CSM: Dickens anyone?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>What books are students reading these days, in and out of class? This is a great question and not just because our 9th, 10th and 11th graders have PSAT and SAT critical reading, writing, and attendant vocabulary lists burning a hole in their brains. Our hs’s 9th grade English class reads Great Expectations - a fabulous book rich in social history, humor, beautifully crafted phrases and visual imagery as well as at least two SAT words on every page. </p>

<p>“Please, I want some more Dickens”:</p>

<p>"A fruitless search for the author at schools and on teen reading lists inspires a parent’s literary crusade…</p>

<p>I left the library and wandered over to the local bookstore…a middle-aged woman entered and asked a saleswoman for a book recommendation.</p>

<p>“Do you want chick lit, a page-turner, or a romance?” the saleswoman asked. Oh, how I wish she had asked, “Do you want Charles Dickens, Emily Bront?, or the latest translation of ‘The Iliad’?” I felt as though I were at Wal-Mart instead of the bookstore, and that prompted me to wonder what other adults were reading. I asked around at the bookstore’s cafe. Nobody had read Dickens since college and even then it was a chore. “I hated all that detail,” one woman complained.</p>

<p>Then I scoped out the bookstore’s teen section. Risqu? images graced the covers of books with titles such as “Skinny Dipping” (second in the “Au Pairs” series) and “Gossip Girl.” For boys, there were paperbacks that looked more like computer games than books ? glossy covers depicting space ships and intergalactic battles.</p>

<p>“It’s all teen trash,” said the mom who had tried bribing her daughter to read “Little Women.” "I might as well buy her a ‘Harlequin Romance.’ " How could the little black and white sketches of chubby men smoking pipes that appear in the older editions of Dickens compete with sexy girls romping on beaches?</p>

<p>“The answer is obvious,” said a local father of two high school girls. “Teachers don’t read Dickens, so they don’t assign him.” And sure enough, I looked at my son’s past summer reading list and Dickens wasn’t there. Neither were Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, or Stephen Crane. It seemed clear: For students in junior high, Dickens doesn’t exist ? not in book groups, not in schools, not at the library, and not at home. “Bah, humbug,” I growled, and went off on a search for Mark Twain."</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0116/p09s02-coop.htm[/url]”>http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0116/p09s02-coop.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

2

<p>I recall back to my middle/high school days English lit days and the readings assigned, classics like Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Julius Caesar, etc. and it is a wonder I eventually found any pleasure in reading at all, so painful was the experience.</p>

<p>Our son does enjoy reading for pleasure even though he has little free time to devote to it. But in middle/hi school he did read every Harry Potter book within days of it coming out. I never read them but I doubt that they would be considered great literature and are books that the article’s author might criticize. But he learned that reading can be a pleasure and I suspect that as an adult he will come to appreciate better literature, be they the classics or modern authors. He did read Black Elk Speaks and At Play in the Fields of the Lord this summer.</p>

<p>And if we insist that they read books we deem worthy we risk teaching them the lesson that reading is not pleasurable but merely another chore that we ask them to complete. A bad lesson IMHO.</p>

3

<p>Right now, my son is reading Pride and Prejudice for school. For non-school reading, he just finished Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat and began reading Salman Rushdie, Shalimar The Clown. In many ways, Rushdie has been his entree into serious literature, because he loved Haroun And The Sea Of Stories so much when he was younger; Shalimar will be his fifth or sixth Rushdie book. This is relatively new, though. Until about this time last year, his outside reading consisted mainly of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Kurt Vonnegut, Kage Baker, some Morman science fiction writer whose name I can’t remember, and manga of various stripes.</p>

<p>I think he read Great Expectations in 11th grade, but I’m not certain. In the past, he has tended to complain a lot about school reading, because he thinks the teachers choose overly depressing books. He once wrote a whole screed about it completely on his own, arguing for more genre fiction in the school curriculum.</p>

<p>Dickens is not as popular in school as he once was, and I don’t know anywhere that teaches Dickens in middle school. Or Twain, or Crane (which is really only one book – my mother used to teach it to 10th graders). And I don’t know any school anywhere that makes kids read R. L. Stevenson, notwithstanding how engaging it is.</p>

