Reply to Just got disturbing email regarding English class for my rising freshman

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Just got disturbing email regarding English class for my rising freshman"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They also assign newer stuff because if it's popular and more identifiable and you can increase engagement across the board. It's not rocket science.  The 9th graders are more likely to actually read John Green than Nathaniel Hawthorne.[/quote]

I've heard this kind of argument from parents for years. "My kid likes candy and not broccoli." "My kid likes tv and doesn't like to read." "I can't get my (overweight) kid to exercise and all they want to do is play video games." Parenting requires directing your kids instead of accommodating them to just what they like. Good luck with this kind of kid when they're given a Myers Psych or Stewart Calculus book to read in AP or college. Or, gasp!, they have to read Plato, Homer, Cervantes, or Paton in a humanities class. Classics have stood the test of time and, instead of replacing them, they should be added to with works that are of equal importance, relevance, and scholarship. The problem with most high school English classes is that their lists consist of modern books that are not literature in the classic sense: they're poorly written and edited, they're practically guaranteed to have typos, and whatever "theme" that's contained is often forced with predictable protagonists who all seem to speak with a 5th grade vocabulary and live in a hackneyed world. Just because it includes some topic [i]du jour[/i] does not make it a great read in an English class that's supposed to be teaching how to read and understand difficult works, and see how different literary elements are used by authors to make cohesive arguments for a particular message. Plus the Lexile index of most of the popular books assigned these days in high school are often grade levels below the actual grade that is supposed to read them.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics