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Reply to ""Lord of the Flies" - in TENTH grade?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, give your kid a copy of AARP Magazine. It is recommended for ages 55 and up, so will be a stretch challenge for your genius child. [/quote]

Funniest post ive read here in a while.

Very sad to see tiger parenting reach the level where one would brag about their elementary school child reading Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, and other books with dark depressing themes. Oh but the books have big words! If your child is verbally gifted, let them do the NY Times crossword or read Anne of Green Gables. [/quote]

Basically all children's literature from the 19th century (heck, even Nancy Drew from the 40s) has more sophisticated language than most students read now.[/quote]

But what is the purpose of learning old English no longer used?    When writing i was always taught to simplify the language and not to use a $20 word when a 25 cent word was perfectly fine.

Court documents were being simplified years ago so that anyone with a with grade education can read them.   Too many insecure people want to be seen as so much more intelligent than the average guy that they would like to see old awkward language stay around.  [/quote]

Learning roots, prefixes, suffixes, and synonyms grows the mind.

Anyone can learn 25 cent blogger or biz speak. Won’t grow your mind a bit.

School is for growing and learning. Hopefully your career is too, but maybe yours isn’t. [/quote]

Everything that challenges you grows your mind.  You want children to align their growth with the world they live in.  Sure learning old British terms for various clothes and school functions might be new information to them, but if it doesn't deeply inspire their historical imagination and connect to their lives, it's kind of pointless.  I think it's more important to focus on whether books are well-written, whether discussions help them deeply take on others' perspectives, and connect the themes to their own experiences and to the world around them.   Language is a tool that evolves.

I also agree that "reading difficulty level" which looks at vocabulary and sentence  tells you little about the actual difficulty of a literary text.  The Sound and the Fury was one of the more difficult books I read in high school, but it only has an 800 lexile level.  But the non-linearity of the text, the shifting of narrators without warning, and having to adopt the perspective of characters who thought very differently than me was really challenging.   [/quote]

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