From: Mullin, Margaret Boling <mbmullin>
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:30:33 -0400

I'd like to echo Cindy and Ann(?) who posted about creating links in our curriculum between contemporary literature and the 'classics.'

I teach elementary students who don't read as well as we want them to and also children's literature & reading methods courses for college students who are planning to be teachers. I'm sometimes stunned
(appalled) by the college students who tell me they don't like to read! Ugh! However, what comes up repeatedly is that they were given assigned readings that didn't interest them and to which they didn't make connections. My elementary students also tell me that they believe choice is really important, and that reading is fun "if it's a book you like, and that someone didn't tell you you have to read" (a quote from my doctoral research).

I heartily agree with Cindy when she suggests using Prinz winners as the core of our curriculum if those are books which our students will really connect with! It is far more important that our students also leave our classes with a love of reading, so they're more likely to revisit those classics later.

Margaret Boling Mullin Elementary Reading Specialist, Indianapolis Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of Literacy, Culture & Language, Indiana University

Quoting Cindy Dobrez <dobrez at chartermi.net>:

> Could be that some of the classics became high school curricular
> staples decades ago because YA Lit HADN'T BEEN WRITTEN YET? I wrote
> poetry in high school but didn't appreciate the "classic" poets until
> I was in college and older. I don't think Huck Finn is a 7th grade
> book, really, and I don't think that Walden Pond is a high school
> read. Not to say that some kids won't read them and love them and
> understand them at those ages, but I think that some of the important
> elements of literature can be taught with our Printz winners in high
> school and engage today's students better than The Great Gatsby or
> other classics that were written for adults. If a student studies
> Monster by Walter Dean Myers (the first Printz winner) and afterward
> can discuss plot, setting, character, theme, etc. is that a failing
> of an English teacher that she didn't use The Scarlet Letter? If the
> students learn how to understand what they read they will be able to
> apply it to anything they go on to read l
> ater. Better to me, that the whole class hangs on every word of
> Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK and understands what the curriculum
> needs them to while going away with a message about teen issues than
> they give up before they get started because they don't care about a
> Glass Menagerie or what have you. Tell me that the farming brutes in
> Laura Ingalls Wilder's one room school house wouldn't have responded
> better to Gary Paulsen than they probably did Pilgrim's Progress or
> whatever she was forced to teach them?
>
> And, Lee, I don't think anyone is teaching TWILIGHT in the
> curriculum, my teachers don't. That's what the students are reading
> for leisure reading. I've had 8th grade boys who had never read a
> book in its entirety until I gave them Eve Bunting's SOMEONE IS
> HIDING ON ALCATRAZ ISLAND for independent book reports. Those guys
> wouldn't have made it through TREASURE ISLAND and you can bet they
> aren't making it through FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON that's excerpted in
> their text book. But you should have seen their faces when they
> learned that they could finish a whole book. I wouldn't be so quick
> to dismiss YA literature for the classroom. Have you read the
> Octavian Nothing duet? These boys might eventually because they
> figured out they could finish a book thanks to YA lit (and a
> librarian who read widely and spent time to match them with the right
> book--not that public schools value that skill too widely these days.)
>
> Cindy Dobrez
> dobrez at chartermi.net
>
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Received on Fri 10 Jul 2009 06:30:33 AM CDT