Books I read in school

[mirrorshard]

I keep hearing, from one source or another, about how English teachers completely turned them off reading, or how English teachers sparked their lifelong love of $author(s). (If English isn't your first literary language, substitute. Or not, as you prefer. You know the drill.)

A lot of them have seemed a bit absolutist - don't like anything we read in school, usually. Oddly, it doesn't seem to go the other way, but then I don't think I've ever met anyone who liked everything.

My experience was always that I'd make up my own mind about each piece, and I don't think it was the teacher (or the fact that it was In School) that did it. Then again, that might be because I was lucky enough to grow up in a house full of books, with family that approved of my reading, so books were nothing special to me. Intellectually, I understand that there are people who don't have this experience, but it's not something I've ever discussed with people - are any of you in that position?

Of course, it probably helped that I enjoyed school - or at least most lessons - too. I was always enthusiastic and engaged, though occasionally over-snarky about something I'd decided I didn't like. My likes and dislikes never seemed to divide themselves along genre or form lines, at least, and I don't recall having to study anything I actually disliked.

I did manage to OD on Death of a Salesman, and I probably wouldn't have finished Jane Eyre if it hadn't been for A-level English, but then it would have been years before I discovered Jane Austen otherwise, too.

So am I that atypical? (This is probably a rhetorical question, given the skewed nature of LJ. I'd be interested to find out if any of you had the "classic" turned-off-by-teacher experience.)

Comments

[yaqub.livejournal.com]

I was in the happy (and unusual, it seems) position of having next to no compulsory literature. There were, IIRC, 3 books that we had to read and write essays on. You could escape this by doing a play instead. But other than that, any books you put on your reading list were your own decision. Of course, if you chose to put a lot of simple fiction (say, Stephen King) on your reading list, this would in turn reflect on your grades.

My take on the situation was to skip all the chewed out authors and their chewed out works (I guess other people would call them 'classics') and find other books to read. I did discover some interesting books through that. Some of which I found in our attic, the others in the public library. It caused one of my Dutch teachers to exclaim once 'That's another title I don't know!', but when the final exam came, I also got a compliment for the originality of my list and scored a 9 as my final grade (on a 0-10 schale).

So, if anything, the Dutch classes gave me a wider scope on literature and led me to read books I otherwise wouldn't have read at all. The classes themselves helped me identify the genres later on, helping me to search more specifically for certain authors which I particularly enjoyed (I have fond memories of the works of Hubert Lampo, for instance).

Oh, and out of the three compulsory titles, two were very interesting indeed. One was a biography of a man who had lived through World War II as the son of a strict Protestant family and ended up in the German army, the other was another story by Hubert Lampo (we had a choice of stories there) so that was an easy pick for me. :o)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very good system - we had X prescribed texts, which I think was something like three a year, which we read in class (usually taking turns to read aloud, which gets painful sometimes. I was usually a few chapters ahead).

It's all part of the great British class-induction scheme, making sure that everyone gets the idea - or the illusion - they can rise up to be the sort of person for whom reading Classics is natural.

Mind you, I don't think that's a bad thing in itself, if you have a decent teacher - they really are there for "people like us" (ie. people), not for some alterity-defined Them.