What aren't kids reading?

[Czech]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?em

Caught this in the sidebar when I was reading about Miguel Tejada tipping pitches to fellow countrymen. How do you feel about this? While there's plenty of merit to letting kids choose what they want to read, I still feel like there have to be books we've all read, whether they're by Judy Blume or John Steinbeck. But on the other hand, our school system's gavage of great literature often irreparably ruins the books in question, if not the entire concept of reading for reading's sake. Too bad it's not enough for our parents and public libraries to say "you really ought to read To Kill a Mockingbird" without study guides and SparkNotes and all that crap.

 

[HarleyQuinn]

I kind of like the idea in theory, that a kid reads what they want to read for the class, yet at the same time, I've discovered books I enjoyed that I likely never would've picked up if not taught them (Virginia Woolf in general, "A Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles, "To Kill A Mockingbird", among many others). That isn't even getting into the short stories I discovered.

I like the idea of a student maybe bringing something to class for the first week or two and the teacher individually tailoring suggestions/ideas to that student (i.e. what was mentioned on Page 3?) to broaden their horizons and push them to slightly more challenging material.

A kid interested in warfare could be pushed to read "The Things They Carried" for example by Tim O'Brien whereas a person into more darker supernatural tinged material could read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or works by Poe.