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?

If it were done when ?tis done, then ?twere well
It were done quickly

I must say that doesn't reflect the practice of my department AT ALL. We are very much committed to meeting the needs of all students - yes, of course there is some focus on D-to-C grades, as there will be in all schools while we are measured on this, but we certainly don't say "Oh, a B is fine" for a student who could get an A*. We teach whole texts, read the whole thing in class (setting reading homework also very much disadvantages students with weaker literacy skills and is a great was of alienating them), teach grammar (my students always get taught what an adverb is and I use grammatical terminology, which I had to teach myself as we never covered it at school!) and use terms like "stanza".

At A-level we go out of our ways to expose them to huge amounts of differents literature - they read full set texts and then selected extracts for historical or social context. It's pretty much impossible to do this in Years 10 and 11 though otherwise there simply wouldn't be time to teach the GCSE course thoroughly.

Excuse my typos - I have a teething baby on my lap!

Agree Brian My DDs were/are constantly being pushed to achieve A/A*.

They also come home with termly targets, which tell them what they have to do to achieve the top grades.

Reading is a huge problem generally. A parent of one of my AS students said at the last parents' evening, 'Well, he doesn't read, you know.' My face was And on World Book Day, I took my Yr 11s up to the library to look at the huge range of non-fiction reading there is (things like Touching the Void, Bryson, biographies, etc) and encourage them to choose a book to read before their GCSE in the summer. One girl hasn't read a book since she was seven. One boy dismissed the whole library, with its thousands of books, as 'boring'.

Believe me, the English teachers I work with are trying their very hardest. But when the last book one of your students read was by Jacqueline Wilson, we're fighting a losing battle sometimes when we try to instil a love for - or indeed any smidgeon of interest at all - in the classics. The change even between my generation and the current one is huge. Reading for many many children seems to be a lost art.

I'm reading it with my Year 9s but I'm certainly not expected to read the whole thing and tbh lots are strugging. They are set 4 but mainly, as Sherlocked says, they're really not used to reading (despite the fact that I have been HAMMERING reading all year!).

And let's not forget that the only reason I'm teaching it in Year 9 is because the English/English Lit syllabus has been packed so full that there is no time to read it next year. We're reading it prior to their assessment which will probably be this time next year .

It's one of the many reasons I will (almost definitely) be hanging up my chalk (and interactive whiteboard pen) at the end of the year. That and the fact that 'teaching' is now a dirty word (only allowed to use 'learning' at my school) and woe betide anyone being found by OFSTED talking to a class .

So very cynical after only 11 years

God I hate Shakespeare.

That felt good.

My friend ended up home educating his daughter for GCSE and for the English Lit they did Great Expectations and he was told that as long as she read the first chapter and watched the David Lean film of it she should pass the exam.

He was gobsmacked.

Then she refused to watch the film as it was in black and white.

Come on Miggsie - we need to know the end. Did she read any of it? Did he find a colour video of a BBC performance? Did she pass?

Mind you my DF never did finish reading Middlemarch, but he still passed his A level English. I'm not sure I'd have finished it without the thought of Rufus Sewell in a long coat in the BBC version to "encourage" me.

I'm going to out myself as a complete English geek by saying Middlemarch was the most griping novel I have ever read.

Did you mean gripping? If so that was a fab typo

I do. Stupid phone.

Eng Lit is not compulsory - in fact, you will find it disappearing rapidly thanks to new syllabuses in the next few years. I have been more or less told to stop offering it, but as a stubborn bugger I am ignoring that 'advice'

I would love to set reading as homework. But to do that I would need to have enough copies of the book to send home with every kid, and I can't afford that since I had to buy 75 brand new copies of one text at £8 each to be used in exams only - specified edition and all that.

I have to say what Hackman wrote is my experience. I have a bright ds doing GCSEs this year, who will pass them all (I hope suspect) but if his teachers has stretched and challenged him, and yes Brian set homeworks that needed to be done, so they could take a proper part in the next lesson, from Yr7 onwards, then he could be getting As. As it is, he's been left to cruise through the last 4 years or so, because he knows he can 'pass' without doing any work, and the management that collate all the data, know he will fall into the '5 A-Cs at GCSE, including maths and English' without that pushing, so have (I presume) focused their energy on those more bborderline students.
Yes, in an ideal world, every student would be intrinsically self motivated, but, in real life, that's not my experience of teenage boys!

I bet they'd watched the merle Oberon film too, which bears no relation to the book whatsoever.

Yup. It's crap.

Oh and I agree with Quattro too. And I've just become a school governor to do something about it.

She's probably not going to read the whole text - unless she's in a highly literate class of very well behaved students. Unlikely that she is not going to read any of the play.

I know Lequeen it makes you despair really. My mother was in a class of forty plus in a secondary school (full 11 us system so all 11 plus "failures") and they studied Shakespeare, dickens Wordsworth, tennyson etc.

Feralgirl - I hate to correct you, as it sounds like you teach Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is not written in Middle English.

I saw that comment and rolled my eyes.

I don't mean to be unkind but surely it is unacceptable, surely it HAS to be unacceptable for an English teacher to think that Shakespeare is Middle English.

This thread is an advert for independent schools, it really is.