Why do high schools and colleges assign such boring books?

Oh come on; do you think every teacher really gives a huge damn about every single aspect of their subject? You think there's literally zero physics teachers who are more engineers than they are mathematicians? But those are critical areas in their subject, how can they not be enthusiastic about partial differential equations to model fluid dynamics! What do you mean they'd rather be building cool, exciting projects involving magnets?

Just to take from this thread; I can tell you the F Scott Fitzgerald is an important author but how well do you think I'm going to teach The Great Gatsby given that I loathe the man's writing? Does the fact that it's an important work trump my personal lack of enthusiasm? I don't blame anyone for not being excited at the prospect of teaching any particular book no matter how important. Enthusiasm isn't the same as high regard, you know?

Teachers are people. And yes, even good teachers don't love everything they teach. And there's a whole lot of mediocre teachers too who aren't really all that enthusiastic about anything. And that's just because they are people and we pay our teachers shit and it ends up being the fall back for graduates who couldn't succeed as anything else instead of being what it should be; the first choice for the cream of our society. But since it doesn't pay and the system doesn't really care if teachers are any good then we get what we get. And yes, I do think that teachers being able to choose specific works that click with them is really helpful in that situation. Hell, how many Shakespeare plays have you actually read? If you studied English at uni then maybe six or seven. But there's forty of them and a dozen or more are really notable. So even if you are really into Shakespeare there's a good chance you can be railroaded into teaching plays that you've never even heard of (King John anyone?) simply because you can only study so much. Now expand that into the literary canon which is absolutely vast and has so many prominent and important authors in it that we could name them for weeks.

Yeah, it's hard to care about them all.

 

I didn't say every single aspect. Perhaps it isn't that these books are boring, rather the reader (at that age) hasn't developed the ability to appreciate them. If the teacher shares in this shortcoming then there is little hope for all concerned.

 

Nothing is ever fully entertaining/engaging; the ratio is fluid. They do not assign books that are primarily boring.
They may, however, assign books to widen intellectual horizons, regardless if in a way and manner desired by the students.
Reading books that were out of my depth and interest has helped me find out what I truly enjoy reading and, best of all, my enjoyment horizon has
widened as a result. To addopt a view, however different from that of yours, and defend it/agree with it to a degree, is an ancient philosophical practice.

The question of engaging content is a 21st century stuff. It's good when it is so, but the merit lies somewhere else.

 

To be honest, showing someone the importance of being somewhere they don't want to be just so they can be bored mindless doing things they don't quite understand and don't want to do is pretty much the only lesson schools teach that actually helps prepare kids for the real world. I don't think that's something we should take away from them by forcing their teachers to become performing artists.

 

I hope there's sarcasm here.

 

Yes and no.

 

I think it goes beyond book selection. It's about how ineffective the school system can be. Everyone learns differently and has different tastes in art, so the "let's put 30 kids in a classroom and teach them the same way" method doesn't work very well. That being said, based on my personal experience, college was much better for English/literature courses. The professors were more knowledgeable and, for the upper level classes at least, the students seemed to be more engaged. Colleges also typically offer more specialized courses. Do you like children's lit or mystery novels? There are classes for that. I know some high school teachers let their students pick what they want to read from a handful of approved books, but that's the exception, not the norm.

 

You can teach a class full of kids together just fine. The problem isn't with the idea of the class room. The problem is that teaching is no longer a respected profession that brings in high quality graduates. The class responds totally differently to a good teacher but we have so few of them. Good teachers know how to engage different types of kids and to design lessons and exercises so that they cater to different styles of learning. The problem is, broadly, that we don't trust teachers to do that now. They get forced to teach to specific lesson plans and make them sit and do paperwork on how they delivered them with exactly fourteen minutes of class discussion.

And yes, college is a whole other beast. At college if you aren't interested it's on you. You don't have to show up, you don't have to be there at all. And college professors are still respected and paid reasonably well and aren't expected to be a mix of surrogate parent, nurse, councilor and mentor all at once. We put so much on high school teachers then blame them for not getting the best from kids when they have so little latitude and so little opportunity to do better anyway.

