In my last blog post, I discussed the impact that reading an entire book together has on a high school English class. In particular, I described how one student, Jessica, who had previously complained about reading Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ultimately took on a leadership role in class discussions, engaging her classmates in reading a challenging book far more intently.

I’d like to explore what that student actually said that energized her classmates.

The student, Jessica, reacted to a specific moment in Chapter Two of The Narrative when Douglass explains that visitors to his plantation often misinterpreted the peppy rhythms of certain slave songs as expressions of happiness. Douglass explained that, while sounding upbeat, these songs actually expressed intense pain.

The students were confused: If slaves were miserable, the students asked, why, in fact, would they sing lightheartedly? 

Then, Jessica suggested a way forward: “The songs they sang were not happy songs. Yes, for a moment slaves had permission to go to the ‘Big House’ so they sang like they were happy. They were pretending. They were still slaves and were being forced to work. And, soon they would be whipped again.” 

After hearing Jessica, and after the teacher asked for corroborating evidence, a classmate pointed to Douglass’ statement that slaves were singing about “deliverance from chains.” Another student’s hand shot up and he explained that the “Big House” in the song actually referred to Heaven. They were not singing happily about going to the slaveholder’s home; they sang about their faroff hope for ultimate deliverance.

The teacher explained to me that after this particular discussion, the students’ confidence increased significantly. She said that they felt like “they were sophisticated enough to understand the suffering. They no longer stopped reading when it got hard. They wanted to have intense discussions so that they could understand the book.”

Adolescents want to understand the pain that fully developed characters feel in beautiful literature. When they read an entire book alongside their peers and with the guidance of their teacher, they have the time to build the wherewithal to dig in.

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