Why do schools not read anything bloody cheerful ?

[Howlongtillbedtime]

I really think teens would be engaged with reading a wee bit more if they ever read a positive book.....

So far my son has read
Holes

Maggot moon
Of mice and men
Never let me go
Jekyll and hyde

And that is without the poetry and the Shakespeare.

Where is the uplifting or at the very least slightly bloody cheerful stuff?

Both my boys struggle with English which may cloud my judgement but surely we can have something a little more sodding positive !!!

I read the boy in the striped pjamas before ds read it, I could pick more holes in that than a fishing net!

I mean like the boys would`ve been chatting over a fence !!! and the outwith, fury, forseeable future.......I think its crap! oh well.

I did To Kill A Mocking Bird in Y7 or 8 (when it was called 1st or 2nd year) and loved it. Some dark themes but uplifting too.

Holes is a terrific book! All the KS2 classes I’ve read it with have loved it. They loved spotting the parallels between the flashbacks and the present day. It’s incredibly cleverly plotted and beautifully written. It’s about a lot more than boys digging holes. That’s just a deliberately obtuse and simplistic way of talking about it. In fact most fiction is about a lot more than just the events ... that’s why we teach literature. Wimpy Kid has got nothing to say.

It's a long-term problem. I'm currently helping my mother sort papers as she is finally downsizing. We just looked at a draft letter she wrote about 25 years ago tackling this very topic.

@smarshian one year of lang and lit at uni saw me off. The Wasteland, Heart of Darkness, Waiting For Godot... I should have stayed, sacked off the lit and taken up an actual language coz the Chomsky, analysing sentences, phonology and ancient english was actually interesting, but I developed full blown depression and quit. I'm not saying it was the literature. It was other stuff. But I stopped reading for a looooong time. And I've never watched Apocalypse Now, which I'm squarely blaming on first year.

Norfolk
And that's before the ending where the reader's sympathy is manipulated in totally the wrong way.
Maybe I'm a bit subversive but any time I've had to teach it we do lots of work on historical accuracy (or lack of) in young adult literature, why would authors choose to romanticise the past, book Vs reality.
I'd happily never teach it again.

Hope
Holes is a lovely book for KS2 . It's a terrible book for KS3.

The language is far too basic. It's almost impossible to teach language analysis beyond superficial comments about red fingernails/lipstick. It's low challenge at ks3 and really only has a place in nurture groups or lower sets who need a supported transition.

There’s Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare comedies, Laurie Lee’s ‘Cider with Rosie’ ‘or ‘A Room with a View’ would be good. It would great to have some less miserable classic texts to lighten to grimness.

It’s not a recent thing- 30+ years ago I did I’m the king of the castle ( v sad ) , Romeo and Juliet and a Thomas Hardy I forget the name of but I think a man sells his wife and whenever it rained something bad happened, and it rained a lot. I remember at the time thinking it was a particularly depressing combination . I loved reading as a teen but I found these 3 hard going as a set.

In fact I did a stint teaching in East Africa a few years later and the local syllabus ( to be fair - a colonial hangover) - was Macbeth, Diary of Anne Frank and a book called Scarlet Song which was very good but very sad- so misery-lit is international as well!

@Howlongtillbedtime I completely agree with you. I know a boy who was hauled in to speak with HoY and put on special watch because his Creative Writing piece was a grahic piece about suicide and they told him on no account should he write something like this in an exam as it would be flagged as a safeguarding issue. He quite reasonably said to me later, genuinely confused: 'So why do we study Romeo and Juliet - about teenage stabbings and joint suicide, An Inspector Calls about suicide by drinking bleach, Of Mice and Men about a man murdeirng his best friend for killing a woman, Lord of the Flies about schoolboys going mad and killing each other, and Power and Conflict Poems about soldiers dying in all sorts of vile ways? But when we write, it's supposed to be upbeat.

There are so many powerful, uplifting and funny books they could study instead - your list is great.

