Salon: Books That should be Banned from Schools.

[Rob Lister]

Originally Posted by Keryl Raist

2% read and enjoy.

That was me. I don't remember ever being given a reading assignment I didn't at least like. Sometimes I would make editorial comments in the margins , but I mostly loved the books I was forced to read.

P.S. This reminds me of my 9th(?) grade English class. Mrs. Munns assigned us The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. During the post-assignment class discussion, she commented that the book was really a series of short stories. She asked if everyone understood that. I disagreed, saying that since there was a clear underlying thread of plot through the book, which you really wouldn't get if you read just this chapter or that, it should be considered a novel. She asked the class if anyone disagreed with me. Everyone raised their hand. She looked at me as said, "Well, Mr. Lister. It seems everyone disagrees with you." I replied, "Since you and I are the only ones that actually read the book, and I have my doubts about you, I think I can ignore their opinion." She asked me to leave the class. I got detention.

P.P.S. On mature reflection, she was right, but at least I read the damn thing.

[voracious71]

I think that the point of assigned readings is to build reading comprehension and the ability to grasp abstract concepts. Sadly, when I was in nursing school, you would not believe the number of classmates I had who had real trouble with reading something in the text and grasping it. ditto for note taking and study skills in general.

These were not stupid people in many cases( in some cases they were,lol) but if you don't build these skills early on, it often comes back to bite you in the butt later. Many things we have to do in high school are boring as hell. But, they need to be taught.

[RDaneel54]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

That was me. I don't remember ever being given a reading assignment I didn't at least like. Sometimes I would make editorial comments in the margins , but I mostly loved the books I was forced to read.

P.S. This reminds me of my 9th(?) grade English class. Mrs. Munns assigned us The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. During the post-assignment class discussion, she commented that the book was really a series of short stories. She asked if everyone understood that. I disagreed, saying that since there was a clear underlying thread of plot through the book, which you really wouldn't get if you read just this chapter or that, it should be considered a novel. She asked the class if anyone disagreed with me. Everyone raised their hand. She looked at me as said, "Well, Mr. Lister. It seems everyone disagrees with you." I replied, "Since you and I are the only ones that actually read the book, and I have my doubts about you, I think I can ignore their opinion." She asked me to leave the class. I got detention.

P.P.S. On mature reflection, she was right, but at least I read the damn thing.

She was teaching you to think for yourself, but be quiet about it.

Seriously, you were pretty gutsy.

[Rob Lister]

Originally Posted by RDaneel54

She was teaching you to think for yourself, but be quiet about it.

Seriously, you were pretty gutsy.

I got most of my education in detention!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

I got most of my education in detention!

I presume you were allowed to read while in detention?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It wasn't at my school. I just had a hippie for a Jr High science teacher in the seventies who encouraged us to read it and LoTR on our own, and devoted a small portion of class time to discussing them.

We had one of those as well, he got us reading A Clockwork Orange in an attempt to wean us off the Richard Allen skinhead books. Didn't work though because there wasn't any sequels and we were all used to having new skinhead books to read every few months.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

but if we don't teach our kids about knife fighting for fun and profit, who will? better they learn it from books and dad than on the streets.

i'd put Fight Club, both book and film, in every school. i've learned more about being a man and a citizen of the modern age from that movie than i have from anywhere else.

I agree. Kids are going to knife fight. They always have.
We don't want them to do it wrong and we need to teach them the right way.

Westside Story and The Outsiders. Even religious types discuss knife fighting such as in The Cross And The Switchblade.



You can't stop kids from knife fighting.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Phogg

...



You can't stop kids from knife fighting.

I mean what are superfriends for anyway?

[DMB]

I suppose that a lot of modern children find 19th-century prose hard to understand. It does demand a certain degree of literacy that may be missing in the younger age groups.

In a way I was lucky as a child. From a young age I had a voracious appetite for reading and so read lots of adult books without anyone telling me to. I must have been 9 or 10 when I read Ivanhoe, for example, as well as several novels by Dickens. I don't think I understood everything, but at that age I had no historical sense and tried to read everything as contemporary writing. It did at least get me used to the language. I even had Oliver Twist confiscated by a teacher because I was reading it in a geography lesson. (I went to many schools, and hated every single geography teacher I ever had. )

I thinking reading for oneself early on is one of the best ways of getting to grips with classics. It's really satisfying to be able to pick up any book in modern English (i.e. from the 16th century onwards) and be able get to grips with it.

There is simply no satisfactory general answer to the problem of getting children to like particular set books. A child can hate a book that a couple of years later they might appreciate. That is true of adult reading as well. My taste in reading has changed enormously since I was a young adult. I am now much less scholarly in my reading.

[kennyc]

I just finished reading "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne....can't say I loved the language, but definitely thought it interesting and enjoyed the story. I can certainly see how today's youth might not appreciate it.

