Does Veeky Forums agree?

#3. You're Not Allowed to Talk Smack About the Books

>Even if you love literature and had a pretty good high school reading experience, you probably can agree that at least one book you were asked to read (in your opinion) sucked. There might be excessive exposition, laughable imagery, characters intended to be sympathetic who are grating or characters intended to be grating who are so grating that you can't pay attention to the story (Holden Caulfield).
There are very few classrooms where you are encouraged to express this point of view, because I think a lot of teachers feel like if you admit to the book not being that great, then you open yourself up to the kids arguing that they shouldn't have to read it. I don't think it has to go there. I think teaching well-reasoned smack talk has a lot of value.

>The stated goal of teaching literature isn't just to get kids familiar with famous books; it's also supposed to teach kids how to discuss stories and write intelligently. You teach them how to find symbolism and metaphors and hero's journeys and character arcs in an assigned book so that when they consume other media (other books, movies, long personal lies told by disturbed family members, etc.) in the future, they can point all those things out to explain why they're good or bad.
>And to be totally realistic, most of the practical application of this would go to movies, because more people watch and discuss movies (or TV shows) than read books these days. This seems bad at first, because there are a lot of terrible movies and TV shows out there today. But there's a lot of very smart criticism and discussion of bad movies. I've mentioned Red Letter Media and their reviews before. You wouldn't think there would be anything to learn from the vacuous Star Wars prequels, but apparently there's a lot to point out about what specific elements of story and drama are missing, and a lot more intelligent observations to be pulled out of the movies than went into them, somehow.
>So of course you don't want to let the kids get away with writing an essay about an assigned book saying, "It sucks, it was boring, Heathcliff and Catherine were stupid and annoying," even if you admit that Wuthering Heights is a piece of shit. But what if you let them write an essay that goes negative on the book as long as they make reasoned, intelligent points that show they understood the author's intentions and the methods they used to achieve them, and then explain why they think the author failed at this?

If I haddn't already discovered books I loved before highschool/middleschool, I wouldve fucking hated books for making me read trash like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies

Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 are pretty baller though

>Sometimes they let kids read one or two "fun" books (like the Hunger Games books or something) in a concession to try to keep them into reading. But they treat them like candy, a necessary evil that you should spend as little time on as possible. Maybe you give a book report, but otherwise they don't want to waste time on that popular crap.
>The argument is that fun and popular books are too shallow to get much out of. They're not going to have as many themes, or new vocabulary words, or symbols, or unusual storytelling techniques as a classic novel. And that's probably true in a lot of cases. The point they're missing here is that most high school classes never even get close to digging out all the analyzable stuff from a book, because of time limits or limits of the students' reading level. So imagine books as oil wells, full of tarry, black, flammable ideas to analyze. War and Peace has like a ton of light sweet crude going 5 miles deep and Jurassic Park is about, I don't know, 10 feet deep.

>From my experience, even the average honors class only ends up drilling down about 9 feet. Tolstoy sure has a lot more to offer, but you're never going to get to it.

>Maybe that's a good experience to have -- to know that there are books that are totally going to make you feel out of your league and take a lot of time to fully grasp. But you should also have the experience of thoroughly analyzing most of the facets of a book to get an idea of all the parts you should be looking at, and just to have the satisfaction of mastering something. You can get a Cliffs Notes overview of a big, complex book, and then just totally dismantle a more lightweight book like you are rebuilding a '57 Chevy.

>And when you're discussing universal themes like good and evil, redemption, belief, and farts, or common techniques like symbolism, irony, and first- vs. third-person narrative, I think it's a mistake to only look at them in classic literature. It creates an artificial barrier between classics and modern-day popular media so that a lot of people who learn those concepts while reading Shakespeare don't think about applying them to Inception.
>I think it would be kind of neat to have an assignment dealing with a character's turn from good to evil where you compare how it's done in Paradise Lost, Animal Farm, Breaking Bad, the Star Wars prequels and Warcraft III. Where was it most believable and why? How much of it was character-driven and how much of it was driven by outside circumstances or magic? And you'll probably get to use the term "deus ex machina" somewhere in there. Literary!
>You'd read Paradise Lost or Dorian Gray or whatever in class, and it's up to you to find other things to compare them to. You only get one video game. (And if it's Deus Ex, you're not allowed to use the term "deus ex machina.")

#1. Enjoy Reading? Preposterous!

There is a point in time where a lot of adults stop telling kids that reading is fun and start telling them that reading should be work. That if you're not improving your mind and broadening your horizons, reading that book is just a waste of your time. And they have a lot of ideas about what kinds of books broaden kids' minds.

One writer suggests that what kids really need is more contemporary foreign literature. The comments are full of different adults saying, "What kids really need to be reading is ..." followed by their favorite book, or a list of books that teach about issues important to them (the adult). Like this guy feels the most important goal of reading should be to protect kids' minds ... from religion, I think? Or communism? The Skin book is kind of random.

And this teacher feels like kids should not waste their summers reading The Hunger Games because they don't gain much "verbal and world knowledge," recommending The Red Badge of Courage and a bunch of nonfiction books about the horrors experienced by real people in other times and places, like Hiroshima, well-known as a great summer romp. These are really valuable books, and kids should have some idea about the world around them, but seriously, even in the summer, they can't read a book just for fun?
She says: "Summer assignments should be about why we need to learn and why we need to talk about what we think." Sure, that's an important lesson that needs to be taught at some point, but when is there time for them to learn the other important lesson: Reading is something you can also do for fun, when you are taking a break from learning? You can't just tell people that and hope they remember it when they graduate and finally have time for it. That's something they need to learn by doing it and experiencing the fun.

I was a really fast reader and had no life, so I probably had the time to read important, assigned books as well as fun things over the summer, but most of the other kids I knew didn't read that fast and had a lot of activities, and, you know, friends or something. If you assigned them a book to read for the summer, that was probably going to be the only one they would have time to get to. They would see reading as a hateful devil that chases you relentlessly, even into your leisure months.

>as well as gain a deeper understanding of what honor is, what it means to be a man, etc
Adolescent, not a good reader.

>>The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Ethan Frome, Walden, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, The Catcher in the Rye and The Sun Also Rises all suck.

>OK, that's just my opinion, but the average high school student -- hell, the average human being -- will probably agree on a bunch of those at least.

this person definitely did not read any books in high school, else they mightve been able to construct a better thesis

Most of that is retarded but Ethan Frome is legitimately one of the most turgid piece of shit books I've ever read.

The 'author' ('spewer' would be more appropriate) of this article is living garbage.

Poor post

>I've mentioned Red Letter Media and their reviews before. You wouldn't think there would be anything to learn from the vacuous Star Wars prequels
DROPPED

>Catcher in the Rye
>trash

Underage, please go.

but he whines so much!!

>Cracked

Agreed. Came here to say this.

Yes. Literature is just entertainment. The idea that it is taught is ridiculous.

kys

>Literature is just entertainment.
Highly debatable
>The idea that it is taught is ridiculous.
This, though, is completely retarded. Even the author of the article in op thinks that lit should be taught.

No.

reeeee and whatnot