Choice

[lillibet]

There's an article in the New York Times talking about some English teachers trying to give their students more choice in terms of what they read.

Reading was always very easy for me, but I was the top student in my school, so I don't think I'm much of a metric. Looking back at what we read, it does feel as though a lot of it was poorly chosen and too mature for us. I mean, I think Crime and Punishment is a great book, but it was a very hard read at 16.

As I think I've mentioned, my school did a cool thing where they'd pick a theme with four books to it (alienation, death of innocence, etc.), divide the class into teams to read and present on the books, so we got a significant exposure to more books than we could have covered doing them one at a time.

One of the things this article touches on, but doesn't have any answers for is: what is the goal? Perhaps the answer is to give kids much more choice in earlier grades, to develop their love of reading and then switch in later years to either direct assignment or narrowing the field of choice in order to develop the shared cultural literacy.

I'm curious what other people think about this.

Comments

[gmpe.livejournal.com]

I think you can have both. Learning "the canon" is really important to being considered "educated" in society. At young ages, a lot of schools seem to do X minutes of reading per night, with no restriction on what. This makes sense. It also lets kids who are poor readers not feel behind because they didn't read 75 pages and only made it through 18, and it teaches kids to find things they want to read. In high school, most of our reading was all of the class reading the same thing at once. We did have major projects, however, comparing works by the same author, the works of one poet, etc., and we got to pick those. Other places make kids keep journals and reading journals on whatever they read. All of these also make sense as a way to get kids to read things they want, while also keeping the communal learning of the same thing in place. You really can't have a discussion on Hamlet if only half the room has ever opened it. (Yeah, maybe they all just read the Cliff notes, anyway. That's a different problem.)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i think that "the canon" is part of what's silly about society, and part of what's silly about "being considered" to have an education.