[Keryl Raist]

Originally Posted by Darqref

The difference is all in the class presentation. Because those 50% don't bother to read, the teacher had a lot of class time devoted to plain reading. Then you add all the dissection and investigation of deeper meaning, and I was ready to walk out of class. The other class? The subject was SF, and only about 3 days total was spent on 1984, with intelligent discussion instead of rote dissection. (Then, I had to give a book report to the rest of the class about the book I read instead.)

I had a seventh grade teacher use this technique to make Huckleberry Finn horrific. On average we went through 25 pages a week. It was sheer and utter torture. I don't know if she was trying to make sure none of us would ever voluntarily read Twain again, or if she just personally hated that book, but by the time she was done 30 kids loathed Huckleberry Finn.

The kicker, I read it in two days, and liked it. Until I had to spend all that time on it. Completely killed that book, and any joy I had at English classes.

[Keryl Raist]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

P.S. This reminds me of my 9th(?) grade English class. Mrs. Munns assigned us The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. During the post-assignment class discussion, she commented that the book was really a series of short stories. She asked if everyone understood that. I disagreed, saying that since there was a clear underlying thread of plot through the book, which you really wouldn't get if you read just this chapter or that, it should be considered a novel. She asked the class if anyone disagreed with me. Everyone raised their hand. She looked at me as said, "Well, Mr. Lister. It seems everyone disagrees with you." I replied, "Since you and I are the only ones that actually read the book, and I have my doubts about you, I think I can ignore their opinion." She asked me to leave the class. I got detention.

P.P.S. On mature reflection, she was right, but at least I read the damn thing.

I'd say any teacher who doesn't try to refute an intelligent argument with an intelligent deserves no respect.

Instead of engaging with you, she shot you down by a vote. She deserved a whole lot less respect than you showed her.

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Out of curiosity... what age were you when it was assigned? I wasn't thrilled with the novel (much to the dismay of all my classmates) at the time, either. But not because of it's length or tediousness; anthropomorphism just always rubbed me the wrong way. Even as a child (though I didn't know the term for it until much later).

Just as a minor point of interest, and perhaps an illustration of how we are perhaps encouraged to take "the" book of the time too seriously, the Royal Shakespeare Company members adopted this as a fun creed, talking in (rabbit, I suppose is an accurate title ? ) the language, and adopting characters for themselves.
The craze didn't last too long, but it must have led to some strange conversations in the wings while in full flight......!

[witeowl]

Originally Posted by RDaneel54

She was teaching you to think for yourself, but be quiet about it.

Seriously, you were pretty gutsy.

Respectfully expressing a differing opinion is gutsy? Well, thank goodness I have a ton of gutsy students, then. Dissent is the root of some of the best discussions in my class, whether it's genuine difference of opinion or dissent out of misunderstanding.

Originally Posted by Keryl Raist

I'd say any teacher who doesn't try to refute an intelligent argument with an intelligent deserves no respect.

Instead of engaging with you, she shot you down by a vote. She deserved a whole lot less respect than you showed her.

Yeah, the vote kills me (as does her statement that she thinks that zero of her students completed the assigned reading). I may look for agreement/disagreement by a show of hands just to see who's on what side so that I can call on students and lead a discussion. My (college educated as opposed to middle-school educated) view normally wins out, of course, but by then it's no longer "my" view. Nonetheless, more than zero conversations have ended up without being fully settled. And that's ok, so long as everyone has the ability to reasonably defend his/her argument.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I presume you were allowed to read while in detention?

I was. Teachers never knew what to do with kids who read.

I had had a few detentions through primary and middle school that were usually during lunch period or something. But I only had one detention during my time in high school (which is quite shocking when I think about how I spent my high school career - mostly deliberately causing problems for the administration and protesting), and I remember it well.

I got a detention for "insubordination." I was actually quite proud of that. There was a stupid rule, and since it was stupid, I refused to follow it. Nothing crazy. Of everything I did that could have or should have earned me a detention, this was probably the most mundane.

At my high school, detention was on Saturdays at 7am. I took the slip home to my dad, told him what happened, and told him the time and place I'd need to be there.

He laughed, called up my school, and said "You expect me to get up before sunrise on a Saturday so I can take my daughter to detention over some ridiculous idiocy you guys have about how far apart students must be seated? I'm sorry, but I have better things to do, like sleep. Either come up with a time that is within the realm of sanity or she's not going to your stupid detention over nothing at all."

So they set up another time for me; right after school, in the office. I got there and asked if I could read. The administrator stared me like I'd grown another head. "I... I guess?"

An hour later, they told me I could go. My reply? "One sec, almost at the end of the chapter." There was a groan from the administrator - the one who'd given me the detention - as he realized that he had essentially done nothing but provided me a nice chair to hang out in.

In detention, I was not allowed to listen to music, take out my phone, or do my homework. I wasn't allowed to do anything that could be seen as productive or enjoyable. The goal was to make you simply sit there and be driven half-mad from the boredom.

But they never considered that they might have a student who finds reading enjoyable. I don't know what's worse: the idea of what that says about how the adults look at reading, or the idea of what that says about how few kids actually do read these days.