From Mad Magazine:
GALLERYGOER #1: You have to know what the artist was trying to say!
GALLERYGOER # 2: How should I know something he didn’t know?
You clearly didn’t read The Miller’s Tale
We had to read parts of the Canterbury Tales for one of my college courses. I was intrigued and read the whole thing.
(In modernized English. It would’ve been tedious to read it in the original. Although our professor insisted on read a portion in the original, which he said flowed more easily. Maybe, but I couldn’t understand it.)
Mine are already mentioned:
Catcher In The Rye. Might appreciate this one more as an adult who understands we are reading about a kid undergoing a nervous breakdown. At 15, 16, or whenever, Holden just came across as a whiny putz who needed a good spanking.
Ethan Fromme, dreary shit.
I had a 8th-grade teacher assign us Something Wicked This Way Comes. I think I was just too literal-minded for this one, just hated it.
The one that leaps to mind for me is Watership Down.
I may see it differently as an adult, but as a high school student (and avid reader), I found it ridiculous.
About halfway through I approached the teacher after class and expressed how much I hated it. To her credit, she allowed me my opinion and excused me from the rest of the book.
mmm
A Man For All Seasons? Brave New World? A Separate Peace? Heart of Darkness? Romeo and Juliet? Macbeth? Hamlet?
The must be 200,000 books. How come most everybody reads the same few? And this is probably over 20 year age differences. (It has been claimed reading whole books is no longer a thing in many schools).
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Since our class basically refused to read that thing, we were given for the first time ever two alternate choices of books we WOULD read.
I can think of at least a dozen or so books I was supposed to read in school (not just high school) that I just skimmed, read the Cliff’s Notes version of, or what have you. I faked my way through 90% of the books I turned in.
As for the books that I actually made an effort to read, I gave up on The Grapes of Wrath after a couple of chapters. I don’t know if Steinbeck thought he was being edgy or cool or innovative or whatever with his pattern of every few chapters being stream-of-consciousness short phrases, but it turned me off.
Thank you. The class was 12th grade English. The outcomes were set by the state and included demonstrating reading and writing skills. We did talk about the meaning of the works we read, but from the perspective of how the students understood it, not a “what the author meant” stance where the teacher is the holder of the real meaning and students essentially have to guess at it.
Most of the students at this school had a lot of experience being lectured to, then repeating back to the teacher. Their learning was pretty confined to the low-level skills described in Bloom’s taxonomy. They had rarely been asked to think about books except details that are irrelevant, or being told and then repeating the book’s meaning or moral teaching. There was very little peer-to-peer discussion or learning, no relating of literature to history or culture, really nothing beyond reciting details and answering with the correct moral of the story. No attention to the book’s style, language, or structure. No learning the meaning of the words the author used, no playfulness, no creative writing related to the texts. No analysis or synthesis. No attempts to have students answer to question “so what?”
One thing I did for that school was improve the PSAT and SAT verbal scores naturalistically in the classroom, not through a rote-learning prep class. More of my students got into better colleges.
I did a project with them that I wrote up and which was published in a professional journal, which included explanations from the students about what they had learned by engaging in their own research and discovery. This also gave them something they could reference in their college applications.
In some grades, my students could choose which books they wanted to read from a list I developed of 100 grade-appropriate options. I let them propose others, but they had to be books I had read (and also met curriculum standards). For those books, I provided options for fulfilling each of the outcome criteria once the student passed a basic quiz on the content. I don’t mean content like “What is the meaning of the green light at the end of the dock?” for Gatsby, but “Who is Buck? A. The captain of the ship, B. The narrator’s brother, C. A dog” for The Call of the Wild. You’d be surprised how many students would bomb these, because they hadn’t actually read the book before their quiz, or because of an unidentified learning disability. After passing the quiz, they chose assignments from my packet, and could propose their own.
Yes, I had units on forms of poetry, the short story, grammar, vocabulary, creative writing, essay structure, and all of that English class stuff as well. To the extent that I could, i associated these with each other so they wouldn’t be disconnected requirements floating in space. To the extent that I could, I offered choices.
I get that a student might not like Fahrenheit 451. I get that the student might not enjoy then watching the Truffaut film of it, or discussing what the filmmaker chose to emphasize, or the differences in their experience of reading and watching the same story. At that time, the tech in 451 wasn’t everyday. If I taught it today, I’d be more focused on questions about Amazon clawing back Kindle content and other topics that would bring its relevance alive. It might not work for some students. Not everyone likes the same books. That’s fine.
