[I'm back, bookworms! Sorry for my longer-than-planned break. For an explanation, head over to Ordinary Mer. Otherwise, read on for some crazy ideas about assigning number values to books.]
Did you know Hamlet is worth 7 points, while the Gossip Girl novel I like It Like That is worth 8 points?
Welcome to the world of Accelerated Reader, a software program that allows teachers to track students’ reading progress by assigning books and novels a certain number of points. Supposedly, the program awards points “based on length and difficulty, as measured by a scientifically researched readability rating.” And yet many classic literature novels and plays, such as Hamlet or My Antonia are awarded relatively few points compared to more contemporary books.
The schools and teachers that use the Accelerated Reader program often set a specific number of points that a student must reach in a year or a semester. The program then allows students to choose which books they want to read, as long as they reach the designated number of points.
I’m all for balancing classic literature with more popular choices, but with so much classic literature falling on the low-point end of the scale, students are ignoring these choices and choosing fewer books worth more points to satisfy the requirements.
According to a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review essay by Susan Straight,
Librarians and teachers report that students will almost always refuse to read a book not on the Accelerated Reader list, because they won’t receive points. They base their reading choices not on something they think looks interesting, but by how many points they will get. The passion and serendipity of choosing a book at the library based on the subject or the cover or the first page is nearly gone, as well as the excitement of reading a book simply for pleasure.
While the trend in book choice based on points is worrying enough, I find the bigger problem to be assigning a numerical value to literature. As Straight says in her essay, it’s “a bit insulting to literature.” There’s a reason math and English fall into different department categories in education. Numbers are definitive and finite. 2 cannot be 3 and 5 cannot be 7. Literature, on the other hand, has the ability to stir up any number of emotions. And these emotions can change, from reading to reading, person to person. Numbers, says Straight, cannot consider “landscape and character, and certainly can’t identify what makes even some of the simplest-seeming sentences so complex and lovely and painful.”
How do you assign a numerical value to Lizzie and Darcy’s first meeting? Or to a reader’s empathy as Harry finds out Snape’s secret, finally, at the end of a long and tumultuous journey from boy to man? How do you determine the worth of a story that teaches children to be courageous or persuades people to change their lives or their communities for the better?
Literature can’t be reduced to a number. It’s not definite and it’s not finite. Literature opens up the world to endless possibilities and you just can’t put a number on that.
