Your regular hostess, Jlongs/Fritz, is out of town this weekend, no doubt enjoying a well-deserved rest and a few good books!
So when she sent out a call for a guest host, I raised my hand and volunteered to play substitute teacher for this week’s installment. By way of introduction, I should probably mention that I am a “professional”—-that is, I’m a 20 year veteran high school English teacher, and the very best part of my job is getting to talk about good books every day.
At the end of each school year, I give my students a survey form, and one of my favorite questions is: “If you were choosing the literature for next year’s students, which books would you make sure to include again in the curriculum, and which books would you want to drop?”
The interesting thing about their answers is that, inevitably, books on one student’s “must read” list show up as another student’s “never read again” choice. To me, that says the range of literature that we’re using in high school classrooms is working, and also something about one man’s trash being another man’s “I’ll remember this for the rest of my life” treasures.
So what should be required reading for an American high school education? Which books that you were assigned to read by a teacher really stuck with you and taught you something? And which books were truly a waste of your time?
Usually when someone asks me to name my favorite book, it’s like asking a mother which one of her children she loves best– “I love them all the same, but different.” Just sitting down to make this list, I found it very, very hard to highlight just a few. How do you choose between Shakespeare & Shaw, Dickens & Dante, Tolstoy & Twain?
Except there are a few books that hold a special place in my heart.
These are the books that provide the underpinning for my entire teaching year–the books that make me smile when I see them on the syllabus, the books that make me walk into my classroom each day, excited to explore them all over again, and excited to see my students about to make the discoveries I made when I first cracked the bindings.
So in no special order, here are a few books from my high school’s “Required Reading” lists that make my literary heart soar each year:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Usually taught in 9th grade, it’s what I like to call a “welcome to high school” book. Kids are intimidated by the length and vocabulary, but hooked, every.single.time, by the nobility of Atticus. And I get to watch the Gregory Peck movie at least once a year. Who says teachers don’t get good job perks?
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. This little book, originally conceived as a screenplay, begs to be read out loud, and often I do just that, reading whole passages to my classes. The kids are giggly and pretend-shocked at the language, but soon come to appreciate the gritty reality of the migrant worker’s world and the harsh choices of friendship in a society that has no place for the old, crippled, outcast, or poor. There isn’t a kid in the room who’s ever loved a pet who isn’t a bit choked up when Candy’s dog is killed. The newer movie remake with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich is also a gem.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. This is the book that gets the most groans each year when I introduce it. I do a lot of scaffolding, hand holding and textual support for my sophomores who read this (honors classes only) but it usually ranks at or near the #1 spot of their favorite books at year’s end. Part of it is the adolescent obsession with beauty and appearances, where they recognize in Quasimodo a little piece of their own insecurities—“I’ll never be beautiful enough on the outside to be loved” and part of it is the outrage at the social injustices of Victor Hugo’s Paris. Me, I love this book for its dual villains–the vain and shallow Phoebus and the poor torn apart Claude Frollo, who can’t reconcile his physical desires with the morality imposed on him by his worldview, (Hmm, sounds like some Republicans I know) and who ends up blaming and destroying the very thing he most desires.
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. This is the one book that I adore and most of my students barely tolerate. Maybe they need to get a little older to appreciate the depth of a father’s despair or the impact of hatred and racism, but for me, it’s a highlight of the year to journey through this book. Whole chapters are like poetry.
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons. This is a relatively new novel (c. 1987) in the high school reading lists–we’ve been teaching it since the mid 90’s. My students are hooked from its opening page:
When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.
The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he’d be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something’s the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I’m all in a state of shock and just don’t know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I’m shaking all over.
But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next think I know he’s in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.
All I did was wish him dead real hard very now and them. And I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.
Ellen Foster is exciting to teach. The literary devices of an unreliable narrator, point of view shifts, local dialect, etc make prepping for the end-of-course literary terms section a piece of cake. The characters are strong, memorable, and practically walk out of the story as living creatures. And the themes are powerful and important: self reliance, the psychological damage to Vietnam veterans, the injustice and bureaucracy in our social welfare systems, child abuse & neglect, and finally, overcoming racism, one friendship at a time.
Oh, gracious, there are so many others– The Bean Trees, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby— it seems wrong to leave out so many of our treasures, but for the sake of time, I’ll leave you all some space to add your own.
I love my job.
