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Originally Posted by JD Gumby
Personally, I rather like 'em, at least the first 6 (up to "The Emerald City of Oz"). After that, the "Please let me stop writing Oz books!" really starts to show. :P (yes, I am an adult and I read them about 6 months ago for the first time ever. Yay Project Gutenberg!  ) |
I read my daughter all of Baum's Oz books. I'm reading them again to her. I did read the first of Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz books, but I wasn't impressed. The tone felt off. In Baum's later Oz books, the sense of danger disappears. In the earlier Oz books, people can die, but later on, no one dies, unless they are "destroyed", which apparently takes quite an awful lot to do.
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Sure, but they should be assigning books for that purpose that will have a better chance of keeping the audience's attention, rather than books that will have half the class (rough estimate, based on my own school days) seeking out the Coles Notes (licensed out to be Cliff's Notes down in the States a decade after they were created in Canada ) for the assigned book.
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The point of a high school literature class is to demonstrate that they can read and understand a book. No one is suggesting that Captain Underpants would be an appropriate book for a high school literature class. Students are going to get more out of a book that they enjoy than one that they don't.
There is an upside to the students all reading the same book; the teacher knows the material and can judge whether or not they read and understood the text. Or at least if they read and understood the Cliff Notes. There are always students who watch the movie instead, and they can get burned if the movie content they reference isn't in the book.
Some teachers are overzealous, and their sure that if they just expose children to classics that they will fall in love with them. Some students do, others just learn to hate them. And students don't always pick up what the teacher wishes them to get out of the book, but that's the nature of books. I've heard from a number of people who hated the books that they were forced to read in high school, but liked them when they chose to read them as adults.
Ideally, students would be picking books that they like that at least have some degree of quality, Captain Underpants would not qualify. Those students who wanted more of a challenge could pick more difficult books. I admit it does make grading more difficult.