I guarantee you that if we paid teachers a proper salary and cut the administrative crap from their jobs so they could just teach then we'd see a marked improvement in the kids being engaged, partially because teachers would actually have an opportunity to teach material that the kids can engage with better.

 

Regarding your comment on some teachers allowing students to "pick what they want to read from a handful of approved books, but that's the exception, not the norm" I have a story from my high school days. As I previously noted in this thread, I had to read The Great Gatsby for three separate classes in high school. When I saw that this book was on the agenda the third time, during my senior year, I went to the teacher, said this would be the third time I'd be reading the book for a class and asked her if I could read either a different book by the author or some other book of the teacher's choice. I said I would participate in the classroom discussions about the Great Gatsby, but I would read the other book and do assignments on the other book. The teacher turned down my request.

 

I must have been living in some sort of Golden Age of education, because the books assigned to me for English class were excellent. The short story collection featured stories by the best authors around ... Jessamyn West, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Vincent Benet, and other type writers of the 1950s and 1960s. I still remember some of them, a half a century later. In high school, we read the Divine Comedy (in translation), The Once and Future King, and others.

For public school systems, I think the blame can be laid at the door of the school boards who select the books. They have to respond to pressure groups like churches and civic moralists, and I doubt if they solicit recommendations from acclaimed novelists, short story writers, or editors of top publications. A school board member who does not love literature simply cannot make good decisions about it.

When will the situation change? When people who know good literature make recommendations to school boards about what to buy, and parents demand that school boards choose those books for their curricula.

 

I think that there needs to be a mix of what (many of) the kids might like (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc) and some of the so-called classics. Especially in the lower grades, however, things should be skewed heavily towards what's fun to make the kids approach reading as something to be enjoyed, not simply tolerated and regurgitated for a grade. J.K. Rowling has done more in the service of reading than J.D. Salinger ever will. I was never required to read that damn book, but I've tried three times; as a teen, in my twenties, and in my forties, and I just cannot get past the first dozen pages or so.

Making people read Shakespeare is just asinine. Yes, he explores the human condition. Yes, he had an amazing command of and influence on the English language. No, he was never intended to be fucking read by anyone except the damn cast. Find an adaptation of the work in question, show the students, discuss and write about it, don't make them slog through a fucking script for fuck's sake.

Yeah, sorry, but this I feel rather passionately about. When you can manage to nip both the love of reading and any interest in Shakespeare in the bud in one fell swoop, you're doing your job of creating the next generation of Maury Povich viewers perfectly...

And yeah, teachers these days rarely get to choose anything, either out of fear of offending someone's parents or fear that the kids will "waste" time learning something that's not on the standardized test that will determine the department or school's budget next year.

 

I completely agree. Being forced to read Shakespeare in high school made me want to completely tune out the teacher. I got nothing out of it. Every kid in my class felt the same way. Everyone hated it in my class. My kids say the same thing. I think the overwhelming failure of teachers to make learning fun is a huge problem in our educational system. Yes, there are good teachers, but creativity is definitely frowned upon by school boards. Making learning fun does not mean a teacher has to dumb it down. Learning can be both fun and educational. I took freshman algebra in eighth grade, and by senior year in high school those of us in the same boat ran out of math classes so there was a statistics class for us to take. For the final project, the teacher said we had to do an in-depth statistical project on ANYTHING that interested us. The work people did was amazing for this project. My project was to take something like 50 different team statistics of NFL teams and determine the statistical correlation to winning and losing for each statistic. I spent more time on that project than anything I ever did in high school. A critic might turn up their nose that I did a project on football, but the reality is that I did a massive statistical project. It was more in-depth and sophisticated than anything I did when I took statistics in college. I got a ton out of it because it was something I was interested in.

As far as I am concerned, any teacher that creates a curriculum that bores students to death is guilty of laziness and should be beat over the head with War and Peace (1,225 pages). With a little creativity, you can teach AND motivate/inspire at the same time. Ancient, dusty books that kids hate are not higher learning; they are more likely to be no learning or tuned-out learning. There are plenty of with-the-times, high-end books that are worthy of academic teaching. Acting as though only books that are older than dirt are worthwhile of academic learning is just crazy to me.

