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Before I discuss why young adult literature is a viable option in the classroom, I want to discuss some of the reasons why young adult literature isnt. With that said, I cant think of any that are backed by any evidence, but, of course, there are arguments against young adult books not only in the class room but also in general. Lets take a look: 1. Adults Should Read Adult Books Fairly self-explanatory. In The New York Times opinion pages, theres a debate room where writers wrote small pieces on their thoughts on young adult literature. One writer, Joel Stein, posited that young adult texts dont have the depth of language and character as literature written for people who have stopped physically growing. A witty remark for sure but his article is full of ridicule. He compares young adult literature to playing video games, watching movies or listening to Justin Bieber. Its fun to make fun of things that appeal to children but theres no substance to this argument. Plus, the young adult texts he chooses to make jabs at are actually childrens books. 2. Lack of Depth Were going back to Steins statement that young adult literature lacks language and character depth. This is true in many cases but its also true for an y genre of books. The reason students read what they read now in school, the canonical texts, is because people, over the course of time, have selected these canonical texts and deemed them great and worthy of study. Young adult literature hasnt had the luxury of time as canonical texts do; we dont have a canon for great young adult books, but more and more teachers are creating, adopting and modifying their own. In a few years, a

handful of young adult books will break into the educational canon. These books are going to rival canonical texts in every way: character development, sophisticated language, you name it. In a few years, we wont be having this discourse and I wont need this on my website. 3. Controversy! Charlie talks about masturbation in Perks of Being a Wallflower. Theres too much violence in Buried Onions. They talk about sex in 13 Reasons Why! God forbid any controversy be involved in any books our teens read in school. Keep in mind theres adultery and murder in The Great Gatsby, sexual impotence in The Sun Also Rises, and all kinds of controversial topics in The Catcher in the Rye. Many young adult books are more tame than our classics, we just dont know that because we havent read them. Maybe because adults should read adult books.1 The Reality of Young Adult Literature Now that weve taken a look at some opinions against Young Adult Literature, lets look at why it can be a tremendous tool for teachers to help your children become better readers, writers, and thinkers. When teachers talk about young adult books, theyre talking about the goods one: the books that may eventually make it into the educational canon and the ones they keep in their classroom libraries because students are going to love them. If we can move past the misconception that young adult books are smutty and poorly written, we can start to see the value they have in education. Here are a few ways in which they are valuable.

Given that this is the internet, I want to point out this is sarcasm and the only footnote I will use.

Young Adult Lit is Student Centered The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky follows 15 year old Charlie, an introverted social pariah, through his first year of high school where he is determined to improve his outlook on life. Written as a series of letters to an anonymous person, Charlie presents his numerous experiences through the year, including his relationship and adventures with his two new best friends, Sam and Patrick. Perks presents a great magnitude of different experiences and problems students are going to encounter throughout their high school lives. Charlie may only be a freshman but his new friends are mostly seniors. The book explores subjects, which include homophobia, teenage relationships, drugs and alcohol, friendship, and loyalty, but all of these things center around one message to students: be active and willing to seek what makes you happy. Charlie doesnt know what is going to make him happy; he only knows he isnt content with his current state in life. We often stumble upon happiness ourselves, but I digress. What does this have to do with young adult literature in education? Young adult books present engaging characters and stories more students will relate to than, say, The Great Gatsby though I, personally, am an enormous fan. Marshall A. George, in his article, Whats the Big Idea? Integrating Young Adult Literature in the Middle School, looks at three different grade levels and three different teachers experiences in implementing young adult literature into their classroom. The results may be surprising for some. All three teachers found more students more engaged than previous years where only canonical texts were used. More personal connections to characters and situations were being made, more passionate discussion took place, and that led to better and more frequent analyses of the text. The

