My aunt teaches 8th-grade English at a Catholic school in Plano, TX. In a recent letter, she describes what she’s teaching her kids:
I just finished teaching The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary Builder, which is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s classic. This text is a shortened version, infused with about 1800 SAT vocabulary terms. At times the reading is almost laughable because the text is so saturated with $50 words when 50 cent words would suffice.
What a great idea. If we do this to all of the classic — Shakespeare, Henry James, John Steinbeck, and Herman Melville — our kids can graduate without having actually ever read any of the classics. After all, I’m sure the guy who wrote the Vocabulary Builder (Mark Phillips) is every bit as good a writer as George Orwell.
At least not all is lost. She writes that in the winter she will teach Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, in preparation for a class field trip to the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
Email This Post
⋅
Print This Post
Several years ago, my daughter wanted a cellphone. I thought 14 was too young, but I got the ol’, “but Lady, all my friends have one!” speech.
(yes, she calls me Lady… strange kid)
So I told her if she read Little Women, I’d get her one… a couple of weeks later, I was purchasing a damn cellphone.
I guess my moral to that story is, it shouldn’t be left up to the teachers to expose our kids to the classics. Sometimes parents should go against the grain and render their own offspring to something other than MTV and MySpace.
Just be careful how you bribe them.