I have memories of a chalkboard stick figure with a "no" symbol over the private parts before we started reading Sun Also Rises, so there was no chance of misinterpretation.
That's hilarious.
I'm already on record with how disgruntled I am with the way literature has been taught at Emmett's school. Literally every novel he's read has been one about the oppressive forces of social injustice and economic determinism. They are all depressing novels, social realist, and selected for their social mores rather than literary merit.
Obviously I'm fine with the lefty social perspective but it's really turned reading in a total fucking drag for Emmett.
I think the English teachers just presume that everybody is miserable in high school and need literature that validates that. But Emmett is not by nature miserable.
I liked to read, and the general selection of books we read in high school was not great (Red Pony, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The Old Man and the Sea, The Heart of Darkness). Also, we read very few books, now that I think about it-- it seems like they read a lot more. We read 1 per year, and in 10th and 11th grade we had an outside reading from a choice of 3 books (I read Black Like Me and To Kill a Mockingbird). We just had endless short stories and poems from the Houghton Mifflin Readers.
I came away from my high school English classes with an aversion to classic literature, although that was more due to the way they were taught than the content. (However, I will never read Thomas Hardy again.) The teachers had a tendency to dissect the books down to the symbols/themes, which took a lot of potential enjoyment out of reading.
This is reminding me, too, of the parent I spoke to in my library a month or two ago. She was looking for recommendations for her daughter, who she said wasn't much of a reader. She said the girl mostly liked to reread books over and over: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, etc. I was happy to give her some new books/series to try, but I also suggested (gently) that it was actually OK if the kid just wants to reread her favorite books over and over, especially if the end goal is to have a kid who likes to read. (What I didn't say was, "I'm pretty sure telling a kid she shouldn't be reading the books she loves is a great way to turn her off reading for pleasure.")
That article is the exact opposite of my experience with reading as a teen. I inhaled novels and found nonfiction utterly uninteresting. Real people's lives? Booooooring.
I only teach nonfiction and I love it. (Not in AP lit obviously). We do mostly text sets and the occasional full length non fic. To prepare most kids for college non fiction is way more relevant. As part of class, kids read full length works of whatever outside of class, mostly fiction. I have less if an issue with nonfiction than with a strict adherence to the canon. But my course title is Expository Reading and Writing. It is the only 12th grade option other than AP Lit. Unlike Emmett's school we don't do a lot of issue novels. We just finished Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Ernest.
David, which books would you suggest instead? Where are these happy happy joyful books?
