To want DD to actually read literature in literature lessons?

[buttonmoon78]

DD1 is in year 9. In English they are just starting Macbeth. Last Thursday she missed a lesson as she had a hospital appointment and this morning informed me that she'd missed some of the dvd they'd been watching. When I said it didn't matter as they'd be surely reading it she said no, they were just watching the dvd. I was a little bit .

I did Macbeth in year 7 - and we read it all. And this was in 1989/90 so not millenia ago.

What makes it worse is that her teacher said that they wouldn't read it because they wouldn't understand it. I mean, what? How to put a student off Shakespeare in one easy step!

AIBU or is this why the Daily Fail goes on about slipping standards in education?

Backforgood - I'm sure there are schools where you can set reading homework and be so secure they will do it that you can actually base the next lesson on it, but I've never known one.

YANBU - my DSS watched the dvd of Romeo and Juliet instead of reading the play!! I was gobsmacked. He was in a lower English group so maybe the higher groups did actually read it?? I dunno. Shocking. Why not read something a little more accessible then???

I appreciate that it's a problem BB, but how do you do Dickens then? You can hardly read all of Great Expectations in class.

But that is what we did Brian. Both for GCSEs and A levels. With GCSEs if you didn't do it you didn't understand what the next task was about, if you did then you managed fine. A student has to take responsibility for elements of their own education surely? And at A level stage then if you are studying a subject you should be prepared to put in the work - otherwise choose something else. After all, no one forces you to take a subject for A level unliks GCSEs.

Sadly, this is not an unknown concept to me in the first place. I studied literature at University. In our second year, one girl said with genuine annoyance that she was going to have to read this book (can't remember what it was!) as she'd been unable to find a dvd adaptation. It's a literature degree!

Am waiting til lunchtime to ring the school in the hope I'll have a better chance of getting the teacher.

It's probably an issue to do with trying to make everyone equal. English Literature is compulsory at most schools for GCSE, isn't it? So, it being unfair to make thick children read, let's abolish reading!

Thank fuck for selective schools, where children have proper opportunities to study Shakespeare.

My own interest in English Literature was sparked by Shakespeare. I did an English degree probably because of Shakespeare. DD will do an English degree as well - I can see that from here. How awful for her had she been exposed to this sort of teaching. Or not teaching.

I genuinely think that anyone who has done this to teenage children is a disgrace to the teaching profession.

PS To anyone who thinks that Shakespeare is better seen performed than read, that seems to me to be a moot point, you know.

DD1 wouldn't pass the test for our local selective school so I wouldn't put her through it. Which means that DD2 goes to the non-selective school too as it's in a different part of the city so I would need to collect which is impossible with primary age children too. She would have passed with flying colours though - she's more traditionally academic.

If I had the money I'd pay. I know full well that's another bag of snakes and if I was to take my dcs out of it, I wholeheartedly support the idea of state education. The problem is that as children are all so very different, one size does not fit all and there are simply not the resources available to ensure that teachers are able to tailor every lesson to each child. I would pay good money (if I had it) to ensure that each of my dcs had an education that was the very best for them. And yes, I realise that simply paying for education does not make it good. There are some independent school out there which are as bad as the worst state schools.

I used to want to teach. Having spent a lot of time volunteering in various schools, now I don't. It is a thankless impossible task for the most part it seems.

So I teach one to one instead, in my own house!

This thread is a shock to me, it really is.

Reading Shakespeare and Hardy and Plath at school opened up the whole world to a kid like me. How else would I have been introduced to them? My Mum and Dad left school at 15!
I was so in love with it all, I actually got my parents into it!

And yes, we were sent home reading as homework and if half the tossers in the class didn't read it then that was their funeral.

Cut to the present day and in my capacity as a writer I'm often asked what I think of the Eng curriculum. Usually I bluff because a. my DC aren't in state school so I don't know about the NC etc and b. because they were young.

But now GCSEs are looming and I don't want them to study only a few edited highlights. Sure, I can teach them at home, but I want them to have the collegiate experience of a classroom discussion.
I specifically asked the question on parents evening and was told yes, they study whole texts. Thank goodness.

In the menatime I've been asked to a radio show about just this issue and I will have a few choice things to say!!!

Can I also say that I sometimes do work in prisons at the request of a good friend who isa writer in residence and the prisoners read the whole bloody books!

Thread has moved on but I do think it rather sad if a level students aren't motivated enough to actually read the whole of their set texts, I really do. They choose to study their subjects, it's not a lot to ask that they actually show some interest in them.

MY dd is in 3rd year of high school (scotland) and they watch DVDs all the time in english i scratch my head at the thought , People complain that reading levels are going down children dont understand the written word yet they are allowed to watcg DVDs instead of the book , she was doing of mice and men and watched the film and got some handouts of keypoints in the book

Next time someone on mn has a pop about private schools being a waste of money I am linking to this thread.

Quattrocento: "It's probably an issue to do with trying to make everyone equal. English Literature is compulsory at most schools for GCSE, isn't it? So, it being unfair to make thick children read, let's abolish reading!"

