Required Reading in School

[AbielleRose]

Looking back on my literature classes I'm a bit disappointed in my local school system for the lack of required reading we had. Unlike many schools we didn't have summer reading lists and read only 3-4 novels a year. The curriculum was so poor that we ended up reading one novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding both my Sophomore and my Senior years of high school.

 

There are so many influential works that should have a place in our children's literature classes. Do you think the books that were required reading for you made in impact on your education? What are the books you're greatful your school had on the curriculum growing up? Are there any books you would like to see schools start using in their literature courses?

[Echo]

My schools had excellent English classes. I read everything from Shakespeare, to Hemingway, to Twain, to Sylvia Plath, to Hawthorne, and beyond. All of the reading I did shaped not only myself as a reader (I definitely learned what I liked), but helped me to learn how to read critically and think critically.

[chesilbeach]

We had a pretty good curriculum at school, but we never had summer reading lists. The class read the books and plays together during term time and that was it. I'm not sure how much it's changed since then, but I know they still have to read Lord of the Flies which I loathed, so I guess probably not much has changed!

 

We read Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice and compared it with more modern plays such as A Taste of Honey (I can't remember who wrote that). Novels included a couple of Steinbeck, Cider with Rosie and Brave New World, but not much of it actually inspired me to my own reading tastes - most of that I've developed myself as I always read outside of the curriculum anyway.

 

The one book that I've kept and re-read is a play called Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw, and I loved it so much, it did encourage me to see any of his plays when they were performed in my area.

[Univerze]

Well there were few books that we were required to read, actually I can think of only one, Hamlet. And that one we read in class mostly, with the teacher reading (acting) it to us mostly because we had trouble with the way it's written.

For the rest, we had to read like.. 20 books for the last two years? And they had demands, say so many of the needed to be written before 1900 etc. I had more than that though, even then I liked the classics better. But I can just remember reading Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, and I think War of the Worlds. I even got a Stephen King book on there..

 

But well, it could have been much better, it wasn't like our teacher recommended books to us, or showed us books that I would have never considered to read otherwise.. and back then (10-12 years ago) it wasn't as easy as now to find those things online. It was just coming that we could look those things up at school and though we had a computer at home, no internet yet then.

So he could have done better, asked our tastes and given us reading lists or so. To choose from I mean.

 

As for our Dutch classes, those books were horrible. Dutch writers most of the time write about banal things, or things you deal with in every day life, cancer, break-ups, cheating etc. Not books I'd like to read. Had trouble making my required number of books there. Whereas I had no trouble choosing english books.

 

Edit: I know that my old reading lists might be stored somewhere in the house, might be fun to re-read all those books since honestly, the books I hated back then I love now, at least that goes for Brave New World. But I have to say, I was top of my class in english, and even for me really reading a book in english was hard then, can't imagine how bad it must've been for the rest. Guess how it was for me to read a french book, hard! German always was ok, still able to sort of read books in german though I don't like the language.

But can you imagine, I had to read books for french, dutch and english, and the years before too for german, though i didn't graduate in that language.

Edited June 23, 2010 by Univerze

[Nienna]

We tackled 2 books a year in English Literature GCSE - one Shakespeare play and one classic novel - and then the rest of our classes revolved around grammar, vocab and creative writing. This way we got 2 GCSE's from effectively one class - Literature and Language. The two works I studied were Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird - still two of my favourite books, and I really started appreciating literature around the time I was reading them. I loved my English teacher, so I think this helped too.

 

For A-Level, we took on 4 or 5 works - another Shakespeare, one classic play, one piece of Irish literature and the works of a specific poet, combined with other similar pieces of random poetry for comparison. For Shakespeare we had King Lear - I don't remember much of it now, so I guess it wasn't one of his best (imo). For the play we did Oedipus Rex by Sophocles - books like this are a good basis for literature because so many other works reference them, so I'm glad we got to study it. For the Irish lit. we did a play by Brian Friel called Philadelphia, Here I Come which was about Ireland becoming British territory, the land being taken over and the feeling of being unwelcome. Our poet was WB Yeats - again, a lot of Irish political themes. I guess the NI syllabus is pretty heavy on bringing the Irish history thing into literature classes, but then it is a big influence on a lot of Irish writers. I was never very good at English back then, but I wish I had a second chance!

[Ooshie]

We did Shakespeare and Dickens at school, and I'm afraid to say it pretty much put me off them both for life!

[Kidsmum]

We did Shakespeare and Dickens at school, and I'm afraid to say it pretty much put me off them both for life!

