The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences....Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing.

I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier.

I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture.

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.

But she then she admits it is true:

Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school.

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime.

To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything.

A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving:

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.

It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing.

This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.