Fighting City Hall...

[seawasp]

... or at least school administration.

I have finally had it up to HERE with the choices given by the schools for summer reading, so I just sent this:

I've ignored this for the past few years, but I am finally driven to demand:

Why is it that EVERY reading list chosen for children, including the current list for my 10th-grader Chris, seems CALCULATED to drive kids away from actually LIKING reading? Selecting things ranging from bittersweet down to "commit suicide after reading, it's happier that way"? I would have hoped we'd have gotten away from that since I was a kid and had marvelous (note that this is extreme sarcasm) material such as "Lord of the Flies" shoved down my throat. Had I not already cultivated a love of books long before I entered school, I would give even odds that school would have solidified a long-standing hatred of the printed word.

Really, children don't need to be fed on a diet of "realistically grim" material. Upbeat, cheerful, and optimistic books not only are easier to read, they help cultivate a similar attitude in the kids. And most importantly, an attitude that maybe books aren't to be dreaded as assignments.

At least offer some choices that HIT the bright side of the spectrum, rather than the brightest one being something peeking out of a closet at dusk.

I don't expect to CHANGE things, but I feel somewhat better in having finally SAID something.

Comments

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Courtesy of my e-book reader and FREE BOOKS from Project Gutenburg, I am reading classics I avoided reading as a student, or re-reading some I did (and was bored by). I have also re-read many things I liked as an adolescent/college student. I find a mature adult perspective changes my attitude remarkably.

Some of my old favorites from college turned out to be far more... mediocre than I remembered back then (that's you, Michael Moorcock). I am less tolerant of crappy pro writing since I started writing myself, and saw way too much of it in fanfic.

Some of them have aged like fine wine, turning out far better than I remembered back then (that's you, Robert E. Howard). As a young woman, I devoured genre books for the action and the "gee-whiz" factor (in movies, we call it "eye-candy"); as an older adult, I more appreciate interesting characters and settings.

I find I like many of the classics *now*; I would not have enjoyed them as an adolescent or college student. I recently read Wuthering Heights, which is a totally awesome train wreck of dysfunctional characters. The author very carefully keeps your sympathies from battening too hard on to characters doomed to destruction, and preserves the characters she finally does let us like. I greatly enjoyed the book. I would have hated it as a student and not "gotten" it. I rather doubt I'd push it on adolescents in general, as I think they'd miss half of what's going on in that story, and care about less.

I have yet to re-read The Great Gatsby to see if it still sucks as much as it did in high school, though.

Also, Shakespeare's tragedies are far more fun seen in the theater than read as scripts. My then-adolescent daughter and the rest of the family really enjoyed a kabuki-style performance of "Titus Andronicus". There's something about that over-the-top Greek-style tragedy done as a Japanese kabuki or noh drama that just fit, perfectly. I suspect actual over-the-top Greek tragedies, like "Medea", would be cool as noh or kabuki.

(Also, if you educate your children in the classics, they'll know which stories major comic-book plot arcs were stolen from... like X-Men's Madelyne Prior arc vis-a-vis Euripides' "Medea").

[seawasp]

Well, we may have very different perceptions. My reading preferences really haven't shifted much since I was sixteen or seventeen. Certainly not to the point that a book I felt sucked boulders through a garden hose would do anything differently now. I think I may have encountered two things in my life where that kind of change happened (but I can't offhand think of any examples). Wuthering Heights is clearly going to suck at any age, from my point of view. I don't WANT dysfunctional characters in my reading, unless they're few, far between, and mostly villains, thanks very much.

And seeing ANYTHING in the theater is far LESS fun than reading it as a script, for me. I can't imagine WHY people go to theaters. I've done plenty of ACTING, and I know why I like playing on a stage, or singing to an audience, but speaking honestly I have no idea WHY there's an audience. I can't understand anything people are saying most of the time, I can't really see what they're doing, and in a play that has any fanciful content, well, dude, if I want to see clumsy representations of magical events I can always LARP and be in the middle of the action.

So the other problem (which this reading list ALSO points up) is that YMMV, and MV drastically. SOME readers might think reading angst by the ton is the best thing since sliced bread, but others will think it's more fun to start carving their initials in their arms with a dental drill.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Re:YMMV - I was fortunate in that my high school summer reading lists were more "read 5 from this list of 20+ books" than "read these 5, period." One could pick books that had a chance to be interesting, then. Lit classes would cover specific books that you had to read, which is why I still hate "The Great Gatsby" and WTH did they always pick "Julius Caesar" or "Romeo & Juliet"? I would like to have covered some of Shakespeare's other plays; he wrote a few.

Huh. Never met anyone with that reaction to theater before. Well, different strokes and all that.

As for Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is pretty clearly the villain ("byronic hero" my aft! What moron came up with that analysis?), and he is magnificently dysfunctional, driven by passion and obsession and vindictive hatred. Think of the Count of Monte Cristo gone too far over the line...

A book fascinating for its characters, but not to everyone's taste. My younger self would have disdained it for the lack of obvious action or obvious supernatural horror, and wondered why everyone acted like such idiots and couldn't just get along like sensible people. My older self appreciates stories with characters that act like flawed human beings really do.

[kyokimarie.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing people say 'summer reading list'. Maybe my school was strange? We didn't have required summer reading. The books we read we were forced to read during the school year, and there was no list to choose from. The teacher passed out copies and said "everyone will read this in the next few weeks, chapters such and such due by so and so date" and that was that. There was no selection, no choice. If you'd already read it, too bad- read it again. If it gave you nightmares, you were just overreacting.

Was my school strange that we had no choice in our reading?

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

What you describe is what I had during the school year--required reading for literature class. We'd all study the same book/play/short story and it would be the topic of lessons and discussion.

We also had summer reading lists--that is, at the end of the year or possibly during the summer, we'd be given a list of books that we were supposed to read some number of before next school year started.