Read the Best Part First?

In chapter 3, Tovani told an anecdote about the challenge of getting students interested in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.  Tovani was concerned about the book because it starts so slowly, as she herself found when rereading the novel. She said of the beginning of the novel, “It was so dull that my mind kept wandering from the text” (31).

In order to get the students interested, Tovani decided to pass out an excerpt from the book that was particularly interesting. “I passed out copies of page 53 and 54 of the novel. I had decided that these pages were the most likely to pique their interest. The only way I know how to do this is to let them read a good part” (33). But I’m not exactly sure that giving students a “good part” of a book will be enough to encourage them to push through the boring parts.

While in Tovani’s anecdote the students were enthralled and incredibly curious over the excerpt, I’m not convinced that reading an exciting excerpt of an otherwise arduous novel will be enough motivation to get the students to read the entire novel.

Wouldn’t it be frustrating to read a really exciting portion of a book, and build momentum around it, only to have to go back to the beginning and slog through 52 boring pages before you get back to the good part? 

Wouldn’t kids be in a position to think that they’ve already read the highlight, so what’s the point of reading any other part? Especially once they start reading the boring parts, they find that those boring parts didn’t answer the questions from the interesting parts. I guess Tovani is assuming that curiosity created from reading the best parts of the story will outweigh the boring parts. And I’m just not sure there is evidence to support that assumption.

Perhaps if the teacher prepared questions about the interesting except that he/she knows will be answered in the slow boring parts, students would have more motivation to read the whole book—boring and interesting parts alike.