I teach 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts to black kids in the hood. Last year...

I teach 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts to black kids in the hood. Last year, we got a grant to have class sets of novels for the first time in our school. Most of the kids can read on grade level (according to some bs test we give), but they've never read an actual novel in school.

I got the following books;
>Hatchet
>Call of the Wild
>The Hunger Games
>The Hobbit
>To KIll A Mockingbird
>Flowers for Algernon
>Wonder

the fourth grade teacher got A Wrinkle in Time, which I consider way more challenging than some of those, so I'm not sure I buy into the books' reading/lexile levels.

any suggestions for how to break these up between 7th and 8th grade? Could 8th graders appreciate To Kill a Mockingbird/ The Hobbit?

Well this thread is going to be fun.

I really recommend the hatchet for the kids, it's a really interesting book which I am sure all kids would enjoy. I knew some kids that never read books at all and they really enjoyed it. Plus I think it teaches some lessons about family and shit, but I'm not sure it was a long time ago when I read the book.

Well the first thing you should do is look through your entire curriculum and throw out any concept or assignment that requires your students to think about the future. This will save a tremendous amount of time, effort, and frustration on your part that can be more wisely spent on getting more grants from the gubmint and colluding with the teacher's union to ensure that youre unfireable.

thanks. do any of you guys have positive memories of the book? I remember The Outsiders and Flowers for Algernon and Where the Red Fern Grows having a real impact on me, but Hatchet seemed forgettable. hopefully it was just me, tho

Nobody asked you, /pol/

>Could 8th graders appreciate To Kill a Mockingbird?
I read it in 5th grade, so.

The Giver

Possibly Lord of the Flies but I think thats typically assigned in highschool

why not let the black kids read a black book? maybe invisible man, or death and the kings horseman? it may be difficult but work with them. the last thing they need is more shakespeare

Maybe Hemingway? He's short and easy.

i could point out that nearly every african language that wasnt influenced by european languages lacks words or phrases that imply the non-immediate future (for example, there's no zulu phrase for "promise," because a promise implies obligation, and obligation requires you to think about acting differently in the future for someone; the closest translation is "maybe i will, maybe i wont.") but then boards like Veeky Forums always comes down to
>these facts are allowed for discussion on this board, but THOSE facts? they gotta go bucko

>hey goyim why don't we keep driving wedges between niggers and the rest of the world by teaching them to hate whitey in school!
Shut the fuck up

>hate whitey
>goyim
you have not read either of those books

It's got to be Call of the Wild, I loved that when I was a boy.

I've read both. Nigger kids will not understand it. The only thing they'll get out of it is "fuck whitey, kill whitey"

>Invisible Man culminates in a BLM-esque race riot
>the whole novel the narrator is told that in spite of his obvious intelligence and refinement he isn't worth shit
>acknowledges it himself in the end

Gr8 choice m8

all those suck, do lord of the flies

is your classroom chaotic or peaceful?

Sounds legit.

White Fang is better.

Nobody understands niggers better than /pol/.

>animals reading about animals
fund it

>reading a book this shallowly
It's internalized racism you idiot.

>the hunger games

Wat.

>they've never read an actual novel in school
That's depressing.

Call of the wild seems like a safe bet.

Fuck sorry, didn't see the hunger games.
I'm conflicted now.

They're niggers. They won't read anything you give them.

Just give them the easiest out of them (call of the wild) so you don't have to suffer through so much.

I'm black and A Wrinkle In Time was my favorite book as a kid, you should've got that, especially with the movie coming out next year. I think I read it in 5th grade.
Flowers for Algernon was a great choice. You should got The Time Machine by HG Wells, that was my favorite book in 4th grade.

if you have them read the hobbit 90% are just going to watch the movies and never even look at the book, i say have the read some obscure stephen king book that was never made into a movie, when you're in 4th grade stephen king is ultra edgy, i remember reading tommyknockers around 3rd or 4th grade, it was pretty fun, but stephen king books start slow so that might put them off, but stephen king books start a hell of a lot less slow than some 19th century victorian crap that starts slow and stays slow and then makes you feel like you got memed and wasted your life, but that is an aside

dude, island of doctor moreau is perfect for grammar school kids, has some nice literary value for the little shits to consider, but at the same time it's a spooky story about beastmen and evil doctors and shit which any elementary school kid can get behind

kids fucking love the hunger games dude, and you probably love the weeb version "battle royale" or "rumble royale" or whatever the jap version was called so get off the high horse nerd

>why not let the black kids read a black book?

Man when I was school we had to read The Washingtons Go to Birmingham and Junebug, it was fucking terrible.
>invisible man, or death and the kings horseman
Can't help but think those are very bad ideas. If they're in middle school maybe they should be reading Maya Angelou and August Wilson.

have them read some excerpts from Soul On Ice, or maybe Seize The Time by Bobby Seale

>Could 8th graders appreciate To Kill a Mockingbird/ The Hobbit?

My 8th grade class read Mockingbird, the kids seemed to like it fairly well, and it was a mixed student body. Maybe not 50/50 but certainly black in proportion to the general US population or so (urban-ish: Nashville.) We also read an abridged version of Algernon, it seemed to go over pretty well. I personally read the Hobbit in the 4th or 5th grade, but that was just for funsies.

>tfw class reads TKaMB for a month in class but I read it in 2 days so the reading teacher excuses me to the library to pick out whatever books I want to read for the rest of the time.

Most primitive societies had no words to talk about the future, or units of time smaller than the day, before interaction with Europeans. This goes for any continent, but more so for Africa and Oceania.
Also interesting to note is the total absence of words for love as different than sex in primitive societies.
The fact that blacks, even in developed countries, still live as though they do not understand these concepts, means that maybe there was a good reason they never invented the words to begin with.