students were engaged in critical thinking and were developing an appreciation for literature as a means of exploring relevant issues (76). The themes addressed in young adult literature are often lacking in the canon. The 6th grade teacher in Georges article planned a unit in which responsibility was the central theme using young adult texts and her students discussed their new responsibilities transitioning from elementary school to middle school. The same could be done for students in the 9th grade who have just entered high school or students in the 12 th grade who are about to go on to college. We often forget that many of us had to be taught to see symbolism and themes in stories; we had to be taught to think and read critically using texts. Student centered young adult books engage more students in a way classics often dont. Again, Im not saying canonical texts dont have a place in education, but its difficult to engage all students with only those texts. Complementing them with more relatable young adult novels engages more students and helps create an appreciation for all reading. Young Adult Lit is More Inclusive The biggest problem with the literary canon is its a Western, European canon. The vast majority of protagonists are white males created by white authors. I wasnt assigned any nonwhite writers in high school and I went to a school where the population was over 50% Asian and only about 25% white. Exclusion of other cultures in literary reading does not seem inherently harmful but it is. Remaining neutral or silent in the face of discrimination

always condones the behavior of the oppressor. 2 By not including all cultures we are passively saying the ones excluded are lesser than the ones included; that they are not important and not worth studying. In the aforementioned New York Times debate room, Sharon Flake, a young adult author, writes, these books do not, and cannot tell the full story of America and what all of her children are capable of accomplishing. For this to happen, we need more books about African-American youth and other kids of color, and this was in regards to the variety of young adult books available: a genre considered to have greatly more cultural diversity than what we consider the canon! If a genre considered diverse still comes up short, what can we say about the canon? Many of the settings and characters in the canon appear alien to readers; they dont depict anything close to the reality of what many non -white readers experience. How can we expect students to engage the literature we give them if 0% of what we have them read feels foreign to them? In spite of Flakes critique of young adult literatures adequacy in regards to cultural representation, there are numerous outlets for all cultures in the genre. Street fiction novels are easily recognized by their explicit connection to mainstreamhip-hop culture (Hill 77). Street fiction has origins in the Black experience novel and offers students who grow up in familiar settings a more realistic and relatable reading experience. There is a large and evergrowing selection of books with protagonists who represent under-represented ethnicities and cultures that have been written by non-white authors. Bad Boy is a memoir written by Walter Dean Myers, one of the most prominent young adult writers, African-American or otherwise.

Just kidding! There are two footnotes. This is from Nicole Sieben and Laraine Wallwitz article, Watch What You Teach: A First-Year Teacher Refuses to Play It Safe

The memoir chronicles his struggles growing up in New York City and explores issues such as race, responsibility and finding a place in life. And its non-fiction! American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang is a graphic novel Jin Wang, Danny and Sun Wukong the Monkey King in their struggles to fit into a society that sees them as the other because of their appearances. Aside from providing ethnic diversity, young adult literature has books that explore the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) experience in todays educational settings. There are books whose protagonists have disabilities or mental illnesses. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon follows 15 year old Christopher John Francis Boone, who is thought to be on the autism spectrum though it is never stated, and his investigation of a murdered dog which leads him to detecting3 many mysteries in his life. The story is unintentionally humorous, heart-wrenching and inspiring all at once. Then there are novels written about poverty and class struggles. There are novels whose protagonists are teens with a tendency towards criminal activity. There are young adult novels centered on every young adult problem you or your kids can think of. Accepting them into our curriculum and school environment opens the door to including all students and excluding none. Critical Lenses, Reading Levels and Depth The opinion that all young adult books are less well written than the literary cannon is a misconception. Lexile.com is a website that can give you the Lexile Measures, reading levels,

The verb form of detective used by Christopher. At this point, you should realize I lied about how many footnotes there are/will be. Will there be more? Stay tuned!

