Monday, May 14, 2012

'Readicide'

Based on the facts stated in Gallagher’s Readicide, I don’t think schools should teach literary fiction so exclusively. It really is making kids not like to read.  I know for example I hated reading until the end of junior year, which is crazy because I love it now.  I hated it because of the books we had to read in school, none of them thrilled me so I just assumed all books were like that.   And to this day I still don’t read the books we are supposed to read for school, instead I would rather read a book that I want to read so I am not wasting my time on a book that is not appealing to me.  The only exception in my opinion is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  We read this senior year and it was actually a really good book but I know for a fact a lot of schools don’t have this book in their reading curriculum because it is very controversial.  I definitely think that genre fiction should get mixed in to the curriculum for high school reading especially freshman and sophomore year because that is when they are really beginning to read higher level books.  I don’t think anyone should tell someone what they have to read so I think the best effect would be to make all assignments a “choose your own” kind of deal.  Maybe have the teachers give the students a list to choose from that goes along with the topic they are going to be learning about.  If you think about it, every book has a meaning of some point.  You may have to look a little more for one in some books, but you will be able to find a lesson in any novel. I think this is so worth it though because loving to read is something that will be so helpful later in life and if it is acquired at an earlier age it will just be better in the long run. 

9 comments:

  1. I agree with your statement on the "choose your own" assignments but not all should be that way or the teacher would have to teach each individual book. There should be enough "choose your own" assignment to sustain the love of reading.

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  2. I agree that there should be both literary and popular fiction in the curriculum. I think that would help teach people not all books are in confusing old English, but sometimes it's okay to read some classics.

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  3. no i dont think that you should be able to choose your own assignments because then you could just make up everything that you do in your project and the teacher wouldnt notice, because they have a life to and would have the time to read over 100 different books in 2 or 3 weeks.

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  4. It all comes down to the kids. They won't read a boring book, so we should add in more books they'd like.

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  5. The classics have no purpose in today’s world, we have newer better books to read now that do a much better job and are more fun to read.

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  6. I think that they should try to slack off a little on how strictly we have to analyze the books, but i don't think we should be allowed to chose our own books and assignmenets. For summer reading sure. For school were the whole class is reading and talking about the book, that would be way too hard.

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  7. I think kids should choose what they want to read, with some limits, of course, but there should also be a little bit of literary fiction to keep some of the classics alive.

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  8. I agree when we exclusivly read Non fiction it get's really boring and we need to add more literary fiction

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  9. I completley agree that saving literary fiction for schools only, takes the enjoyment out of the classics. We should want to read those without being stressed or worried about how fast we need to read or the details between the lines that it seems only our teachers know about.

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