Was Mr. Berryhill, by any chance, a hobbit himself?? That seems like a pretty hobbity name.

He would have been absolutely delighted to be called such, but he would have been a very tall, looming hobbit. He was very handy to have on hand when a teacher was needed to intimidate a football player who was acting up. His classroom was at the intersection of two main hallways, and hearing him bellow would make everyone freeze.

And that random unit on The Bible As Literature, i.e. Make Sure The Heathens Can Understand The Bible References In All The Other Books We're Going To Read.

That would have been useful to me.

The only age questionable thing I recall is Niecelet reading Johnny Got His Gun. But she rolled with it. Ad I'm not sure I'm old enough for that book.

In my high school Junior lit class, we read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. There is nothing more depressing than that book.

I remember nothing else that we read except Great Expectations, and that one I remember because I read most of it aloud to the class. I didn't like the story but I liked reading it to them, and they liked it too.

The teacher had some idea that we should read other books besides the "classic" high school lit. So we read, apparently, totally forgettable books, and I've never read most of those classics. Oh, but Jane Eyre. Another depressing book. Codependence used to be an admirable trait in a woman. Well, still is, really.

I like Jane Eyre. She refused to marry the doofus, and there's the lovely, quietly triumphant "Reader, I married him."

On phone, so excuse typos, but I truly didn't mean to imply that TBE isn't about racism or that a book dealing with racism has to have white characters. I'm horrified that it seemed I meant that. I was trying to express my frustration with the fact that there's a lot more to the book than just Racism is Bad, which I feel grossly oversimplifies the complexity of the novel. Without a doubt, it is at its core looking at the effects of racism. It's many other things too. And beautifully, poignantly crafted.

Anyway, I am sorry Emmet's love of reading has been damaged by a crippling series of tragic novels. There are many ways to teach tragic novels--which, true, are often also the most compelling-- without it becoming a miserable experience, and it doesn't sound like his teachers have balanced that well. I know I work very hard to make my curriculum pleasurable, and I check in with my students constantly to make sure we are having fun exploring even when the content is painful, and I do try to break up the texts I teach. Context and personal what-ifs also help this process. It makes me sad when this happens to students like him.

Coffee (now with real keyboard):

And because I can't let this go without clarifying what I now read as my very cryptic comment about students not realizing that characters in TBE aren't primarily white... I meant that when some teachers teach the oversimplified "Racism is Bad" theme, students begin to oversimplify those books as well and start thinking in terms of "Whites are Bad and Blacks are Victims" rather than seeing nuance in how racism has historically affected identity--not just Whites vs. Blacks, but within African American communities--and how the characters in books like TBE aren't just symbolic but are depictions of real people in all their complexity and confusion.

As I said, I clearly was very unclear in my initial post and am mortified that it came across that way. I apologize for any unintended offense.

I apologize for any unintended offense.

I was never offended, Pix, and have always admired the way you teach. It's just that while The Bluest Eye is a more complex investigation of how racism damages, it still conforms to the broader outline I noted.

I know Emmett is going to be turned off when he gets to the girl being raped by her father. I know he will turn away from this book. From his point of view it's the same fucking thing. There will be no nuances absorbed. It will be miserable and he will have a miserable experience for bothering to care about these characters.

He has learned one thing in English class: literature makes him feel shitty. He doesn't want to feel shitty so he doesn't want to read it. It's pretty simple really.

And I'm not complaining that he occasionally has to deal with books that are uncomfortable or dark in theme. It's that more than half of the books he's read during his entire time in high school have had this particular shape to them. Like three-quarters of them. They just kind of circle around the dial of minority possibility pounding on this theme.

I mean, hard things happen in My Antonia but your take away there is Strong Women Are Cool and Often Overcome Their Circumstances. It's not socioeconomic racially determined fatalism.

It's too bad Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue won't be in the curriculum before he graduates. That's a book that might mean something to him.

The only comedies they ever teach are Shakespeare. And there's such a huge bias towards Naturalism. A generation who grew up watching Invader Zim and the Simpsons would have no problem understanding the meta-snark of Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49. Or Portnoy's Complaint. Teenagers would definitely get a book about masturbation.

Funny thing: I read Great Gatsby in high school (on my own, like Catcher in the Rye it was not part of our curriculum, too much of a yankee sensibility or somesuch) and thought it incredibly boring. All I remembered about the book a couple decades later was something about white flannel clothing. Re-read it last month and it was AMAZING. Heart-wrenching, actually. It just makes more sense to my adult self and was utterly irrelevant to my teenage self. Now I'm wondering how many other books I need to read again....

I had a similar experience with Gatsby.

And other things, like Wuthering Heights, were different when I read them as adults than when I did so as a teenager, too.

I discovered Philip Roth when I was Emmett's age. Not only did it amaze me by being so dirty, the other language felt like language I recognized. Roth characters are just folks, you know, more Yiddish-inflected than mine, but that was a big fuckin'deal. And, strangely enough. excellent preparation for the Anthony Weiner scandal...Weiner's a Roth character. Except if he were, photographing it would shrink it, or steal its soul or something, so in the press conferences, he'd apologize for something he no longer really has. "Goodbye Columbus" is erudite enough to study in school, I'd guess.(Portnoy's my favorite, too, but the school board would freak.)