Question for English teachers

[WinterCarlisle]

This is something that’s been bugging me since I was at secondary school.

WHY are so many of the set texts so bloody depressing? When I was at school (mid to late 80s) we did A Kestrel for a Knave which was pretty tragic swiftly followed by Z for Zachariah which was utterly terrifying. They were no fun AT ALL to real and tbh I’m still a bit traumatised <dramatic>.

My DS is 13 and has just finished The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas and they’ve now moved onto A Monster Calls. He’s quite a sensitive boy and he’s really not liking the second one at all, especially as a family friend recently died of cancer in her mid 40s.

Obviously I understand that they need to explore different themes and life isn’t all jolly but AIBU that maybe a few cheerful books might encourage them to read a bit more rather than DOOOOOOOMMMMM??

So:

YABU - Buck up kids, stop being Wet Hens and just read about life’s depressing abyss

YANBU - There’s enough doom and gloom already in this world. Let’s read some cheerful, yet literary books while we’re at school

I reckon you could get away with short passages from Ulysses, which had my 12 year old in stitches. I am all for eclectic, and happy for them to read Hunger Games, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wimpy kid for comfort reading. As a parent I am happy my children love to read and they learn so much from even a lightweight text. There are some fabulous suggestions from teachers on here, Shirley Jackson is great @viques! I think the main thing is that kids enjoy reading, which may/or may not lead them to explore more challenging reading later on.

Sorry OP, my comment wasn't very relevant. I do think books and the media generally have taken a depressing and vacuous turn. I believe it would be healthier for children to have a mix of inspirational and funny texts.

I'm laughing at Enid Blyton's 'too pi for words!'

Someone upthread asked: Can someone please explain why they think The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas shouldn't be taught? It must be 10yrs plus since I read it so I can't remember much about it besides the basics.

A variety of reasons.

It's a variation on the theme of 'Holocaust for the masses'; the monetization and romanticisation of an atrocious historical event. This in the eyes of quite a number of Jewish critics, in particular. 'A comforting fairytale that saves us from confronting the truth of history', said Phyllis Lassner.

Another variation on the theme of anti-Semitism: the presence of the lice. Too close to the polluting presence of the Jew? Awful.

It's fantasy. Fantasy fiction and the Holocaust are not easy bedfellows, and at university the reasons for this might be unpicked, but at Level 3 and below this is quite a challenging task. Ie. no boy would be sitting beside the perimeter fence, or likely alive inside the complex at all, because children/pregnant women were taken immediately to the gas chambers.

The 'different but the same' narrative - even down to the boys' sharing of the same birthday. They were really not.

'Lines will divide us, but hope will unite us', says the movie strapline. Not really. If Bruno is entirely ignorant of the purpose of 'the farm', as readers are led to believe, there's not really much of a lesson to be learned. Plus ... the ending.

The two-dimensional, lazily stereotypical characters (good doctor, maternal women, genocidal men) which all cluster around the themes of 'good Nazi, bad Nazi'. In fairness to the film, it did a better job of complicating these oversimplifications a bit: it's one of the occasions where IMO the film was better than the book. But most of the problems still persist. As for the novel, it shies away from any suggestion that the Nazis were 'just like us' (imagine?) - they have to be an evil 'other'. The problems with this are obvious.

Aside from this, there are other, better Holocaust texts that are less patronising to their readers - even to a child reader. Solomon Perel's Europa Europa would be a much better choice.

An Inspector Calls put both our DCs (who did the damn thing 5 years apart) off Eng. Lit for life and I can't say I blame them.

Agree with the points about Shirley Jackson, she's having a bit of a resurgence lately. 'We have always lived in the castle' is a better book than 'I capture the castle', which is a variation on the typical privileged white marriage plot novel, although I confess I quite like reading the latter.

Ulysses - the 'Cyclops' episode from Homer works well in the corresponding one from Ulysses with the Citizen and Bloom having an argument in the pub. I don't like teaching just extracts but it seems to be more the common practice these days.

The sadly recently late Cormac McCarthy is wonderful - The Road is a masterpiece although happy it ain't - I also love the dystopian work of Octavia Butler. I'd teach these, Burdekin's Swastika Night and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or even Cameron's The Terminator before I'd ever touch The Handmaid's Tale, which is an offensively prurient text that I hate.

Harper Lee has problematic connotations with white saviour narrative. I'd ditch her in favour of Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, or Yvonne Battle-Felton's Remembered which was recently nominated for the women's prize.

