Hand-out

So this hand-out thing makes no sense… sort of. Do I just sum up my arguments and then give resources?

Arguments:

1) Students’ standardized test scores are not matching their grades.
2) There is obvious distaste and rejection amongst adolescents of the classics.
3) Students, across the board, are more interested in YAL than Classical Lit.

I guess my sources I’ll put on the back as most important will be the NCTE articles: Comez, DeStigter, and George. Then also the Post article about SAT scores falling with grades rising and finally the Gibbons article on YAL in the classroom?

Relief

I am SO relieved that we had class tonight. The handouts have answered all my questions! Yes, I’m on the right track. Yes, my paper looks somewhat normal! The Columbine paper was really really interesting. I feel like my paper is completely inadequate compared to that one, but I’m an undergrad taking 18 credits trying to keep my head above the water. Hopefully, my creativity and hard work will have paid off. I think this is my final order for everything:

Xbox Forum
Facebook Group
Obituaries (this makes me nervous. I really liked the idea because students complain about how old these authors are… but I dont’ think I tied this in well)
Any Typical Day… (The ficion piece in the classroom)
BREAKING NEWS HEADLINES! (the articles from the post about SAT scores)
Blank Space (the poem from the teacher’s perspective)
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE CLASSROOM (articles about teacher curriculum reform)
Teen Read Website (I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS! Dr. Horvath approved the ability to use pictures tonight and I’m totally going to! I think I’m going to take the cover art from 4 classics and 4 Young Adult Lit books and juxtapose them to show how much more enticing the YAL’s are)
Quotes (Barbara Tuchman and Stephen King)

The Stephen King quote, I think, wraps up my idea perfectly: “I have often wondered about two things. First, why high school kids almost invariably hate the books they are assigned to read by their English teachers, and second, English teachers almost invariably hate the books students read in their spare time. Something seems very wrong with such a situation. There is a bridge out here, and the ferry service is uncertain at best.”

Poetry

I realized last night that I haven’t included poetry yet. Why on earth not?! I know I’m talking about novels, but I can write my own poem and put it in, right? I mean, poetry is one of my favorite things. How could I forget it? I haven’t done anything from the teacher’s perspective yet, so let’s try it out:

Blank Stares

They just stare–
they don’t wait for anything grand.
They don’t wait for a fantastical excursion.

They wait for me to say
what I think so they
can write it down and get
the A.

There’s no debate, no exploration, no expansion.
Just me, my words being regurgitated in their papers.

I kind of like it, but that 2nd to last stanza is WAY to sing-songy with the rhyme. Aaand… let’s fix it:

Blank Space

They simply stare–
they don’t wait for
anything grand.
They don’t wait
for a fantastical excursion.

They wait
for me to say
what I think
so they
can write it down
and get the A.

There is no debate,
no exploration–no expansion.
Just me,
my words
regurgitated
in their papers.
I like that so much better! I can’t believe I forgot poetry until now. This should definitely fit in well after the student’s perspective is shown. I think it’ll go nicely with the news articles:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050101399.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201781.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125121641858657345.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/teacher-wants-classic-novels-censored-now-obama-is-president.html

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v33n3/gibbons.pdf

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

The deadline is getting closer and I still have NO IDEA what this thing is supposed to look like!!!!!

So what I’ve got so far is a repetend comprised of a bunch of lyrics, a few resources that show me how students feel about literature and a couple NCTE articles discussing perspective and point of view (this is the point of view one. i found it last night: http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EE/0363-april04/EE0363Conversations.pdf) Anyway, I still have no idea how to incorporate it all.

I was thinking of just posting a chunk of that xbox forum in and scrapping the Scarlet Letter since it doesn’t reflect the student’s struggle–which is my main point, I think. Also, I might just wind up writing a piece of fiction anyway showing a student’s disconnect with literature. Why not try it on here?

“And as we discussed last class, this really is the main reason for the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s dock.” Ms. Colins flipped forward a few pages.

*the bell rang*

“Well, class, thank you for being patient—I know it’s been a long day. I’m sorry for keeping you late. Please review the remaining chapters. There will be a short quiz for comprehension on Thursday.” She placed her worn copy of The Great Gatsby down on her desk, watching her students file out the door.