In the business world entrepreneurs either adapt or die. In the military world, the same. Lawyers either stay current on the law or they become obsolete. Teaching seems to be the only profession I can think of where the curriculum remains stuck in the days of old, where ancient is revered. Shakespeare last wrote something new like 400 years ago. I just don't comprehend how he is relevant to a teenager today. If you want to have kids study plays, why not something more modern? Hamilton, A Raisin in the Sun, Death of a Salesman. If you want to teach poetry why not Maya Angelou instead of something from a million years ago? I just don't get the fixation with teaching material that puts kids to sleep. It's like teaching a class in music appreciation where only music from the 1950s or earlier is covered because the teacher thinks all music from the 1960s to the present is just infernal noise played by long-haired hippies.

 

I think schools should use a range of material to be honest. Not all kids will be fascinated with the same things and this is even more true in high school when teenagers start becoming more independent. If you have a range of material and content in the lessons then you're more likely to get more of your class interested and it keeps the subject from becoming repetitive.

 

Yes, sir. And you know why it is the way it is with the academia and everybody involved? Because, just as it stands said above, in academia (business, law) you either adapt or die.
But, how can you "die" (in this case, figuratively) in high school? The tendency is to be a surrogate everything for the students, just as you said, thus keep them in their childishness and prolong
their immaturity. How often, I say how often is there the "shape up or ship out" philosophy promoted on (high) schools? (And usually hated by the students, what coincidence). This also contributes to their immaturity because there is rarely a threat of definiteness. It is because the student head hunt calls the shots and schools are subsidized based on the number of students instead of, say, I don't know, results?

That is exactly why there is so much responsibility put on high school teachers. I say, treat our youngest, young and adolescents so that they are being explicitly
taught and expected to mature, instead of becoming adult suddenly with the age of eighteen or twenty-one or whatever. That is artificial, it's shit and it doesn't work really, because the newly-adulted binge and go awol with sudden freedom. Okay, to pacify the crowd, some of them do. I say do this and teachers will feel more at ease to engage in territories
thought impossible now because they will rest assured there will be input from the students.
To expect a teacher to motivate a classroom full of bored teenagers is impossible. It happens in movies. Reality is much, much worse. And then, whose fault is it that they're bored?
Give them the burden of responsibility and they will value much more already. But that is not the teacher's job, that's the family's. A teacher is nowadays expected to take responsibility
even for that, but, sorry, that is preposterous.

My experience is that students hate to be treated as kids but again, once the principle of good behavior, own initiative, fair play, respect, creativity and the willingness to push boundaries, step beyond one's shadow on more than a-few-individuals-in-the-class-scale is required, they usually chicken out. And then it is me who feels I have to supply discipline, creativity and stimulation for where it is wanting and that is so incredibly stultifying that I rarely have spare energy to create engaging content, knowing it will fall on deaf ears.

Exactly. I validate the curriculum mostly in the fact that I do with/teach the students what I feel they're grappling with and that is almost invariably contrary to what/when/how of the
curriculum. And the question of money, definitely. The teacher should have the respect, and sadly, in today's world respect is bought by money; the teacher should not be a fetch-and-carry
who's being looked at as a petty underling. Sure, better salary is not a cure-all. But it would be a substantial improvement in the direction of better education generally.

 

Whoa, not saying Shakespeare shouldn't be taught, just that he was never meant to be read. With the older books, you need to find a way to gateway kids into them. I was (and am) a raving little nihilist, so when one of my English teachers handed me Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, she managed to fool me into thinking that Russian literature might be worth taking another look at.

I haven't really found anything else that I liked in that genre, but it was a good strategy.

Back to Shakespeare. I catch hell for this, but two of my favorite adaptations are Mel Gibson's Hamlet and Baz Luhrman's (Leonardo DiCaprio) Romeo and Juliet because they leave the noble themes for you to find when you look, and instead show young people losing their damn minds in the midst of intolerable situations. Claire Danes' Juliet is a dizzy, ditzy little lovestruck girl, and Mel Gibson, even though he was 34 at the time, plays a college boy flipping out over the death of his father much better, IMO, than Laurence Olivier's mopey version or Kenneth Branagh's "Oh I'm so Shakespeare, look at me" sword-thrower. But anyway, the point is that any one of these are more in keeping with the author's intent than a whole bunch of teens sitting there looking up words in the glossary at the end of the text. "Love goes towards love as schoolboys from their books" makes a lot more sense spoken than read, whether or not she was really on a balcony.