My 17 year old self didn't get the humour in the wasp factory, maybe I'll give it a re read then see if I get it 2nd time round

I do however love a bit of a
Agatha Christie, I've read nearly all and bar one or 2 she red herrings me every time!

What is wrong with Harry Potter? I'd rather read HP than Lord of the Flies (Goddess that book was dull, and I had to write so many notes in lessons my hand cramped up.) Actually I do still read Harry Potter, on the train. And if it weren't for Rowling I would never have read Pullman, Tolkien or Lewis.

I actually agree with OP, I was an angsty teenage Goth (now an angsty adult Goth) but my reading material consisted of HP, The Princess Diaries, The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, Anne of Green Gables series and the Little House books. Nothing very dark or angsty (that was provided by the music I listened to.) I still read all those as an adult, but I haven't touched any of the stuff I had to read at school.

It's the relentlessness of the set texts that is so demoralising. I love a good dark novel and I bet teens would adore Jekyll and Hyde or LoTF or OM&M if they were taught alongside something funny or light. Why not try Scoop or Decline & Fall? They are funny, easy-ish reads. My Family & Other Animals used to be on the syllabus too. For Shakespeares, Much Ado or MSND have more banter in them.

I completely agree with you. I know a boy who was hauled in to speak with HoY and put on special watch because his Creative Writing piece was a grahic piece about suicide and they told him on no account should he write something like this in an exam as it would be flagged as a safeguarding issue
You do realise that's because creative writing is actually a surprisingly common way of some students making disclosures of abuse and mental health struggles?
We legally have an obligation to record it as a safeguarding concern.

It's not about some weird hypocrisy. It's that we have a duty of care in law to report it.

I've always said to students they can write about upsetting things but please be aware of my legal duty. It's up to them them. Unsurprisingly, students find it easier to write sad pieces than happy ones. They also find it easier to describe gothic or spooky settings than utopian and peaceful ones.

Yes Lola of course I understand that! The point he was making and I agree with him is that it's disingenuous to feed teens a relentless diet of suicidal and murderous literature and then be concerned that they are emulating it.

Cathpot

The Hardy, the title of which you cannot recall is The Mayor of Casterbridge.

SapphireSeptember

What is wrong with Harry Potter? I'd rather read HP than Lord of the Flies (Goddess that book was dull...

Well, one of the authors won the Nobel prize for literature and all the other important prizes; the other made a lot of money.

Never read Holes

Liked seamus heaney with the potatoes and hands in the earth

Richard 3 was hard going

Thank god we read lots of Margaret Atwood

Lord of the flies is amazing

Perfectly possible to enjoy both Lord of the Flies and Harry Potter of course!

When I was in KS3 back in the 1970s I remember reading My Family and Other Animals, Moonfleet, and The Children's Crusade, as well as the Mayor of Casterbridge and Of Mice and Men.

Mid-Term Break
by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

The above is a sad poem and it is well worth teaching.

Millie
People have been reading and writing these pieces of literature for centuries. It's not disingenuous to see the fairly obvious difference between:

1. Studying a literary text in its social context, considering how difficult and challenging parts of human experience are communicated along with a range of other themes. All of this is guided by a teacher who has planned the lessons and knows the text well and can handle material.
2. Please be aware that you're best not writing first person monologues as someone about to kill themselves, or disclosing child abuse because we have a legal duty to report it.

Equally, on the creative writing front most depressing pieces don't emulate what's been studied. Students may write about a themes but they don't read like someone emulating a literary style.

I've read some amazing pieces of quite disturbing creative writing. I've told the students when I've had to make a note of the content to keep us all safe. Usually that means the safeguarding lead/head of year has a quick chat to say "Mrs Lola told us about your response in class..." And the student says "yeah, I had a great idea and she said if I wrote it then she'd have to log it but everything is fine".

notheresa
That poem breaks my heart. It was in one of the old GCSE anthologies.

Look on the bright side OP. DD’s first secondary text was Northern Lights

Dreadful.