Instead of Dickens, (or the Great Gatsby yet again), I might be tempted by a bit of Evelyn Waugh. NOT Brideshead, but his commentary on the bright young things and the cynical media age is good fun and pretty topical too. Scoop! might be good for this, otherwise Vile Bodies is a great novel with a not-too-bad film adaptation.

World War I texts - Helen Zenna Smith's Not So Quiet, or Anand's Across the Dark Water for me.

Poetry - the Out of Bounds anthology covering regional areas of multicultural Britain, or the modernists might be good here. Not Mina Loy - she's too difficult for that level.

We definitely do need some decolonization, I think.

V for Vendetta might be a good one, too! Why not graphic novels if they want to study dystopia, they are a pretty subversive genre. There's also 'Maus' on the Holocaust, or The Watchmen.

I understood OP, I think it's just that these themes make thought provoking books. I always looked at " love reading for kids" when buying English books for my children. ( lived in Europe so couldn't use the library) It's a running joke, that they say, good book mum, but really sad and somebody died.

@SerafinasGoose I love The Road, but was haunted for weeks. Interesting what you say about Handmaid's Tale, it's years since I read it. Can you say a bit more about the prurience if you don't mind? On modernists - Langston Hughes comes to mind. For fantasy there is also Neil Gaiman, though I don't know how suitable he is for KS3.

@user9630721458 we do Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - the kids love it.

Also, and I know this is a random nitpicky thing, the writer obviously did only the most basic research. Silly things like Bruno mishearing the word ‘Fuhrer’ as ‘fury.’ Obviously it’s supposed to be a cutesy/poignant mishearing of a young child, but why would Bruno, who presumably is speaking German as his mother tongue, mishear a German word meaning ‘leader’ for an English word which means ‘anger?’ Fury is ‘wut’ in German. Or ‘zorn.’ Why would Bruno hear the English word ‘fury?’ And it is presented as the word meaning anger, I think to encourage the reader to associate Hitler with anger/fury. But it makes no sense in the context.

It’s such a small thing, but I think if you’re writing about huge issues belonging to another culture or country, you simply have to get it correct. I had a similar experience reading a Korean novel where the Korean narrator is using incorrect Korean words. It was cringey and put me off the whole book because it felt like it wouldn’t be so taxing to do the very basic research into a language you’re using.

Oh fantastic, I think Gaiman is great. Macabre but funny. I haven't introduced my children to this one, but I think I will now you have recommended.

Remembering back to Y7 English at my school we did Mrs Frisby And The Rats of Nimh. The vivisection theme was topical with the Body Shop’s campaigns against animal testing.

The English teachers produced a huge reading list by year group with suggestions for literary books we might like to try at home. I devoured the books on there. It had a lot of mid-century woman writers - Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy A Wizard Of Earthsea, The L Shaped Room by Lynn Reid Banks, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing. All very feminist texts. Are these ever studied now?

My issue with The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t the prurient thing though - I felt like it was excessively clumsy. All the detailed descriptions of the Martha people cutting into the fruit and flowers and describing the juices and seeds etc. Felt like a some English teacher’s wet dream as they frantically scribbled down symbolism notes. Not me obviously, some other English teacher.

When I say a Korean novel - it was written by a third generation American but all about a Korean family who had just come to America. Really interesting and actually quite well written about the struggles of trying to keep your hand on your culture/your parents’ culture while assimilating to the culture where you live. But that one obvious mistake of a younger brother constantly calling his sister by the name a girl would call a sister rather than a boy just spoiled it for me.

@Kanaloa I had forgotten those descriptions! It must be 20 years since I read it. My abiding impression was that the author was a clever woman but a bit of a cold fish.

I just felt like it was written specifically for somebody to pick out fertility and feminism symbolism and write an essay on it. I’m not keen when an author bashes you over the head with the themes. I much prefer books or short stories or whatever that allow you to find the themes and message by yourself rather than literally spelling it out. I always think the very best authors trust their reader, and clumsy writers often treat their reader as if they’re too stupid to get their very clever concept. To me the whole novel reads like a feminist wanted to write her feminist manifesto and make a point but in novel form. I felt just the same about Surfacing. It felt like it was written to teach young English uni students how to write an essay on eco-feminism, rather than to be a good novel.

@Kanaloa Yes, I see what you mean. Books should try to present their subjects truthfully without telling you what to think. It's part of the pleasure of fiction to make your own mind up.

I'd not call A Wizard Of Earthsea feminist, but the later books in the series become increasingly so. Particularly from Tehanu onward, when she starts picking apart the concepts of the first book