I don't think I've told this story

[amelia_petkova]

During his senior year of high school, my younger brother's English class was reading Hemingway (I can't remember which novel). I haven't read any of his novels myself, but I do know that his readers often turn out to either love him or hate him. When the teacher asked my brother's opinion on the novel, he said, "I don't like it very much. It isn't really interesting."

The teacher then tells him [almost original wording]: "That's because you're reading it wrong."

Granted, it wasn't quite "You're interrogating this text from the wrong perspective," but it was close enough to make me collapse into laughter at the dinner table. And no, the teacher isn't Anne Rice. Even though my brother attended a Catholic high school.

*headdesk*

Comments

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of an article I read a while back: We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082202398_pf.html)

Basically, students are being told they suck for not being interested in books whose intended audience are middle-aged women, or 20-something salarymen, etc..

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. I had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school and I was bored silly.

While working at the B&N last summer, I helped a number of adults with children who were there to find books for summer reading. The "better" teachers had given lists that were along the lines of, "Read any two of these books" out of a selection about 10. One day I helped a mother and her son who was going to be a freshman in high school. They asked me for recommendations. Two of the books on his potential reads list were Little Women and The Joy Luck Club. I told them, "I think both of these books are very good but most of their readers are women. I'd recommend starting with something else on the list."

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah: I also had to read Julius Caesar in 9th grade. Not the best introduction to Shakespeare.

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

You know, that makes me think. I was going to say that you should have been introduced through one of his comedies - say, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Merchant of Venice.

But that makes me wonder. See, I don't like comedies so much anymore. They used to be all I liked, but my tastes moved on. And one thing I really abhor - also why I refuse to participate in any collaborative writing - is that there are people for whom everything simply must be a comedy. Anything else is dark and dreary and above all boring. So they shun anything which isn't funny.

Personally, I am much more interested now in the complex personal relationships, the drama, the interplay of people. I find comedy tiresome.
So I wonder how much of it is teachers who want to advance to the (to them) more interesting discussions of drama, and unintentionally rushing past the comedy.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

In 10th grade we read Othello and it went much better. I do like many of his comedies.

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

That sounds like good advice. Hopefully there were more relevant choices in there. I recall being given many reading lists which simply had nothing at all of any interest in it. Once I had a literature class which covered every short story in the book - except the one story I actually liked!

In retrospect, I think this is because most of my lit teachers, at least until college, were middle-aged women, and they tended to select literature which they found interesting. There being a world of difference between a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy (also a world of difference between an actual teenage boy and the common conceptions thereof, especially those held by middle-aged women), the selected literature simply wasn't all that interesting.