<p>Well, JHS, though I agree with your main point,I guess my kids would be two of the handful of freshmen at “elite universities or LACs” who didn’t read P & P in HS. You’d be surprised how little “classic” lit gets assigned in many run of the mill high schools. </p>
<p>My S had to read it as a frosh, though, as it’s included in the Literary Humanities class of the Core. He didn’t love it, but he did say that “Elizabeth is pretty cool.”</p>
<p>OK, so maybe I was a little hyperbolic. As far as I can tell, however, Pride and Prejudice, Song of Solomon, and Hamlet seem to be the three books every AP-English-taking kid has had to read in this area, no matter which high school they attend. Even the prospective engineers.</p>
<p>As for lad-lit: Try Hemingway, of course. And Chuck Pahlahiuk. Cormac McCarthy. Bret Easton Ellis. Neil Gaiman.</p>
<p>I find Austen unreadable-so sorry I have no suggestions-
Im not a big Merchant Ivory fan either.</p>
<p>My older daughter didn’t read it, but my younger daughter may have had to read an Austen novel in 10th grade.</p>
<p>Dog in the Nighttime- is a quick read, and it is obvious that the author has a lot of experience with autistics.</p>
<p>My kids both had to read Hemingway-my younger daughter read Fitzgerald and Steinbeck , but she is also getting to read Tim O’Brien and Sherman Alexie, who coincidentally is a friend of my older daughters English teacher :)</p>
<p>Im not so big on the classics if you mean assuming that everything that has been taught for the last 50 years, should still be as emphasized.</p>
<p>My oldest had to read the Epic of Gilagmesh, and Beowulf as well as Grendel, and I think a grounding in literature is important but there are some great present day writers.( She also had to read the Odyssey once in middle school, once in high school and then she went to Reed- where she had to read the Odyssey and the Illiad- but at least the Fagles trans. is pretty readable)</p>
<p>I just hope that after his work on his summer assignment the teacher collects it unlike my daughters English teacher ;)</p>
<p>Years ago I took a modern literature course in college where we had to read a book every week; the course met once a week to discuss the book for 3 hours and we then had to write a paper based on the discussion. It was fascinating to discover how differently people reacted to the books. I remember that I found Crime and Punishment unreadable and had been unable to finish it (I think I’d read 50 pages)–others adored it and raved about it. The week we read Tropic of Cancer, half the class was furious with Henry Miller, and some of us enjoyed it.</p>
<p>Reading is about individual tastes. I think it is worth the time in high school to read widely in an effort to learn about those tastes. I would never have read Dickens without high school English, and yet I found him highly readable and recently reread many of his books with great pleasure.</p>
<p>To the OP: don’t assume your son will hate P&P. He may surprise you. My son was stunned to find that A Streetcar Named Desire was a pleasure to read; he’d been told by all his friends that he’d hate it. (I, of course, was stunned to hear him discuss the play intelligently with his sister, the theater major, FOUR years later.)</p>
<p>There was only one book I was ever assigned that I hated so much I couldn’t finish it: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. I threw it out the third-story window of my college library one night. There was nothing in it that remotely interested me. It wasn’t my best moment.</p>
<p>Later, I read Eric Auerbach’s beautiful chapter on Proust and Woolf in Mimesis, and I (somewhat) regretted my actions. I forced myself to read some Woolf. I still didn’t like it much. I’ve never gone back to To The Lighthouse.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to suggest that students should NOT read P&P, I was lamenting the fact that it was selected as SUMMER reading with no other options. My personal opinion- it would be nice for teachers to TRY to make summer reading as enjoyable for the students as possible. </p>
<p>I have a couple friends who teach HS English and they both try to provide summer reading lists that would appeal to a variety of tastes. They also try to balance the lists as far as girl and boy preferences go. They do not teach AP English.</p>
<p>That’s the only point I was trying to make. Summer reading= enjoyment. Schoolyear reading= teacher picks, not necessarily enjoyable.</p>
<p>Edit: JHS The book I hated the most of all was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bleck, not for me (my son would probably love it).</p>
<p>Lol, doubleplay, it’s like that with my S. While he may stare blankly at the pages of P&P for an hour and have no idea what they’re really talking about, He can take a new stereo system complete with woofers and speakers and an installation maual an inch thick in 3 different languages and have the whole thing installed in 30 minutes, no problem.</p>
<p>I have a slightly different suggestion. Buy the miniseries (the recent movie, while not a bad movie is too far off from the book for what I have in mind), watch it yourself, it is great, then mark off his book in sections to match the parts of the miniseries. Read one, watch one. He needs a little background on the social conventions of the time, and the depth of division between the wealthy and the more middle class. He also needs to understand the implications of the runaway daughter’s disgrace - in 2007, this would be “no big deal”, not a disaster for the whole family. He also needs to understand what entailment means, and that any women left alive after Dad’s death are out on the street. Good luck, my D and I love P&P, we have a watch-in almost once a year, where we watch the miniseries over the course of a couple of days, but for my son to read the book would be a challenge. Reading some of the dialogue out loud might help pick up on the humor and sarcasm.</p>
<p>Thanks for the tips Cangel. I’ll look into the mini-series since that seems to the the unanimous choice. The written assignments are not too difficult…list and decribe characters, write/type a two page summary of the story, write/type a one page paper describing his favorite part of the book and why. He has to do this for both books.
