Carol Atherton's 'Reading Lessons'
We should form a support group. I know some potential members in person here in Ireland, but also online I’ve connected with others in Scotland, England, Australia, the United States. It’s always lovely to share ideas and enthusiasms with other English teachers who have been at the job for a long time, whose accumulated wisdom has been shaped by decades of classroom experience, and decades of reading. I definitely qualify, since I’m approaching the 40th anniversary of the day I started teaching English.
When we do meet for the first time, the main item on our agenda should be a discussion of Carol Atherton’s richly-rewarding new book, Reading Lessons: the books we read at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter. A Head of English in Lincolnshire (not far from a part of that county I know very well), she writes about 15 books and one poem she has taught over the years, as well as many other books that branch off from them. But that is a very bald and underwhelming description: these books are springboards to so much more in a way that all English teachers will recognise. They open up conversations with teenagers and thinking about social issues and the ways they touch the lives of those pupils like no other school subject approaches. Reading Lessons also turns into a book about the author herself, which will not surprise other English teachers.
Our subject is in this author’s words in a different context incorrigibly plural. In a more academic phrase, it is in the words of the Australian researcher John Sweller an ill-structured learning domain. Here are both its strengths and potential weaknesses. It is capacious and flexible and deals with the central issues of human life, and I wrote recently with tongue only slightly in cheek about why I think the most ‘important’ subject to study in school is poetry.
However, its critics and those who are too lazy to think carefully, can regard it as ‘irrelevant’, and we must never be complacent about its place. The poet Michael Hofmann has just written about the depressing degradation of his English Department at the University of Florida. If universities cut humanities, as they are doing in some parts of the world, where will the future teachers come from? Carol Atherton is conscious of this in England, too. She calls her book ‘a love letter’ to ‘the profession that has sustained me for the whole of my working life’, a profession ‘that is under increasing threat’. That threat in England, and perhaps here too, is multi-factorial, but she points to specific challenge to the subject in England from an overemphasis on STEM subjects (so easy to see their ‘relevance’):
They involve clear bodies of factual knowledge and straightforward techniques that can be memorized and mastered, rather than the complications of nuance and interpretation.
In passionate advocacy for her subject in the Afterword she dismisses the shallow attitude that ‘studying English is an indulgence in a world that needs more scientists and engineers.’ Instead,
English deserves more than this. It deserves more than this because it matters. For one thing, the ability to read sensitively and write precisely is vital, not only in many workplaces but also to participating in the life of a democracy.
This is deeply important for us as citizens, voters and consumers, all the more so given the obsession of the moment, artificial intelligence. And of course it is vital to us as human beings in so many ways. The good news is that if anyone ever questions that proposition, you can just hand over a copy of Reading Lessons and say:
‘After you’ve finished reading this book, come back to me and tell me then that English has little value.’
The single poem I mentioned earlier alongside the 15 books is Robert Browning’s marvellous ‘My Last Duchess’, still as sparklingly vivid and fascinating as ever, after 180+ years. Atherton in her first chapter shows how these few lines open up gender politics and misogyny in the age of Andrew Tate and the widespread viewing of pornography on internet devices. She follows up on these ideas in a later chapter about Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men.
This is just what English can do, and it is what makes it thrilling, enriching, ‘relevant’ and indeed sometimes risky. Another strain in the book looks at books which open up the complexities of racial issues (To Kill a Mockingbird, Noughts and Crosses, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). As she says, subjects like Geography and Chemistry are ‘safer’, and
The slipperiness of English often troubles [students], with its ambiguities and scope for interpretation.
We all recognise that frustration: the backwash from other more ‘defined’ subjects means that so often we have to resist our students’ desire for ‘correct’ answers, but also
Sometimes students think there are no right and wrong answers in English, that you can make a poem mean whatever you want it to mean, but this isn’t the case. Reading closely, reading carefully, is a matter of tact: working with the words on the page, what we know of their authors and their historical contexts, and the echoes they have in our own day and age. It takes time to develop the kind of understanding you need to be good at … there are no quick fixes, no easy wins.
That tact, that expertise, is developed over many years as an English teacher. I think back with horror to my own first two or three years: I started off when I was just five years older than those I was teaching, with no life experience worth mentioning. Those 18 year-olds were pretty tolerant. While of course all teachers need time to learn how to run a classroom, in English we also have to handle what is sometimes uniquely challenging and personal material.
