How do you choose which books you'll read? You probably have a variety of sources for new reading ideas: books you've read or heard about online or on radio or TV, suggestions from friends, browsing the bookstore and library. But unless you belong to a book club, you probably don't have your reading assigned to you.
According to the thought-provoking article by Motoko Rich in Sunday's New York Times, some students in 6th through 12th grades are being allowed to choose any books they want to read for their English classes. Rather than being forced to read Moby Dick and Pilgrim's Progress, they can choose to read the Twilight series, Harry Potter, or James Patterson if they prefer.
I think this is a great idea, if not entirely new. As neither a parent nor a teacher, I can only approach this as a former student and as a reader. You simply can't force someone to read a book. Even the most conscientious student will have difficulty sticking with a book that doesn't hold their interest. Eventually, many students will turn to “alternative” methods of learning enough about the assigned book to pass a test: CliffsNotes or SparkNotes, Classic Comics, the movie version, asking someone who actually did read the book.
Rather than encouraging students to waste their time by avoiding reading a book that they aren't ready for, why not let them read books they actually want to read? A good teacher will be able to provide the knowledge and enthusiasm to point them toward books that are both worthwhile and relevant to the student. A student who wants to read nothing but Twilight books might find that, with some encouragement, she might also like Bram Stoker, Jane Austen, and Edgar Allen Poe.
looking for his White Whale
It all comes down to this: What is the point of reading literature? Partly to acquire a common knowledge based on the classics, a shared canon. But is it really necessary to slog through Moby Dick to understand what someone means when they refer to a “white whale?” No. Another purpose to reading the great books is to learn to analyze, deconstruct, see beneath the surface – in other words, to learn to think. In the pursuit of such a worthy goal, I would advocate any means necessary: movies, graphic novels, excerpts, condensed versions – for many, these are stepping stones to the real thing. In the end, isn't it better for students to learn to analyze even lowbrow books than to learn creative ways to avoid reading highbrow literature?
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Deven McKay
Ersatz Reader
Donna Ski
Christine Bollerud
Felisa Rogers
lasomnambule
Salon.com
Comments
Forbidden Planet... The Tempest.
Westside Story... Romeo and Juliet.
Harry Potter... The Once and Future King... the King Arthur legends.
I think literature education is a complicated and ideally has several goals: to teach kids the mechanics of reading; to show them how words can convey deep impressions (so that they can think more critically); to turn them into lifelong readers; to teach about our cultural touchstones; and so forth.
chefbobcat -- Faulkner (shudder). Another author I am still not ready for.
Penrose -- Right! And there are some books that if you don't read them as a kid, you may not really get them. I didn't read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my thirties, when it did me no good at all. I wonder if it would have impressed me more when I was sixteen?
Sgt. Mom -- I recently read that Gone With the Wind owes a lot to Vanity Fair. What do you think?
Rob -- That IS a good idea for a book. As far as cultural touchstones go, they seem to be changing as we speak, and maybe are less important. But critical thinking is vital. We see the consequences of the lack of critical thinking every day and it's pretty frightening.
As always, a pleasure to hear the point of view of our most bibliophilic couple :)
I'm also on board with Stellaa and Rob.
At the same time, I wonder how the students will fare next year, with a more "by the book" teacher. My junior high lit classes were mostly the traditional " read aloud in class then discuss" model. I got yelled at an awful lot that year for not paying attention, even though I had finished the assigned reading and had moved on to other things in the anthology.
But, your point is a good one. We need to realize that there has been great literature written in the last 30 years. We should not force young readers to look at only those works that were written before the 1970's or '60's.
I agree. It's simply important to get them reading. What happens after that is limitless. I hated the Scottish play for years because of a bad experience in high school with it. And what a shame, as it's a wonderful play.
Start them on that book and then add to their collection with related material.
Thanks for your take. Rated.
Stim -- A perfect example of how even TV can (occasionally) contribute to literacy.
peppermint -- good point. I hope those kids continue to read what they want to outside of class.
Procopius, hi! Condensed versions might not be a bad idea, especially with some of those older novels (for which, incidentally, the authors were paid by the word.)
john blumenthal -- I expected there would be more disagreement with the NYT article, that some people would emphasize the importance of reading certain books, and that the discipline of reading books you don't want to is good character building. But nearly everyone seems to be thrilled that kids are reading any books at all.