<p>You know who else is even more missing than Dickens? Melville, Hawthorne, Balzac, Flaubert, Thackeray, Elliot, Hardy, Conrad, any Brontes . . . really, the entire 19th Century EXCEPT Dickens and Austen. (My daughter had a minicourse on Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, but that was unusual.) And Hemingway and Faulkner. </p>

<p>I’m trying to remember other books my son has read for school. 1984. The Handmaid’s Tale. Siddhartha. The House On Mango Street. Song Of Soloman. Bone. The Things They Carried. Pygmalion. The Great Gatsby. One Shakespeare play a year.</p>

4

<p>I do not think that the purpose of reading should be to better prepare a reader for the PSAT or the SAT critical reading section. I wonder why the author saw fit to link reading to test-taking. If that is the attitude, no wonder why so many see reading as a chore rather than as a pleasure.</p>

<p>I don’t know about other people, but for many students, being told that a book is a classic or that it is on an assigned reading list is the kiss of death.</p>

<p>In school, S read some books that are considered classic and some of more recent vintage. Outside of school, he read whatever he wanted. This included a long list of math and science books, sci-fi, fantasy fiction. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>There are plenty of alternatives to Dickens, the Brontes, and so on. The popularity of the Harry Potter series suggests that when books capture kids’ imagination, they can be persuaded to leave their game consoles and their TVs. That most people do not care for Dickens is not a sign that the end of (western) civilization as we know it is nigh.</p>

5

<p>A couple of my favorites in high school were All The King’s Men, Tale of Two Cities. I had great English teachers in high school, though. I don’t know that I would have gotten that much out of Tale of Two Cities if I had read it on my own. </p>

<p>I remember reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights on my own though-- loved them. Sure beats Gossip Girl. I tried to read a Gossip Girl book a couple of years ago. Whoa. </p>

<p>Tks. for reminding me that I need to find a way to get my eighth grader to branch out and read some better stuff . . .</p>

6

<p>I agree with marite; this article is crap. Old people complaining that technology is dumbing down the new generation…give me a break. Let kids read what they like–reading should be a fun thing to do, not an academic exercise. My parents put very few restrictions on the types of books I could read, and it’s not a coincidence that after getting through the “lame” books I gravitated toward award-winners and classics. No kid nowadays considers “Gossip Girl” to be “literature” or a substitute for “dry classics.” It’s a completely different genre, and kids know that.</p>

7

<p>JHS – my eighth grader stopped going to a book club at the library a few years ago in elementary school because every book they chose had a character who died.</p>

<p>My sons complained about having to read Amy Tan in high school. Personally, I love Amy Tan.</p>

8

<p>So far, Gossip Girl has not been an assigned book in my kids’ schools . . .</p>

9

<p>The books are archaic - like shakespeare, they contain language no longer current, and they are usually overly florid and long-winded. And yes, I love reading - but I HATE the choices they use in English classes at the high schools (as do most high schoolers). Talk about depressing!!! People on death row, rampant racism, morbid and maudlin tales of depressed old men. Yuch. My son had to read “Winesburg, Ohio” over the summer for A.P. English, and we borrowed the taped set from the library so he could listen to it in the car on our family vacation - somehow we thought it would make the trip more enjoyable and get him motivated to read it on his own. By the end of the first chapter we were all begging him to turn it off! So depressing - we just couldn’t take it. Where are the joyous euphoric exciting books? The pared down essential books? They are not on our A.P. English lists!!!</p>

10

<p>I never heard of Gossip Girl before this thread. I doubt either my kids would want to read it (but then, they don’t care about Austen, either).</p>

<p>S read Amy Tan in 7th grade and liked the book a lot. A Shakespeare play a year (and performing a play in 6th grade). The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno. Dostoeivsky’s Crime and Punishment. Dickens’ Hard Times; Faulkner, Light in August; Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; Miller’s The Crucible; Melville (S hated the book); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (ditto); Capote, In Cold Blood; O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Cisneros, The House on Mango Street.And quite a few more titles.</p>

