I just got the great news that I get to teach an Honors English class next block for all of our top-level sophomores.
What books should I order? I can probably have them read four or five novels during the nine-week block. I haven’t had higher level students in quite some time and have pretty much forgotten what books are traditionally taught in such a class.
There are a couple of other caveats, as well:
They are sophomores who haven’t been exposed to much, if any, classic literature.
Most of them are not native English speakers; many speak Spanish at home and have smaller than average English vocabularies. I want to challenge them, but I don’t want to push so hard that they give up.
They’ve never been exposed to an Honors environment. Our school hasn’t really had anything like this before (I did a trial AP class last year that was severely lacking), and our academics have been sub-par in the past. While I get to hand-pick the 25 students I want in the class, I still worry that they may not have the strongest foundation.
All Quiet on the Western Front: A short, fairly easy read, a genuine (and relevant) classic, and deeply moving stuff. I loved this book in high school.
Lord of the Flies: Another short, easy read with a lot of meat on it. (Perhaps not the best choice of words there.)
1984! Exclamation point because I’d call this one a must-read. Shouldn’t strain their language skills, and they’ll genuinely love it. I can never put down a copy of 1984 after I’ve started reading it, even after all these years. Plus, you can assign Orwell’s brilliant essays for extra credit!
Congratulations, by the way - teaching really smart high school kids is tremendous fun. I got to team-teach a constitutional law course for them a few years ago, and I still judge high school moot court competitions. It’s a rush to see kids get an idea for the first time.
Had a thought: Are these kids big readers in Spanish? You could have them pick a book they’ve already read in Spanish, read the English translation, and lead a class discussion on the differences. Could be a fun conversation on the role of the translator, the difficulty of bringing ideas across cultures, and so on.
It’s been my experience that high school reading lists tend to be heavy on the doom and gloom, so I’d suggest throwing at least one classic work of comedy into the mix – maybe The Importance of Being Earnest, or a modern-English translation of The Canterbury Tales if the parents aren’t too prudish? (I’m sure there are probably some novels that would work as well, but for some reason I’m drawing a blank at the moment.)
My wife teaches honors level English, and The House on Mango Street is always popular with her students. It’s a coming of age story of a Hispanic girl in Chicago.
Camus is easy to read in any language and packs a big punch. I remember devouring The Stranger in one extended reading session, when I was in high school. It left me a little punch-drunk.
It helps that I already have class sets of All Quiet on the Western Front and Lord of the Flies that are sitting around gathering dust.
The House on Mango Street is taught at our junior high, so most of them have already read it.
I’ve never read Camus or The Stranger, but I’ll get them on my Kindle tonight to check them out.
I think Slaughterhouse-Five would be too difficult for most of my kids. 18 of the 25 I picked speak Spanish at home, and they have a tough time with sarcasm and satire; it’s the same reason I won’t teach Catch-22 again at this school even though I love it. Both books are available in my classroom for kids who want to read them, but I’d hate to kill someone’s joy for reading by assigning something that will fly right over his or her head.
Oh, and thanks for the suggestions! I love the idea of having them discuss translated texts; I’ll have to try that.
Should I try Beowulf? I remember hating it in high school, but it may have just been a bad translation.
There’s something appealing about classic literature that has been translated into multiple languages. I think it really shows the universality of the stories.
And… triple post. I’ve been grading midterms and studying for a final exam I have to take tomorrow all day today and totally had a brain-fart about Camus being the author.
Talk about a “duh” moment for a Literature teacher!
Yes, good point about the sarcasm . . . that hadn’t really occurred to me. That said, now that you’ve slaughtered my suggestion, I’ll just second the one about Camus. *The Stranger *is a very good book, fairly straightforward, and relatively short.
Along those lines, perhaps something by Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Magic realism shouldn’t be too difficult for kids in an Honors class.
i’m pretty against tailoring the course to speak to their latin heritage. it only highlights their ethnicity, when really (imo) you want to highlight their intelligence. it’s borderline patronizing to say “oh, aren’t you all a smart bunch of latinos” instead of just “oh, aren’t you all a smart bunch.” IME, overachieving minorities are motivated and desperately want to prove they can play the game as well as the rich white kids and want to read the same stuff that the white kids are reading. They WANT the Shakespeares and the faulkners. Don’t treat them with kiddie gloves. Challenge them.
OTOH, if you did it in a way that incorporated global perspective, instead of a hispanic introspective, i’m all for that. Planning your year around Things Fall Apart, The Good Earth, Kite Runner, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, to show the kids many different country’s cultures? That’d be fantastic. I’d just be hesitant to make it specifically hispanic-centric.
Animal Farm is both accessible and challenging, I think.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic for high school for a reason. It’s compelling, beautifully written, and not dead boring.
The Old Man and the Sea isn’t one of my favorites, but I think it’s a good choice in this context.
Maybe some Joyce short story. “The Dead” is a good 'un. Maybe paired with another short story like “A Christmas Carol” where they might already know the story.
The upthread translation idea is a good one, but it might be hard to do if you aren’t fluent in Spanish. Another idea is to pick a book that has been made into movies and talk about the translation from book to screen. Jane Austen, Dickens, Mockingbird, etc. all have fine movie adaptations. Or something like Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare would have filmed plays.
You could do some fun thematic stuff. Ghost stories, for example could have The Turn of the Screw, “Hamlet,” “A Christmas Carol,” and then maybe something like The Haunting of Hill House.
Four to five books in a nine week block?! That’s a book nearly every two weeks! Which seems terribly fast to me, but I don’t know all the details of the class you’re teaching or the students you have.
Is there any other material you have to cover, or are you focusing just on novels?
Are you reading aloud in class or assigning reading for home? A mix of both?
What are your plans as far as discussions/lectures/other activities to do with the books?
What is the workload like for these students in the rest of their classes? How much can you reasonably expect them to read in a night? A week?
How much do these kids know about discussing literature - will they be able to point out symbolism/metaphor/characterization/point of view/voice/mood/tone/etc/etc/etc? Or will you have to review this stuff beforehand or as you go along?
I teach high school freshmen, college prep juniors and AP/Honors juniors. With everything I have to cover, I read maybe 2 or 3 books a year with my freshmen, 4 to 5 books a year with my college prep juniors, and maybe 8 or 9 with the AP kids. I teach a couple of more reading-focused semester long electives, and can still only cover about 2-3 books in that amount of time, if I’m going to do activities and projects and tests and papers to accompany them.