Stacey -- n3v3r say n3v3r.
Lainey -- Good idea getting the parents involved. Sounds like an excellent teacher. There's hope after all!
Here's the thing: I also assign certain readings to my students and suggest others. Why not do both with elementary and high school students? You get to write a review (not a boring "book report") of any book you want, but you also have to participate in class discussions of Pride and Prejudice or Moby Dick (well, maybe not Moby Dick). A good teacher will lead good discussions, and discussing how "great" books work may, in turn, send students to those books for a closer look.
I believe this could lead to an interesting examination of the prevailing biases in literary evaluation and criticism.
There is definitely a resemblance, with the pair of heroines - one good and sweet but faintly boring, and the other being beautiful, bold and unscrupulous whom just about everyone finds more appealing, but I think it ends there. Becky Sharp never comes to the shattering realization that Scarlett O'Hara does - that she had undervalued the one man who really did love her, but instead spent her energy in the fruitless pursuit of one who didn't. Becky Sharp cheerfully goes on using and tossing aside. When I first read Vanity Fair, I didn't think having her wind up with Amelia's fat and rich brother was any sort of ending - but later I came to the conclusion that perhaps for her that was a happy ending: a rich and compliant man who adored her and would pay the bills and never make a fuss about her lovers and bad habits.
Harry Potter may be fun, but it is fluff and frankly our children get a steady diet of fluff. The job of education is not to entertain... it is to teach children to become adults. Because one of the first things a kid will learn when they become an adult is there is a lot of none entertaining things that will make up their lives. They will find that sometimes work is dull mind draining, but essential for the continuation of our society.
But, overall I think it is a really bad idea for children to dictate what they will learn. That is the job of the adult. It seems insane to think a child with no real life experience should be deciding their education materials.
I only made it through Romeo and Juliet as a 14-year-old because I'd been told that so many "fluff" stories were based off it, so I decided to find out what the big deal was. I didn't willingly read Shakespeare again until college. (Also, Shakespeare's plays were PLAYS. They weren't meant to be read but to be watched. Seeing them staged or on film makes a world of difference in the understanding of the language.)
When I was 16, I'd owned a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov" for several years, having had it handed to me by a crazy-eyed and more than a little frightening used bookstore clerk with the words "You look like you'd appreciate this," when I was 12 or 13. But I'd never made it more than a few pages in until I learned that an episode of "The X-Files" was basically a re-write of the Grand Inquisitor scene from that novel, and I wanted to see how the original shaped up and compared. Suddenly everything clicked into place, and I finally had to retire and replace that old copy of The Brothers Karamazov this past year, because I literally wore it out.
Try as I might, I've never been able to get into "Little Women." Had it assigned in school, never read it. Just. Can't. Make. Myself. Care.
Loved Tom Sawyer as a kid, hated Huck Finn. Loved Huck Finn when I read it again as a college freshman.
Couldn't get into either Jane Austen or Flannery O'Connor when they were required reading in high school. Now love them.
I mean, let's be honest about it, shall we? A salient motive for students' increasing lack of "interest" in works of classical literature stems more from these inexperienced teen-aged readers' inabilities to navigate complex prose structures than from any tangible dissonance with the fictional material. It isn't like Meyer's melodramatic contrivances are any less accessible than Hardy's--his prose certainly is. But one needs a developed attention span to engage with and appreciate the challenge of prose complexity present in the former, while the "liberated" others need only be able to move their eyes axially across the page, and gratification comes.
Meanwhile, the bloom itself came off the rose of cultural studies some time ago, but I suppose this practice will remain comfort food for people (parents, teachers) who wish to shrink respectfully from actually doing their jobs in exposing their children to all greater and greater complexities of language and literature awaiting encounter. Today's cultural analysis appears to be little more than yesterday's New Criticism, and probably quite a bit less. But hey, it *might* get them to read more and other books, so full steam ahead.
Our music teacher on the other hand used to encourage us to bring in LPs, and critique them from his point of view as a classically educated musician who played jazz on the weekends. He gave us a lot of insight, way before it was fashionable, into how all music shares common roots.