11

<p>I agree with many of the posters on here, if you are ever going to get a kid to really enjoy reading for pleasure you can’t start by forcing them to read things that they consider archaic and painfully boring. There is a reason that we have moved on from the traditional Dick, Jane, and Sally books when teaching youngsters to read. There are so many really good beginning reader series now, Step Into Reading, All Aboard Reading, etc. </p>

<p>I’m not saying that kids should never be exposed to some of the great classic authors, but speaking as an English Lit. major myself, I truly felt that some works were living strictly on reputation. A great story is a great story, and hopefully if you create an environment where kids learn that reading can be one of the great pleasures of life they will eventually branch out and learn to enjoy a variety of genres and authors.</p>

12

<p>I don’t believe that any of you are trying to say this, but it seems to me that you’re essentially saying that you find the study of literature worthless. Harry Potter is an enjoyable read that can be credited with inspiring some children to read. But it is not a credible alternative to Dickens and the Brontes. It is perfectly valid to dislike Victorian literature, which is a matter of taste. The problem is that all too often, students don’t like any mature literature, and as a result they don’t really understand how to use language or how to think critically about a whole range of issues.
Do you that believe that students shouldn’t be forced to read books that they don’t enjoy? A teacher is supposed to expand students minds, not give in to their limitations. Unless we are to agree that there is no value to the study of the great works, I don’t see how assigning Terry Pratchett instead of Dickens serves that function.
Maybe I take this a little personally because Dickens is my favorite author, and has been ever since my father read Great Expectations to me when I was eight. I credit Dickens, and other authors, for making me a better reader and writer,as well as a more conscious person. Reading great books enriches the quality of one’s mind and sometimes the quality of one’s character as well. We cannot draw a false equivelence between truly great books and those that are simply good or entertaining just because students are more willing to read books in the latter class.</p>

13

<p>I agree with Anxiousmom–the great old literary classics tell great stories, but are often antiquated in language and extremely verbose. One of my favorite books growing up was Dickens’ David Copperfield. My older daughter, now in college, has always been a voracious reader of most genres, but when she read Copperfield a number of years ago she clearly didn’t love it as I do. I re-read it recently, and think I saw the problem. Dickens loved to describe, describe, and describe some more–if he could say something in 100 words, he’d use 1,000 instead. While I still adore Dickens, verbosity and all, his style (and that of other old classic authors) apparently doesn’t fit today. Alas.</p>

14

<p>During sophomore year, S2 read about 30 novels for Honors English. At least I think he read them – there may have been some skimming involved! The books assigned have been wonderful, but the pressure to read a book a week means that he approaches some wonderful stories as a chore. I hope he eventually returns to them for pleasure. </p>

<p>For fun, he is working his way through all of the Ian Fleming books. He reads them in a few days, and really enjoys them. He also reads non-fiction physics books (Hyperspace and others like that), “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, anything by Edgar Allan Poe, and poetry (especially Frost and T.S. Eliot).</p>

<p>He has an eclectic taste for reading, and I think that’s great. I just want my kids to read – I don’t care that much about what they are reading, as long as they are reading. I don’t always choose “Great Literature” for my own reading, and I think few of us do.</p>

15

<p>I am so happy to see it is now much less likely that the schools will ruin the experience, or innoculate the kids against future experience.</p>

<p>(If one is to assign Dickens in school, it should be “Hard Times” - but the schoolpeople might not be so happy:</p>

<p>The book opens upon a school founder and overseer, the “eminently practical” Thomas Gradgrind, addressing his newest schoolmaster-trainee, one Mr. M’Choakumchild (Dickens lets you know very quickly where he stands, doesn’t he?):</p>

<p>“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”</p>

<p>In the second chapter, we are treated to a demonstration of this method, coupled with an insight of how a commitment to Facts would ensure the regulation of everyday life:</p>

<p>“We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You must have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.”</p>

<p>And so on and so forth. The entire novel is built around the failure of this educational approach (coupled with the unscrupulousness of politicians and the pompous duplicity of the industrialists of Coketown – a city which is “a triumph of fact” – as they grind the life out of their workers), and the ruin it brings down about the Gradgrind family and everyone else within their compass.</p>

16

<p>Paraphrasing Originaloog:</p>

<p>“I recall back to my middle/high school days math days and the topics assigned, like geometric proofs and trigometry etc. and it is a wonder I eventually found any pleasure in math at all, so painful was the experience.”</p>

