Cartoon by Samara Fantie
There is nothing met with more fake enthusiasm and collective groans than the announcement of a new book for English class. The new assignment is just going to lead to nights of deep, crippling procrastination, passing out from exhaustion while reading before bed or quickly skimming the Sparknotes of the assigned chapters during the period before English class.
English teachers always try to get you to read the book, telling you what a marvelous novel it is, that you will definitely enjoy it and how it will soon be your favorite book of all time. But you know this is not true. The reason being? You read the exact same book the year before. Well, not exactly. But it sure seems like it.
I realized just how aggravating this issue is to so many students during a recent English class of mine, when many students expressed frustration that we were reading books that seemed identical to books we had read in previous years. They thought this repetition was from what many students find to be “racism books.”
These are books dealing with, discussing or overcoming racism. I’ve felt like over my high school career, maybe even throughout my middle school years, we’ve read books like this way too often. This year, it was A Lesson Before Dying in honors 11th grade English. A few years before, back in my freshman English class, it was To Kill a Mockingbird. Some curriculum books deal more with culture than racism, but they all still seem to come down to the same thing: a thorough examintion of culture. Is the county trying to shove this message down our throats? That’s how it’s coming off. It’s a positive message, sure, but it’s more important that we learn about well-written literature that teaches us about symbolism. It seems like the county is dumbing us all down by giving us books to read that are simple and all about the “same ol’ stuff.”
For instance, in my English class last year, we read The Joy Luck Club as opposed to The Catcher in the Rye, which other classes read. I was particularly annoyed by this. The Joy Luck Club turned out to be a boring and tedious read. The Catcher in the Rye, which I ended up reading on my own, turned out to be wonderful and original – something I don’t come across often in school. I felt that I could relate far more to the inner woes and complexities that come with being a teenage male, all portrayed in The Catcher in the Rye. Yet, my teacher had me read a multi-generational story about Chinese women who had mothers who were ashmamed of them. I don’t know if there was even one thing in that book I could relate to. I could not understand why we would read one over the other, and The Joy Luck Club was taught just because of its racial content.
The county’s book curriculum is in need of a fix. Students are getting restless and looking for change. The point of reading in school is to inspire a new generation of readers, and it is a difficult task to accomplish when all of the books that are studied are one giant blur of similarities.
