Re: OT: Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

It depends on where you teach and to whom: try teaching Shakespeare
or some fat 19th century novel to students at inner city schools with
classrooms made up of (in roughly equal parts) second-language English
speakers and lower socio-economic students going home in the afternoon
to places most of America only glimpses in movies like Boyz 'n the Hood.

So inner-city kids are incapable of grasping Hamlet's desire to revenge his
father's murder? Or the marital problems of Othello and Desdemona? Or the
"gang warfare" in Romeo & Juliette?

You don't teach "great literature" by telling kids "This is Great Literature
which you should read because We Say So". You teach it by showing how it
relates to their lives.


Children should be interested in what Western writers, philosophers,
and religious leaders have been thinking about for the past 2500 years
-- not what the kids find of momentary interest.

The operative word here is *should,* but if wishes were fishes we'd
all cast nets. I make no apologies for reading primarily short fiction
(where I can better address reading deficiencies) and largely
20th-century works.

There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's quality literature that
addresses the points I and others have been making.


I also leaven my assignments with readings I think they will enjoy,
and I make no apologies for that either. To argue that I should be
ramming a steady diet of Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson essays
down the throat of a student who has never finished a book in his
(trust me: it's always a "he" who fits this description) life is not to
understand the reality of classrooms such as mine.

I certainly wasn't arguing such a thing.

I will qualify that with the following... One of the problems with a grossly
materialistic society such as ours is that most people -- regardless of
race, ethnicity, or social class -- live for the moment, without regard for
anything that occurred more than a decade ago. (This is one of the reasons
American politics is such a mess.) Kids need to be taught that human beings
and their problems are no different from the people and their problems of
100, 200, 500, 1000 years ago. This is one of the purposes of teaching
literature -- the show the universality of human existence.

Have you ever seen "Born Yesterday"? It makes the rather naive point that,
if even uneducated people are exposed to Important Ideas, they _will_ think
about them. Good luck.


.

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