High school was full of books that we read/struggled through together, especially Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet) and poetry. I learned far more from group discussions and analysis than I could have on my own, since so much can be hidden between the lines. But occasionally I'd have the opportunity to choose my own book (within the boundaries established for the assignment), which I found very satisfying and, sometimes, even more challenging. When there's no chance that classmates are going to hold you up in a group discussion, knowing that you're "on your own" in facilitating the conversation, you're less likely to slack on the work.
I had a high school English teacher that gave us that flexibility for quarterly book reports - he gave us a huge list of the classics and we each had to pick one (no duplications allowed). If we wanted to read something that wasn't on the list, we had to justify to him why we wanted to read it. He was a tough one, so most were too afraid to challenge him - I did get permission to read a John Grisham novel for one of my four reports. But I chose (on my own) the Great Gatsby and the Fixer for two of my other reports. He was also the teacher that guided us through Hamlet, so he obviously was confident enough to tackle both approaches to teaching in his courses.
Later, during college, I took a political science course on leadership. It was very open ended and we each had to choose a subject for our final report. One classmate wrote on a Japanese feudal lord, while I chose to analyze Churchill through his own words, using his own writings/assessments of other leaders as my guide. As much as I learned from this experience, I don't think I would have been prepared to tackle something like this without my required readings (Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, the Federalist Papers, etc) as a foundation.
So I'm all for acknowledging that teachers should be encouraging a student's interests and a love of reading. I was a voracious reader that didn't need any encouragement from school or teachers, consistently tackling books far beyond the basics. But without the foundation that required readings provided, I would likely have missed out on a great deal - different thoughts, styles, symbols, and theories - since sometimes we learn the most through what seems like suffering at the time.
I get what Michael Norris is saying about Meyer vs Hardy (give me Thomas any day; at least he could spell his own first name), but I also think the Meyers and Rowlings of this world have their place as a gateway drug to get young people interested in reading.
The problem here is that the sole purpose of teaching literature is not to engender a love of reading, that's just one piece of what we are trying to do. We have many other objectives. We also must deal with the reality of the outside demands placed on us. Most teachers are dealing with a district-wide curriculum that dictates that certain literary works must be taught. In my district, we must choose a certain number of works from a common list and may supplement that with other pieces that teachers may choose. On the statewide level, we are mandated by curriculum standards to teach certain genres and skills for analyzing them, as well as specific kinds of writing (i.e. literary analysis and persuasive on the secondary level). Teachers aren't making these choices at the classroom level.
In our middle/high school, students in literature courses can sometimes choose from three or four books that will be studied in smaller groups at the same time. They sometimes all read a book or play together, and have the opportunity to choose a novel on their own at least once a year.
I agree with those posters who have said that it is not educationally sound to have the uneducated student choose his/her own curriculum. Building in some choices is essential, but students often don't know what they like. Just today, I got a note from a former student on Facebook telling me that she never would have read Jane Austen were it not for me teaching Pride & Prejudice, but now she is a lifelong fan. Every year, because of the way I teach the novel, I have 18 year old football players deeply involved in the romance of Darcy and Elizabeth.
That brings me to my final point. Some of the commenters here simply did not have good teachers. You are all right about many things concerning how literature is taught. Book reports are boring--and no one in my department has assigned one in the ten years I have taught at this school. Plays were meant to be acted and watched, not read from a page. I have plastic swords in the cupboard for acting out scenes of Romeo & Juliet, and my seniors read an act of Macbeth out loud then watch a dvd performance with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Our students know about all the stories and films derived from Shakespeare because we talk about that in class. Good literature teachers can make what might be considered boring come alive and students can discover tastes and passions they never would have known they had. But none of that will happen if we just indulge their obsession with Twilight.
And, I am convinced that my kids developed their love of reading because it was something they saw going on every day in their home. Newspapers, magazines and books were always present and being read by their parents. And kids love to emulate their parents (well they do when they're young anyway).
Yeah, maybe kids should be able to pick the books they read (I remember being able to do that in elementary school back in the late 50's--I was particularly fond of the "We Were There" series.
They should however be required to write about what they have read and what it means to them. And, teacher should require a mixture including biographies, etc.
