All I Really Need to Know About Literature I Learned Years and Years after High-School Graduation

[florafloraflora]

I've just found Will Okun's New York Times blog. He's a schoolteacher in Chicago who was chosen in a contest to travel around Africa with Times columnist Nick Kristof, and now he's back to work and still blogging. Today he writes about how his students fall asleep every time he tries to work on traditional literary classics with them, no matter

Comments

[zz_neena]

I know I'm the odd one out here, as I've had this conversation with other people in the past.

Reading the classics in school never put me off them. In fact reading them made me see that I could understand "hard" books on my own if I put in some effort.

As a teacher, though, I am very careful to select books I know I can get ethusiastic about sharing with kids. I find that it is my enthusiasm that often gets some of the most reluctant readers interested.

[melydia]

Assigned books at school put me off reading for a long time. The only stuff I read for pleasure was the occasional fantasy book in the summer for the library's summer reading program. In fact, I didn't read for pleasure regularly until college, at which point I was desperate to read anything that wasn't a textbook.

That's not to say I hated every book we read. I enjoyed The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and much of the Shakespeare. But the vast majority were more effort than (I felt) they were worth.

[retc]

I totally agree.
Literature should speak to you.
It should be something that makes you think
and you therefore need to be able to relate to it
(at least when you are just learning.)
Give them something challenging that they'll love
and they will learn to love the challenge.