As the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, Dr. Dan Courson is well-versed in the world of literature due to being the head of the team that creates the curriculum for the Paradise Valley district. His answers to my questions helped me gain a better insight into how those who are in charge of the system view their contributions.

The five areas of emphasis for the PVSchools English Language Arts curriculum are reading literature, reading informational texts, writing, speaking and listening, and language. Besides extra standards that are put in place for the Advanced Placement (AP) programs, these are the foundation of the curriculum that the everyday student must go through in their classes. Though these specific pillars may not be specifically mentioned in a syllabus or on a whiteboard, they are integrated into every activity and assignment that is done throughout the class. Or at least, they're supposed to be.

Literature curriculum is important for ensuring that students are exposed to different perspectives, styles, and themes that can help them branch out as they progress in their education. However, these books of classic literature can be difficult to include into modern curriculum when it comes to time constraints, distractions, and social issues. In general, students can be quite difficult when it comes to getting their readings done due to other things such as social media that did not exist when original curriculum was founded. There are now many new ways to get important information that were not originally accounted for that might have changed the course of curriculum had we taken a closer look at them.

My final interview subject was Elana Eisen-Markowitz, who also goes by E.M., a teacher with a long history of humanities and history classes who has numerous thoughts about the current system. She has worked in AP classes, standard classes, and alternative social studies classes, which has given her the opportunity to see the growth of numerous students in different situations and how the required reading system affects them.

For example, one of her most recent teaching experiences was at City-As-School, a New York alternative school that I go into a bit more detail about in my video, as it did not have a required reading schedule and allowed the teachers and students to have free reign in terms of how to handle the topics that typical required reading is meant to cover. E.M. believes that the subjects that the normally forced readings go over are present in many different types of reading, and that pushing only one kind of agenda only narrows the scope that students look at the world through instead of broadening it to different perspectives.

Motivation for reading can, she believes, be decreased by seeing the same types of stories over and over again in books. When people do not see themselves represented in one way or another, they may get the message of the story, but they may feel even more bored or like the message wouldn't apply to them. Demands on children grow as time moves on also, so an older sibling may have way less time to read than a younger one thus contributing to them feeling demotivated from tiredness or already feeling behind.

Throughout her interview, E.M. emphasizes the importance of equity and representation in school readings and how issues with that could be why our current system isn't at its best.