Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
In support of what you are saying, I remember being assigned a book that I hated. After graduating, I was desperate for something to read, and found my old book and reread it. This time around I loved it. I wasn't enough older for my tastes to change. The only change was that I wasn't forced to read it.
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This.
What's also important is how it's presented by the teacher; a bad teacher can kill a good book.
Take
Beowulf (in
Annie Hall, recall Alvy's line "Just don't take any course where they make you read
Beowulf."). Easy to make the assigned reading into torture. Yet, in my 8th grade daughter's language arts class, the instructor kicked off the semester with
Beowulf, making it the entry point into a larger lesson plan about the hero's journey, how ideas in
Beowulf show up in modern literature and cinema, and how it relates to some of the basic truths about humanity.