There is merit to everything I have read here. I actually enjoy discussions like this because it allows me to reflect so much on the past and how I approached literature (I’ll be pondering this all afternoon). In my mind, you can introduce “the classics” but you have to do it in such a way where it isn’t necessarily painful. Too many times I have known teachers who seem to go out of their way to destroy the enjoyment of reading. Take my freshman English teacher. We read “The Old Man And The Sea” and I thought it was okay. But she seems out-and-out determined to make us hate it with her discussions of symbolism. She was not amused when I was saying that there was nothing special about it, that it was all about a fisherman who one day went after a marlin and spent his time not fishing by discussing baseball.

Don’t get me started on “Great Expectations”. That was the worst novel I read in school and in fact I think Dickens to be overrated. While she was destroying whatever fun you could have with something as horrible as “Great Expectations”, I kept sneaking swipes of “The Odyssey”.

Of course, at the other extreme is the example of my senior English teacher who had us watch “Hamlet”.

The best set of readings I even had in school were during my 8th grade year, when I took a half-year class where we focused on Mark Twain, and another half-year class focused on Charles Dickens. Both are accessible and entertaining for teens.

One crazy possibility would be to watch a movie of the play in question. *Then* read the bits that we care about while discussing the play.

I have a hard time imagining a film class *reading* the scripts and talking about the movies *without* watching them. Why are plays different?

-Mark Roulo

This is true of a lot of required readings. For instance Dickens did not write true novels. Most of his major works are actually serials that were published over the course of years in literary magazines and then collected into single volumes. Worse yet, no one told me this when we read David Copperfield.

The same is true for Shakespeare. His plays are meant to be performed onstage but are often taught as if they were closet dramas. Not that high school students do very well with acting things out, but it sure was less painful than reading it at home.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was eight or nine through Charles & Mary Lamb’s charming adaptations for children.

Another thought…They also hate it because they have to read it. My daughter has loved Homer since she was 8. I found some excellent retellings in the form of audio books for her at that point.

They were originally oral tales and maybe that’s how kids should be introduced to them. It always struck me as a little stupid to introduce kids to Shakespeare by making them read it as well. Present art in the medium it was meant for?

My teachers introduced me to authors I would have never read on my own but who I came to love such as Steinbeck and Solzhenitsyn. At the same time, they occasionally demonstrated a knack for coming up with books that were almost impossible to get through.

I remember that in preparation of 9th grade we were assigned Gods, Graves, & Scholars by C.W. Ceram, The King Must Die by Mary Renault, and a third book that slips my memory. I started with Gods, Graves, & Scholars because I thought it sounded cool but the reality was that this teenage boy found it very dry and incredibly boring and I was doing well to read more than 5-10 pages at a time. In fact, it took me so long to get through it that I never did manage to read The King Must Die before school started.

Amusingly enough, when they tested us on the books we were supposed to read, I did better on the section about The King Must Die than on the two books I had actually read just by giving vague answers based on my knowledge of the Theseus myth from my independent reading of Greek mythology.

Every generation of kids has this problem. I was one of the best in my graduating class (finished 3rd), but I used Cliff Notes when I didn’t want to read a book like Jane Erye. I slacked off on some homework that I wasn’t interested in. I remember instead of reading Hamlet, I watched the Kenneth Branaugh 4 hour version that was 99% close to the original.