As my seniors settled in to their seats to prepare for another hour of learning, I smiled out at them.

I had just been given approval to begin a new project about censorship. I had mentioned the project to my classes previously, but it was on hold until I could convince my administration that this wasnt a form of rebellion but simply a way to interest students in a topic and invite them to share their feelings. I started the hour off by explaining that I was going to be experimenting with them and that I was asking them to trust me with the project. I had planned this out, had a project packet made up, and was ready. The biggest variable was how the students were going to react and interact while discussing the finer points of censoring. My students were excited to see the reading list available to them and had silently created their reading groups while I was still outlining the project. They were to create small groups, choose a banned/challenged book, read the book, write a persuasive letter to our principal about the book, and finally make recommendations about whether the book should be banned or welcomed within our district through a paper and presentation. By the end of the second class period, my students were arguing over which group was going to read Slaughterhouse 5, researching different novels to choose from, and were laughing over the ridiculous accusations surrounding some of their favorite books. As the project progressed, I watched some of my students who bragged about never reading, actually reading ahead of their groups. I saw my students having in-depth discussions about their novels and having academic arguments over whether they would challenge the book or not. My class was having full class discussions about topics ranging from WikiLeaks to Judy Blume novels being censored. The best part was that the entire class was involved. I would love to lie and say that my class was always this involved and engaged, but I would only be kidding myself. I put a lot of effort into making sure that this project would interest as many of my students as possible. But this is just one project. My average class involves using our anthology, large and small group discussion, and a lot of kids shutting down. So what is the difference between the censorship project and the other various reading and writing projects my students have done? How do I continue to engage my students in such a way? These are questions I began playing with this summer when I re-entered the college classroom to work toward a graduate degree. I wasnt sure what I wanted out of the degree, but I quickly realized that I had missed a lot in the four years I had been out of college. As I was learning how to teach writing to my students in a way that wouldnt make them whine (or at least not as much), I began to wonder about their reading habits. My second class, Current Issues and Trends in Literacy, discussed various theories to teaching reading, and as we continued through the course work, I realized that I had a lot of work to do within my own classroom to help my students to find meaning within their reading. The first major change that needs to take place within my own classroom (as well as many other highs school classrooms), is a change in attitude about reading. According to Jeffery D. Wilhelm, in his book You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents, studies indicate that students spend very little time actually reading in school. Some experts estimate that the average child spends less than 5 minutes a day reading including school work (cited by Healy, 1990, pg. 23) (2008, p. 51-2). As Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmerman discuss in their book Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, the concern is that because of the way we are teaching students to read, we are creating students who only read in school (2007, p. 30). In fact, in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts about literary reading habits, it was found that literary

reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young (NEA 2004, vii) (2007, p. 30). Those students who do read keep it secret so as not to be looked down upon by their peers, because reading is not cool. It thus becomes the job of the teacher to find a way to make reading, if not cool, acceptable among teens. So how could I continue to interest my students, both readers and non-readers, after our censorship project was finished? Jeffrey D. Wilhelm summed up the problem wonderfully when he explained, It seemed that the real reading lives of my students were led outside of school. They did not expect school reading to be fun, engaging, or personally satisfying. If they regarded themselves as readers, then the reading they valued was pursued in study halls, at home, with friends and familyusually anyplace but the classroom (2008, p. 39). Students dont walk into a literature classroom with the expectations of being excited about literature. They feel forced to read literature that has no real meaning to them, and they only do so for a grade. My students were surprised to find themselves enjoying the literature that they had chosen. They were happy to share details about their stories with the classmates, but they enjoyed this all so much because it was something new, not the norm. My students often feel that what they are reading about in class does not connect to their lives. Although this has been the case for many years, todays teachers must work to help students to find their reading relevant. Frank Smith (2004) said, Where children see little relevance in reading, then teachers must show that reading is worthwhile. Where children find little interest in reading, then teachers must create interesting situations (p. 212). If teachers fail to do this, then their students will not create meaning within the text and the students purpose for reading will remain only to answer questions. But if a teacher manages to engage their students, the students will gain comprehension of the subject they are learning about. My seniors were a class who wanted to rebel. They had survived twelve years of school uniforms, going to mass, and strict rules. They enjoy questioning authority in any way possibly. They always want to know why. I took this feeling from them and turned it into a unit. We discussed why they werent allowed to read vulgar words or about sex. What was it that their parents and the school was so afraid of? Why would people be cautious about putting books like the Harry Potter series on the shelves of the library? Because they found these questions interesting and relevant, they were engaged and they began to create meaning between their novels, the class discussion, and their lives. Although I found success with one unit, I dreaded moving on. Indian literature was next on my syllabus, then Asian lit, followed by the Illiad. How can I continue to engage my class and make my teachings both interesting and relevant? Current classroom anthologies include various excerpts from pieces of canonized literature that many adults and scholars agree is worthy of reading; however, students find these anthologies to be boring and to not reflect their interests. It therefore becomes the job of the teacher to help make sure the students interests are taken into consideration when choosing literature for a class. Wilhelm sharea that, the transactional view, focusing as it does on the experience of reading, does away with an traditional idea of a literary canon. What constitutes a literary text is any text that provides a particular reader with a deeply engaging aesthetic experience. This depends largely upon the reader: her interests, abilities, preoccupations, experiences (2008 p. 48). This means that it becomes the teachers job to help their students find interesting texts, and a variety of them to choose from, based on their interests and needs. If a teacher is using an anthology, they need to find a way to help their students to make connections to the literature. This also means that

