School and Books

Now here’s the rant I’ve been looking forward to!

In elementary school your teacher gives you Dr. Seuss books and The Magic Treehouse books. Kids love those! They’re short and they’re not hard to understand.

In fifth grade we stepped it up a little and read books like, Frindle and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (I still love that one).
In 7th grade we moved on to My Brother Paul is Dead, They Cage the Animals at Night and we read our first biographies (I read one about Christopher Reeve).

However, then you get to 9th Grade and you read books like The Old Man and the Sea, Watership Down, and The Odyssey. We read our first plays, Romeo and Juliet, and Antigone. I thought those books were bad (there’s a reason Hemingway killed himself), but then I started 10th Grade. We read more plays; Cyrano de Bergerac, Medea, and Julius Caesar. We read Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities.

Brave New World was just strange. I don’t know about you, but at 7:30 in the morning, the last thing I want to do in my study hall is read about an orgy. I also don’t enjoy the author trying to convince us that we can’t know the truth AND be happy. That’s BS (and those are my initials, so you know it’s true).

There is a reason some books are considered “Classics”. It’s because they were good and enjoyable when they were written. I’m sure A Tale of Two Cities was great when it was published two chapters at a time in a newspaper, but if you try and make students read it all at once the only result will be sparknote quiz grades.

The summer assignment going into 10th Grade was The Count of Monte Cristo. You DO NOT give that to a group of 15 year olds and expect them to write an essay with no guidance and then give them a test on the whole book on the first day of class. It’s ludicrous!

So, if you’re an English teacher and reading this, the moral of the story is: give kids books they want to read. If you want good grades and students that pay attention, put the first Harry Potter in front of them. Give them Redwall. In elementary school, I didn’t even get to read Narnia. If you gave your tenth grade students Harry Potter as an assignment they would probably start crying with joy.

Do you know why I think this country is so stupid? It’s because the schools give us books that we don’t want to read. The end result is a generation that has the mentality that books suck. They avoid reading at every cost. If you start giving kids books they want to read, they will have the mentality that reading is good and that will create a generation that wants to read, and is ultimately smarter.

GIVE GOOD BOOKS. THEN WE READ. YOUR BOOKS BAD.

(Seriously, give them books they’ll enjoy… or they’ll eventually end up talking like that.)

(Original Post on June 28, 2011 at: http://dft.ba/-BSMeyers70 )