<p>But I actually liked calculus, after all that.</p>

<p>Dickens and Austen are not any more “archaic” than they were when we all read them in the past. Yet many (not all) of us read them with pleasure. We got through the description just fine, somehow. So the language itself doesn’t explain why kids “can’t get through them” nowadays. OTOH, the very depressing books that kids complain about these days are more likely to be that horrid Young Adult “problem” fiction that’s so prevalent. Most 19th century novels had deaths, but also a ton of life; complicated, messy, sad, and glorious. (OKay, Great Expectations is pretty bleak–my kids hated that, but they liked A Tale of Two Cities–how grand is the end of that?!)</p>

<p>And lots of the best contemporary fiction is verbose and complicated, too. I’m girding to undertake Pynchon’s new novel–he makes Dickens look easy!</p>

<p>To ask kids to try to do something difficult does not make them reluctant readers–let’s give them a bit more credit than that. By high school, most students know how to read; this is the time to start stretching what they can do. Reading the complex grammar of older novels makes students better writers, and thinkers, as well. </p>

<p>But I agree, it’s not for everyone. But then neither is calculus.</p>

17

<p>Thanks garland for making my point. I did not complain about schools assigning challenging reading as a part of their literature curriculum. BUT, if we parents want to help our children learn that reading can also be a pleasurable pastime, then we should encourage them to read anything that gives them PLEASURE, not insist on books that have some intrinsic value we adults expect. To do otherwise will teach them that a book can never be considered in the same category as that next video game or network sitcom.</p>

<p>And that is what the article was about after all. A parent looking for books that may increase that SAT score or some classic neglected in school. Ignoring the fact that her daughter might find the new teen favorite that many of her friend are talking about something which she might really enjoy at this stage of her life. Uh, it would be better if she could give them a treatise about Pip and Mrs Havisham(?) if she happened to get through Great Expectations. I think not.</p>

18

<p>I was forced to read Tale of Two Cities in high school. I hated it. Passionately hated it. I didn’t touch Dickens again until my mid-30s when I reread Tale and then went on to read all the Dickens I could find. I recently had to read Dombey and Son for a course in English Lit that I took to keep my teacher certification up to date (we read some Bronte too). That’s not the best of Dickens, honestly.</p>

<p>I was forced to read a lot of really good books when I was in high school, and frankly my assumption then was that anything that was required was awful and anything good was not on the approved extra reading list. (We had to read a book a month off the list in addition to the English class stuff.) I’ve reread a lot of those books in the years since, and they really were pretty good. </p>

<p>The reality is that many teenagers simply aren’t ready emotionally and intellectually for many of the books they are expected to read and discuss. Trying to explain to a ninth grade boy how the love of a woman could sustain a man emotionally through starvation, illness, and war (Cold Mountain) is not easy. I know I tried when I subbed a few years back. The Great Gatsby was worse. How can you explain to someone how shocking that book was when they’ve seen modern movies?</p>

<p>I’m not saying teachers shouldn’t try, but it would be nice is some of the school reading was a bit more accessible… how about Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night’s Dream instead of Henry the Fourth? Or Jules Verne instead of Cold Mountain?</p>

19

<p>One of mine uses the net to learn about digital animation. He’s essentially reading technical manuals online. Recently I gave him Excel and he had it mastered within minutes. His online learnign speed is soemthing to behold. I believe the online technical reading led to a great CR score. His current books are : ‘11 days’, ‘The World is Flat’, ‘March’ and ‘Unconquerable World’.</p>

<p>The other one hardly has his nose out of a book. Over break he read, for fun, ‘Three Musketeers’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Places In Between’ and ‘The Haj’. Favorite? ‘Three Musketeers’.</p>

<p>In my opinion, one of the aspects that makes primary and secondary school so dull is the forced participation in banal group discussions which leads to three hours of homework after school. For bright students in high school, I prefer the English tutorial system which allows students to silently and independently complete the work in class.</p>

<p>I’m not a fan of homeschooling.</p>

20

<p>Ninth graders in Victorian England (the few there were of them) wouldn’t have been required to read Dickens either.</p>