The Hobbit

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I wonder if your kid is in school with mine. He is also an 8th grader reading the hobbit. They did animal farm either last semester or last spring. I think they did a sci fi type disaster story too. I think you are hyper focusing on what your impression is of McPS. It’s called confirmation bias.

With that said, I wish they would read more books and more classical literature. I read the red badge of courage n middle school. They are old enough for Shakespeare.

I have never understood why of all books in the world, The Red Badge of Courage and Of Mice and Men were required reading in middle school.

However, I was super pleased when my kid was reading Lord of the Flies at school and came home and said that there was a discussion in class where the teacher said that the book is about the universal human experience and somebody raised their hand and asked how it could be about the universal human experience when there are only boys and men in it. Which is true about The Hobbit too.

Good for the young man who pointed that out; I don’t think my boys would be that perceptive yet. That said, women/girls can also be a part of the universal human experience that happens to focus on males in this particular story. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that a boy cannot connect to a book with all or primarily female characters, nor is the reverse true.

I'm the PP. It was a young woman who pointed that out. Yes, women and girls are part of the universal human experience. A book with only boys/men in it does not portray the universal human experience, any more than a book with only girls/women in it (except that nobody has ever claimed that a book with only girls/women in it does).

Both of you are wrong, as is the girl who raised her hand. The teacher is correct because Lord of the Flies is an allegory about how civilization organizes itself not to restrain violence and coercion, but to direct it. It is a reflection on the human condition.

The idea that a girl can’t be expected to appreciate Lord of the Flies unless she sees a couple of girls worshipping a severed pig’s head is both insulting to girls, and emblematic of the kind of brain dead literalism that can only be found on the internet.

Well, you raise a really interesting point about whether the lessons of LOTF are really universal or whether they reflect an unstated male bias. Would a group of girls stranded on the island behave similarly? Many people would suggest no. I’m not saying that a book has to have women in it. But to say that a book that is written entirely around a very male worldview is “universal” displays a strong unconscious bias. Fwiw, I wrote a 9th grade essay in the 80s complaining about being assigned The Iliad because I felt it was overly focused on a male worldview with no real female characters or female viewpoints. I also remember lengthy debates in college about whether War and Peace had too much of a male bias (on that one, I disagreed—I love Tolstoy and think he has some surprisingly complex female characters—given what a famous mysogynist he was, I now wonder whether his wife, who transcribed all his novels, did some heavy editing there.)

Again with the ridiculous literalism. Lord of the Flies is not a thought experiment. If a group of girls got stranded on an island and failed to paint their faces, murder each other, and hallucinate conversations with dead pigs, that would no more invalidate Golding’s message than if a group of boys got stranded on an island and failed to do all those things. It is a metaphor, not a prediction.. This is like complaining that Animal Farm can’t convey a message about people because all of the main characters are animals.

You’re missing my point. Your point (or another PP’s) was that it was a metaphor or allegory for a universal human experience about power dynamics. There is perhaps an argument that female groups have the same power dynamics, albeit expressed in different ways (see, e.g., mean girls; real housewives of anywhere). Others would argue that seeing this as a universal tendency reflects an unconscious male bias. I don’t have a problem with mixed sex classes being assigned to read LOTF anymore than I have a problem with them reading Emma or Beloved. No book is really going to be universal in its themes because the human experience has too much variety. Acknowledging that diversity is valuable, as is using literature as a vehicle to walk a mile in someone els shoes. The only thing that objectionable is acting like an experience or viewpoint is necessarily universal, when it is not. Even the things we commonly say are universal like “a parent’s love for their child” really are not universal, and have varied a lot over different cultures and times.

You’ve clearly missed the point of the Lord of the Flies if you think it’s a commentary on the nature of boys. It’s not an attempt to represent their viewpoint. It’s not an attempt at realism. Emma is a book that is actually about men and women and romance, and a good one at that. Saying Lord of the Flies is about boys specifically is like saying Animal Farm is about animal behavior, or that Veggie Tales is about the food pyramid. All your gibberish about “universal” viewpoints is just an attempt to motte and Bailey your initial position by just defining “universal” so narrowly that literally no book could ever claim to be about a universal theme, because, like, people are different, y’know?

I'm ok with that.

