Comments on: Teaching English

By: Joelle

Joelle — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:53:53 +0000

I think that’s horrible that you have page count concerns! Sheesh…I went to a state university and even though it was a pretty pedestrian education, I had to read 3-4 plays EVERY week for my theatre degree, plus all the reading for my other classes. So a novel every two weeks (big, long ones), 3-4 plays, rehearsal every day after school, and work 16 hours on the weekend. I never read for pleasure, but I sure read a lot of pleasurable stuff (and a lot of bore-me-to-death stuff).

What about novellas by people like Alan Bennet? You could always teach The Bridges of Madison County (haha…seriously, I’m joking).

Okay, I’ve left two comments on this one topic so clearly I am procrastinating the writing I should be doing!

By: EDWARD

EDWARD — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:14:47 +0000

I teach college freshman in Florida. I am under relentless pressure to find works of great literature that are short. It doesn’t matter wether the book is modern or classic, it matters how many pages long it is. More accurately, how few. This is essentially an offshoot of standardized testing. The student needs as much time as possible to learn how to identify words on a multiple choice test. Nothing else matters. I have found young people can relate to THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER (a long short story with many implicit moral threads). There are better books, but they are more pages and thus counter productive. It is hard to tell what the student gets out of any of this. The word “education” would be misleading.

By: Kevin A. Lewis

Kevin A. Lewis — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:04:26 +0000

This brings to mind a customer I was talking to at Borders before the ship sank who came from somewhere in the back hills of Arizona, where a teacher had finally gotten it through her head that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was possibly the dullest book in the universe, and decided to give her class the option of reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula instead. It was a wildly popular choice until a delegation of complaining parents beseiged the school board into having it pulled off the list for the following nutty reasons: It was too Satanic for
Catholics, too Catholic for the born-again crowd, and too Godly for the couple of atheists who chimed in. My customer got called away before I could learn the name of this benighted town, but I put a fictionalized mention of this idiocy into the book I’m shopping around now, so hopefully someone will recognize themselves and speak up. One can only hope; I’ve noticed that Dracula is never on any reading lists even out here in CA, so this problem may be more common than we imagine…

By: Joelle

Joelle — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:43:36 +0000

It’s always a bit of a toss up what to teach when, I think. I mean, I remember reading Great Expectations in ninth grade and thinking it was a load of boring crap. Then I had to read it in college and thought it was genius. I didn’t think Austen was funny in college, but in my thirties and now, it cracks me up.

I was just at a middle school and the entire school had read The Hobbit. The kids were way less than impressed. They all told me “it was soooooo boring!” But ask them about The Outsiders and they came alive. They loved every minute of it.

My friends’ kids read Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK in ninth grade and loved it. They also enjoyed (for lack of a better word) Lois Lowery’s The Giver. I am not so sure about those books…I mean, I read Speak, but as an adult. I think I would’ve found it pretty upsetting as a teen, which I know is the point, but I like to choose which books upset me, not have them be required reading.

I remember stumbling through The Red Badge of Courage and hating every second of it though, so maybe I would’ve been better off with SPEAK.

All in all, I think a mix of classic and a contemporary novel or two sounds like a good plan. Also, summer reading lists are full of contemporary novels and kids often have to read 1-5 of them, so that way they get to choose. I like that plan. Especially when my books are on the lists!

By: Siri Kirpal Kaur Khalsa

Siri Kirpal Kaur Khalsa — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:14:57 +0000

When I was in high school, back in the last millenium, lots of us read STEPPENWOLF on our own. It wasn’t on the curriculum then, maybe still isn’t. My Mom, who taught English at the community college level, had her students read the Simon and Garfinkle song “Sounds of Silence” as a modern example of the old medieval dream poem.

Other nominations:

LIFE OF PI

Barbara Kingsolver’s THE BEAN TREES

Not super current, I know. But I’d love to have read them earlier than I did.