<p>
So they shouldn’t read “The Great Gatsby” in high school either.</p>
<p>I sympathize with the grimness issue – my son raised it all the time, when he was in high school – but would note:</p>
<p>(a) I think we are talking about college-bound high school juniors and seniors here. There may be some things they are not sophisticated enough to appreciate in terms of style – I wouldn’t assign them Finnegan’s Wake or Journey To The End Of The Night – but I don’t think there is any subject matter they need to be shielded from.</p>
<p>(b) We can argue about what ought to be in the literary canon, and I would want to expand it, but for the most part the set of non-grim works of widely recognized literary quality is small, and many of them are a lot more sex-drenched than everyone here would endorse. And the exceptions – e.g., Jane Austen – are not so attractive to high school boys, even smart ones. (I think they could be taught to like Austen, but I will admit to failing in that task with the high school boy I was in the best position to influence.)</p>
<p>As for middle schoolers and the Holocaust, let me tell a story of perhaps my biggest specific parenting screw-up. When my older child was in middle school, we went to New York City for the day with both of our children and a friend of the older one. At the half-price TKTS booth that day, they had tickets to the production of The Diary of Anne Frank with Natalie Portman. How perfect, I thought. Both girls (the older ones) had recently read the book in school, and it had inspired my daughter to start keeping a journal. So we all went to the play that evening.</p>
<p>When the lights came on at the end of the performance, my younger child, then 10, was sobbing so hard he could not get his breath. He had just become perhaps the first person in history to see The Diary of Anne Frank without knowing in advance how it ended, and it hadn’t even occurred to him that the character played by Portman – on whom he had a huge crush by the end of Act I, of course – might not survive. It took him 20-30 minutes to regain any semblance of composure, and you can imagine the looks we got from everyone around. I had totally forgotten to take account of his maturity level and background knowledge. He still brings it up some times, and he’s in graduate school.</p>
<p>The middle schoolers, on the other hand, were fine.</p>
<p>I think any of the really great books can be taught well, Alh. And the invisible man is a great book. </p>
<p>But the great books are not easy. They refuse to look away from the hard truths. </p>
<p>The question for me is whether or not our teachers are being well trained in facilitating effective conversations. I am guessing some are much better at this than others, as is the case in everything. </p>
<p>Still, a great book has a point of view. Nobody will agree with all if them or be comfortable with all of them. The point isn’t to be comfortable, but it’s not to feel personally attacked either. </p>
<p>As in all things, it is the teacher and the class that will create the values in the room. </p>
<p>I’m against book banning and gate keeping around literature. I am FOR better teacher training in leading discussions.</p>
<p>Re Marsian’s post #260: I don’t actually agree about a difference between films and books. For me, anyway, and I think for QMP also, a book exists “inside your head” in a way that a film does not.</p>
<p>Re mokusatsu’s post #261: The Great Gatsby has become standard high-school fare, although I first read it in college. When QMP’s 10th grade class read it, one of the boys regarded Myrtle’s death as humorous, and joked about it. If you would like to see illustrations of limited understanding of The Great Gatsby by high-school students, the “Grade my Essay” section of the SAT prep forum here at CC will (sadly) provide ample fodder.</p>
<p>Re JHS #262: I think that high-school juniors and seniors differ in prior exposure to grim situations in literature (or film) and differ in readiness for it. I suspect that your own experience and readiness does not generalize too well–you seem to have been relatively sophisticated and well-read as a high school student. That’s good, but I see no rush in it. It is ironic in a way that at the same time the local school was preaching that “mathematics is not a race” and there is no need to accelerate in mathematics, they seemed to see exposure to the harsh realities of the adult world as something that needed to be ramped up very fast. Group theory in mathematics is a good deal less troubling!</p>
<p>Personally, I think that your 10-year-old son had the only good reaction to the death of Anne Frank. One of the side effects of exposure to so much grimness is to normalize it, so that we lose the horror of events that should shock us every time.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I am still reading Invisible Man. alh is a much faster reader! :)</p>
<p>QuantMech, I wouldn’t hold my own experience of studying literature as a model for anyone’s curriculum. I was precocious, and very good at it, and loved it to distraction. My mother, on the other hand, taught Literature and Moral Philosophy to a wide variety of students who weren’t me, in 10th-12th grades, for 25 years or so. (She barely taught me at all. I avoided taking any class she taught until the last three months of my senior year.) I don’t think there was any topic she wouldn’t address with 11th and 12th graders.</p>
