We can predict what’s going to work for class of fourth, fifth, sixth graders, after that, I think it’s very, very difficult to predict what’s going to work for a wide group of people. But we can predict what will work for individuals.
As personalities develop and form, what they want in books form too. And you know parents will say to me, my son’s in eighth grade and he only wants to read non-fiction, he just
and I say to them, let him read non-fiction, that’s terrific there are a lot of great non-fiction books to do that. And yes, they begin to define themselves not only in who they are and they’re the geek in the school or they’re whatever, but they begin to define themselves in reading case as well, this is what I like.
For a teacher in those older age ranges, I think that some of the implications is providing a much wider range of material then teachers often think they need to provide. There are now readers in middle school and high school that define themselves as readers of graphic novels; that’s what they read, that is what they look at. And there are some very fine graphic novels, you know, but you have to provide a whole sense. It’s sort of like, you have to set you know a smorgasbord is what I would say, in the teen years, where in elementary school years, maybe you can have a little more limited cafeteria wise, you know you can all get turkey, mashed potatoes and green beans that day. Whereas when teen years, you have to provide a lot more possibilities.
And so I think for teachers choosing materials and certainly choosing summer reading lists, they need to focus on a wider range of materials than even they themselves normally know how to focus on. To write “500 Great Books for Teens”, I had to get five of my best graduate students to sit me down and show me how graphic novels worked, you know, because I had to be able to evaluate them, and I had ignored them up until to that point of time. And I think we cannot in any body of literature, ignore what’s going on, what’s being published, what teens are reading. If it’s keeping them engaged, we have to learn to understand it.