>Most primitive societies had no words to talk about the future, or units of time smaller than the day

bullshit, in europe if you don't plan for the winter you'll freeze to fucking death, you trying to tell me illiterate german barbarians in the bronze age didn't have a word for winter? fuck outta here

The Bell Curve

Have them start with the greeks.

i coulda swore i read mockingbird in elementary school, then again this was in massachussetts where even proletarian scum are expected to be somewhat literary, even if it's just a throwback to puritanical days when everbody better read the damn bible or go to hell

They are kids AND niggers and you think they won't read it shallowly?

I'm taking about tribes discovered by Europeans while they were still primitive, not all tribes in all of history.

you conveniently didn't comment on tribal european societies and their concept of time as reflected in their languages back then.

>strong sahir-wolf hypothesis

stopped reading

>sahir-wolf
u mean worf-sapir bro?

Sell that shit back and buy Finnegan's wake. If they can't hang with Joyce let them remain illiterate, they aren't worthy.

>actual interesting thread
>turns into bullshit and uninteresting racism

it's Veeky Forums, i shouldn't have been surprised

>thread about teaching urban black kids
>upset that thread has racist tendencies

clearly you live in the suburbs and the high school in your gated community had one black kid who's dad was an afro-cuban doctor or something. do u really think someone who teaches in an innercity school is really racist? of course not, but if u have to put up with those little bastards day in and day just to put bread on the table, u gonna have politically incorrect thoughts from time to time and what better place to express them than on an anonymous pepe exchange

80% of blacks are literally just monkeys.

Veeky Forums is as obnoxious about its racism as SJWs are about their anti-racism. Just like how everything an SJW touches has to be about race or gender (funnily enough, they usually ignore class), everything Veeky Forums touches (and it isn't just /pol/ anymore, it's the whole goddamned site) has to be infused with a shit ton of racism. I think the point of political incorrectness is to debate and think without considerations of whether our thoughts or not are offensive, not merely to be intentionally offensive.

Anyway, OP, take the Hunger Games off the list and make them read The Giver. It's also a dystopia, and kids love dystopias because school is basically one huge fucking dystopia, but it's a better book than The Hunger Games. It also sets them up to read even better books like 1984 and Brave New World.

I was also very impressed by The Lord of the Flies as a middle-schooler, but I think that's more important if a student finds it on his own. Then again, if they aren't really readers, they might not find it on their own, and that's your job.

I don't envy you, OP. Teaching sounds really hard and is mostly thankless.

Monkeys have tails you idiot, hahahahah you fucking idiot, you think blacks have tails, holy shit, kys quickly

Black guy from the hood here. Where I was in 8th grade in the 80's we read way tougher literature. Kids today are too soft. We Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, The Brothers Karamazov, Infinite Jest and more.

Take my advice, and put these kids through the ringer. Make them have to actually learn something. If they want to fail, that's on them. And don't worry, you won't get any pushback from the parents, black parents don't give a shit about their kids.

Peace out, home slice

>And don't worry, you won't get any pushback from the parents, black parents don't give a shit about their kids.

lol my sides tru tho

but it's not the parents u gotta worry about, its the administrators who get mad if all your kids don't pass due to all the bureaucratic metrics the local, state, and federal government tracks everything by.

>black parents don't give a shit about their kids

mostly true but then you get that one carribean mom who drags her kid in and yells at both of you

>Peace out, home slice

Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe

It's an indispensable.

>its the administrators who get mad if all your kids don't pass due to all the bureaucratic metrics the local, state, and federal government tracks everything by.
Same shit happend at my highschool where we all knew the dumbfucks with shit grades wouldnt pass but magically got their diplomas anyways.

wtf I love minorities now

I didn't even know about this battle royale thing. I just thought it wasn't normal for schools to include summer teen novels in their required reading lists.

I'm with this guy You might try and sneak some more difficult books into the curriculum. Actually, shit, what about some Dumas? Give them The Three Musketeers. Tell them a mixed-race guy wrote it and let them at it.

Animal Farm

Who the fuck cares? Black kids have an average IQ of 80. They'll never achieve anything of intellectual significance; at BEST they'll be affirmative action monkeys who push society to cater to their families' incompetence and stupidity. You should assign them Dragonball Z cartoons and Kendrick Lamar albums and transfer to a school with intellectual potential

Sad truth.
It's still fair to give them a chance.

Guy who pretended to be a black guy from the hood here. How fucking stupid are you faggots for missing that I said I went to HS in the '80's but read Infinite Jest (published in 1996)

but OP you should still go really hard on the kids, you'll get zero pushback from the parents, they hate their children, probably can't even tell you who the father is half the time, and the school administrators? The fucking administrators? You're looking for teaching advice on fucking Veeky Forums, how sorry and pathetic must your administration be? They won't do shit

Those cave homos? Nah.

What a useless post.

We all noticed but it wasn't funny enough to bring up.

Fair enough

Teach them The Bluest Eye instead.

None of those are grade-level.
>promoting propaganda literature

Have them read David Simon's book about all the crime in Baltimore.

>Blacks
Well, if you want diversity points, you could read "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. It takes place during the colonization of Nigeria.

>TFW you were able to take Eng I H in 8th grade instead of dumb dumb English
>TFW you read this book, and they were less than ten blacks in the Eigth grade in your (technically magnet) middle school

Anyway, the book is a bit dense. What skill level are your students generally speaking?

>seeking teach advice from a pack of anonymous sociopath /pol/ shills

Were you actually expecting anyone to say anything helpful? For your own sake, find some real life mentors.

>White kid roleplaying