<p>For a number of years, she had a unit towards the end of the year where she would arrange a private screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries And Whispers for the juniors and seniors in two classes she taught. (At first, these were all boys, but by the time she stopped teaching high school the school had been co-ed for 7 years, and she had previously taught at an all-girls school.) For those of you who are not familiar with the film: It is female-centric, and very, very, very grim, and while not relentlessly sexually explicit it has a fair amount of nudity and some shocking moments of perverse sexuality. My mother loved the film (as do I, for almost completely different reasons), and had no trouble teaching it to cohort after cohort of high school boys and then boys and girls. For a while, before that, she had done something similar with the film *If . . . *, which was set at an English boarding school for boys and involved homosexual rape, heterosexual sex, and mass murder. Whichever film she used, a big point of this segment was learning to use intellectual tools to analyze challenging, upsetting material.</p>
<p>Sorry . . . scraping myself off the floor. Cries and Whispers? I don’t think I saw that until grad school or possibly as a post-doc.</p>
<p>What this conversation finally comes down to, whether we want to admit it or not, is whether or not we see a real value in the study of literature. I usually don’t like slippery slope arguments, but in this case, I think the logical extension of “this book is disturbing/offensive/inappropriate so it shouldn’t be taught” is a severely watered down curriculum that sacrifices both quality and deep thought at the altar of taste. </p>
<p>If you think that high school English class should be mainly about the mechanics of writing, maybe you don’t have a problem with that. Someone can be taught to write effectively without reading a lot of classic literature, especially if the curriculum becomes more non-fiction heavy (which does seem to be the educational trend). But if you think there is a value in introducing students to experiences and lives widely different from their own, of asking them to think critically about issues of identity and expression and human nature, about both the failures of language and its capacities, about loneliness and mortality and how to live in a world where both are, on some fundamental level, inescapable, then we can’t eliminate every work that could reasonably be considered objectionable. Some texts that grapple with these questions end hopefully; some end despairingly, and I don’t think there is any reason for a reading list to include only books of the second type. But however these novels end, they are frequently going to include some very heavy material, and that’s a good thing.</p>
<p>Even if I were to accept that novels too disturbing for a 17 year old high school senior would be fine for an 18 year old college freshman, taking these novels out of high school is doing more than delaying the reading experience by a couple of years. Many students are going to go through four years and only take one required literature course. In many schools, they will have wide latitude to pick from a variety of courses, many of which will be pretty specialized. If a student takes, as his one lit course, Science Fiction or The Graphic Novel or, for that matter, Lyric Poetry or Victorian Literature, there are whole swaths of experience he’s going to be missing. </p>
<p>I think it is a problem if we move to a system in which students who don’t major in literature or related fields aren’t going to ever be exposed to literature that makes them uncomfortable. If you don’t, that’s a different argument, but let’s at least admit that that’s what we’re talking about here.</p>
<p>*Incidentally, I am still reading Invisible Man. alh is a much faster reader! *</p>
<p>Well, I need some way to entertain myself when I take short breaks from CC.</p>
<p>JHS - post #266 - Thank you!!!</p>
<p>* Whichever film she used, a big point of this segment was learning to use intellectual tools to analyze challenging, upsetting material. *</p>
<p>Yes. This is my ideal. Fortunate students and fortunate son.</p>
<h1>263 - poetgrl:</h1>
<p>As in all things, it is the teacher and the class that will create the values in the room.</p>
<p>Exactly!</p>
<p>apprenticeprof, if you have time, please take a look at the some of the “Grade my Essay” threads over on the SAT Preparation forum. I think you may be surprised by how little of literature the students understand, actually.</p>
<p>I think Invisible Man was written by Ellison for adults. I think that it is a very valuable book for adults to read.</p>
<p>I doubt that much is truly gained by exposure to literature in high school, by the types of students who would enroll in Science Fiction to fulfill the college literature requirement and never read a serious book again after high school (assuming that such people exist).</p>
<p>There are a lot of authors who are lost from the high school curriculum in the “rush to grimness,” at least if QMP’s school is representative. Thoreau? Nothing. Wordsworth? Nothing. Blake? Who? Any of the Brontes? Nothing. Emerson? One essay. Melville? Nothing. Cather? Nope. Rolvaag? Forget it. Shakespeare? Less than there used to be. Milton? You are joking. Chaucer? Only the most gruesome parts; is that the baker–I forget? William Henry Dana? No. Thomas Wolfe? Gone. Steinbeck? Only Of Mice and Men, to which I think that the untaught Grapes of Wrath is a valuable counter.</p>