teachers should no longer limit themselves to only the stories available in anthologies. High school students should be exposed to as many different texts as possible. Adolescent literature has grown over the years and now contains multi-genre work such as magical realism as well as the newer genre of graphic novels (Lesesne AL 2007 p. 61-70). The novels that were written as recently as ten years ago for adolescents are now being read by middle schoolers, while high school students are eager to read honest literature that deals with issues concerning teens. Stereotypical characters are no longer approved of. Instead, students are looking for characters who represent themselves and who are dealing with similar issues. Popular novels include topics of rape, anorexia, teenage alcohol abuse, and terrorism (Lesesne AL 2007 p.61-70). Young adult authors have recognized that their audience is interested in reading about topics that they can relate to, and yet teachers have not yet decided to use this tactic in the classrooms. Although teaching Indian literature may not be the highlight of my year, helping students to see connections between the conflict in Indian literature and their own lives, as well as including more contemporary Indian literature into the unit, may help it become more meaningful to them as well as a more enjoyable unit for me to teach. Allen Webb (2001), in his book Literature & Lives, gives teachers many ideas of how to connect the culture of the world around us to the literature available to teach students with. Throughout his book, Webb shares several different cultural studies approaches to teaching literature. According to Webb, In the classroom, cultural students calls for up-to-date and engaging thematic curriculums where culture, social structures, and historical circumstances are explored side by side with a particular emphasis on how those issues touch real people in the present day ( p. 8). Webb recounts meeting a local homeless man and how he decided to focus an undergrad college class on homelessness- a serious issue in the area where he was teaching (p 13-21). He goes on to describe other lesson on topics such as school violence and the holocaust. In explaining why he chose to use a cultural studies approach, Webb explains, what really made the difference in this class was the opportunity for students, via a response-based cultural studies approach, to enter into dialogue with each other about the contemporary crisis, consider its effect on their own lies, and begin to think about how they would address [the problem] (p. 56). Webbs cultural studies approach to teaching his students works because the students are both interested in the topic and see the issue as relevant to their daily lives. When students no longer find their assignments relevant, the outcome is not good. Shirley Bryce Heath, in her ethnographic study detailed in Ways with Words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms, helped teachers to understand the problem of a loss of relevance in teaching material and solve it with the students of the mill town described in her book. The high school students were not interested in reading and writing, and many were just waiting until they were old enough to drop out of school to get a job at the mill. The teachers took action and went to the mill, where they found the jobs largely did not require any forms of reading or writing. The students didnt find the teaching relevant because they knew they would not need the information (Heath 1983 p. 310-312). The teachers that Heath (1983) was dealing with did not want to give up on their students, and instead went to the students to ask them what kinds of reading and writing actually came into their homes. The teachers found that the students often helped their relatives with paper work for various social services and various city regulations. The teachers then built lesson plans helping students to prepare to be literate in a way that was relevant for their lives (Heath 1983 p. 310- 314). The students were motivated to learn about these topics because they saw them as relevant to their lives. With Heaths help, the teachers learned about the community

the students were living in and helped to make connections between the students lives and the literature that they were accessing. So what happens when students do not find relevance or interest between what they are being forced to read and their lives? Although I have been bragging about my seniors and the wonderful classes they have been having, it is time to be humble and share the story of my sophomore classes. My American literature class is currently in the middle of reading Arthur Millers The Crucible. I enjoy teaching this play, and in previous years have been able to pull students along with me through the play. I am unsure what has changed this year, but after several quizzes with class averages in the failure range, I had to check what it was that I was doing wrong as a teacher. Talking about the problem with my students, I was shocked to hear one student explain to me that she and her class understand the play, but when I ask them all those harder questions about why characters do something, or why something happened, they dont know what I mean. In essence, the students can find the answers if they are black and whit, but they are not thinking deeply about the reading they are doing. As seen in my example, another major issue that many high school English teachers face is the fact that students do not really understand the purpose of reading texts in general, let alone individual novels, short stories, poems, etc. The students really can not be blamed for this problem; their literature text books (along with the texts from their other classes) have taught them that understanding something simply means answering a test question about the subject correctly. In the book Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, Ellin Oliver Keene realized that without meaning to, we [teachers] had settled on, and settled for, a notion of understanding that was little more that remembering details, answering our questions, and learning a few new vocabulary words that the text had set in boldface (2007 b. p. 31) Todays textbooks and companion programs step teachers through a process that often begins with a vocabulary assignment, takes the teacher through teaching the story, and then checks for student understanding by assigning questions. Because students are so familiar with this process, they believe that if they are able to answer the questions correctly, then they have, in fact, succeeded. There are two main types of reading. Efferent reading is where a reader is focused on extracting information from the reading and then retaining that information for some purpose. Examples of efferent reading include reading directions and researching a topic (Ruddell n.p. 1994). Although there are many merits to efferent reading, the problem is that, most classroom readings, questions, and texts are designed to elicit efferent responses, and assume there are correct answers to these questions (Wilhelm, 2008, p. 27-28). Although Frank Smith (2004) argues that reading is a natural process (p. 2), he also says that reading in order to gain information not because you are interested but because someone told you to is an unnatural and even tedious act (p. 55). The problem becomes obvious; the majority of reading that teachers are asking students to participate in is something that they dont come across naturally. They are searching for answers to questions posed by the teacher or the book and are focused on topics chosen by the teacher and the administration. This does not help students to find deeper meaning within their reading. Instead, teachers should be attempting to find ways to help their students read for aesthetic purposes. Aesthetic reading is reading for pleasure. Often, aesthetic readers feel that they are living through the literature that they read and experiencing the literature. Instead of finding information, the reader is focused on the feelings and ideas of the book, the personalities of the characters, and the emotions that the conflicts create (Ruddell n.p. 1994). Although efferent reading and aesthetic reading seem to be polar opposites, they are actually opposite ends of the same scale. No one piece of reading needs to be entirely efferent. Even

research projects can have an aesthetic quality if the teacher allows the student to focus on a topic that interests him or her.