-person whose high school English classes consisted of the teacher asking us to identify the "universal truth" on p. x of Siddhartha, or Of Mice And Men, or King Lear

[Anonymous]

We read The Hobbit in our Studies of the Epic at university - alongside The Iliad, The Aeneid, and Beowulf. And Dune. Great class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I noticed my 8th grade DC reading the Hobbit. I asked if they were reading it on their own and to my surprise, they said it was for school. The first book in four years that was not about the struggle of some disadvantaged person.

So this is in advanced English? Is this true at all schools or just a particular class?

[Anonymous]

:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I noticed my 8th grade DC reading the Hobbit. I asked if they were reading it on their own and to my surprise, they said it was for school. The first book in four years that was not about the struggle of some disadvantaged person.

I hate those books about the struggles of disadvantaged people. Antigone needs to get over herself. Oliver Twist should have make better choices. Les Miserables, The Grapes of Wrath, As I Lay Dying, Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, blah blah blah blah blah. I refuse to read anything except books about the struggles of advantaged people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For years, it seemed that every assigned book my MCPS kid brought home, someone died. It seemed to be the defining quality for what the schools considered literature. It got to be a joke. Every time she had a new book assigned, I’d ask “Who dies in this one?” and she always had an answer. Literature doesn’t have to be so depressing.

Thorin dies in The Hobbit.

Was I the only one who sobbed inconsolably when Sauron fell? All those thousands of years of knowledge and experience gone because some young homeless punk gangster dunedain shives him. Tragedy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For years, it seemed that every assigned book my MCPS kid brought home, someone died. It seemed to be the defining quality for what the schools considered literature. It got to be a joke. Every time she had a new book assigned, I’d ask “Who dies in this one?” and she always had an answer. Literature doesn’t have to be so depressing.

Thorin dies in The Hobbit.

Was I the only one who sobbed inconsolably when Sauron fell? All those thousands of years of knowledge and experience gone because some young homeless punk gangster dunedain shives him. Tragedy.

You have made my day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP That is very interesting. You should thank the teacher because it’s not on the curriculum list. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BbErRyjKcfu0KqJmHtUgKch-DGvuj8GMetoWnzECknE/edit

The teacher must be doing it on their own

That’s actually a nice list. What is the meaning of the hbolded? Are teachers supposed to pick a few of these or do all of them?

I think those are the novels that the teacher can select from -- kids read one novel/marking period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think mine read Tom Sawyer, LOTF, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Les Miserables, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Circe, Penelopiad, Of Mice and Men, Night, Animal Farm, bunch of Shakespeare. That's just off the top of my head. All "real books."

In MCPS? What school was that and when? I actually don’t think this sounds appropriate for 8th grade. My exptremelt advanced reader has read some of these but not all. Reading all these in a year is more like a college level course, and I think would be too much for even an advanced 8th class—especially with le miserable and hunchback in there—those are dense.

These were between 7th and 11th, I think. Not sure what they read for AP Lit. But, Hunchback was 7th! (as an option).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder if your kid is in school with mine. He is also an 8th grader reading the hobbit. They did animal farm either last semester or last spring. I think they did a sci fi type disaster story too. I think you are hyper focusing on what your impression is of McPS. It’s called confirmation bias.

With that said, I wish they would read more books and more classical literature. I read the red badge of courage n middle school. They are old enough for Shakespeare.

I have never understood why of all books in the world, The Red Badge of Courage and Of Mice and Men were required reading in middle school.

However, I was super pleased when my kid was reading Lord of the Flies at school and came home and said that there was a discussion in class where the teacher said that the book is about the universal human experience and somebody raised their hand and asked how it could be about the universal human experience when there are only boys and men in it. Which is true about The Hobbit too.

Good for the young man who pointed that out; I don’t think my boys would be that perceptive yet. That said, women/girls can also be a part of the universal human experience that happens to focus on males in this particular story. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that a boy cannot connect to a book with all or primarily female characters, nor is the reverse true.

I'm the PP. It was a young woman who pointed that out. Yes, women and girls are part of the universal human experience. A book with only boys/men in it does not portray the universal human experience, any more than a book with only girls/women in it (except that nobody has ever claimed that a book with only girls/women in it does).

Both of you are wrong, as is the girl who raised her hand. The teacher is correct because Lord of the Flies is an allegory about how civilization organizes itself not to restrain violence and coercion, but to direct it. It is a reflection on the human condition.

