Shakespeare? Hurston? Or Cisneros?

Natalie Semmel can teach only one work of literature.

Will it be Sandra Cisneros’s Latina story, The House On Mango Street? Or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God? Or a tale about hot, impulsive teenagers, albeit written by a dead white dude named William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)?

Do kids today benefit more from reading ​“classics,” which can be a slog, or more ​“diverse” authors with a more immediate connection to their lives? And how do you decide?

Semmel and two dozen of her fellow students at New Haven Academy placed themselves in the positions of their teachers and culture-makers in how to make those decisions, drilling down on how a literary canon gets created.

The deliberations took place Friday morning during a thoughtful and provocative hour-and-a-half seminar conducted by English teachers Marco Cenabre and Leszek Ward. It was one of ten morning seminars and 14 afternoon workshops exploring the subject of diversity that unfolded at the school.

Every year since the high school’s creation 15 years ago, Co-Princpials Greg Baldwin and Meredith Gavrin have set aside one day a year for all students to meet new teachers and new colleagues and, as a school community, to dive deep into a single compelling subject.

The 2018 subject, diversity, seems more compelling than ever, Baldwin said.

Here are some highlights from how the literary-canon structured lesson went – readings, paired and group discussions, and students confessing to what bores them as well as excites them reading-wise – all culminating in an online vote for the winning book.

9 a.m.: After settling in, kids are asked to talk to each other around the question; ​“If I was in charge of lit at NHA, what would I choose?”

“I was thinking the Bible,” says Semmel. ​“I’m not Christian. I’m Jewish, but I’ve never read it as a story,” and there are such frequent references to it in literature and general conversation. ​“If the school allows it,” she added.

“Books should make people think,” says Karlyse Pollard. She gives as an example: The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, among the current books the senior is reading.

“People of color should be main characters – more of this,” adds Semmel. ​“I think more realistic things because classic novels are mostly about white characters, but we still should know that.”

“I definitely want to read Anne Frank,” says Pollard. This past summer Pollard participated in an intensive two-week Yale course called ​“Citizen, Thinker, Writer,” which included readings by Plato and Jean Jacques Rousseau, among others. Now Pollard challenges Semmel: ​“What do you consider a classic?”

Semmel: ​“Mr. Cenabre mentioned Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. We did that.”

“But what about all the rest?”

9:10 a.m.: Teacher Ward asks the kids to talk about books that have grabbed them, or didn’t ​‚and why. In the group conversation, a temporary consensus emerges that books should be ​“interesting.” Ward asks for a more detailed response, with names of books.

Tenth-grader Justin Evans says he finds John Steinbeck’s short novel Of Mice and Men not very interesting. ​“Books should relate to us,” he said. His table-mate says he liked it, even though the story is far away from them.

Senior Wesley Agyn-Kyei cites Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as both a classic and one that spoke to him.

How so? Ward responds.

“It teaches me something important,” says the student. ​“Leadership.”

I ask him if it was important to him that Achebe’s book is set in Africa and is from the point of view of the colonized, not the colonizer. ​“No,” he replies. What is important is that it teaches, he said.

Ward corrals the attention of the 13 students: ​“If an author drops a Shakespeare reference and you don’t know it, is that a problem?”

Semmel raises her hand and says she thinks it is.

“We’re asking you to be like us, teachers,” Ward goes on. ​“The classics, written by mostly white dudes? Or more accessible [books] What do I mean by ​‘accessible’?” After a student gives the correct answer, he concludes the block by asking, rhetorically: ​“Do we choose one or both? And how do you balance [them]? And if it’s kids who pick, what do we gain and/or lose?”

9:20 a.m.: After projecting the Wikipedia definition of ​“canon,” Ward asks what the kids think of it. Ninth-grader Sam Crumlish says, ​“Those [books] that influence how people talk and act. Most are old white men talking about the past, and they’re not super diverse.”

“So should we be reading less of this [white faces projected on screen] and more of that [diverse faces]?” Ward presses the importance of the decision. ​“As English teachers, we have some power. [Today] We give that power to you.”

For the next half hour, the assignment is to read six single-paged essays by authors debating the subject under discussion and determine on which side of the argument they each come down, and why.

The kids also read passages from the three books, an overview, and thumbnail bios of Shakespeare, Cisneros, and Hurston, all to be weighed in their ultimate decision.

Among the essays: One about an 11-year-old girl who ended up on the talk shows because she resolved, as an antidote to what she had been reading, to collect no fewer than 1,000 ​“black girl books.”

Another of the essays is an excerpt by Ron Suskind about a freshman at Brown, as he peruses the books on the aisle of the student store and realizes, intimidated, he knows so little. Thank god, he exclaims, grateful he has signed up for lower-level courses.

Semmel offers this at the end of this block: ​“When I read the classics, I feel smart. But when I read books that [really] speak to me, I feel empowered, and that’s more important than feeling smart. Still I need to know stuff” found in classics.

Then she engages her table-mate, ninth-grader Rhea Bacourt, on whether she likes August Wilson’s Fences. It’s considered a classic now, and Semmel liked it because it’s realistic, she said, even though her regular English teacher, Mr. Cenabre, faults the play for a slack dramatic structure that relies too heavily on long soliloquies.

Bacourt, who is African-American, isn’t quite sure how she felt about the play. Just because it was about African-American life didn’t seem to be enough. Perhaps because it is set in faraway Pittsburgh and in the far away 1950s. ​“I couldn’t relate to it,” she said. Other problems interfering with her response: ​“the baseball, and Troy [the protagonist] being unfaithful.”

Sam Crumlish says he sees valid points on both sides. He said a work like Fences straddles ​“classic” and diverse.

Karlyse, phrasing it differently, endorses that idea: ​“We should read classics that still matter.”

And The Winner Is …

And there the matter more or less rested until it came time for the vote. The students didn’t have the luxury of having landed on a general proposition; they had to pick only one.

In weighted voting, which the kids did using their phones, The House on Mango Street prevailed.

The kids had had more than an hour of discussion. They had read passages from the three authors, had read a précis of each writer’s biography, and had now chosen what turned out to be the middle position anointing a book that is a classic but also contemporary.

Semmel said she voted for the winning House on Mango Street because ​“it was good not to have a love story” and she liked the feminist approach. She was tempted a bit by the Hurston. But Shakespeare, or at least Romeo and Juliet, by her lights, was definitely in the back of the field.

As Natalie Semmel left for her second seminar of the morning – on people who ​“pass” as a member of an identity group other than their own to get by – Ward said his own position vis-a-vis the canon has shifted in his ten years of teaching: ​“Overall, I’ve shifted more toward the canon. The argument that sways me most is that ultimately that it dis-empowers” if you don’t know the canon. ​“And those most likely to be dis-empowered are students of color,.”

Then he and Cenabre cleared off the tables of their teaching materials and prepared to present their seminar again to the second group of students who had signed up for it, and were already filing in.