of pretty much any book you come across. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is written at 730L; at this point, its unimportant to know exactly what 730L is, but if youre interested, you can go to Lexile.com and look it up; in this case, 730L basically means the language used in the book would suit a middle school student. In contrast, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is written at 720L, essentially the same level. But! you cry, Hemingway is known for his short sentences and ease of reading! Surely other canonical texts out-write any young adult literature! Fair enough. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is written at 1070L, appropriate for juniors and seniors in high school. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night is written at 1180L, almost past the 1220L cap applied to seniors. Canonical works and young adult works have something in common: their language and content within their respective genre vary greatly. If young adult literature is written at the same level as canon novels, can we start believing that we can do the same critical analysis in both categories? One of the more difficult points of analyses is the use of critical lenses such as the Marxist and Feminist lenses. In Of Grave Diggers and Kings: Reading Literature Through the Marxist Lens, or, Whats Class Got to Do with It? a teacher uses Shakespeares Hamlet to teach the use of the Marxist lens. Hamlets characters can be divided into three categories: the nobles, the non-so-noble-butaffluent, and the commoners. The teacher, Michael, uses an activity to explore power structures in Hamlet in comparison to today, and class identification. Who has power in the play and why? What power do the other classes have? Whats to stop teachers from doing this, if not more effectively, with novels such as Asphalt Angels, a novel by Ineke Holtwijk that explores poverty stricken teens in Brazil or Buried Onions by Gary Soto, which looks at a poor

adolescents life in Fresno, California? Hamlet is not specifically focused on class and power struggles while many young adult novels are. Buried Onions explores Eddies struggles to avoid the gang life by working in societys structure to lift himself out of his poverty and the limited power he has to do so. Still Here? Thanks for Reading! First, if youre still reading, I want to extend my gratitude. Youve either found my writing interesting enough to finish or you hate it so much you want to read it all so you know exactly what youre hating. That, or youre my young adult literature pr ofessor and you have to read it! I really hope your opinion on young adult literature has changed since you started reading. If youre a worried parent, I hope you have more trust in young adult literatures power to not only teach your children in the same way that canonical texts do, but that they can potentially motivate your children in a way that canonical texts cannot. Through young adult literature, your children experience the same language and depth as they do from canonical texts, but absorb a wider breadth of cultures, ethnicities and experiences. It also gives them the opportunity to discuss things applicable to their everyday lives, like personal responsibility and the value of family. Books, in some ways, are like movies. You have your canon: movies that are nominated for BAFTA and Academy Awards. Then you have movies that will never be nominated for any of those awards . I wont mention any because they vary for everyone. But then, over time, something amazing happens. The Dark Knight, a movie about a billionaire who dresses up like a

bat and fights bad guys with his fists, is nominated for eight Academy Awards and wins two of them.

Works Cited Books Asher, Jay. 13 Reasons Why. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print. Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Gallery Books, 1999. Print. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. New York: Random House, Inc, 2003. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2006. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 2012. Print. Holtwijk, Ineke. Asphalt Angels. Asheville, North Carolina: Lemniscaat, 1999. Print. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Back Bay Books, 2001. Print Soto, Gary. Buried Onions. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1997. Print. Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: Macmillan, 2006. Print. Articles Appleman, Deborah Ann. Of Grave Diggers and Kings: Reading Literature Through the Marxist Lens, or, Whats Class Got to Do with It? George, Marshall A. Whats the Big Idea? Integrating Young Adult Literature in the Middle School. The English Journal, Vol. 90, No. 3, The Lure of Young Adult Literature, January 2001. Web. April 2013. Hill, Marc Lamont, Biany Perez and Decoteau J. Irby. Street Fiction: What Is It and What Does It Mean for English Teachers? The English Journal, Vol. 97, No. 3. American Cacophony: Languages, Literatures, and Censorship, January 2008. Web. April 2013. Sieben, Nicole and Laraine Wallowitz. Watch What You Teach: A First Year Teacher Refuses to Play It Safe. The English Journal, Volume 98, No. 4. Teacher Journals, March 2009. Web. April 2013.

"The Power of Young Adult Fiction." New York Times. n.p., n.d. Web. April 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/28/the-power-of-young-adult-fiction/whenauthors-take-risks-thats-not-kid-stuff