The idea that a girl can’t be expected to appreciate Lord of the Flies unless she sees a couple of girls worshipping a severed pig’s head is both insulting to girls, and emblematic of the kind of brain dead literalism that can only be found on the internet.

Well, you raise a really interesting point about whether the lessons of LOTF are really universal or whether they reflect an unstated male bias. Would a group of girls stranded on the island behave similarly? Many people would suggest no. I’m not saying that a book has to have women in it. But to say that a book that is written entirely around a very male worldview is “universal” displays a strong unconscious bias. Fwiw, I wrote a 9th grade essay in the 80s complaining about being assigned The Iliad because I felt it was overly focused on a male worldview with no real female characters or female viewpoints. I also remember lengthy debates in college about whether War and Peace had too much of a male bias (on that one, I disagreed—I love Tolstoy and think he has some surprisingly complex female characters—given what a famous mysogynist he was, I now wonder whether his wife, who transcribed all his novels, did some heavy editing there.)

Again with the ridiculous literalism. Lord of the Flies is not a thought experiment. If a group of girls got stranded on an island and failed to paint their faces, murder each other, and hallucinate conversations with dead pigs, that would no more invalidate Golding’s message than if a group of boys got stranded on an island and failed to do all those things. It is a metaphor, not a prediction.. This is like complaining that Animal Farm can’t convey a message about people because all of the main characters are animals.

You’re missing my point. Your point (or another PP’s) was that it was a metaphor or allegory for a universal human experience about power dynamics. There is perhaps an argument that female groups have the same power dynamics, albeit expressed in different ways (see, e.g., mean girls; real housewives of anywhere). Others would argue that seeing this as a universal tendency reflects an unconscious male bias. I don’t have a problem with mixed sex classes being assigned to read LOTF anymore than I have a problem with them reading Emma or Beloved. No book is really going to be universal in its themes because the human experience has too much variety. Acknowledging that diversity is valuable, as is using literature as a vehicle to walk a mile in someone els shoes. The only thing that objectionable is acting like an experience or viewpoint is necessarily universal, when it is not. Even the things we commonly say are universal like “a parent’s love for their child” really are not universal, and have varied a lot over different cultures and times.

You’ve clearly missed the point of the Lord of the Flies if you think it’s a commentary on the nature of boys. It’s not an attempt to represent their viewpoint. It’s not an attempt at realism. Emma is a book that is actually about men and women and romance, and a good one at that. Saying Lord of the Flies is about boys specifically is like saying Animal Farm is about animal behavior, or that Veggie Tales is about the food pyramid. All your gibberish about “universal” viewpoints is just an attempt to motte and Bailey your initial position by just defining “universal” so narrowly that literally no book could ever claim to be about a universal theme, because, like, people are different, y’know?

Loved the Veggie Tales reference!

[Anonymous]

According to Tolkien, In The Hobbit, the dwarves are inspired by the Jews and Jewish Diaspora. The Lonely Mountain is like Jerusalem/Palestine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:According to Tolkien, In The Hobbit, the dwarves are inspired by the Jews and Jewish Diaspora. The Lonely Mountain is like Jerusalem/Palestine.

Source? Because there the dwarves are, in the first chapter of The Hobbit, eating pork pie.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:According to Tolkien, In The Hobbit, the dwarves are inspired by the Jews and Jewish Diaspora. The Lonely Mountain is like Jerusalem/Palestine.

Source? Because there the dwarves are, in the first chapter of The Hobbit, eating pork pie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarves_in_Middle-earth#Jewish_history

[Anonymous]

Spoiler alert!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:According to Tolkien, In The Hobbit, the dwarves are inspired by the Jews and Jewish Diaspora. The Lonely Mountain is like Jerusalem/Palestine.

Source? Because there the dwarves are, in the first chapter of The Hobbit, eating pork pie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarves_in_Middle-earth#Jewish_history

Tolkien elaborated on Jewish influence on his Dwarves in a letter: "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue..." In the last interview before his death, Tolkien said "The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say, that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic."



No, please, thank you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don’t consider hobbits disadvantaged?

The Hobbit, as the name suggests, is about only one hobbit, one of the wealthiest elite hobbits in the Shire.