Why do high schools and colleges assign such boring books?

For the most part, I feel like I developed my interest in writing and books despite the books they made us read. There was always one book a year that I liked, but that was on top of the dozen others that just... ugh. Couldn't stand Shakespeare, was bored numb reading Great Gatsby. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one baffled by the book choices.

 

Yeah I had much that same feeling. I developed my love of the written word because of the people who taught me, not the books. The books were always dreadful pap. I remember specifically having to read something called "Unman, Wittering and Zigo" which is just... Awful. A terrible book. But we still had to read it and be baffled and answer silly questions about this worthless piece of crap superb piece of literature. But Mr Lee was a really good teacher and he made it fun and laughed at how stupid it was we had to study it and that made me interested.

 

I always considered the books we read at school to be a distraction from my reading. We regularly went to the library, I regularly got five or so books, read them in a day or three, and re-read them until the next library trip a week or two later.

 

To the above three comments ...

Do you at least appreciate that the forced exposure to difficult, or highly praised, texts can serve a purpose in the long run?

I am all for fun and enjoymen tin the classroom. I strongly feel that it is important to be able to put your mind to task on topics/books/whatever that are considered tiresome.

As an example I read Wuthering Heights a couple of years back. I struggled to finish it, but at least found some passages in it pleasing. It also made me consider the difference in attitude today compared to them toward romantic relationships. I could not bring myself to have much empathy for either of the main characters. I also found it very interesting that many women love the novel whereas most men fail to appreciate it - myself included.

Shakespeare is one of the oldest grinds people have. If effort is put into understanding the language and historical setting, there is a very rich world available to you.

 

One could ask what the point of going to school is if kids will only read the Hunger Games and Twilight.

 

Even though the slippery slope is the hardest "fallacy" to dismiss, you've definitely got a point. However, I'd argue that if you teach kids to:
1) Enjoy reading, no matter what the particular subject matter might be

-and-

2) Learn to read critically and understand why they enjoy what they do, and what is less than perfect about what they enjoy, you're making a good start.

The real problem (speaking as a teacher, but not a literature teacher) is keeping abreast of what the students are interested in. There's always the majority rules problem, but even if you avoid that, as an adult over...does twenty-five seem fair?

Maybe they still know what's going on, but as an adult well over forty, confident in my teaching skills, I rely on my students to tell me what the hep cats are reading these days, and then I try and find that shizzle and make lesson planz 4 it, by which time, it's hopelessly out of date, so open wide and say



cuz here comes Hemingway, I can download those lesson plans....

Tough call....

 

I like Hemingway. I only went through The Old Man and The Sea in high school, though, and aside from a couple of short stories in Uni, I had to read the rest on my own. It was pretty frustrating, though, because when we read The Old Man and The Sea, half of my class was all, "The ending was dumb. What did the lions have to do with anything? What happened to the old man?" He had a stroke. He died. Yeah, I know they don't explicitly state it, but it's not an ambiguous ending.

 

The point is, at least as I saw it and still see it, is to broaden the horizons of the kids and to get them to think. A lot of students won't read books that are particularly thought provoking and most will stay within their comfort zones. While some of the books were boring, or plain awful in plot (I'm looking at you, Romeo and Juliet), I really enjoyed a lot of what I read. Two of my favorite stories are ones I had to read in high school (Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men). I can't remember if the teachers were enthusiastic about the books, but I definitely was. To this day I still recommend them to everyone because they had such an impact on me and I wouldn't have read them if it wasn't for school.

 

Long time since I was in HS, but if I remember correctly, it was half and half for me. I loved of Mice and Men. Don't remember a lot of the others. One teacher handed out a list of optional reading we were to select from. She very specifically singled out one title to avoid, so of course it was the one I read. Stranger in a Strange Land by R.A. Heinlein. It started slow, but I forced my way through the first two chapters and it became one of my most influential works.

 

Boredom is good. If you go around thinking that learning should be fun all the time, you're going to learn only low-quality things. When people ask questions like this, it just seems like a denial of the way life is. It's one thing to say this stuff is boring so I have no interest in it. It's another thing to say this stuff is boring so let's get lower-quality stuff instead so I can pretend I'm all about learning. If you do that, you've changed the whole point of the classroom. I think you're also equating genre and mainstream fiction with literary fiction. They're different. There are some classes which analyze genre fiction but I don't really get that since that is more for entertainment with some messages in it. Whereas literary fiction is almost philosophy and generally contains the wisdom of a generation if it's good enough to be in a class curriculum.

 

I think it just depends on the teacher. I know that the "classics" are supposed to be taught at certain times, but it the topic is made interesting, then the reading will be. At least in my case. I know I HATED summer reading.... I hated being told to read over the summer. I LOVED to read, but I hated being told to read a certain book over the summer instead of reading what I wanted. Therefore, I hated it. However, the assigned reading in school, if the build up to the book was interesting to me, then it would make me want to read it. For example, in middle school, we were learning about WWII and how it gave way to science fiction and pulp fiction (or something like that). So when i had to read "There Will Come Soft Rain" by Ray Bradbury, I was so intrigued (it actually became one of my favorite short stories!). When it came time to read Fahrenheit 451, I actually WANTED to read it because it was by Ray Bradbury.
I remember skimming through Huck Finn when it was assigned in middle school, because I didn't understand it (they could have done better to introduce the topic). However, when it was assigned in one of my college literature classes that had a whole section of race in America and how it translated into literature, I found reading Huck Finn easier and even a bit enjoyable.

