"Here at the LBC, we're about celebrating books and writers we love..."
I'm still waiting for a struggling book, writer or press to actually be mentioned over at the Lit-Blog Coop. So far all the lit-hens are doing is cackling about themselves.
Wait, Gwenda mentioned Holly Black. Okay, Gwen, you're excused.
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Glancing at the teacher's contribution on the LBC thing, it does rather occur to me that the schools themselves might be responsible for killing off reading as a liesure activity.
ReplyDeleteFor example, we were force fed Dickens and Steinbeck. All very literary and clever, but bascially a chore. The one is rambling an indegistable, the other downright depressing: "Loser meets chance for escape. Loser loses chance at escape. Loser is ground in dirt."
If I had not come from a household where people read books for kicks, the experience of school English classes might well have put me off them.
Taking this further off topic...
ReplyDeleteOr what about Moby Dick for that matter which is NOT about rapper/singer Moby and his ahem you know what. So disappointing, I'm sure, to students everywhere.
I did want to add however, that I was one of those freak students who liked Chaucer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Moliere, and mythology. Dickens was okay and Steinbeck didn't do much for me, but I found more works I loved than hated in English classes. But I did hate Moby Dick, the only book I never read--I bought the Cliff Notes for that fish carcass.
Heck I did my H.S. senior thesis on Waiting for Godot and existensialism (sp?) which I don't remember anything about now (I'm not as smart as I used to be).
Was I really that strange?
M
No stranger than me: I quietly read my way through Marlow and Beowulf while the class slogged through Great Expectations. I also read Malory's Le Morte De Arthur when I was about ten years old
ReplyDeleteHowever, that was my choice.
Given the state of reading, English classes should spend at least 50% of the available time looking at modern popular fiction and discussing what makes it tick.
Great books should be discovered, not made compulsory reading. Hook a kid's attention by giving them a taste of the work, and if the story is solid, they will hunt down the book themselves. Assign it and threaten them with an F if they don't read it, and their curiosity shuts down.
ReplyDeleteWe used to have a reading program when I was in elementary school where the host would read a chapter from a book on a classroom TV. The program would show illustrations and photos during the reading to suit the text, but mainly it was just a read-to-the-kids program. I can't remember the name of the program, but through it I discovered writers like Jane Austen, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Chaucer and H.G. Wells.
>Great books should be discovered, >not made compulsory reading.
ReplyDeleteThat probably says it all.