“Hey, hey Joe!”

Joe turned around, startled to hear his name. “What’s up, Tim?”

“I was wondering if you got anything she just said.”

“No.” Joe’s cheeks turned red. “I mean, I usually get what she says, but I have no idea what she was talking about today.”

“Oh, shit. Well, do you have any idea what she’ll ask on that quiz Thursday?”

“Umm…I guess it’ll be about symbolism? Like the green light and the giant blue eyes?”

“Yea yea, she seems real hung up about symbolism. Ok—let’s get together tomorrow night and look it up on Sparknotes to see if we can find anything we’re missing. I really can’t afford a B in this class.”

“Me neither.” Joe’s future depended on his GPA. “This class is going to kill us.”

“Tell me about it. I mean, graduation is still two years away, but every grade counts, right? Do you think this crap will be on the SATs?”

“God I hope not.” Nausea began to infest Joe’s gut. “I don’t see how cramming us full of plots and characters written by authors who were born before my grandparents makes a difference in my life. I mean, really, Shakespeare was a cool dude and I’m sure F. Scott Fitzgerald had some sort of a nice life, but what do they have to do with me and why should I be tested on them?”

I’m worried that sounds unrealistic… like an adult writing a teenager’s point of view.. which is what it is–Me writing in a teenage perspective. I kind of like it, though. It reminds me of  a lot of conversations I heard in high school, which was only 4 years ago.

Sources

I found a BUNCH of cool stuff. I don’t know if I can apply all of it, but here goes nothing.

I found an xbox forum discussing Dickens. It seems really interesting because it’s a true dialogue that I don’t have to invent and hope is accurate of the student’s point of view:

kK stoned

05-04-03, 08:09 PM

Do you think Charles Dickens is a great writer or overrated? I mean, yeah he has nice plot twists and stuff but Great Expectations and I read over 100 pages of Tale of Two Cities and its soooo BORING. I think he’s a bit overrated.

---

Garp

05-04-03, 08:10 PM

HAHAHAHA! Because you found him boring he’s overated? David Copperfield is a triumph of literature!

---

Valentino the Cynic

05-04-03, 08:18 PM

I’ll tell you who is over-rated… Shakespeare. Did anyone notice that MacBeth and Julius Caesar were nearly the same type of story?

And To Kill a Mockingbird… I’ve read better, but everyone puts the book on a pedestal.

---

Echelon

05-04-03, 08:25 PM
I totally agree with ya.
I’m also gonna throw in Lord of the Flies. I didn’t like the book at all.

EDIT: My English teacher told of us of other stories and plays that Shakespeare copied from. Inspiration perhaps but he did copy them big time. Then again, because of Shakespeare the English language became more well known.

---

mtbaird56877

05-04-03, 08:26 PM

oh man i hate him
im reading a tale of two cities right now, it sucks donkey balls also Great Expectations sucked, i wish Miss Joe beat the crap outta pip with the tickler though, that would have made it so much better

---

Valentino the Cynic

05-04-03, 08:27 PM

Lord of the Flies could’ve been very interesting, but the author wanted to wrap up the story too quickly with a happy ending of the rescue, thereby ruining the theme of the story…

---

mtbaird56877

05-04-03, 08:28 PM
YAHHHHH i really wanted to see how they got back to living normal and if the adults found out about the deaths of some of the kids and stuff, it coulda been reallllly interesting

---

tomchxbox

05-04-03, 10:40 PM

Because you’re bored with an author doesn’t make him overrated. I was bored with 1984 the first time I read it in HS. Since, I have read it 4 times and consider it to be a masterpiece.

I was bored with Fitzgeralds ‘The Great Gatsby’ in HS, only to read it again in college and realize the genius of the book.

Give it time, and not all books or great works can be truly appreciated without a little help (i.e. classes with good teachers)

---

freedom brock

05-05-03, 06:44 AM

The problem with reading books written more than about a hundred is that the language gets in the way, but they are interesting in terms of giving you an insight into life in that time period, btw, did you know that Charles dickens was paid a flat rate (a penny for every so many words or something)

---

toolband

05-05-03, 09:03 AM

how can anyone call him overrated? we all play videogames and talk on a stupid forum:(

Here’s the website:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:v6xQapzUAqQJ:forum.teamxbox.com/archive/index.php/t-193939.html+Great+Expectations,+dickens,+sucks&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

There was a LOT more discussion after that point, but I thought the opening points were really good for a teenage perspective.