Long ago I taught American Govt. through my University. I didn't use a text. My "text" was Newsweek which was weekly required reading including a brief (1-2 paragraph) opinion paper on a major article each week which was first turned in and a discussion of the topic was held. Why? To get the students who ranged from grad students to those who barely got out of high school to read, think and express themselves on the topical issues of the day. (Just think of all the contemporary lessons that can be gleaned on the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches from what has been happening just in the last 6 months).
Reading is critical to all this. But I think that there may be "new" classics out there.
Great post. Really made me think.
It's similar to approaches that have changed how writing is taught in schools -- by encouraging fluency first, over correctness. Get kids writing and excited by it, then teach them to edit and correct themselves later.
I think classics in simplified form (graphic novels, abridged versions, excerpts) should be introduced EARLY. As a history teacher, I think literature in incredibly important to having some sort of historical perspective. The Greek myths, "A Christmas Carol" and other short stories can be engaging even to youngsters if told right (ahem...expurgated Greek myths...not Ovid of course!)
In high school, we read "The Jungle" to learn about the rise of unions and the horrid conditions precipitating the need for both unions and FDA inspections. We read "Huck Finn" and talked about the nature of slavery in the U.S.
In my honors English class, we read everything from "Oedipus Rex" to "The Divine Comedy"; from Shakespeare to Faulkner by way of Dickens and Eyre. I didn't like "Great Expectations", but it certainly didn't kill me to read it.
I really do fear a detachment from our historical and cultural past. How can "Twilight" substitute for literature from other periods of history? Wouldn't "The Diary of Anne Frank" still be worth assigning? Would students make their way to any great literature without guidance?
Mea Culpa...I am, of course, speaking as history teacher.
This is my whole problem with the current phenomenon and its continuing rationale. Why is it that in one context allowing our children to experiment with drugs (especially "gateway" ones) is a capital social sin, but when it's a metaphorical addiction, we can't affirm it fast enough? Isn't the job of a parent to instill thinking and behavior that would obviate the offspring's turn to substance abuse? Huffing aerosol=bad, and could lead to worse; snorting morally-bankrupt literature=good, and could lead to better? I fail to see how that equation makes sense. I do see how it is an easier calculus.
I do lament some parts of a "classical" education. Spelling has to do with etymology, which has to do with history...again...showing my (alas...perhaps misplaced?) love for the past.
How many people know that "A.M" and "P.M" mean "ante-meridiem" and "post-meridiem"...before and after "mid-day"...or how to figure out the meanings of such words as "pathology" or "ideography"...by using their Greek roots. *sigh*...I know, I know...it's only geeks like me who love this stuff...me and the spelling bee champs!
I love a good Nora Roberts paperback when I'm settled in for an afternoon on my back porch, but recognize I won't get anywhere near the merit from it I'd get from the Newsweek magazine sitting on my kitchen table.
Take them to a Shakespeare *comedy* before having them read any Shakespeare (It was "Merry Wives of Windsor" that opened me to Shakespeare, but your mileage may vary). If you can avoid laughing at "Midsummer Night's Dream" when they've switched the genders and a 6'3" black man in a pink tutu bellows, "Hail, fair Oberon!" you're better than me.
Show the kids "Clueless" and then read passages from Jane Austen. Etc. Show some confounded imagination, for Pete's sake.
sorry...
I hated English classes in grade school (which were separate from Reading classes). I cannot for the life of me diagram a sentence or recite the parts of speech. I can, however, write just fine in Standard American English when the situation demands it, and I can spot grammar mistakes a mile away. Why? I picked it up through osmosis by reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. We don't pick up the rules of spoken English grammar by being taught them; we mostly pick them up by hearing people speak in sentences. It's no different with written English.
In that regard, anything written in Standard English ("Twilight" and "Harry Potter" count) will help the students become better writers.
Text-speak (as much as it annoys me) is a good segue into discussing how English spelling and capitalization and punctuation evolved and became standardized and why. Text-speak ("n3v3r" for "never" and OMG for "oh my god!") makes perfect sense when you're typing a message on an alphanumeric keyboard and only have 140 characters to get your point across. It doesn't fit when you don't have the limitations of that technology.
But I wouldn't make it an either/or proposition.
The idea that students should be empowered to choose all their books is lunacy. On the other hand, what's the harm in giving them some room to round out their schedule with their own choices?