 

Unfortunately i think that's the case for a lot of people. I studied Midsummer Night's Dream for my O level & it was torture, we did the play to death, it wasn't till i saw a production of it at the theatre that i really appreciated how good it is. Far from the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy was another one that i didn't enjoy at school but became one of my favourites when i read it as an adult. However, i do remember reading & enjoying Lord of the Flies & Smith by Leon Garfield in my English class.

[Vanwa]

Some of the novels I've read as an adult I would have liked to have seen on our school curriculum. Examples are 1984 by Orwell and Northern Lights (Golden Compass) by Phillip Pullman. I think novels with a controversial element are far more likely to encourage students.

 

We didn't have summer reading lists, and the only required reading were exam texts. At GCSE (or end of high school exams) we studied the Child in Time by Ian McEwan, which at the time was one of the most dire books I had ever read. I have since come to appreciate it, although I still don't enjoy it. We studied the Crucible by Arthur Miller, and Macbeth.

 

To be honest though, a lot of the problems with those classes were the two teachers I had. Neither could control the class, and subsequently not a whole lot of learning was done. We were then of course ill-prepared for our exams.

 

Terrible at most other subjects, I was lucky that English has always been my strong point, and luckily I sailed through the exams with no notes, my poetry anthology had been destroyed by another student, so all my margin marks were no longer in existence. We had done no revision, had been taught no exam technique, no mock papers, nothing.

 

The majority of lesson time was spent watching the tutors trying to convince the boys to take the classroom furniture off of the roof and put it back in the classroom.

 

Our A level years though were much more organised. And the tutors actually cared about our results. Particularly our Eng Lit teacher. When we studied Chaucer, all discussions took place in Olde English dialect.

 

When we studied Othello she took us to a play to help us appreciate Shakespeare as it was meant to be - on stage.

 

We weren't given reading lists per se, but I asked for suggested reading for novels, plays, poetry and so on, and she sat down for what must have been quite a while, and penned me a comprehensive list.

 

I don't think it's the reading material that influences our education so much as the attitude of the teachers.

 

And just for the record, that comprehensive list lit the way to Stoppard, Osborne, Heller, Orwell, Poe, Austen, DH Lawrence, and many others I would have missed out on had she not been there to guide me.

[Katrina1968]

Because of where I work, I have the "privilege" of knowing what all our local schools are reading because they purchase their books from us. What I've seen renders me speechless, heartbroken and disgusted.

 

The one private school in the area will read Austen, Shakespeare, Twain, Hemingway, Hawthorne, etc. The public high schools are a letdown. The books that are on these lists are the equivalent of what we call our "middle schools", grades 6-8 (ages 11 thru 13). These schools are reading LOTRs, Lords of Discipline, Lord of the Flies, etc...

 

My son's school has them reading Patterson books, magazines(wt..?!) listening to audios of Alexis Sherman's Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, The Harry Potter series, etc. Not one classic and definitely NOT on a high school reading level.

 

I explained to our son that I didnt care what the schools lists required, he was going to read a wider variety of books. He will read something on the list but it wont stop there.

[pickle]

I can't really remember what we had as required reading at school I know we did The Crucible and Macbeth as well as Things Fall Apart and Of Mice and Men but to be quite honest school never inspired me to read, we were in a class of mixed ability so reading a book would take over a month and i am not talking about intense discussion on any topic arising from the book but because some people were incredibly slow readers or because they were just disruptive. All in all I found it incredibly boring as i would read the whole of the book as soon as it had been issued and then spend a month waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. The library was not really one where you were encouraged to go either (thats the school library not the local one) it seemed to be full of books from my dads era rather than anything modern or up to date (this was the 80's)

[Vanwa]

Hmmm, LotR, LotF, these I can understand.

 

Patterson? Magazines? I think you're doing exactly the right thing. He needs a thorough education, not an introduction to pure twaddle.

 

He should be reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, Orwell, Dickens, Wordsworth... but then you know all this I'm angry on your behalf Katrina.

[Clare_Star]

I always feel a little let down that there isn't more contemporary fiction taught in school. Like a lot of the posters here we studied Shakespeare, Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights and poetry which certainly put me off approaching any Bronte for a long period of time!) and were lucky enough to have a bit of Sylvia Plath thrown in.

 

I know that for some school is the only time they will come across "classic" or highly regarded texts but it sometimes seems like laziness that Shakespeare seems to be the only playwright that children come into contact with! I don't know, am I being too harsh?

[Katrina1968]

I'm all for a wide variety of quality reading but Mad magazine and manga books just done fall under the quality of "reading". Our students are required to do reports over the summer and this stuff is just rubbish. When middle schoolers are given a better quality to choose from the high schoolers, their is a problem. The high school students are reading books well below their grade levels. When they are preparing for standardized tests and the SAT, these books wont help them at all.