And then I also found this for The Scarlet Letter:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:U9Up6p9qku8J:www.librarything.com/work/2264+the+scarlet+letter,+high+school&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Scrolling down the page a bit reveals a bunch of really educated people speaking about Hawthorne’s book. I dont’ think this is quite what I’m going for, but it might be interesting to contrast a students perspective with a teacher’s.

Speaking of perspective, I found this article http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EE/0354-july03/EE0354Booktalk.pdf which is really insightful for perspective.

Repetend (again)

I figured out my repetend!

Since it’s multi-genre… why not add a little music in it? I’m going to have my repetend be someone scanning through the local radio stations, each time settling on one that plays a clip of a song that has something to say about reading/books/or references “classics”… like these:

“somewhere away from here, the best mistakes they often learn. At Fahrenheit four-fifty-one you close your doors and let it burn” taken from Fahrenheit Four-Fifty-One by Five Iron Frenzy

“oh I’ve finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road” taken from Goodbye Yellow  Brick Road by Elton John

“Yeah ‘cause you can’t judge a book by its cover. Only time it’s gonna show, only time will let us know. ‘Cause you can’t judge a book by its cover” taken from You Can’t Always Judge a Book by its Cover by Stevie Wonder? (I still have to figure out who sang this)

“Valentine is done. Here but now they’re gone. Romeo and Juliet, together in eternity” taken from (Don’t) Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult

Yea… these are just a few. I’ll go searching later for more. I’m excited! I think if I find ones that have to do with my topics, which I’m still ironing out, then I can easily use them as transitions from one topic/genre to the next!

Repetend

I’m lost as to what this word means. I mean–I know what it is in poetry. Like in a villanelle:

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill.

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day

To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

I guess I don’t see how a repeated line/phrase fits into a paper. Maybe it’s because I’m still viewing this as a research paper like my other courses with an introduction and conclusion and well stated arguments with quotes and paraphrasings from primary resources. I have two ideas for my repetend but I don’t know if they’re repetend material or not:

1) I chose quotes that are really applicable to the material from some of “classics” being taught in high school. I place them in between my sources.

2) I write about a kid who walks into the library, while wandering the halls to escape science, and stumbles upon a card catalog that says “Literature” on the top. He opens it and sees a bunch of categories with cards in the middle. Thumbing through, he reaches my different sources/topics?

The first one sounds more logical but I kind of like the creativity the second one could allow. I’d have to make it more cohesive, though. And I’d have to officially figure out my sources and topics. That might help with my direction 🙂

“Great Books”

I’m quite proud of myself. 3 posts in 3 days in a row! I highly doubt I’ll maintain this efficiency or stamina, but since I have the time, I might as well utilize it. I found a list of the “Great Books” as composed by Mortimer Adler:

1. Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works
12. Epicurus: “Letter to Herodotus“, “Letter to Menoecus“
13. Euclid: The Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius: The Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: The History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: “On the Teacher”; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); “On Monarchy”; The Divine Comedy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; “Monadology“
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: “A Tale of a Tub“; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; “A Modest Proposal“
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: “Essay on Criticism“; “The Rape of the Lock“; “Essay on Man“
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: “The Vanity of Human Wishes“, Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
87. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
88. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
89. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
90. William Wordsworth: Poems
91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
92. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
93. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
94. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
95. Lord Byron: Don Juan
96. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
97. Michael Faraday: The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
98. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
99. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
100. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
101. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
102. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
103. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
104. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
105. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
106. Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
107. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
108. Henry David Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience“; Walden
109. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capital; The Communist Manifesto
110. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
111. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
112. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
113. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
114. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
115. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
116. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
117. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
118. Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
119. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
120. Jules Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
121. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
122. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
123. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
124. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
125. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
126. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
127. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
128. Lenin: The State and Revolution
129. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
130. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
131. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
132. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
133. James Joyce: “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
134. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
135. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
136. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
137. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
138. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward

This list was comprised in 1940. I found it on wikipedia. I don’t use wikipedia as a source, but sometimes it is a good jumping off point. I don’t like this list, however. I don’t think it accurately represents today’s selection of “Great Books”.