I'm rambling, I'll just leave with this:




and this:

 

I don't think it's that the books are boring but rather that teachers either don't understand the books, view them through rose colored glasses, or simply forget to teach the important parts.

For example, for Lord of the Flies it would help to know that Golding was a pessimist who believed that humans were inherently violent and society was the only thing keeping up from slaughtering each other. The only thing I can think about when the kids start really getting violent is dude, it's only been like four hours. Also, the deus ex machina ending has always annoyed me, I remember specifically wondering in high school where the military came

I also wish that classes would coordinate with each other. Obviously in college that's impossible, but in high school, students should read Of Mice and Men at the same time that their history class is going over The Depression or Romeo and Juliet while learning about the Renaissance.

 

You realize, of course, that they were rescued by a warship that was going off to battle, thereby acting out on a larger scale what the boys were doing on a smaller scale. Golding seems to be asking, "Who's going to rescue the warship?" There won't be a deus ex machina answer for that question

That would be nice, but I don't know if teachers could coordinate their lesson plans to that extent.

Another problem is that we are a mobile culture, and the odds are good that a child today will go through many school systems, each with a different syllabus for each class. I myself went to three schools for high school and junior high, only two of them in the same school district.

 

Yes, I do realize what the warship represented. Golding went out of his way to describe their weapons and gear. I simply didn’t like that they simply showed up at the most convienent time. Doesn’t detract much for me though, I still have a copy of it on my shelf.

 

I think what younger readers fail to understand is that the assigned books usually mark a watershed event in literature. They need to be taught in order to better appreciate modern stories. Not to say that I appreciated all I was forced to read in school... you can keep, The Old Man and the Sea, anything by Ms. Austen, and the dead English poets.

 

My high school /college required reading was hit and miss for me. Some I enjoyed included:
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Of Mice and Men- Steinbeck
Midsummer Night's Dream- Shakespeare
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Lolita- Nabokov
Metamorphosis - Kafka
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Beowulf
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Odyssey - Homer
Lord of the Flies - Golding
Night - Weisel
Frankenstein- Shelley
Antigone - Sophocles
Lysistrata - Aristophanes
The Iliad- Homer

But then there were the ones I suffered through:
The Great Gatsby (had to read for multiple classes) Fitzgerald
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Heart of Darkness (honestly had to read this one 4 times for different classes)- Joseph Conrad
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
Animal Farm - Orwell
1984 - Orwell
Brave New World- Huxley
A Separate Peace- Knowles


And I was kinda meh on a few:
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
Emma- Jane Austin

Suffice to say, I had a large variety of assigned reading. Like others have been saying, it's mostly up to the school district and not the individual teacher, until you get to college, anyway. I found the college assigned reading to be mostly interesting, but then again, I was an English major and was able to pick classes that were more tailored to my tastes.

 

I think part of the problem is teachers don't explain why their work is considered excellent.

If you told students that Shakespeare put loads of sexual puns into his work, suddenly the subject becomes a bit more interesting.

 

Interesting, I read Lolita in high school because I wasn't supposed to, and it did nothing for me. Then I read it again in my thirties and ended up feeling like I needed a shower, preferably with a nice....

No.

But Nabokov can crawl into your brain if you aren't careful.

Some books I needed to age into, some I aged out of, some didn't stand the test of time, I can never tell til I go back to them.

 

Lolita was actually a college required reading. I'm not sure if my high school would have gotten away with assigning that one, lol. Which is also the reason why the high school reading list can be a bit dry- much more censoring by the school board not wanting to deal with an angry parent because their child read about a pedophile or a classic about women withholding sex to stop their men from warring. (Lysistrata, btw)

 

I've heard people say Nabokov can, not least in Lolita, write "the f*ck out of a sentence" and write to achieve pretty impressive verbal epicness, in which regard I've seen him often mentioned in connection to Conrad.
Now that I'm reading heart of darkness and savor the verbiage myself, I think I might have an idea why.