Mister Cow Cow writes “washingtonpost.com To be sure, pushing some students to challenge themselves is important, educators say. But there are points where kids read books before they can truly comprehend them and then lose the beauty of the work.
If adults liked to read books that were exceedingly difficult, they’d all be reading Proust.
Most don’t.
So why, reading experts ask, do schools expect children to read — and love to read — when they are given material that is frequently too hard for them?”
great question
I have been wondering this for years.
Here’s some of what I had to read my senior year of high school: “Madame Bovary”, “Canterbury Tales”, two or three Shakespeare plays, Plato’s “Republic”, etc.
What the hell good is that going to do a 17 year old? I realize that the purpose is to get them ready for college but to that end I would have been better off learning to carb.
HA! Joking. I learned to carb in 10th grade.
Sorry, what I meant was if they had slowed the hell down and concentrated more on the deep reading of a few more accessible works (“All Quiet On The Western Front” maybe) that might have been better training.
We keep a collection of the local high school’s summer reading and the stuff that’s on there is hard friggin’ core. Ishiguro, Proust, lesser Dickens, Mann, Eliot, Hardy, hard stuff from the last 10 years. I’m sure some of them can hack it and a stretch is good. But, damn.
sometimes I want these people off my side
Based on the blurb, I was all set to completely agree with this article. I get very frustrated when 11-year-olds are expected to read Midsummer Night’s Dream in the original early modern, as if giving them a Western Canon text which would be hard for them to understand even in contemporary English will somehow make them smarter or more literate. I get frustrated when great works of middle grade and young adult literature are brushed aside so that middle school and high school students can read only those Western canon texts which have adult content matter which might not even be accessible to them yet.
But the article takes things too far. Librarians think Bridge to Terabithia‘s themes of death and gender roles should be kept away from elementary school students? What librarians are these? (And in what way exactly are Bridge to Terabithia‘s 30-years-out-of-date gender subversiveness — that is, that girls can be tomboys and boys can like painting — even vaguely risque to modern six year olds?)
There are also valid arguments for using graphic literature in the classroom, but there are plenty of valid arguments against using graphic literature in the classroom. The article’s presentation of “well, they are relevant to students, so they should be in the classroom” is shallow, lacking in subtlety, and not representative of all of the issues at stake.
Expectations?
From the article:
“The average fifth-grade student in Detroit and Baltimore, for example, reads at a third-grade level, he said, but schools still give them fifth-grade core reading and social studies texts.”
Umm, I don’t think that this is totally out of line but obviously those students who are reading below grade level shoud be getting extra help. I know they are probably not and THAT is the problem, not having reasonable expectations of abilities.
Expecting a high schooler to read and understand Proust is a little different than expecting a 5th grader to read on grade level.
Also, I haven’t read Beloved so I’m open to hearing from those who have but from what I know of the book I wouldn’t put it on a middle school reading list. Probably upper-level high school but definitely not middle school.