if it turns out to be the new To Kill a Mockingbird. Teachers usually work as departments to determine the curriculum; they have meetings to pin down which books will be taught by particular classes, in part to specifically avoid things like teaching Macbeth in seven different courses. Introducing a new book would require all the teachers who might use it in class to read it and agree that it deserves to be introduced to the curriculum, figure out where it fits, and decide which book or books should be cut to accommodate the newcomer. That kind of change takes a good deal of time and money. Books are expensive, especially when you’re buying them for dozens of students. Most schools opt for hardcover versions of class texts, so they’ll last for several years, but that means that they expect any book they purchase to be used for several years. It’s not a decision that most schools can afford to make often.

Then there’s all the things that go with teaching a book—worksheets, tests, essay ideas, etc. When a teacher’s been using a book for many years, there’s a good chance that they’ve built up a library of such assignments to pull from each time it’s needed. Introducing a new book means building a new set of supplemental material, and that’s a time-consuming process. It’s easier now thanks to the Internet; lots of teachers post their worksheets and lesson plans online for others to explore and use. But I guarantee that there’s a lot more online for teaching Catcher in the Rye than The Hunger Games. It’s not that either book is necessarily better; it’s that one has been around a lot longer, and so a lot more people have taught it and developed lessons and assignments around it. Teaching new books means breaking new educational ground, and that’s not an easy process.

Finally, part of our job as teachers is to get students to try new things, and to help them become more well-rounded individuals. It’s a little like dealing with picky eaters—no one wants to be forced to try that weird-looking new thing on their plate, but some people will end up really liking it, and will really benefit from the opportunity. Others won’t like it, but at least they’ll learn something about their tastes, and they can’t say they never tried.

You’re almost certainly going to have to read some books in school that you don’t like, even if you absolutely love to read. My advice would be to approach each book with an open mind and a positive attitude. Try to find something—a character, a choice of words, an event—that you can identify with and enjoy, even if it means laughing at how unintentionally silly the author is, or the bizarre decisions the characters make. At the very least, it’ll make the experience less miserable. Reading is one of those things where you often get out what you put in. If you approach every new book expecting it to be dull and stupid and boring, chances are it will be. And chances are you’ll miss out on some really good books because you aren’t open to enjoying them. After all, Macbeth is a story about ghosts and witches and gruesome murder that ends with a battle straight out of a Lord of the Rings movie. It can be very entertaining—it’s Shakespeare’s equivalent of a big-budget Michael Bay action blockbuster—but you have to be willing to put in some effort and set aside some expectations that these dusty old books that you have to read in school are bound to be boring. That’s the price of admission.

What book would you have loved to read for class?

Related post: Ask a Teacher: Do Teachers Like the Classics?

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