[Skírnir]

I'm 18 years old and still going to school. I'm sort of disappointed in our school system when it comes to this. We don't even get through 3-4 books every year, far from it. Usually 2 a year for each subject (icelandic, danish, english, and even less for french), only a little more for graduation subjects. In icelandic, we're pretty stuck in poetry and literature from the 1200s, which is great and all - I myself find it pretty amazing being able to read something that was written in the 13th century and still understand it in it's original form. However, if that doesn't spark students' interest, it won't encourage them to read like modern literature might do. There have been some great books written in the 19th and 20th century, we also do have one Nobel Prize winner in literature and it's preposterous that they won't make us read any of that along with the old works of unknown authors. Secondary school even does a better job at this than do the high schools/colleges here, they have more variety in their book choices.

 

I guess English classes are a bit better organised when it comes to this. Last year, we read Animal Farm for the former semester and Of Mice and men for the latter. It is understandable that we only go through 2 books a year considering all the grammar, translations, word definitions etc that we go over because English is our second language. However, I think we could get through at least three over the whole year.

 

Lastly, I definitely agree with you on the summer-read. I hear some schools do that here but mine doesn't and really, it's ridiculous because I hear in the UK, they have more "semesters" and shorter breaks than we do really... My summer vacation starts the 30th of April and ends on 20th of August and who couldn't get through at least 2 books in that time?...

[willoyd]

I can't remember what books we did for O-Levels, although I remember being required to read a choice of Barchester Towers or Pickwick Papers in the year before, and I lapped up both. At A-Level the set texts I can remember were Emma, Middlemarch, Hamlet, Othello, One Way Pendulum, The Great Gatsby and Hardy's poems. I hated Emma, until I reread all my texts in the summer holidays at the end of the first year, and then fell in love with everything Jane Austen. I wasn't really ready for Middlemarch - find it a bit of a grind. Loved Hamlet, still detest Othello. Can't abide Scott Fitzgerald either. Neutral on the others.

 

I'm appalled Katrina. My children are year 5 (they have their 10th birthday during the academic year), and most have finished and disposed of Harry Potter. They don't read much in the way of classics, although some of the girls have enjoyed Black Beauty and Little Women, but they generally read widely and pretty avidly. They are reading children's books generally though - Lemony Snickett, Anthony Horowitz, Enid Blyton, Cornelia Funke, Eva Ibbotson, Michael Morpurgo, Susan Cooper etc - with only one or two 'older' books - e.g. Watership Down and one or two reading His Dark Materials.

Edited June 23, 2010 by willoyd

[Vanwa]

Ooh Willoyd, in that case considering their ages you might like to try Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian. Our year 5 teacher read this to us at school, and to this day it remains one of my favourites.

 

A young boy called Willie Beech is evacuated from London during WW2. He's a really shy and timid kid, who is put into the care of the miserable Tom Oakley. Against all odds, the two develop a strong friendship, and Tom discovers the reasons for the child's demeanor.

 

It is a children's book, and one that has stayed with me for about 15 years. I've read it dozens of times and fall in love with it all over again everytime I pick it up.

 

Not only that, but as the parent, you get the joy of reading it first to double-check it is suitable material! Win-win I say

[Nollaig]

I'm all for a wide variety of quality reading but Mad magazine and manga books just done fall under the quality of "reading". Our students are required to do reports over the summer and this stuff is just rubbish.

 

I wouldn't be inclined to call Manga rubbish as a whole, some of it is very good. But not like reading novels, and I wouldn't encourage it in schools, I'll agree.

 

The books I studied in secondary school had no effect on me or my reading whatsoever. I studied Shakespeare, Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry, Of Mice And Men, To Kill A Mockingbird. Think that was it. Enjoyed them all, later studied Shakespeare every year in college but I don't associate any of them with school.

 

College was a lot more fruitful because it was more specific, and allowed me to figure out what sorts of classic novels I liked (in the classes I chose we covered Frankenstein, Caleb Williams, Kim, Robinson Crusoe, The Female Quixote, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, The Blackwater Lightship, Amongst Women, Good Behaviour, Vilette, Mary Barton, The Moonstone, She and also a bunch of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer. And some Poe. Love me some Poe.) I wasn't keen on the adventure stories or Chaucer, but loved the gothic/romantic stories and the contemporary Irish novels.

