By the time that we were in middle school, the majority of my friends felt that reading was a chore and turned their noses up at any books I'd suggested to them. It's only logical to conclude that there is some grievous error that teachers are making between first grade and junior high school. That's not to say that students cannot be rescued from this loathing of books during high school, but by the manner that high school teachers present them, that isn't a likely prospect. The serious decline of youths reading literature that Francine Prose notes in her essay is a depressing, almost tragic circumstance. If reading is exercise for the brain, then are teachers doing enough in other areas of education to promote thinking?
Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965. The Whig Interpretation of History written by Herbert Butterfield is a superb meditation on the study of history and how it can be distorted by imposing moral judgments into research. It is a defense of studying each historical period on its own terms, and not imposing one's own moral and social standards on figures and situations that existed with, perhaps, a different set of ethical and cultural concerns.
3. Prose makes several key assumptions about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school. What are they? Some of the key assumptions that Prose makes about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school are that our literary taste and our love for reading is developed in high school, not before, not after. Also, that high school reading lists are developed by adults who had to suffer through the same system as the kids before them, thus developing their literary taste in high school and recycling the same books generation after generation.
Ricky choses the hardest books imaginable. He believes in reading up on what others have to say about a difficult book, and then making up his own mind about it. He says that part of the reason he feels this way is because of his teacher, Mr. Buxton, who taught him Shakespeare in 10th grade. Ricky shares how Mr. Buxton met him one night to go over the text line by line, but he didn’t share the conclusion with Moody, he left that for him to figure out on his own. Reading Umberto Eco’s “Role of the Reader” in college, Ricky states that, “The reader completes the text, that the text is never finished until it meets this voracious and engaged reader.” Although there are critics who believe there is a right and a wrong way to ready books, Moody says, “I believe there is not now and never will be an authority who can tell me how to interpret, how to read, how to find the pearl of literary meaning in all cases.” Part 2.
She states multiple times that the children within the education system are being cheated every day because they are not being forced to read more difficult books. “Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with reductive, wrong-headed readings of mulitlayered texts” (Prose 97). The reader can blatantly see that Prose thinks negatively of the high school curriculum that today's students face. It seems clear that Prose does not want to hide her personal view or feelings, so she starts her essay out in a way that we do not have to read between the lines to get a sense of how she feels about what she is writing. She uses more emotional language when she says, "The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers may themselves have read in adolescence"(Prose
Weikun Lu 09/16/2014 EAD II, Section 21 1.2 Professor Kalteissen Title Literacy transmits an ability to screen negative and positive while growing and it may help people change their life. Literacy always plays a key role in daily life from past to present. Sherman Alexie is the writer of “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”. Alexie was born to a US family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State and his family has[had] very poor living standard[s] but his father is[was] never miserly with books. In his essay he described[s] how he became a competitive student through reading books and gaining knowledge.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a very important story for every high schooler to read. Although it does a little more then slightly hint at the racism in that time period, it also teaches readers. It shows racism in such a horrible light, that nobody could revert to such a thing. Our past isn’t always the nicest thing to look upon, but it’s still there. The difference is what we do in the future, and this novel teaches us that everyone is equal and shall be treated as
In the book Rodriguez takes every thing that his teachers say at face value and he never questions if perhaps they could be wrong or mistaken on subjects. In school Rodriguez read acclaimed literary books: Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, and Wuthering Heights. Which his teachers praised him for considering the books were a bit advanced for his grade and for the fact that other students lacked the ambition to read them. So he decides to be really ambitious and he wants to impress his teacher with his new reading choice. So he decides and tells his teacher that he wants to read the bible but the teacher (nun) feels that it is out of his reading comprehension and would be difficult for him to understand.
The Passion of Curiosity Bienvenue sur le site d'ORACLE 1. Observatoire Réunionnais des Arts, des Civilisations et des Lettres dans leur Environnement 1.4. Revue ALIZES 1.4.13. Alizés n°23 The Passion of Curiosity This essay will attempt to stage an encounter between literature and psychoanalysis; the ground of this encounter will be Henry James’s story, “The Jolly Corner” and Sigmund Freud’s discussion of a particular mode of negation—“disavowal”—which results in what he calls a “splitting of the ego.” Spencer Brydon, the exile who has returned to his home, experiences one aspect of James’s concern with the “global.” Motivated by a “passion of… curiosity” concerning what he would have become had he remained in the United States, he searches for his alter ego in his family’s home, the “jolly corner;” their encounter, however, does not at all reveal to him what he had expected (724). The profoundly enigmatic character of Brydon’s relation with the alter ego can show how the mechanism of disavowal creates within consciousness a series of logical contradictions, each of which will be embodied in an aspect of the fantasmatic scenario of castration enacted within the text.
Why I Hate English Class (essay one) In a lot of countries, school is taken very seriously and teachers are looked at as the people trusted with teaching others what they need to know to enter the world. Many may say some classes are more important than others and some may like one subject more than another. This could be because it’s too hard or the class may be too boring. But the reasons I hate English, are the long drawn out essays, the thick novels we are always assigned to read, and the ever-changing rules to how the English language is spoken and written. The long essays are the first on my list to explain why I hate English so much.