Mailman: I’m surprised. Daughter’s a high school senior in the suburban Seattle and they read about a dozen books per year. In fact, there’s a required summer list (the kids choose 3 of 15 books on the list) that they’re tested on early in the fall.
The other surprise (maybe) is that everyone’s cited fiction. No non-fiction has been put on the despicable list yet.
tanookie: Yup–can and do assign reports; the power of a class talking about the same book though, is hard to equal. A good discussion lets good readers talk about what they noticed, and shows less able readers how they might approach reading deeper into a text. You can almost see the light bulb going on at times. Reports…? They usually feel pretty forced to me, and cookie cutter-like.
Mooney252:
I teach 8th grade, in a district where the junior high curriculum was gutted by the departing high school-bound teachers as the middle school was being created. They left behind only curriculum that they loathed themselves, i.e. grammar, grammar, grammar, and the occasional novel that was a pain to teach. And since I’ve been here, it’s been like pulling teeth to get new books added to the list. We successfully exploited the horror of the Holocaust in order to get copies of Maus some years ago, but since then it’s been a long dry spell. Consequently, I teach public domain stuff I find on the internet, such as Shakespeare, and spend a lot of time reading about and discussing current events, and then writing lots of essays. It’s a compromise I can live with, but I would love to have a great book or two that would round out their school year.
How could I forget her? :smack:
Oh yeah, I repressed all memory of her and her literary fly shit.
“The Wind in the Willows”
By all that’s holy that must be THE most boring * book? * written since the creation of crow shit
I really like A Separate Peace…I read it every few years, and it makes me cry at the end (not cos it’s a bad book, smarty)…oddly enough, I hated it at school (age 13) cos when the teacher asked which book we’d like to study next, all the girls in my class were swooning over it, ‘Oh, we have to read A Separate Peace! It’s the best book.’ I didn’t win many points by asking, truly baffled, ‘A separate piece of what?’ I honestly didn’t know that was the title of the book…
Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors, but I cannot imagine having to read one of her books for a class…I think that would kill my affection for her, for me. I was very fond of ‘Alias Grace’ and ran screaming in the other direction when I saw that the American Historical Review (I believe it was) had a whole issue dedicated to dissecting the novel…I don’t want to know…I’m not listening, I’m not listening, la la la la
I loved Wuthering Heights, mostly cos I thought, what a bunch of nutcases, from the very beginning…I also had a very good English teacher who drew us a family tree, and also held the Catherines in as much scorn as an English English teacher could…
I’d read Flowers for Algernon on my own at 14 or 15, and have re read it with pleasure since, but I remember a school friend in our last year was assigned the book, and she hated it – because it WAS assigned – I remember looking over her ‘study sheets’ what the teacher had made up, and thinking, can we make this book any LESS interesting…
I have to agree with an earlier comment that some of these books are just wrong to assign to teenagers – not cos of ‘short attention spans’ but rather lack of experience. I thougth Pride and Prejudice was boring dreck at 16, but when I re read it at 32, after 16 years of being alive, getting through uni, having jobs, relationships, travelling, experience, suddenly it was like a smack on the head why the book is such a delight. I’ve seen the BBC version twice (with David Rintoul as Mr Darcy) – at 16 it was just a good way to avoid class, and at 32 I was struck with how fantastic the story was, and how well acted…
add me to the list of Dickens haters. For us it was Bleak House, and man oh man is that book aptly named. I HATED herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (sp?) too, and Jane Eyre to boot. Now I LOOVE to read (mom was a librarian after all), but these books just sucked the life out of me.
I have always considered public school English lit criteria as a method of attracting people who like such work to English teaching, thus keeping them out of other, more important professions. The extreme boredom they engender is tedious, and the bad rep literature and reading gets are regrettable, but I’m sure uncounted lives have been saved by keeping those people out of work on which people’s safety, etc., depends.
I forgot about A Seperate Peace…dang.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
A. Solzhenitsyn.
A classic, I know, but I couldn’t deal with it.
Oooh, Heart of Darkness tops my list, especially since the teacher who assigned it loved Joseph Conrad and thought he was wonderful. Also, 1984–yuck.
We also had to read some pointless, idiotic story by Katherine Anne Porter in my senior year of high school—another case of being subjected to a teacher’s favorite author.
I never really liked Catcher and Gatsby*, but didn’t despise them. However, I must be the only person on the face of the earth who loves Silas Marner. Everyone else I know hated that book.
Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. Didn’t really hate it, just the only book I ever had to read for school that was really a “chore” - probably because of the interminable length and endless allegorical references. Really liked the bit the tortoise crossing the road with the seed on its back, though!