That development of experience and identity is explored throughout the chapters by Carol Atherton. She weaves elements of her own life into the books, but delicately and often movingly. There is no emoting here, and nothing gratuitous: simply, when she needs to let us know about something, she does so because it mattered in her teaching and to her as a person. Jane Eyre was important in opening up the possibility of studying English at university, though such a path was utterly unknown to her family. Charlotte Brontë’s novel is powerfully about people ‘who struggle with speaking out’, and Atherton needed to develop her own voice. Great Expectations, one of my own favourite books to teach (I have taught half of the books here, and have read them all) follows on with an examination of the author’s arrival at Oxford and her sense of not fitting in (I did that journey too, but my uneasiness was more to do with nationality, an Irish person there at the time of the Falklands War). She became burned out, and her father died suddenly. Irishman Brian Keenan’s intense memoir An Evil Cradling was consoling. Another Irishman, Seamus Heaney, through his poem ‘Digging’ shifted something in her head about the path ahead. And most startlingly, a late chapter on Macbeth, ‘On Emptiness and Desperation’ (my own piece on The Real Lady Macbeth), opens up the rawest subject imaginable, her struggle with fertility, and the subsequent adoption of her son:
There were times, during those difficult few years, when I felt sidelined by life, fed up with being told that I should just relax. There are messages that society gives you if you’re in your early thirties and don’t have children. You’re incomplete: hadn’t you better get on with it?
All this is part of the metal fatigue suffered by any teacher, any worker, but English teachers have to deal with such personal matters in the very substance of their practice in a way that teachers of Mathematics and Economics do not:
We share parts of ourselves when we teach. We make known who we are and what we believe in.
This is a two-way street, and like all English teachers Carol Atherton has to be hyper-alert to her students’ troubles. It’s not just a matter of being careful about approaching a writer like Sylvia Plath, but after all a standard curricular text like Hamlet is about the deaths of fathers, and mental illness, and suicide. Classroom management is an extraordinarily complex thing, with hundreds of micro-decisions happening in every lesson, and manoeuvring through such tricky waters is even more challenging. The job takes a toll, and Carol Atherton is eloquent on the way it can wear you down to the bone:
There are days when I drive home close to burnout, running on empty, desperate for a proper night’s sleep.
It is also deeply rewarding: what a privilege and pleasure it is to approach great works of literature and share them with young people. We do have to keep reminding ourselves that a text we know inside out is fresh for every generation of schoolchildren. The seeds are sown, and often we have no idea what becomes of them. Sometimes years later a former pupil explains how one class had a particular impact; often I can’t remember that. I have been teaching King Lear for decades: it’s a thrill to see young people gripped by the opening love test scene, not knowing what will happen - wow, he actually banished her! - and by the horror of the blinding of Gloucester, as well as by the darkest tragedy of all, as the old man staggers into view under the weight of his dead daughter. Sometimes, as Carol Atherton points out, life changes our approach to a book. It was only when I became a father that the full import of Cordelia’s murder hit me and made that final scene unbearable. We (should) never become stale.
Atherton says that the system in England has however become somewhat stale and constricted, with a relatively limited palette of texts: other teachers in England have confirmed that to me. At least for the moment at least text choice at Leaving Certificate level in Ireland is done quite well, and I wrote about it in my piece ‘On the role and selection of prescribed text lists’.
It is invigorating to be able to approach for the first time the poetry of Tracy K. Smith, and recently I have done a lot of work on Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These, published first in 2021 [downloadable guide]. In what other subject do you teach an area which didn’t even exist three years ago? For the interest of those outside Ireland, here is the syllabus for 2024-26. In the current year, alongside Small Things, our pupils are also studying for comparison Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: that is a fascinating rich mixture, opening up all sorts of thinking and discussions. Recently I caught up with Thi Bui’s graphic novel The Best We Could Do, about her family’s experiences of immigration from Vietnam: that would also be fascinating.
Miller’s Death of a Salesman shapes the penultimate chapter of Reading Lessons, ‘On not being nothing’. I have often taught it too and it never fails:
It demonstrates, brilliantly, how the features of a genre with its roots in ancient Greece can be adapted for the modern era. In the process, it also opens up conversations about success and failure, and about the way work shapes our lives and identities.
Atherton quotes Willy Loman’s despairing cry,
You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit!
I think also of the memorable lines of Willy’s wife Linda in her despairing plea to their sons, Biff and Happy:
I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
This is what great literature helps us to do: pay attention to people, to ideas, to language. For me - and increasingly so in our technologically-saturated world - it is an act of attention. Carol Atherton uses a different word:
What we do in English often borders on an act of resistance, an attempt to make students think more carefully not just about the texts we read but about the world we live in.
When we have the first meeting of that experienced English teachers’ support group, it will be quite crowded, since also in attendance will be the ‘shadow colleagues’ who have been our companions for so long. As teachers we probably had the same origins: deep readers in childhood, whose love of books led on to study in university and then into this profession. We’re bound to talk about the books those shadow companions wrote which we would use in our own versions of Reading Lessons. Mine will have a more Irish flavour: I think of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (despite its reputation, what joy it is, how funny and tender!), as well as the poetry of Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney. Let me also squeeze in Chaucer and Elizabeth Bishop (all of whose poems are beautiful acts of attention, indeed subtle acts of resistance).
Along with the laughter and the wine, we can share stories of our classrooms as well, of the demanding and exhilarating job we have done in those ‘frail travelling coincidences’ over many years. Experienced teachers should be the last to claim excellence for themselves, but based on this book I am pretty sure Carol Atherton is an excellent teacher. And I know she’s an excellent writer.