This next list is comprised for the “college bound”. It was put together by collegeboard.com

—	Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll’s House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene	Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan	Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel	Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard	Native Son

I think this is getting closer to what I’m looking for, but still, it doesn’t show the average list of high school novels read across America. After probing around for a bit, I found a self-made list on Amazon by a student of the books he was assigned to read throughout High School:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Reivers by Michael Millgate
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
A Documentary History of the United States by Richard Heffner
Henry V by William Shakespeare
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Beowulf
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1984 by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Light in August by William Faulkner

What’s interesting to me is that these three lists have very few books in common. The “Great Books” are more like a composition list of Greek and Roman classics with a few “modern” texts. I thought the collegeboard.com list would have had more in common with the high schooler’s actual list, but surprisingly preparation for college is not reflective of highschool education.

My Perspective

So… if I’m going to write a paper about this, which I think I will… then I might as well get my bias out of the way, right? Here’s my perspective about the topic of literature, particularly the classics and reading comprehension in the classroom:

I see books like Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Scarlett Letter, The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Beowulf, Crime and Punishment, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Heart of Darkness, Frankenstein, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, Fahrenheit 451, The Catcher in the Rye, Pride & Prejudice, and Lord of the Flies as opportunities for students to leave their modern culture and find something of equal value in the past. I don’t see them as necessarily outdated, though I will agree that many of them use language that is not current with modern speech. I see their content as completely applicable. Though the way they act or the way they speak may differ from modern day, the desires and the plots are quite similar to many situations we still experience. Also, the fact that these have been noted as “great works” is something to consider while exploring the field of literature. What made them great? Who called them so and what in their society did they value so that  these works were praised? Are these values different from ours? What can we gain from these works? I think these questions help keep literature alive across the ages.

First post

So… I don’t think this will be productive toward my MGRP, but I’m going to free-write about the entire idea and hope it gets me somewhere. To be completely honest–I’m entirely lost. I really wish I had even the slightest idea of what this is supposed to look like.  In high school I was always that kid that got upset when I wasn’t given enough room to be creative, but whenever a completely free project like this was presented, I was equally upset because I had no direction. I feel like I’m being dropped in the middle of the Amazon and asked to find my way out like I’m Bear Grylls or something. To make a long story short, I’m really interested in novels and literature in the classroom. I remember in highschool I was completely in love with all the books we read but I was seemingly the only person who cared. The kids around me either thought the novels were boring or didn’t deserve to be on the top 100 best books or whatever crazy list they were on. They also didn’t understand how the books we read won awards or deserved the honor they received. I remember kids got especially flustered over Great Expectations (which happens to be my favorite book) and The Scarlett Letter. They were okay with The Great Gatsby, though they weren’t necessarily thrilled when the test came around and I was the only person to identity the green light as the American Dream. Maybe I was an over achiever… maybe my mother just got me reading earlier than everyone else. I don’t know why it happened the way it happened, but whatever sparked it, I’ve been non-stop reading since I can remember. Maybe it was the encouragement to get through Jane Eyre in the first grade. Maybe it was winning the spelling bees. I don’t know. I’d like to do some research and find out what the aversion to literature is, though. I have a hunch it has to do with the invisible barrier between old literature and modern culture. The common disbelief that the two have nothing in common. As if previous cultures didn’t lead to this one. I’m not going to call myself a traditionalist and go ranting through the halls about how we must “teach the classics” and educate our students in Greek and Roman literature and debate, but I am a proponent of showing where we come from. It’s best to learn from the past, isn’t it? Not that we should eliminate creative thoughts about the present and the future… but lessons that were already learned in the past can at some extent be avoided in the future, can’t they? Can’t Pip’s turmoils teach students about the negative aspects of jumping to conclusions? And can’t Romeo and Juliet be a beautiful cautionary tale to young “love”? Maybe I’m too idealistic. Maybe they just don’t care at all because these books were printed before their grandparents were even born.