Dear Debbie and others who are interested,
I have had heaps of offlist correspondence about this. to which I have responded,
but your message
has sparked a response to the list.
You say you feel ignorant because you have not read the books that "everyone else
read in high
school" and that you are now catching up.
How important is it to have read "the classics"? As Ron asked, "[Is there] any
literature that
should be common knowledge, and therefore required reading?
I have not read "a classic" since I was in high school in the 60s (in one of those
Grade 10-Oliver
Twist scenarios) and many of the books that are mentioned on this list as
must-reads I have never
heard of, let alone have access to or the desire to find them (your "Native Son" is
one of them)
-but I am never without a book close by. I believe that neither my education (I
have two Masters
degrees in a country where one is exceptional) nor my ability with the English
language (albeit
being a Kiwi/Aussie mix) have suffered. I reached the top of my profession as I
chose to take it
and have many articles and several books published and current contracts for
several more.
One of the reasons I have not read "the classics" is because we were forced to read
them in a
one-size-fits-all situation and because I did not have the maturity, life
experience and background
knowledge of the times in which they were written, I did not understand them and
was completely
turned off and just never returned.( I wonder how much of your current enjoyment is
because of the
richness of your life's experiences that you can now bring to the text) I suspect
my story is very
much that of many of today's students, although I actually kept reading. With the
exception of
Othello (enforced reading in an English Lit unit at university) I could not tell
you even the
storyline of one Shakespeare play. I can go to my grave quite happily knowing that,
and I am neither
ignorant nor less of a person because of it.
Part of the reason for my being anti one-size-fits-all comes from personal
experience (beyond my
high school days)..
One of the worst cases was when my friend's daughter's class was required to read
and analyse Wendy
Orr's "Peeling the Onion", a brilliant novel about recovering from a car smash, yet
there was no
allowance made for the fact that she was still having therapy having survived just
such a thing.
Another friend had just lost her son when her daughter's class assigned novel was
on the theme of
losing a family member. It was too soon and too raw to be anything but
distressing.. (I won't
betray my son's trust about his experiences with another novel that meant that he
has not picked up
a book in 18 years.) I just wonder how many "hurts" are re-opened for our kids
because we insist
they read a particular title when, with forethought and a different approach to
planning, the same
objectives could be achieved with a wider selection of titles.
This might help you understand why I have such an issue with this approach.
This is getting a bit long but in Part 2 I will offer some suggestions for how you
might still have
novel studies but in a slightly different way.
Barbara
Barbara Braxton
Teacher Librarian
COOMA NSW 2630
AUSTRALIA
E. barbara.288@bigpond.com
Together we learn from each other
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