This link has been bookmarked by 19 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Aug 2008, by Patrick Higgins.
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19 Mar 15
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22 Oct 10
Royal LewisAn article on literature selections in the English classroom and the effect these selections are having on literacy.
english literature washingtonpost education teaching literature
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If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
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We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
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"What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
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But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant
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. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
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That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
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In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
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We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?
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When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?"
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24 Aug 08
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But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
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But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
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John MahaffieTeacher's reasoned view on how we should re-think how to teach literature. Kids sometimes just find it all irrelevant
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Tom MurphyAs much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
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Patrick HigginsGreat article about the need to introduce relevance into the teaching of English and literature.
english teaching literature highschool boys reading nonfiction washingtonpost
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