augmentedfourth wrote:It's funny, when I was in high school, I hated the vast majority of assigned reading. Obviously, no English/literature course can cover alllll the "classics", but it always felt like my friends in other classes were reading the books I wanted to read, while my class...did not. When I was in college, I eventually went to the bookstore and picked up copies of the books that I felt I should have read (To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, etc.), and left to my own devices, I actually wound up really liking most of them. Sometimes I wonder if I went back and revisited books like The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick and reread them at my leisure I'd get more out of them, but right now, I just don't have the time.
I will add that when I went back to read the books I thought I missed out on, I was a little lukewarm Catcher in the Rye. I think that's one of those books where you have to be at a certain age the first time you read it to really love it, and by the time I got to it, I was probably too old.
That's a good point on both of these. I remember being interested in a lot of the books our classes didn't actually teach. It really is funny, but it's just hard to get excited about heavy reading that's forced on you, especially when you're fifteen or whatever. I couldn't even sit still at that time, much less give serious consideration to the social implications of Julius Caesar or Hamlet or whatever. But yeah, I haven't actually read Catcher in the Rye yet, so I'll be curious to see how I like it when I finally read it. It definitely seems to be an age thing. I remember really liking The Outsiders as a kid, probably because it was a teen thing.
But yeah, Hukos, I really do feel strongly about the fact that the way we teach English and literature in this country is broken. I hate math and I've always had a thing for English, but even for me some of the heavier stuff was difficult. It just seems to me that expecting kids of high school age to read and digest all of these extremely demanding literary works placed squarely in the milieu of a very foreign century and culture, like Shakespeare, for example, from a very different period of the English language when it was just emerging into the modern form, a form of the language given serious study by trained linguists with a heavy dose of completely foreign and incomprehensible vocabulary, is insane.
Most of the kids I went to school with could not comprehend a word of this stuff and absolutely hated English class, and ultimately learned pretty much nothing. I understand that there's a canon of English literature and ideally school districts want to teach the classics to students at a bare minimum, but when the students are completely left behind and retain nothing it seems to me that our educational system is failing. I've been encouraged by the fact that a lot of teachers, especially younger teachers, are now apparently using graphic novels like Watchmen alongside more contemporary literary works to introduce kids to more advanced literature. I think it might be worthwhile to choose one great past literary work for the semester, whether Shakespeare or whatever, devote more time to it, and focus on it in a more relaxed way, giving the students more time to take it in and really understand it, instead of rushing things along the way most schools seem to do.