Reply to Antiracist System Audit

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm confused.  My kids went through 4 years each in MCPS and they never read Melville or Shakespeare.  Every English book they read was about the struggle of some disadvantaged group or person.  I guess the did read Animal Farm which is considered a classic but the main message there is that some people are more equal than others so it fits the narrative.[/quote]

My kids have read Shakespeare in their MCPS schools. Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, IIRC. Don't remember any Melville specifically, but it's possible the older kid read Bartleby the Scrivener. No high school kid is reading Moby Dick in school; that's for college English majors only.[/quote]

Also, have they read the entire play, or just excerpts?

At our nonW MS, they just pick out excerpts to have the kids read.  Kids rarely read an entire book.  [/quote]

That’s pathetic.

Oh and to the PP who says no high schooler is reading Moby Dick: maybe in MCPS they’re not, but I definitely read Moby Dick in high school. I don’t think it was that unusual.

[/quote]

I read Billy Budd in high school, which is much shorter. We did read some long novels though, like David Copperfield, Crime and Punishment, Ivanhoe. Yes, it was a lot of white male authors. I think the short stories we read were from a more diverse group.[/quote]

I want to say that, while I think it’s important for kids to learn how to digest long novels, spending time analyzing short pieces of work is just as important. People tend to equate length with quality, but that’s of course not true. I took a short stories class in high school and remember spending the entire class period analyzing a 1-page short story.

Yes, at the time that meant reading a lot of old white authors, but looking at the list of English courses now, I see courses in Black Oratorical Power, African literature (as separate from AA authors), Latin American literature, Central American literature, Haitian literature, contemporary Native American authors, etc. They offer all of that alongside seminars on Shakespeare, Yeats, Dickens, Jane Austen, etc.

This is at a private school, but there isn’t any reason why MCPS couldn’t implement something similar. [/quote]

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