I’m interested to hear more about the difference between not liking a book, not being at a point in your life where the book is a good fit, and ways of teaching literature that didn’t work for you. I’m enjoying the replies to the OP that go into it more.
Yeah, well that’s life, isn’t it?
I recently had to sit through a two hour virtual webinar that included shudder breakout sessions, and despite finding it mind-numbingly boring, I had to pay attention and do the thing anyway. That’s adulthood. I hated most of what I had to read in AP English - and I was, and am, an avid, broad reader. Maybe something about my taste and my teacher’s taste just didn’t mesh. My main issue with my teacher is she was hesitant to actually say anything important about anything we read. She never pushed students to think critically. She seemed bland and opinionless about everything.
The Scarlett Letter, the Crucible (both of which I enjoyed well enough) I mean there’s a lot to be said about those, isn’t there? Mass hysteria and religious fundamentalism? Double standards and the attempt to control women’s bodies? Why have us read these if you’re just going to have a milquetoast discussion about them?
I tested out of AP English my first year and took English at the local community college but I can’t for the life of me remember what we read.
I’m bitter about that class because I was the only student in the history of the school to get 5s on the first attempt, we all agreed since I passed the exams with flying colors that I didn’t need another year of AP English, so I enrolled in a college course, and the teacher was going to give me the Senior AP English award until someone else’s parents yelled at her about it, saying I shouldn’t get it because I wasn’t in the class for both years. And the teacher and administration rolled over!
Yes I’m still mad. I was insanely competitive.
Well, i don’t think i actually liked any of the books i read in 9th grade English class. That was “American literature”. And i think a lot of the reason is that the books were over my head, and/or i didn’t understand the social environment the characters lived in well enough to understand what was good about the books. And i do blame my English teacher, but not because she didn’t give us writing lessons if the sort you describe, but rather, because she could have given us more context, which would have made those books more valuable to read.
I formed this opinion in 11th grade, when i still remembered most of the plot of American Tragedy. One of my mother’s friends was surprised I’d hated it, and in 5 minutes of explaining why she liked it, she gave me enough social context that it totally changed my relationship with the book. (I still didn’t love it, but i stopped hating it, because it suddenly made sense.)
I feel like high school students are mostly mature enough to appreciate adult literature, but still general lack the life experience and learning to understand a lot of it. So what i found most valuable in high school literature classes was teachers who provided context.
As best as i can recall, we did address that type of issue. Although i didn’t read the the crucible in high school. I read the Scarlett letter in 7th grade, with a teacher who has it in for me, but was pretty competent.
I recently read it, and was a bit disappointed. And I lived in the Congo, only a year after independence. It did confirm a bit how awful the Belgians were, but I saw that first hand.
How is F451 fantasy? The first version ran in Galaxy, which didn’t do fantasy. I can see calling Martian Chronicles fantasy to excuse the laughable science.
Moralistic for sure.
I love The Great Gatsby, but I also first read it in my 30s and understood that Fitzgerald didn’t want us to like anyone. I wouldn’t have gotten that as a teen.
I also read Jane Eyre for the first time in my 30s and enjoyed it then, too.
The Scarlet Fucking Letter and Leaves of Fucking Grass.
My main problem with The Scarlett Letter was that starting in Junior year in high school, I had it assigned once a year for four years straight.
I did get a lot of mileage out of one paper on it though, so that was nice.
In the original Middle English, or in a modern translation? (And, if the latter, which translation you read might have made a difference.)
I did have to read, and memorize, the first few lines in Middle English, but mostly we read a translation—I don’t remember which.
There are no fires anywhere for the “Firemen” to put out??. Okay Speculative Fiction.
Bradbury wrote in many genres, some cross-genre, some fantasy, some science fiction, some that blurred the lines - and even detective fiction. But I would consider the Martian chronicles (soft) sci-fi.
I honestly don’t remember much about F451. Just that it was beautifully written.
Arguably, most Science Fiction is Fantasy.
Yes, I agree, but also that’s not really how it works in practice.
I don’t actually like fantasy novels much, for some reason, but I love science fiction, and I can’t explain to you why that is, but there’s a difference.
I love everything Bradbury, though, including Something Wicked which is pretty much straight fantasy. And the first book in the trilogy, Dandelion Wine, has no science fiction and no fantasy, and actually no overarching story, yet is in my opinion the best thing he ever wrote.
By this point in my life I’ve read so much Bradbury I’ve learned that the man really did make a story out of every idea he ever had, and some of them were terrible ideas, but bless the man, he did it anyway.