Posted on 06/29/2004 10:55:24 PM PDT by kattracks
I can't say for other schools or when he hits high school. There was a stink last year here about some high schooler's being assigned Tom Sawyer and it's tone towards racism, so they say. I happen to think that's a mighty fine classic!
You can go down to the school and complain to the teacher who assigned the book, but you might be told "You're the only one who complained," which is usually not true. If that doesn't work, you can go to the school board who might accuse you of being a book burner and tell you that if your child is not "mature" enough to read the selected assignments, perhaps she doesn't belong in Ms. Grundy's AP course after all, or you can decide to homeschool (or send your child to a private school that you trust) like you do and choose whatever you feel is appropriate.
Many schools today use books written after 1970 because they feel that books written before that are not politically correct. Honestly! That's the rationale.
Not all public schools assign books such as the one which appear on the PABBIS website, but many do.
That's a pretty decent reading list. Mine is going to be getting The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Black Like Me, and (maybe) the Count of Monte Cristo. Since she's homeschooled I get to pick her books. I'm thinking though that I will have to subsitite a couple of shorter books for Monte Cristo, which runs 700 plus pages. She may get Dr Jeckyl and Mr. Hide plus Johnny Trevayne.
Damn coffee spray across key board....
But as a gradual start we want to take some dyslexics who have failed every effort to learn reading in regular spelling, and teach them in reformed. Perhaps some day one will hand you a note in SoundSpel. Would you deign to read it, knowing it made that man literate? Could you read it?Well, SoundSpel drops silent letters ("no" not "know") and it spells long vowels (AEIOU) as AE (as in steak), EE (as in meet), IE (as in tried) and so on. Heer's a sampl. It is a litl shoking at ferst but being fonetic it's eezy with sum practis. Wuud U tri to reed it, to help a dislexic? To fiend out mor, see www.spellingsociety.org or www.americanliteracy.com/alc6.htm
I thought the purpose of summer reading is to make kids read what they don't want to read...
I'm sure the literary ghetto realist Tupac was quite familiar with the 40-ounce Haffenreffer...
We homeschool too and the utter relief I feel when I read these article is indescribable....relief for my kids and sadness that government school children are subject to this.
Our summer reading list is I Robot, Gulliver's Travels, and Robin Hood.
Apparently those higher numbers came along after I (ahem) "packed" it in.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Cognitive ability, deficiency of.
I learned the word stunad two weeks ago. It was a licence plate on a hot car (Cobra? Mustang?) at a show and my buddy explained.
I thought my vocabulary was alright but I'm all wrong ethnically to know that one.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
A.K.A. I'll pretend to teach you pretend to learn.
Have yo' checked yer chile's summer readin' list? Beware: Some lame-brained skoo officials haf decided t'ditch th' sonnets of Shakespeare fo' th' tripe of Tupac. Thet's slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur -- th' drug-dealin', baseball bat-wieldin', cop-hatin', Black Panthers-wo'shipin', cornvicked sexual abuser who made a fo'tune extollin' th' "thug life" befo'e he was gunned down in Las Vegas eight years ago.
i read Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage in the 7th grade... i was blessed to have had some teachers (in public school) who taught the classics (back in the mid to late 70s)... i was introduced to Shakespear in Jr. High... my sons (ages 3 and 8) have been introduced to Shakespear this year... and they love it...
1. Dumkopf-see Barbara Boxer.
2. Stunad-see Tom Daschle.
3. Buggerer-see Barney Frank.
Now, wasn't that little linguistics lesson helpful?
Time for a new school bored.
For example, many of the high schools in my area have gone from teaching Julius Caesar to Romeo and Juliet in the ninth grade. That is a serious error, in my opinion. Considering that R&J was most likely a parody of the Elizabethan romantic-tragedies (much like Titus Andronicus was a parody of the Elizabethan revenge-tragedies), most kids are just not capable of understanding the theme. How do you explain to a teenage kid that the whole point of the play is to make fun of the idea that teenage kids could possibly be in love?
For the same reason, there are even plays that adults can't properly get a handle on. A good example: King Lear probably cannot be truly understood by anyone under the age of 60 (which I am, and while I feel I have a grasp of it intellectually, I will be the first to admit that I probably can't "feel" it the way an older person would be able to), just based on the fact that it is a story of a person looking back at a completed life. That is a theme that it is very hard to comprehend if you are still living a life yourself that is based on possible future accomplishments.
So, while young kids most certainly can gain a great deal from Shakespeare, there is a lot they can miss without some serious hand-holding, and they should always be encouraged to come back to the plays at an older age to pick up what they have missed...
Bump and thanks!
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