The only book that should be required reading for all teachers and students alike is "So You Think You Know English--A Guide to English for Those Who Think They Don't Need One" by guess who?
See my bio for a link.
Basically, in our desperate attempt to teach reading we've given up on literature, and on the idea of literature. I mean, if you're saying "it doesn't matter what you read as long as you read" then you really are saying literature (i.e., the actual corpus) has no value.
I get it, that this is where we're at. This is what we've been reduced to. That our society has decided that things which require work before fulfillment are simply not worth it (denigrated as a "slog"). I just find it sad that we've given up on a shared literature or heritage. I find it sad that we've given up on language -- an excerpt or graphic novel is not the same thing. The point of Moby Dick is not contained simply in its plot.
Again, I would advance claim that, given competing forms of intellectual/social/physical distraction available in the high school setting, parents' waiting to unlock their children's literary third eyes through hands-washing recourse to the "gateway drugs" of the currently trendy is a shameful failure being dressed up as an invigorating success.
By the way, my plan is to go to my grave without having read "Moby Dick." Not every classic is for everyone. But I would regret it if my AP Lit kids got out of my class without having read "Beowulf" and the hilarious, obscene, philosophical "Grendel."
Your acknowledgment is admirable. But do you seriously believe that most/any OS or S contributors would recognize a fragment if it bit them in the ass?
However, that compliment having been paid, I must say that the fact that a certain pedological pattern has been established for a couple of decades hardly makes it effective. Just look at what such permissiveness has produced. The generations you have taught, no doubt well, are linguistically and literarily empoverished compared to prior ones.
By the way, I'm a terrible speller and don't have the time to spell check.
The kids who love to read often end up as English majors and get through Moby Dick before they die anyway.
Now...as for boxing up "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl"--how can teachers NOT get middle-school aged kids interested in that book if it's required reading? For God's sakes, the author was the same age as they are! She wasn't a made-up person, she really lived and died and you can tour the Secret Annexe on the internet. She has the same problems nearly all kids face: sibling rivalry, disagreements with parents, puberty, young love, problems with teachers (in the early part of the book), an obsession with film stars...but she's stuck in a living situation that's imaginable but nearly unendurable. The language isn't archaic or otherwise difficult. C'mon...you can get these kids interested in Anne.
And above all, I think I would emphasize that this is not just about teaching students to read or to learn to love to read, but to teach them to THINK. That means analyzing, questioning, reasoning. If they learn to do that, they'll get more out of Twilight than most people will get out of Moby Dick.
Say I'm a student. I love _Twilight_. Suddenly, I can read _Twilight_ as part of the curriculum in my English class. Awesome plus, right?
Say I'm a teacher. Apparently, my goal is to stimulate the thinking of my students critically, analytically--nevermind that nowhere in contemporary American culture is this trait revered or cultivated, nor is its application rewarded with anything but resistance and disdain.
So, I have twenty-some-odd charges under my supervision, each of whom loves _Twilight_. Using this book and the waves of goodwill it generates inside my classroom, I'll teach my students to analyze . . . what, exactly? To think about what, exactly? To question what, exactly? The story? The writing? The book "itself"? An honest appraisal of the first two, under even the most liberal literary criteria, would lead my erstwhile interrogators (assuming their efforts are done in good faith) to rather disillusioning conclusions about the book's craft and morality. "What, the book I love is a shoddy product expertly calibrated by corporate interests to part me of my (parents') money while stoking an endlessly-unfulfilled desire for the narcissism of fatalistic behaviors that would actually be damaging to me were I to perform them in my real, physical life?" "What, its message about the utter helplessness of the main character, and her objective status in a world where all others simply wish to possess or consume her, could reverberate in the real, physical world where I'll be spending the next sixty-or-so years?"
There is no level at which this book can be "analyzed" usefully except at that of "cultural object of relative meaning constructed by and manipulable within objectifying capitalist system," and there is no school on earth that will teach students to think *that* way--as schools are complicit and strategically important structures for ensuring that the conforming social agents they produce do not analyze the means of their own production. As much as it's a wonderful fantasy toward which to grasp, a school will not teach its entrants how to recognize, let alone dismantle, its own structure.