Sure, there were assigned readings that i thought were so boring (Treasure Island, Great Gatsby, Catcher In The Rye), but I also realized that once I got to High School, the reading curriculum wasn't the same as normal high schoolers. I was in the International Baccalaureate program, so our assigned readings were pulled from different countries. I had to read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The House Of The Spirits by Isabelle Allende, The Assault by Harry Mulisch, A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, short stories by Nadine Gordimer. As well as American authors like Toni Morrison's Beloved, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. I liked them because they focused on different cultures (even Beloved and Love Medicine, though they were set in America) with different ways of thinking. I was reading all of these authors and books, where as my fiancee and his classmates were in "regular" honors were reading Dracula, Shakespeare, Animal Farm, The Scarlet Letter, Paradise Lost and other classics. When I got to college and got assigned readings, I was surprised by how my classmates had already read these books in HS and they were surprised that I HADN'T read them in HS. However, when we switched to postmodern literature and international authors, I was ahead of everyone because I had already read some of those authors in HS.

 

Because the interesting books they will read anyway, without having to be forced?

 

The only books I've ever read for school that weren't terrible were Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm.

 

I'm sorry but I disagree. The learning process has much better results when it is enjoyable and fun (I used to be a teacher). It is possible to make complicated and high-quality stuff fun, however it is not the purpose of the educational system in most countries unfortunately. Finnish educational system is one of the best in the world. Guess what they do there - they develop each kid's talents by teaching them what they love most. You can't be very good at something you hate.

 

You also can't be very good at something you've never been exposed to.

 

But then this goes back to the question I posed back when this thread was fresh - What books do teenage boys actually like?

And, even to ignore that aspect of the problem; what books do all teenage girls like? For every girl who was squeeling outside the Hunger Games launch party there is another one who is reading Jane Austen or manga; or indeed who is playing the sport of their preference or who is posting on facebook. It's totally impractical to suggest just teaching kids from the books they like because everyone likes different books. And that doesn't even get into the fact that a good chunk of modern books aren't even worth teaching from because they don't have literary teeth; they are broadly written stories with little subtext and no intention to explore deeper themes. They are good guy/bad guy stories where the good guy wins. They conform to our expectations of what a story is, and they can certainly be enjoyable, but that's not enough to write essays with.

We can't let everyone in the class pick whatever book they want. We have to pick one book for everyone, and that necessitates some of the class not being especially keen on it. And since we can't find any one book to engage everyone, isn't it better we teach them books that they may learn an important lesson from reading, even if it leaves the whole class unengaged? It beats handing some poor kid a book that they don't like and which they can't learn anything from.

 

We had a running joke at my school that we weren't allowed to read any books in our English classes that didn't have rape or murder. Speak, The House on Mango Street, The Lord of the Flies, Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Night, Frankenstein. All rape/murder.

 

I don't know what kids are made to read in school today, but when I was at high school (around the year 2000) we got stuff like "Effi Briest", "Heldenplatz" and "Death in Venice".
I think the sole reason for that was that the old guys who made the curricula were already tortured with these books themselves 40 years ago and thought "Why should today's kids be better off?" XD

The only book I somewhat enjoyed was "Life of Galileo" by Bert Brecht.

 

My sister had to read A Raisin in the Sun and The Snows of Kilimanjaro this summer going in to junior year. She's like me and is a procrastinator; she has like 3 days left of summer and has been reading non-stop.

 

I just read the synopses of both book and they sound as "interesting" for a school student as the ones I mentioned above. ^ ^

 

I don't know about "Snows of Kilimanjaro" but "Raisin in the Sun" should be watched, not read. (The same goes for most of Shakespeare.) The 1961 movie version of the play is a classic, and is so widely available that not hunting it down is inexcusable. I'll bet your library has a copy, or can get one.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055353/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

We studied "Hamlet" in my senior year in high school, and my teacher played the recording of Richard Burton's 1964 performance of the play. I don't think there could have been a better introduction to the bard than that.

 

I remember reading The Great Gatsby, A Brave New World, Wuthering Heights (kill me), Fahrenheit 451, Hamlet. The rest I don't remember.

Reading outside of school was always way more enjoyable than reading in school, even if the assigned book was something I liked. Admittedly I find it a little more difficult to learn deeply without the guidance of a coach, but there are ways around that if you're willing to put in some extra time and effort.

I read Anna Karenina my senior year. Tolstoy is legendary. It was for a final project in my Advanced Placement Literature class. I chose to read that though; the teacher offered it as a challenge and nobody else wanted it. My fellow classmates and I seemed way more enthusiastic and engaged if we at least got to choose from a list of literary fiction.

 

The books we read when I was at school still gives me the shivers. “Growing up Asian in Australia.” Outside of my pure un-adulterated loathing of this book, there was nothing I could think of that would, in any way, benefit anyone reading it.

Personally I think that trying to please everyone is a pointless exercise. Someone will always disagree with what you are saying or teaching. So, set something to read that people may learn a lesson from is simply better in my opinion. I once remember two sets of parents arguing over the same book - one set where complaining that it did not teach creationism. The other set complaint it did not teach evolutionism. It made me laugh because the book in question had nothing to do with either. The book was “All Quiet On The Western Front” by Eric Maria Remarque

 

It comes from bureaucrats trying to be all things to all people. They eliminate anything remotely un-PC and whatever remains, however bland and uninteresting, is the required reading. There is really nothing to discuss or critique about these types of books, except that they teach virtually nothing and murder any interest kids might have had in studying literature in the first place.

 

There were actually a few books I enjoyed reading in high school. Frankenstein and I Am Legend in my Creative Writing class.

We also read a good book called Stuck In Neutral by Terry Trueman about a young man with severe cerebral palsy that prevents him from communicating. However, while everyone thinks he's an idiot or mentally stunted, he's actually quite intelligent, and the story is all through his perspective. Also, he's pretty sure his father is trying to kill him to "end his misery."