What the Dickens?

"Today's children have very short attention-spans because they are being reared on dreadful TV programmes. They are not being educated for long attention-spans." So says Charles Dickens' biographer, Claire Tomalin in yesterday's Independent newspaper.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/every-pupil-should-read-dickens-says-minister-but-hes-too-hard-says-the-authors-biographer-6579525.html

I disagree. The ability to concentrate is innate, but like a muscle has to be flexed to extend its use, and reading Dickens is in fact a good way of helping our kids to do this.

Why?

Because Dickens writes in brilliant, episodic bursts designed to grab the attention with his larger-than-life characterisations, lots of dialogue, vivid descriptions and emotionally engaging plots. He wrote for the ordinary person, not the intellectual or the academic, and his storytelling reflects this making it more accessible than might be imagined at first glance. And, in spite of the possibly daunting extent of his books, the length of each chapter is actually quite short.

Great Expectations, for example, may be 440 pages long, but it's divided into 59 chapters, averaging 7.5 pages for each chapter. Any young person who can sit through a 30-minute episode of the BBC soap EastEnders will have no trouble romping through a few chapters, as a 15 year old I once coached found. He had to read Great Expectations for his English GCSE and was daunted by the task. How are you going to go about this, I asked? A chapter a day, was his initial, doeful suggestion. Pointing out that, given the number of chapters, this would take a while I suggested he read for as long as an episode of EastEnders a day, 30 minutes. Which he did, and discovered that he could easily do it and completed the whole book in his half term (7 day) break. He was delighted with himself, not least because he had enjoyed reading, and reading a classic like Dickens, and consequently found his GCSE work much easier having read the whole book. An additional pay-off.

So let's not patronise our young people and say they don't have what it takes to make reading Dickens possible. Instead, let's actively encourage them to read Dickens' novels for enjoyment and see them extend their ability to concentrate and improve their attention span.

And even if you've not read Dickens by the age of 11, there's still time. Dickens is one of those authors that can be read time and time again. His books are timeless in spite of their historical settings, because like any great fiction it is the lie we give to truth.

Slow reading...

Unsurprisingly perhaps, our ability to concentrate long enough to read for much more than a minute (according to one professor's assessment of her students) is being eroded by our hyperactive online habits. So how can we regain the ability to concentrate on reading again? Slow reading is being advocated as the answer.

Thinking about this, I'm reminded of one 15 year old I coached who was aghast at having to read a whole book - Charles Dicken's Great Expectations - and was overwhelmed by the thought of this half term project set by his English teacher. This was someone who had never before read a book for pleasure, and I wasn't sure that reading Dickens was going to persuade him to do so either. We discussed how he might approach it and what goals he could set himself in order to achieve the task. He suggested a chapter a day, but the book had very short chapters - and 59 of them - so a chapter a day was only going to mean seven chapters over the week. Added to which, given the shortness of each, a chapter a day wouldn't allow him enough time to engage with the story, get into the language (which he wasn't used to) or start to enjoy the process of reading, which I felt was going to be key to his success.

Could you manage 30 minutes a day, reading? I asked. Without interruptions? Looking doubtful, he agreed he would try. I explained that he had to give himself a chance and however boring he found it initially, he had to try and persevere so that he could start to engage with it. 30 minutes is only the same length of time as an episode of EastEnders (a BBC TV programme he enjoyed) I said, and although he still wasn't entirely convinced, he agreed to give it a try.

When I saw him next I asked how it had gone. "I finished the whole book!" he told me, obviously really pleased with his achievement. I congratulated him and asked him if he had enjoyed the story. He pulled a bit of a face and said he thought he probably wouldn't choose to read another Dickens, but overall it had been OK and - here I was delighted - what else could he read? *

It wasn't just about the books, although my view is that reading opens up a whole new world you possibly couldn't access any other way, but it also allows people to practice their concentration skills in a meaningful and pleasurable way. For this young man, reading Great Expectations showed him that he was capable of concentrating when he chose, and he could apply this skill elsewhere to things that didn't immediately grab his attention - it was just a matter of practice.

Lesson learnt.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/15/slow-reading

* I gave him a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, which he really enjoyed.