So what was required reading in your own education? No grades & red pens here, no five paragraph essays, just some fun reflections on separating the gold from the dross in language arts classrooms.
Pencils ready? You may begin.
And as always, tell us what you’ve been reading this week!
This past week I’ve been backtracking to re-read early Harry Potters; now that I’ve finished #6, I’m gleaning clues for #7. Last week also saw each member of our household getting their own turn at HP & The Half-Blood Prince, after the fun un-veiling party on the 16th.
Also, I’ve been on a Margaret Atwood kick. I’m a long-time fan of her Handmaid’s Tale, but I’ve just recently finished Lady Oracle and Oryx and Crake. Fun stuff!
Also under much discussion in the Brown household: My husband has just finished two books, When Presidents Lie and On Bullshit. He’s written up his impressions in This Diary Go take a look!
Mrs. B:
I’ve tried to fight it, but my Nit-Picking Persona has come to the fore this morning. Can’t. Resist.
It’s Alan Paton, not Patton.
It’s a typo–and oddly enough, it’s correct at the cross-posted diary at Dkos!
Authors deserve to get correct attribution for their work!
(I’ll fix it here– thanks for the catch.)
I had the great good fortune, not appreciated at the time, of taking a college prep course in literature my senior year in HS…many, many years ago. The instructor, and I use that word intentionally, as she was, in retrospect, much more than a teacher, had us reading Ovid, Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce, and all of the classics. Not only that, but she exposed us to the “Beat’s”…Ginsburg, Burroughs, Cassady, Kearoc, et al. and myriad other authors that I may have never found otherwise. Most assuredly, not your avg. public school teacher-esp in KS in the 60’s. She instilled in me a great appreciation of literature and was the seed for a life long enjoyment of it. I read voraciously, normally 50 + books a year and am well known at the local library. Sadly, I do not recall her name but, to this day, I am thankful that I was her pupil.
That being said, I have just finished Tom Robbins latest VILLA INCOGNITO [ definitely an acquired taste-he makes me laugh out loud] and have just started THE HISTORIAN by Elizabeth Kostova.
Peace
and I’m impressed both with your teacher, and with the school district that gave her enough freedom to explore those wonderful authors.
I feel so restricted some days with what I can accomplish in my classroom, between the required lists and testing preparations– not to mention the constant threat of some parent or other objecting to a book.
My favorite was when a mom didn’t want her child to read The Crucible, because “we’re a God-fearing family here, and we don’t want her to study witchcraft.”
I tried to explain that the whole POINT was that there weren’t any witches in Salem, but she was intractable.
And of course, she never actually read the play herself.
and most assuredly not for the better. At that point in time it was still the prerogative of the individual educator to develop a methodology and strategy to accomplish the goals set forth in the abstract for the class. I was certainly not living in a bastion of intellectual enlightenment, but it was the expectation of my parents and others as well, that we, the next generation, should be prepared to move forward and upward. Alas, for all the many mistakes I made in school and the screwing around I did, I ended up with a better education than I think is possible to obtain in today’s climate.
My ex was instrumental in the formation of, and taught in an experiential, bilingual elementary program for over 20 yrs. The advent of NCLB was the final straw…she took an early retirement and his pursing her desire to write. NCLB created a lose-lose situation wherein no one was able to achieve, or even actively pursue, the goals that were the genesis of the school because of artificial, unrealistic and simplistic requirements.
Peace
I loved The Bean Trees, as well as Pigs in Heaven. The Rapture of Canaan is something I just recently reread given the evangelical climate of today. I love almost anything by Sue Miller…The Good Mother being my favorite of hers. Ursula Hegi’s Stones From the River…and Floating in My Mother’s Palm are awesome reads.
I was so surprised and pleased just a few years ago when my son and his best friends fell in love with The Great Gatsby and also with Catcher In the Rye. Talk about timeless! I was amazed that those books can still hook high school kids the same way they did when I was that age. My son related to Holden Caulfield and they all loved TGG. There’s a romance to that book that remains irresistible to many young people. They also loved The Beach, as I recall. All those tales of cool and alienated youth.
I loved it that there were novels they loved to read.
Shakespeare. When I was a sophomore in high school in KC, Mo., my English teacher played British recordings for us of a couple of plays. Hearing them spoken made all the difference. I was hooked for life. So I guess I’d want to show kids movies or play recordings, preferably by GREAT English actors & actresses.
