Must be something in the air.

[anghara]

I keep on coming up against things I HVE TO RESPOND TO. Because, well, as the cartoon has it, "someone is wrong on the Internet".

The latest culprit is THIS article,by a middle school teacher, which has my hackles standing up on end. It's the usual "classics vs. genre trash" debate, but oy VEY, not from an English teacher, not from someone who

Comments

[joycemocha]

As I commented to jaylake, there's a hidden and unmentioned agenda here, namely the national Common Core standards due to be implemented nationwide and used with the "Smarter Balance" assessment. The CC standards promote nonfiction reading almost to the exclusion of literature (60 or 70% of the classroom readings are supposed to be nonfiction) and everything that teacher wrote falls right in line with that requirement.

IE, she's an apologist for the system. Only she doesn't disclose that connection.

[sartorias]

You beat me to it.

[birdsedge]

I'm with you every step of the way on this. Let kids read indiscriminately for fun so they can develop the reading habit. Sure, guide them to books you think they'll enjoy, but for goodness' sake don't stuff must-be-good-for-you classics down their throats. I hated being force-fed Dickens and Hardy - even into my mid-teens for exams. I've never recovered from my Hardyphobia - I loathe it to this day

[mmy_me]

My twelve-year-old daughter is a voracious reader, and I have never put any values on what she reads. She tends to fantasy, but will go through just about anything. She picked up Tom Sawyer, which she enjoyed a lot, and I gently pointed out that maybe 'the classics' are thus called for a reason, and sometimes it can be fun to read a book and try to figure out why, exactly, it's considered such an important work.

She thought about that, then went and got Moby Dick. And loved it likewise. And she _gets_ it.

I think she'll do okay, without any kind of mandated reading list.

[dsgood]

Among the trashy books I read as a child were Tom Sawyer, Detective and Tom Sawyer Abroad.

[dsgood]

If I recall correctly, "The Red Badge of Courage" was written by someone who had no actual combat experience. Better, I think, for kids to read war fiction by authors who actually knew what they were talking about.

[dichroic]

Funny, I was just telling someone in another context that all I know about the Wars of the Roses was learned from The Daughter of Time and . It's true that only the former is "genre trash", but I certainly wouldn't have read the latter without it. And I wouldn't have read it without The Murders of Richard III, also 'genre trash'.

Other books that taught me history include .... well, it's a very long list. But most of them are fantasy, and a sizeable number of those are YA fantasy, leading off with The House of Arden and A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and whichever Danny Dunn book had him meeting Ben Franklin.

[dichroic]

Also, I think there is such a thing as reading a book too young. Thank goodness I never had to read Jane Austen in school, because somehow I bounced off her works until I was in my 20s, when a door magically opened and let me fall in. I suspect this is what happened to you with David Copperfield (which I have just finished, as an audiobook during exercise, and loved).

On the other hand, I couldn't bring myself to read any Hemingway when it was assigned in English class, and I suspect that's not so much about age as that I'm just the wrong audience for him. (I passed the tests due to the class discussion, not by actually reading the book. Same for The Red Badge of Courage.)

[anghara]

Yes I think I hit that particular wall when I tried to read Heinlein before I had the mindset for it.

[muttering_ogre]

The second time I read A Canticle for Leibowitz, I wondered how much of it I had understood the first time.

On a tangent, I listened to Tom Lehrer frequently from an early age, with an unfortunate effect: by the time I understood all the jokes, they were no longer fresh.