Posted on 08/15/2007 11:16:07 PM PDT by napscoordinator
An angry parent has blasted the East Penn School District for requiring its students to read books he said are "full of filthy vulgarity."
Richard Jones of Upper Milford confronted the school board Monday about some of the books on his 15-year-old son's 10th-grade summer reading list at Emmaus High School, saying they're trash.
Following its standard practice, the board limited Jones to three minutes and didn't respond to his criticism during the meeting. But later, board President Ann Thompson said, "We listened carefully and it is being investigated carefully."
(Excerpt) Read more at mcall.com ...
If a student can be disciplined for using certain words, those words should not appear in the assigned literature.
I wish Ayn Rand were on the list.
That's an interesting book. (If you don't believe me open the book and read about the life story of the potato king J.R. Simplot.) But getting teenagers to read these days is like leading a horse to water. There's nothing wrong with knowing where our food comes from.
He should have announced that he was going to read a selection from his son's summer reading list. Bet he would have been stopped before he finished the page.
Which of Dickens’ novels have you read? I can’t stand his overt social crusade stuff, myself, but the man certainly knew how to craft his characters and turn a phrase. Thoughtful, merry, entertaining novels like Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers are often overlooked at school, overshadowed by the dreary snore-fests like Oliver Twist and Bleak House. You rarely ever find, for example, Our Mutual Friend in a classroom, despite it being Dickens’ most integrated and mature work, finally managing a cohesive blending of the optimism of his early novels with his desire to humanize those at the margins of Victorian society.
From my memory, not always accurate, Wolfe is like the one sober guy at an all night drunk. The beauty of the book is that he exposes the vapidity of the whole LSD thing.
I certainly didn’t have three copies of Beowulf as a teen. I got by just fine with the Penguin edition Old English gloss and a copy of Heaney’s translation, thank you very much. I miss being a student. It’s never so easy to enjoy literature as when you’re trying to avoid math.
i recall reading The Odyssey, The Iliad, Canterbury Tales, Grapes of Wrath, Othello in high school... and MacBeth, Red Badge of Courage and Oliver Twist in jr. high...
check out the following link and listen to excerpts of Beowulf in Old English... you can follow along with the provided text... my boys got a kick out of this...
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Beowulf.Readings/Grendel.html
It's not on my radar, and my degree is in English literature.
You have a degree in English Lit and never read or heard of Willa Cather or My Antonia? I am truly dismayed. Demand a tuition refund.
J.R.R. Tolkien, for one. He was professor of Nordic languages at Oxford, and one of the foremost contributors to Norse-related entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Tolkien understood that Beowulf is part of the mythology of a people, which helps to define that people's culture. You can't understand people properly...even your own...until you have understood their myths.
As he explained to C.S. Lewis, that was the express reason why he invented Middle Earth and all the stories which would eventually become the context for The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was purposely trying to craft a new myth for the English.
Why would he do such a thing? Tolkien felt that, inasmuch as the English had myths, they were borrowed. He wanted the English to have a mythology all their own.
I know the name Willa Cather, but never read her work. I certainly read enough feminist novels, however. (Thank you, Marlene Barr. I guess.)
You read Lord of the Flies in 6th grade? That is pretty shocking. I can only imagine what books you were reading in high school. However I am very impressed that you read that in sixth grade! You could be brilliant...I am not. lol. I went to a Catholic High School that was pretty good. Maybe the one book might not have been the greatest example.
You read MacBeth in Junior High? Man after seeing some of these posts, I must have been in remedial English class and did not know it. lol.
Thank you. My dread is coming through. lol. I actually do find this more interesting today than when I was in high school...
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Willa Cather was a pulitzer Prize winning novelist, a renowned Conservative and anything but a feminist. Odd that you achieved a degree in American Literature and never read any of her work.
Go to the School Board meeting and read excerpts from the books.
I dunno, most of what you mentioned I read in high school, but lord of the flies I distinctly remember reading in catholic grade school 6th grade.
I don’t think I’m brilliant, in fact just the opposite, just was kind of shocked that that book was 10th grade material. Beowolf, 1984, and Shakespears I recall reading in HS.. couldn’t tell you which grades... LOTF though was definately gradeschool when I read it.
You are right though that busybodies would ban nearly everything today if they could. While gratuitous sex and violence don’t have much place in required literature, to say that anything that someone remotely finds offensive should be banned is nuts.
Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer should be required reading, Injin Joe and Nigger Jim and all. Why there are people who think the truth of times in past should be whitewashed is beyond me.
And on an unrelated note Disney needs to Free Uncle Remus.
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