<p>We actually read O. Henry’s The Ransom of Red Chief and The Gift of the Magi in 9th grade. If you want a good illustration of the effects of personal maturity on the interpretation of literature, ask a 9th grader how he/she responds to The Gift of the Magi. I, for one, hadn’t any real clue.</p>
<p>I think grapes of wrath is highly overrated, as literature. It should be taught in American history. Steinbecks writing plods and lacks grace, IMHO. </p>
<p>We read moby dick. My kids read moby dick. It is great taught side by side with the scarlet letter for obvious reasons. </p>
<p>I wish they’d teach the crucible in junior high and show mean girls and heathers with it. </p>
<p>There’s a lot missing because there is a lot of great English language literature and poetry.</p>
<p>I do not now think of The Grapes of Wrath as great literature. Tastes change over time. However, it has scenes that are intensely moving to (at least some) 15-year-olds. The speech about the necessity of allowing oranges to rot in the fields, so that the supply can be kept down, so that the prices can be kept up, while people were going hungry still resonates powerfully in my head, and I am sure that it informs my politics.</p>
<p>I read Moby Dick in high school. I think it would read differently to me now–I’m part of the “Save the Whales” group.</p>
<p>Some students may get nothing out of complex texts, but I assure you that others do, and not just the ones that are going on to major in English. Even with the best teachers, some students may not appreciate what they are reading, but I think a good teacher can frequently make sure that even students struggling with the novel can learn from the experience. A lot of students have difficulty with concepts in science and math as well; we don’t suggest that we stick to algebra until college comes along. In fact, we often complain that schools are too quick to teach to the middle at the expense of the stronger students when it comes to those subjects. Frankly, while I’m glad I had an excellent math and science education, I think a student who has an imperfect understanding of the Great Gatsby is going to get more out of that - if only in terms of basic cultural literacy - than the student who struggles through algebra II. People are going to disagree about what is and isn’t too difficult for a high school class, but why don’t we leave that to the educators? If a high school teacher finds that year after year he is assigning Moby Dick but everyone hates it and no one really understand it, presumably he’ll take it off the curriculum. I don’t think that is the case with The Great Gatsby, regardless of the various misreadings that might be represented in a given class.</p>
<p>In terms of works getting excised from the canon, or at least the high school canon, I think that can be a problem, but part of it is also the natural effect of expanding the canon. I’m not even talking about consciously selecting works by women and minorities, but just about the obvious fact that as time passes, there are more potential works to choose from. If you add Beloved, or All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy), or The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brian) to the curriculum, you’re going to lose another, almost certainly older work. </p>
<p>Essentially, I think high schools should strive for some mix. Teach some classics from the 19th century and earlier, and teach some excellent twentieth century works. Don’t run from tragedy, but make sure all of your texts aren’t totally nihilistic. But it seems to me, QM, that English teachers really can’t win with you. You don’t want books that are too disturbing, you don’t want books that are too difficult, you don’t want books with material that immature students might use as fodder for jokes - but you also, presumably, want students to be engaged and challenged. You suggest books that you think are appropriate, but your selections are fairly arbitrary and arguably, in some cases, not less potentially scarring or difficult than the books you object to. Do you really think students who don’t understand the Great Gatsby are going to have a subtle appreciation for Jane Eyre? Do you think students who make Invisible Man the subject of crude jokes aren’t going to do the same with The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that ends with a woman breastfeeding a starving adult man? Don’t you think that a student might find Gloucester’s eyes getting gouged out in Lear as disturbing as QMP found the rape play in Invisible Man?</p>
<p>You do realize, QM, that all of the “great writers” you say are missing from classrooms are white Europeans and Americans? I’m rather glad we’re including others these days.</p>
<p>I think apprenticeprof nails it: " But it seems to me, QM, that English teachers really can’t win with you. You don’t want books that are too disturbing, you don’t want books that are too difficult, you don’t want books with material that immature students might use as fodder for jokes - but you also, presumably, want students to be engaged and challenged"</p>
<p>I don’t see the point of teaching only books by dead white people, only books that have no chance at being misunderstood, only books that won’t cause students to be challenged for their assumptions and values. I WANT books that take kids out of their comfort zone. That’s part of a well-rounded person, being able to look beyond your own world and what is in it.</p>