I have not read the Twilight books or seen the movies. They sound dreadful. They are, however, extremely popular with teenagers. So...you could start out by asking them WHY they like these books. What is it about these characters and their relationships that they identify with? Why is every other teenage girl in love with Edward? Are they troubled by the fact that he's a vampire (in more ways than one)? Why does Bella love him? Is she in love with him, or in love with the idea of "taming" him?
And segue into "Wuthering Heights."
I agree, for the most part. And I guarantee that you have just asked more "background motivation" questions about these characters than did Meyer before creating them.
To be fair, it should be noted that the sorts of questions you suggest are pointed at the worlds in the books--the domain of standard lit-crit analysis. This post's originator envisions an educational encounter where teachers help students "learn to analyze, deconstruct, see beneath the surface – in other words, to learn to think." Ignoring the implicit assumption that students aren't thinking prior to that gift's bestowal upon them by beneficent educators, I'd suggest that the ability to analyze, deconstruct, and "see beneath the surface" has very little to do with analogizing characters' motivations across multiple literary works. Analysis at the level of "the book" in "the world" would aid the development of students' thinking at greater complexity and consequence than would that done at the level of "the world in the book." An educational emphasis on the first of these two perspectives would, I'd argue, radically undermine institutional education, and so will never seriously be up for consideration in any thoroughgoing capacity. Such ways of thinking, however, could be introduced by parents from the formative stages of a child's life, before too many conceptions about power dynamics and the child's own role in the world are concretized.
We're ditching Atticus Finch for Professor Poopypants? And this is the way to build a more literate nation?
I agree with the mixed approach. Let the students pick some of what they read, but assign some of the classics too. We really don't want to raise a generation of kids who have no connection at all with their cultural heritage. And that can happen - a coworker used the phrase "pin a scarlet letter" in class - and several students later said they had no idea what that meant.
So I think bandying about the word "kids" is not totally inappropriate in this context.
I would never argue that we should stop teaching literature in high schools. But based on my teaching experience with children and adults, allowing kids some choice--and a few "gateway drugs"--can lead them to Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, Far from the Madding Crowd, and everything else that expands the mind beyond fluff.
But equally good? Not at all. The Persian expedition, Herodotus, Melville, Dante, Homer, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee, Cicero...these and many more, the canon plus extras, are brilliant, deep pools of astonishing beauty, masterpieces of writing and history and reflection, of ideas that resonate on many levels, of profound challenges and psychological verite woven into narratives.
We suck at teaching our children now. It can be traced to the early 20th century when we stopped teaching ancient Greek. Even more than Latin, the reading selections in Greek were not just helpmates to learning the syntax and vocabulary, they were the first written forms of literature, the crucial early struggles to become human, democratic, moral, in a barbaric time.
When we lost those lessons we lost our way.
By allowing students to bypass the difficult in pursuit of the popular you are only avoiding critical thinking about our own era's philosophical and moral assumptions. I'm not saying that students be forced to stick with some mid 20th century schoolmarm's idea of the classics, but books like "1984," "Brave New World" and "The Shape of Things to Come," might be on their reading list. Written in 20th century English, these works might provoke thoughtful discussion and critical thinking more readily than the latest popular and popularized novels. The teacher should have some say in what fills young minds rather than the ever present and stuck in the present mass media.
I wish to thank my high school English teacher, Mr. Gainless, and some of my college professors too, for making me read such difficult writers as Shakespeare, Hardy, Melville and Homer. thus I can intelligently respond to the question you posed.
Your solution seems to me to be fatally flawed however, in that there are probably far more kids today who won't read ANYTHING, than there are kids who will read some things, just not Moby Dick. So yes, your fix might work for that relatively tiny number of kids who just aren't into Moby Dick or some other Great Book.
But what about the vastly greater number who just aren't into any book at all? You might tell them as some kind of inducement that you'll let them read and review any book of their choice... but what's then to stop them merely grabbing the CliffNotes to Any Old Book as a way of making the grade without ever reading, really reading, anything?
So, no. Kids should do the hard work of reading prescribed, critically vetted works of literature... and they will, if techers will do the hard work of motivating them and turning them on to the mind-blowing, illimitable worlds to be waiting to explode from the written page, worlds far more wonderful and awe-inspiring than any video-game or TV sit-com can offer them.
There's your answer.