Help Students Read Books By People Who Aren't Dead
My students need class sets of the contemporary novels "Waiting", "The Remains of the Day", and "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches Part Two: Perestroika" that were recently approved by the board.
In boom times, I could ask my students to purchase personal copies of contemporary books to supplement our inventory, and most did. With the economy the way it is now, that option has pretty much evaporated. It would be a shame if they couldn't read wonderful books because of financial limitations.
My students are hungry for books that reflect their world.
Our curriculum is heavy in classics, light on modern lit. I find myself teaching many of the same titles I was taught 25 years ago when I was a student in the same district. While many of those books are wonderful, there has been virtually no forward movement. This stagnation does our students a disservice, implying that the contemporary literature living authors are actively creating is somehow less worthy of study than remnants of a world they've never known.
These kids are working very hard to figure out the world they're about to enter, trying to make meaningful, humane decisions and leave their mark in a positive manner. Modern lit is a primer for them, allowing them to make devastating mistakes and suffer consequences vicariously so they're less likely to make them in real life. The new world is a minefield of poor choices that more canonical texts often cannot help them negotiate.
My Project
As a playwright, Tony Kusher defined the millennial epoch. In his two seminal plays about the end of the twentieth century--Perestroika and Millenium Approaches, which, together, comprise Angels In America--he captured the anxiety and exhilaration of our world on the cusp of a new era. That is the era that our students will continue to define throughout their lives, so a deeper understanding of recent history would benefit them as they shape our futures.
I've been cobbling together class sets of Waiting and Remains of the Day for several years, and it would be such a blessing and relief to be able to fill in the remaining gaps so I can offer copies to every student at the same time. Right now, there's a complicated round robin kind of arrangement where faster readers check the book out first so they can rush through and get them to the slower readers by the time the unit is due. As you might imagine, this is less than ideal if the goal is to offer every student access to the book.
I'll be honest, it’s not that I don't have books, if I were willing to compromise my vision of an English curriculum that is relevant and reflective of our actual world, I could easily spend the rest of my career teaching Shakespeare and Shaw, Orwell and Huxley ad infinitum.
But most of the kids won't read those books. They may pretend to, but mostly they'll use Sparknotes and fake their way through it. That teaches them nothing, and deprives them of the possibility of a real love of reading.
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