The Scarlet Letter

[Zahboo]

Last year we reade "A Turn of the Screw", "Night" "The Iliad" (sp?), "The Jungle", and I forgot the spelling but the pronounciation is like Edipus Rex... think its Oedipus....

 

[WriterofWords]

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Honey it's not a case of we think you should like it, it's what you can learn from it and from taking the time to learn to read it properly and for meaning, not just for enjoyment. Most people don't read instruction manuals for enjoyment, but they need to know HOW to read them to be able to use them properly.

 

[Zahboo]

Plus. There isn't going to be a book that EVERYONE is going to like. Teacher just do what they can to make it bearable.

 

[Rillion]

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That's for sure! Nobody thought we were going to enjoy reading Romeo and Juliet in high school, but it turned out to be really fun to read-- especially out loud. The guys especially liked it when we watched the film, which features a topless Juliet who is....shall we say, quite well-endowed.

Yes, when I was in high school our teachers showed us a film with a topless teenage girl in it. Can you imagine that happening these days?

 

[scbatz33]

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DD was in high school in NC had to read Freshman summer - Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and Of Mice and Men. Her Sophomore summer she had to read Cry the Beloved Country and some other book she can't remember(sad since that was less than a year ago).

This summer she is in PA and skipped junior year so for her Senior AP english she has to read 1984 and "How to Read Literature like a Professor" (talk about exciting!) plus a whole bunch of short stories. And for her AP US History she has to read 3 articles plus a book on Christopher Columbus. And, she has to do writing assignments and her Senior project 7 pages typed research article.

When I was in school, we didn't have all the summer reading stuff, sure, but we also had 20 years less of stuff to know. Schools make you guys do summer learning to help keep you focused on school so you don't have to spend two months reviewing plus there is so much more material to cover to get you guys prepared to graduate.

I remember reading The Scarlett Letter and Animal Farm and all those other "boring classics". Plus Shakespeare and The Iliad and The Odyssey and Beowulf...yeah, some of it's boring and some of it seems pointless, but it will make you a more well rounded person and you will need to know(believe it or not) the lessons you are learning now for future school and life.

Oh, and DO NOT drop AP just because it's easier. That would be a TOTAL mistake. Sure you have to do more work in AP and the work is more intense, but you will be much happier being challenged now than being bored later. Not to mention, colleges look at AP classes as a good thing and you can use your AP scores to test out of boring freshman English in college later. Trust me, you think reading this book is bad - try sitting through sentence structure evaluation in college!!!

I haven't read all the posts, but I would be more than happy to re-read this book and discuss it with you. I bet some others would too. Like a little book club right here on BYC.

 

[scbatz33]

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The Old Man and The Sea - Pointless !!! OMG, I would much rather struggle through the early romance language of Shakespeare than read that one again. The Canterbury Tales were definitely a favorite of mine.....Beowulf was really good too.

Some of the stories we read in my Russian Lit class in college were amazing tales. I 'm glad I was exposed to all that stuff - even the ones I didn't like - because as WriterofWords said, Stephen King and Anne Rice are great, but It is the classic stories that teach you about the past and about how life was. Back in the day before tv and radio and internet, books were how history was taught, lessons about morality and right and wrong were explained and basically how people were entertained. But not just entertained for entertainment's sake. You read these stories to learn and to think.

Faerie Tales weren't just cute little stories, they taught children lessons of life. Likewise, books like The Scarlet Letter were written as commentaries on society - the good, bad and ugly. Nathaniel Hawthorne isn't just telling you a story, he is telling you how things are and how they ought to be - in his opinion.

 

[mom'sfolly]

I'm going to point out again that the Scarlet Letter is 19th century lit, and is difficult to read. Night and the Jungle are 20th century; and The Illiad, Oedipus, Beowulf, and the Odessey are translated. This makes them easier to read.

It is tough and slow going. Even now I find American Fiction from that period very difficult. I love some of the Brittish writers from the same time period.

Just wait until The Sound and the Fury and Ulysses.

 

[mom'sfolly]

svbatz....I'm with you on the Hemmingway....I never liked him. I'd much rather read King Lear, or Oedipus or even the Scarlet Letter (which I didn't like the first time) than anything by Hemmingway.

Just didn't like him.

 

[ChickenToes]

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Beowulf is awesome. I wish I could teach that...

I teach "Romeo and Juliet," Mississippi Trial, 1955, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Odyssey. I don't get to choose the books. Whoever designed the curriculum our school uses chose them.

Our whole school does 20 minutes of SSR as a separate period in the bell schedule every day. It's attached to third hour, so third hour is 90 minutes long instead of 70 minutes. The kids just stay in third hour and pick up their book of choice when the bell rings.

Oooh, "To Kill a Mockingbird," that's one of my all-time favorite books. I think we were supposed to read that in 8th grade, but I was in an advanced program and we just read more Shakespeare. But "Mockingbird" is a classic, no doubt about that.

 

[Jamsoundsgood]

I actually liked the book. Of course, the fist time I read it I was only about 13-14 and just read it as a story and didn't try to get a whole lot of extra meaning out of it. Since I was already familiar with the storyline by the time we read it in high school I didn't have much trouble picking up on the symbolism. I always looked at these highly symbolic books as treasure hunts. Oh, and I also think it's really unfair of the school system today to expect kids to go into these books totally blind to the plots and characters and still be able to annotate and pick out the symbolism when this is what young adults write their masters thesis on!
Emily