Reply to Why can't we accelerate English the way we (try to) accelerate math?

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Reply to "Why can't we accelerate English the way we (try to) accelerate math?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a high school senior taking a college level English class.  She loves reading and writing and has wanted to major in English and be a writer since she was a little girl.  This class has sucked all of the joy out of English and she now intends to go a different direction in college. [/quote]

To be fair. I had the same experience at a top college.  Reading literary criticism and writing lit crit and approaching everything from a post modern or critical gender or whatever different lens took all the fun out of reading and writing.  I became a lawyer because the writing was more fun than lit crit, which really says something about how mind numbing college lit crit classes can be.

I also disagree with PP that said you can’t learn writing by reading.  You actually can learn a lot by reading really well written books, fiction and non-fiction.  Acclerating thorugh lots of APs will teach you less than just reading the classics, writing something on any topic, putting it through multiple drafts and then giving it to a good writer to critique.

I do wish the McPS HS classes read more books, though, plus more classics.  Seems like the standard honors course reads on book per quarter and they are almost always recent publications (my 10th grader has read one published in  2017 and one published in 2018 so far this year, and I think last year was similar — one in 2012, and I can’t remember the others).  They could double the number of books read so they could still include the recent stuff but add back in some of the 20th century or 19th century ones.   Would it kill then to read Steinbeck, Hemingway, or Hawthorne?  [/quote]

Those are white make authors. I do think that Of Mice and Men is n option for 9th with the updated curriculum. But the trend is away from those. My kid reads those kinds of authors in the summer. I’m lucky that I have one that is a voracious reader.[/quote]

My kid did read Of Mice and Men in 9th, but yes it was the only book that quarter.[/quote]

Books are not the only medium that kids read in English.  There are poems, plays m, short stories, speeches.  [/quote]

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