No, that's not the thinking at all.

This is the truth of the matter. Schools need to perform well in league tables if they are to attract more parents and hence more money. Performing well in league tables means getting as many children as possible to pass five GCSEs at grade C or above. What this means in practice is focusing on all those kids who aren't all that clever, and dragging them up from a D grade to a C grade.

So, how do you do this? Well, not by expecting them to read lots of Shakespeare and Dickens. You do it by spoon-feeding them, making it as easy for them as you possibly can, giving them facts to memorise, synopses of stories, quotations, little chunks of text studied in class. That way, you can get a whole bunch of Ds up to a C. You can also forget about trying to stretch the B and A kids, because they're going to pass anyway.

On the issue of Dickens, Claire Tomalin, auhtor of a fabulous biography said.
'Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for Dickens.'

I think this is the crux of the matter.

Teachers are being expected to make every minute of every lesson exciting. But they are not entertainers. And our DC need to learn about delayed gratification and patience.

And they need to learn this not only to enjoy fantastic literature, but also to succeed in many walks of life. The average scientist doesn't make a breakthrough every day. And those cool hipsters in Silicon Valley spend hours and hours just thinking...

hackmum you truth of what you have just said is so startlingly awful and yet so obviously true, I shivered.

Which is the problem with league tables. So many parents never think about added value etc.

I think that what got me most was the teacher's assumption that they wouldn't understand it. I've been going to see Shakespeare performed since the age of 6-7 and whilst some of it undoubtedly was lost, I can also remember every single one.

And I know that is performance, not reading a text, but if a 6 year old can get the gist of a performance, surely a 14 year old can get the gist of a text enough to be able to study it?

I don't like generalisations, though I do employ them , but it really does seem that education is going downhill. Exams do seem to be getting easier. I don't mean to disparage anyone who is a teacher (and I hope no one is offended), as you can only work with what you have been given, but expectations seem a lot lower now than they used to be.

I agree with everything you wrote, wordfactory, but I also think we would do well to remember that in Dickens' times (and, indeed, in the 20th C until the advent of widespread television access in the 1960s), reading was not the solitary pursuit it has become today. The pater or mater familias reading to their offspring around the fireplace is not just an image of the past - it did really happen. Dickens' novels would have been read, in their instalments, by the whole family reading and listening, probably in turn. Hence younger readers than today enjoying Dickens, both because it was a more familiar environment that they found described in the books and also because it was a shared pursuit.

Wordfactory and others you are very wrong if you assume that only private schools read whole texts.

MY 2 DDs are at a comp and have always read whole texts of Shakespeare and other set texts. DD2 has studied Twelth Night this term, has read the whole text in class and at home, they are also going to see it in Stratford On Avon this week.

Not all comps are letting DC down. It really makes me cross when these assumptions are made from a few posts on MN.

quicklookbusy where on earth did I say that?

I have no idea what the vast majority of schools do, whether they be state or independent. That is why I said very little on the subject until now.

On this thread there are many parents expressingt heir disapproval at their DC's English Lit education. And some teachers defending the failure to read whole texts. But we have no way of knowing what sector they belong to do we?

Bonsoir yes indeed. Reading aloud (or indeed storytelling) as a shared activity was common place until recently.

Whenever I do an author event it almost always involves a reading, and while I must admit to finding it excruciating, audiences absolutley love it. It's something very central in our core, I think, this sharing of fiction.

As a family we still read as a shared experience and we all love it. But DS says he wouldn't tell his friends who would think it odd and babyish perhaps. DD wouldn't care.
Sometimes we read plays too. God we sound like the fucking Waltons! And we're sooooo not.

Sorry to make you shiver, Wordfactory!

I do think teaching literature is quite hard. Even in a streamed class, you'll have a range of abilities, so where do you pitch it? And how do you make sure the children read the texts? I remember sitting in Eng Lit classes at school, listening while other children read out loud badly, pronouncing words wrong, getting the emphasis wrong, stumbling over words. It was painful, and dull. Reading Shakespeare out loud by allocating the parts is just as bad, because some kids just won't have a clue what they're reading. You can ask the children to read the text at home and then discuss it in class, but some of them (most of them?) won't do that. Quite glad I'm not an English teacher!

My DD loves audio books and using them to learn great chunks of speeches off by heart (and practice acting them out in front of the mirror!).

Ok wordfactory maybe I read your post wrong at 14.17.

Would it be better if English Literature were not compulsory?

Would it be better if bright kids did O levels and thick ones CSEs? This position of having to work to drag the thick ones up from a D to a C and effectively ignoring the bright ones isn't teaching. It's neglect, pure and simple.

I cannot tell you how profoundly you have shocked me. I am spitting tacks that state schools are allowed to do this, that school governors allow it, that there are swathes of English departments that are doing not-teaching in this way.

It's my taxes, you buggers, huge amounts of my bloody taxes to do what? Turn the bright children off, in order that the dim ones who will probably never voluntarily open a book again can notch one grade higher in some mickey-mouse exam!

I can't bear to read any more.