Tasha's comments (member since May 20, 2009)

Tasha's comments from the The Next Best Book Club group.

Excellent point Lisa. This was something that I really struggled with when I first thought of revamping my curriculum.

The way I'm structuring the classroom is that most of the out of class reading is going to be based on suggestion alone - I wanted to do it a different way, but I live in a VERY conservative location and assigning books with strong language, sex, etc. would have my principals phone ringing off the hook. What I am doing instead is recommending books based on themes that we may be reading short stories or poems of in class. That way, what the student chooses to read within a certain theme is up to them - they can have it as clean or objectionable as their families values dictate, but we can still discuss the genre, writing styles, etc. of the works in general in the class. There are going to be some books that they can select from that I already have at the school, but for the most part these would have been taught many times before and the principal will go to bat for me over any of those.

35 authors and 28 books - I was surprised there were some authors on there I hadn't heard of and yet they made this list
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, c The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, Blindness

My first priority is to get the kids reading. I love the classics and would love to have all the kids love classics, but that just isn't the case anymore. If I can get them to love reading, eventually they may find the classics. And if they don't, really, wanting to read throughout their life is more important than killing them with classics that just make them hate reading more. I do have students every year who will go into the classics because that is who they are - but I probably had 20+ students last year who did not read a single book. I just don't think that can possibly lead to success, so I'm giving a different approach a shot.

Lovely readers -

YOU GUYS ROCK!!! Keep them coming - I love the reasoning and eventhough I'm spending a summer reading my brains out, I just can't get everything in. I love that as you are making suggesitions, you are validating why. Very, very helpful.

Heather - I would LOVE your handouts!!! When you get a minute, I'm at tasha dot seegmiller at ironmail dot org

Thank you for the offer...not sure how this will work out but swore I would never teach a Huck Finn as a class novel again and the idea branched out from there...with some inspiration from Nancie Atwell as well :)

Okay, I'm coming out of the woodwork based on the thread somewhere. I teach high school - Juniors (16-17 year olds) and I'm in the process of completely revamping the way I've been teaching. Because the budgets for education are currently much lower than they have been in years past (we got $0 for books last year) I can't order books and can't really do a teaching of them except to put together a "points to consider" guide to help them as they are reading - not with questions to "prove" that they have read as much as making sure they are picking up on the little elements that they may have missed.

The way this is going to work is that eachs student is assigned a certain number of pages to read per week - average is 50 (decent, right?) with accomodations for those who have difficulties reading or higher for those who are AP English bound (in that class they have to read 100 a week). My only stipulation is they cannot read the same genre two times in a row. My goal is two fold - get them reading (most important) but make sure they branch out of the same genre and have a little literary exposure.

So, with the lengthy introduction over,:) here is my question. If you could select books you wished kids got the opportunity to read in high school - what would you select?

I will just throw out a different opinion. While I really enjoyed the story I had a very very hard time with the graphic and violent sex scenes. I actually didn't finish this book because I was so frustrated by the over the top description of sex and violence, particularly the detailed description of the old murder cases. I heard it gets more graphic from the point I stopped, making me ever happier that I didn't continue, and I usually am not offended by the sex, etc. in books. Just another opinion.

Somehow I stumbled across this group, loved the challenges and have plans to work them into my high school English classes that I teach. Then I found out that all of you love to read as much as I love to read! Yea! And you read good books! Yea yea! I'm done teaching in two days and ready for some intense reading time.

Tasha