You could read the fine novel, Devil’s Tower, it’s sequel, Devil’s Engine, or the series “News from the Edge.”
Not that I have any personal interest in this, or anything.
I adored Cry the Beloved Country when I was 15 or 16 and discovered it (not in school, I can’t remember how I came across it). I liked Too Late the Phalarope even better. And, like teenaged girls everywhere, Atticus Finch was my first love. And Holden Caulfield was my male alter ego.
Do high schoolers still read Orwell? We did- 1984, Animal Farm. I’ve recently gone back and started re-reading him for the first time since he was assigned reading in HS. It seems like these days we need him more than ever. Animal Farm was just . . . eerie . . . . when I read it a couple of weeks ago.
I think we were assigned Orwell as part of our “look how evil Communism is” education back in the early 60’s. It seems like a teacher could do a lot of critical thinking encouragement (and history) by asking students to think about how these books were particular to their time and what about them is eternal to human nature and human societies.
My BA is in English and I went back to school intending to become a HS English teacher. But in my state (TX) teachers have to have two teaching fields and so I started taking bio courses for my second one – and now I’m a biology teacher at a community college. I LOVE my job too. Isn’t teaching great! I’m always just mystified why anyone would choose any other career.
Reading now? The new Harry Potter finally got here from Amazon.uk. I’ve been buying the UK versions b/c they’re smaller and weigh less than the US ones. And these last few installments, that’s been a real consideration. . . . 🙂
Wonderful lists. Back in the long-ago and far-away, we read Shakespeare, Dickens, and from some kind of anthology that had samplings of many English and American writers and poets. Thus, I was introduced not just to prose but to such as Keats, Shelley, Yeats, Thomas. Chaucer in Middle English. Beowulf. Whitman, cummings, Joyce, others.
But our teachers didn’t have to contend with as much bureaucracy and certainly not with such an excrescence as NCLB. Our freshman English teacher was so tough that I remember coming home from school and crying, but from that tiny class in a tiny public school later came several graduate degrees, at least two tenured professors, and several published writers.
for hosting the book diary this week and for your list.
I’ll be very happy if you could expand your list, btw.
I had the most amazing English and history teachers in high school. We had a team taught course called American Civilization, taught within a two hour block, with the history lecture first, and then the literature of that era presented next.
Dr. Johnson, our history teacher, taught a revisionist version of American history. Mr. Loomer, our English teacher, was a fantastic speaker/orator/presentor as well. To this day, I find it’s part of my training, as a result of taking their course, that I need to understand the context of the book else reading it lacks something.
Forever grateful.
As for books, I was a bookworm so I had read many of the HS books already and was burying myself in sci-fi books while in HS.
Thanks for doing this-nice job!
Books I’d give high school kids are probably not your typical picks.
Stranger in a Strange Land. If for no other reason than it changed the way I look at humor. Some things that are funny really aren’t funny.
Push-(Sapphire) This book is purely astonishing and should be required reading for everyone, everywhere. And as a bonus, it’s short. Took me about two hours to read it the first time, the second time I slowed down and read carefully through my tears.
The Martian Chronicles-Not as science fiction, but as a book of related fables. Bradbury’s lessons in this book are profound.
The Grapes of Wrath-No need to elaborate on that choice.
Of Mice and Men-Same as above. No, I’ll elaborate. Love and compassion, empathy, strength. All are learned through the characters in these two books.
Crime and Punishment. Or, if you’re feeling more merciful, The Idiot. It’s important for high schoolers to understand that everyone in the world doesn’t see things the same way-that culture, society, and tradition vary all over the world. Also because I think russian literature is essential. It’s incredibly rich.
For the same reason, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Perhaps a bit easier even than The Idiot since it’s more contemporary, but every bit as russian in flavor.
At least one book by Umberto Eco, but I’d pick The Island of the Day Before. It’s fun, but has all Eco’s trademark high-end literacy.
I got a great book as a prize at the gathering we attended called “Test your cultural literacy IQ” or something similar. I can’t wait to get into it.
As a parent, I’ve recommended tons of books to my kids and they’ve actually read some of them, but it was interesting trying to differentiate between what I think a high-schooler would like and what is important for them to read. And I’m sure I’ll think of 100 more before tomorrow.
Thanks for covering for me, MrsB!