In Defense of School Books

[sistermagpie]

So there was this article about a middle school teacher who, instead of assigning a book for the class to read, told every kid to pick a book they wanted. And this led to, among other things, a blog post that stood up against class-assigned reading. The post contained a lot of criticisms of school-assigned lit that I'd heard before, and some of

Comments

[go_back_chief]

I saw that article as well, and the idea of kids chosing their own books didn't bug me. But I thought that the article ignored an important compromise: have the class reading list be a mix of kid picks PLUS the classics.

That's pretty much how it was when I was in school anyway, and from looking at the sortiment at the high school I worked at last term, it still seems to be. Of course, the books of "our own choice" would rarely be an entirely free choice, more like we'd have a list of books that we could choose from, or we were supposed to pick a book by certain authors or certain eras or even certain publishers, but the element of own choice was definitely there. And both then and now the teachers would mix real classics with more "popular at the time books". If anything has changed they're more openminded about the modern books now (I don't remember my own teachers ever assigning me fantasy books, for instance) but the classic list seems to be pretty much identical.

[sistermagpie]

Right--and I think that's a great way to do it, though there's also times when everybody studying X book is fine too. I can't remember any group study of an assigned book was ever that traumatic for me. It's not like I haven't picked horrible books for myself sometimes too.

[conuly]

If you read the article, the kids were being steered towards more "weighty" novels based on their previous picks - one kid was headed towards I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, another was given To Kill a Mockingbird, that sort of thing.

[sistermagpie]

I should say, I didn't have a problem with the article either--that particular idea didn't seem harmful to me at all. I was more reacting to responses to the article that I'd seen that were about all these other things. With the original teacher in the article I didn't get the impression she agreed with all these ideas at all. She was just trying an interesting approach.

But I totally agree with your approach to reading in general. It's funny sometimes the way people talk about books that would be assigned as if they're all going to be similar and not like books you read for pleasure, but really it's like you said--some of them you might love, others you might not like or just not really remember.