I’m assuming this is just a “get your feet wet” activity and they will have more in-depth discussion in class (though I think that will be pretty tough if he gets Eng. second semester, doubt he’ll remember much of it in January!</p>
<p>PackMom, I read more of the replies, including your #52. Have him read the piece by Mark Haddon, that is very interesting. Definitely suggest he read some of the dialogue aloud as he goes. He will get stuck in the wordiness if he isn’t a big reader, I can see that, but I think if he watches part of the video soon after reading he will begin to get the gist, and the dialog will make more sense. Another vote for Bride and Prejudice, I was trying to think of an update of P&P, but couldn’t. Because it is social commentary, it doesn’t update as well as Shakespeare, where the stories are like Greek tragedies, universally applicable, just with different clothes, but that should help.</p>
<p>I haven’t waded through this whole thread, but what strikes me immediately is the question of why a kid who is having such a hard time dealing with the idea of reading P&P is in honors English in the first place. This is not a difficult book! If he stares at a page of P&P for an hour and has no idea what they’re talking about, does he belong in the class? My older son is a computer geek and would not find P&P difficult. One does not preclude the other.</p>
<p>I’ve picked up books that bore me and stared at the page for an hour. It’s not that I can’t read, it’s that I can’t motivate myself to become part of the story, in which case it becomes torture to have to finish the book.</p>
<p>hereshoping, I answered that question early on in the thread. </p>
<p>I didn’t mean the thing about staring at a page for an hour literally, just grabbed it out of the air for comparison sake.</p>
<p>Thanks,dp.</p>
<p>My son was assigned P&P last summer and never cracked the book. He made do with SparkNotes and the movie. I don’t believe in making people read books they’re not interested in. Not a good way to foster love of reading IMO. Either he reads it or he doesn’t, but I’m not going to crack the whip and “make” him read it.</p>
<p>JHS The book I hated the most of all was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</p>
<p>My mother had a psychotic break while she was reading that about 25 years ago- Im sure it was a coincidence but I have been afraid to pick it up ever since!</p>
<p>Well, the good news is that I just got off the phone with my next door neighbor who owns a copy of “The Curious Incident…” that S can borrow and even better, she also owns the 8 hour mini-series version of P&P which her two daughters love and gave her for Christmas last year so we can borrow that too. Yah for good neighbors!</p>
<p>emerald- I felt like I was gonna have a breakdown when I read it too! Actually, the term “hurts my head to think about it” comes to mind.</p>
<p>Packmom- Yay! Just make sure your son can understand the accents. I have a problem with accents in movies, or maybe it’s just my hearing, or maybe my TV…</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, both my kids took AP Lit. Oldest son religiously read the books carefully, took notes, AND read commentaries online. Made a B. Younger son never read anything except the sparknotes or cliffnotes and made a A. Same teacher. The kids swear she takes her notes/tests from spark notes. :eek:</p>
<p>PTM: your S sounds a lot like mine (the engineering major, and no, he never had to read P&P in any of his AP or IB classes although certainly many others that were just as distasteful in his mind). He would read cliff notes or spark notes whenever they were available and only read the books that least interested him when he HAD to, or only read the portions that were relevant to assignments. Of course, since he has Aspergers he really struggled with understanding them and it takes much longer for him to read this sort of literature than pop fiction but he never would have made it through his classes without the guides (or movies). And, he always got Bs in his English classes so he must have gotten something out of them.</p>
<p>I asked his English teacher once about her feelings on students reading cliff notes and she was actually completely in favor of it, since her goal was to get students to learn to do literary analysis and to enjoy doing it, NOT to memorize every word in the book (although S does have a photographic memory so he could pull out quotes or recall the details of what he did read with relative ease).</p>
<p>Packmom,</p>
<p>So have 3 boys, 2 girls. 4 out of high school in NC as well. High school also 4x4.</p>
<p>3 had AP English and 1 Honors. Boys and girls equally disliked P & P, esp. middle daughter.</p>
<p>Boys, varsity football players as well. So just love that summer reading list!</p>
<p>2 older boys attend “elite” universities and have no desire to read P & P and I wasn’t going to make them. They managed to complete their respective assignments with A’s. </p>
<p>As long as they read I didn’t care what it is/was. And yes, having the class (discussion, review, quizzes, tests) 6-7 months after you complete the assignment is beyond silly.</p>
<p>Unless your kiddo is on the 4x4 schedule people just don’t get the ridiculousness of the timing for the assignment.</p>
<p>Son also starts summer practice 6/11. Camp 2 weeks later. Other son has to get his behind up to college early August for football as well. And just bought my Army/Navy tickets!!!</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>I’m actually a little shocked at the attitudes here. I don’t think it’s OK to blow off assignments, and I don’t think it’s OK to substitute movies or Spark Notes for reading a literary text. One of the points of reading something that may seem difficult or strange is that you learn how to read stuff that’s difficult or strange and to get the meaning out of it. That’s a great skill for life. Using Spark Notes or movies in place of reading Jane Austen is like doing engineering problem sets where someone else has done all the work except basic arithmatic. So, fine, you complete the problem set, but you haven’t done the work, and you couldn’t replicate the work if your life depended on it.</p>
<p>It’s considered cheating where I come from, and whether or not the English teacher considers it cheating, it’s cheating yourself of an educational experience that most curriculum designers deem core. I am not sympathetic at all to the “my son’s an engineer” argument. My daughter the writer has spent untold hours actually learning math – no Spark Notes or movies there – and she hated it but agreed that she ought to do it to be an actual citizen and to have some understanding of what other people do. It’s frightening that parents (and teachers!) encourage kids not to learn.</p>