<p>There is a lot less literature in general in high school today than there was when I was a teen, at least in my high school. My school had a very general (and generally useless) 9th grade English course, but then 10th and 11th grades were devoted to challenging, historically-oriented American and British literature classes. Tenth grade American Lit was Anne Bradstreet to Ernest Hemingway, but I would say the majority of the year was spent in the 75 years or so from Emerson to the early 20th Century (and remembering that the late 20th Century hadn’t happened yet then). Eleventh grade British Lit started with Wordsworth and more or less ended with Hardy and Conrad – so pretty exclusively 19th Century – although there may have been a smidgen of T.S. Eliot at the end. In 12th grade, students took one-trimester minicourses that they selected from a menu. I took Creative Writing, The Divine Comedy, and my mother’s Existentialism in Literature. My mother’s other courses were Afro-American Literature and Literature of Identity. I don’t remember what else was offered, but there were four choices each trimester.</p>
<p>In addition to that, over half the students took French or Spanish through a fourth year, and the fourth-year classes were very literature-oriented. In my Spanish IV class, we read whole novels by Blasco Ibanez, Pio Baroja, Unamuno, and Laforet, and a play by Buero Vallejo, along with a good selection of 20th Century poetry from Ruben Dario to Antonio Machado. There was an AP class beyond that. The French IV class read Gide’s Les caves du Vatican, Malraux’s La condition humaine, and two plays by Ionesco, among other things I can’t remember. Again, AP French Lit was French V. The school only offered two years of Latin, but if you took it you ended by reading chunks of the Aeneid (but then you probably didn’t get to an AP class in French or Spanish).</p>
<p>So most of the people who graduated from my high school, which was a reasonably rigorous provincial private day school, but not Exeter or anything like it, had the equivalent of five or six real literature classes under their belts.</p>
<p>My kids’ public school did not have anything like a systematic literature course short of the AP level in any language, and didn’t offer literature-oriented APs in anything but Latin. The private school they used to attend was a lot better in that regard, with very rigorous English classes, but they didn’t read real literature in foreign languages other than Greek or Latin until the AP level.</p>
<p>Well, it’s probably true that this particular high school literature teacher can’t win with me.</p>
<p>I am very glad that work by non-European-American writers is now included in high school courses, actually.</p>
<p>I have nothing against difficult works being assigned. It’s the unrelenting parade of grimness that I don’t like. I don’t know where JHS went to high school, but if it is the same now and in the future, I would like to have my grandchildren go there (even if reading Inivisible Man is the price of attendance).</p>
<p>With regard to The Things They Carried: This book is extremely popular as assigned reading in high schools. I do not like it, either. Surprise! 
But perhaps unexpectedly, in this case, I do not like it because I don’t think it is grim enough to be true to the actuality of the war in Vietnam. (Ok, granted, the idea behind the book is that a story can be “true” without being true.) The tunnels are included in the book, but booby traps are practically absent. It seemed to me that the losses by Lt. Cross’s squad were light, relative to the losses among the men I knew who fought in Vietnam. Perhaps he is just a better leader. On the other hand, the action seen by the squad in the book seems very light relative to the average. Is it not? Perhaps the Tet offensive was discussed, but I have forgotten it. I don’t think that My Lai was mentioned–nor were borderline inhuman actions by the other side. I don’t think that the men who were POW’s in Vietnam would consider this book to be “true.”</p>
<p>And what can one say about a book where the sole Native American character goes down in a field of human waste? Did I somehow read the book incorrectly? Wikipedia claims that the body was found in “mud.”</p>
<p>My point in bringing up the misunderstandings of The Great Gatsby (which is much easier in my opinion than Invisible Man) was just to question claims that many high school students are ready for Invisible Man.</p>
<p>I don’t want to turn this thread into a referendum on the Things They Carried now, but come on. I recall at least two soldiers in the platoon dying, and the medic winds up shooting himself in the foot because he can’t cope with the horrors he’s seen. The story “The Man I Killed” deals with the narrator’s guilt at having killed a young Vietnamese soldier. The story “Style” (the one with the young girl dancing) is set in a civilian village that has been destroyed by American soldiers, and it is either stated or implied that the dancing girl’s family has been killed in the attack. </p>
<p>As you concede, the text is as concerned with truth, storytelling, and the ethics of fiction as it is with the Vietnam War, but regardless, I really don’t see how someone could see the work as either too light-hearted or inclined to whitewash American behavior. Maybe this is another book you should be rereading.</p>
<p>No thanks, apprenticeprof, I read The Things They Carried as an adult. I think it greatly understates the horrors of the war, on both sides.</p>