[lauraloves]

i studied Macbeth, of mice and men and Romeo and Juilet at GCSE. not very successfully i might add, the teacher i had was rubbish and many in my class thought that books were better thrown at each other than read *shudders*

 

At A level i had a fantastic teacher, we studied Tom Browns School Days and Harry Potter and the Philosphers Stone. in the second year i studied hamelet and this became my favourite play in the world. i absolutly love it

[ian]

We read one 2 books a years, as I remember (hey, it WAS a long time ago you know!). I remember Romeo & juliet, 1984, To kill a Mockingbird, Moonfleet. We also had to read one book a month and write a review on it. The review was a process I detested doing at school, which probably explains why I haven't posted a review of any books on this website!

 

Reading Romeo & Juliet put me off Shakespeare for a long time. I don't think 14 yo boys should be given it: you just don't get it at that age. Shakespeare should be watched, not read (imho of course). The same with To Kill a Mockingbird - I wasn't grown up enough to appreciate it. As a keen reader, that wasn't a problem to me, but I can see that it put some of my classmates off reading for life.

[BookJumper]

To be quite honest, I don't know what kind of reader I'd be if it wasn't for my own inclination and my family's encouragement.

 

In middle school most of the Italian books we were set were dire, as the interesting stuff (such as Ariosto's genius epic poem Orlando Furioso) was considered difficult and only read in extract form; while for English we were usually asked to read heavily simplified - urgh! - versions of the classics.

 

In high school, the Italian books we read in full continued to be mostly dire thanks to a particularly uninspired and uninspiring professor, and the English curriculum was simply laughable (particularly for a modern languages prep schoool!): I remember we spent 6 months on Shakespeare and only got through what was on our book, i.e. two speeches from Hamlet, two from Macbeth, and all of three Sonnets I let you imagine how behind I was when I went to the UK to read English Lit.

[Blackrina]

Ugh i hated reading during school, my classmates were horrors and it really put me off all books for awhile.

 

We had to read The Simple Gift by i dont remember, i think 4 years in a row, and still i was the only one out of all my english classes that actually read it.... Another one was Mice and Men but my classmates wouldnt stop bitching and we ended up watching the movie instead. This also happened when our teacher tried to read Romeo and Juilet i think we spent 2 classes on it before watching the movie with DiCaprio (which wasnt as bad...)

 

When i first started high school our teacher use to make us do lots of books reviews, about 6 months in she stopped seeing as the only ones doing the work was me and a friend of mine.

 

I dont see why teachers even bother reading at school, no body is ever interested and most of the time it just ends up being point less. In primary school its okay, little kids enjoy it, but in high school....

[Nicola Booth]

Two memorable reads at school for me would be: -

 

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

 

 

Incidentially I noticed that To Kill a Mockingbird is being sold in Tesco and Asda at the moment in their chart section!

[pontalba]

Good idea for a thread.

I've seen lists that some posters put up of books that they were required to read in high school, and am amazed, and encouraged as to the new readers being encouraged in school.

I am only an avid reader on account of my mother, not the school system. There were very few books we were actually required to read, and that's just a shame.

 

I only remember [for sure] The Scarlet Letter, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and Lord of the Flies.

[vinay87]

In India, reading isn't really a part of our curriculum. We just read short stories and poems supplied in the prescribed text and that sucks!

 

It's also why so many people think reading is for dweebs here. They don't realise that books are just so wondrous that there's so much that can be gained from a book as opposed to watching TV or roaming the city. It's just frustrating.

 

As for what I'd love to see kids read in school:

 

1. Victorian classics, more of Dickens and at least some of the female writers like the Bronte sisters.

2. Poetry, at least a discussion of Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats.

3. Plays, Aristophanes and Shakespeare

[SaraPepparkaka]

I don't remember that we read that many books, like Vinay said it was mostly texts provided in the textbooks. Much of that was Finnish and Swedish classics, but you don't really get what's great with a book if you only read like 10 pages from it, taken from the middle of the book somewhere. We'd read 2-3 books per year and do reports on those. As I remember it, you could pretty much choose what you liked from a long list. I'd always read most of the books on the list, and I didn't see the logic that they were chosen with. Mostly contemporaries, very little classics.

But given that in the classroom there'll be someone like me, who has read most everything there is in the school library, and someone like my husband, who has read a grand total of 3 books in his whole life (and he read those after meeting me..), I understand that it is difficult to find something that suits us all. Much easier to concentrate on grammar. For the languages I read we never read entire books, but I remember we had a lot of newspaper material on interesting subjects like politics, gender issues, preservation of wildlife and such. I really enjoyed that.

 

No, it's my Mom I have to thank for my habit of reading. She worked in a library when I was 7-14 years old. She'd never give explicit recommendations, she'd just say: oh I suppose you'll find something in that shelf there, and when I had found something she'd give little hints if she thought I'd like the book or not. Or she'd say, help me to put these new books in the shelf and you get to look through them and be the first to borrow them if there's something you want to read.