I was shocked when we got DC1’s reading list for this quarter. They are reading: Into the Wild, Dead Poet’s Society, and the book that I had partly moved DC1 into Honors from Pre-AP to AVOID: A Separate Peace.
In other words, they are reading books from the 1960s that were outdated then about spoiled rich white boys who create their own problems and a somewhat newer book that is just like them. Just like we did in Freshmen and Sophomore English so many years ago.
So we emailed hir English teacher to ask for the list of the rest of the books for the semester. She said that first quarter was about the theme of “Coming of Age” so they had chosen books to fit that theme. Here are the remaining “books”:
… and this is almost exactly like our Sophomore English class back in the early 90s. Lots of books that don’t even have any women *in* them, much less as protagonists. One Greek play where the woman in question comes to a tragic end through Destiny (we read Antigone in middle school, but Oedopus Rex has some soon-to-die women in it… I assume in the South they can’t handle the subject matter like they can in the midwest), and a thing about a young minority in jail for allegedly killing a woman (for us it was Native Son and the woman was white, for DC1 I guess it will be a Muslim man allegedly killing an Asian woman). We also had a unit on depressing (white) Russian (men) and I guess it isn’t Gregor Samsa’s fault he woke up as a giant cockroach, but it sure as heck was the Crime and Punishment dude’s fault he decided to kill that pawn broker and then to just go on and on and on about it.
Readers, I complained about my sophomore year’s sausage fest. I complained hard. And one of the English teachers listened and asked for suggestions of classics that weren’t all men. And they changed things up a bit. I know they added Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston, though I don’t remember if they made other changes. We didn’t get to benefit, but classes after us did.
DC1 is going to have to deal with a year in which 50% of the population doesn’t even show up in the books with a speaking role (TWO are set at boy’s prep boarding schoools!!! TWO!) But we also have a DC2. So here’s what we responded:
Thank you for getting back to us.
Women and minorities also come of age. Our high school back in the mid-1990s swapped out one of these standard rich white boys come of age books for Zora Neale Thurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God after complaints about lack of gender and race diversity. We didn’t get to benefit from that change, but students after us did. Today, of course, we have so many more excellent choices such as The Hate U Give or any number of books about the Hispanic-American coming of age experience (some of which we had thought were on the reading list for this class in the past, but we must have been mistaken). Hopefully in time there will also be books about the Asian-American and Native American coming of age experience. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement has so many suggestions complete with lesson plans that we didn’t have 25 years ago.
Please share this perspective with the other Honors English teachers. We are hoping that by the time our [second child] gets to high school [they] will no longer have to believe that the only coming of age experience worthy of being taught in sophomore English is that of the already privileged. Several of these books don’t have any female or minority characters at all. It seems crazy that the only woman that sophomore honors students are studying is a woman from a Greek tragedy who meets a messy end. And the only (religious) minority person being studied is someone in jail for murder. Hopefully these are not people that female and minority teens are expected to identify with! Women are over 50% of the population and the US and [our state] are rich in diversity. Most kids aren’t wealthy. Shouldn’t our English classes signal that everyone is worthy, not just white males?
(Also, as much as we love the Princess Bride… it doesn’t actually pass the Bechdel test. A thought exercise: How many of the movies shown in sophomore English do?)
That last line is because we had to give permission for a list of movies to be shown in class. Most of them were movie versions of the above novels, but there were a couple in there that weren’t.
But seriously– in today’s world I want to see more of the teenage years of the Sotomayors and Ginsbergs and far less of the Kavanaughs and Trumps. We’ve had enough of caring about their petty problems and not enough of showing the real problems that other teens and young adults face and what it takes to triumph in a society that’s set up against you (rather than what it takes to fail in a society that stacks the deck on your behalf). Though perhaps contrasting those two types of coming of age novels makes the difference all too obvious.
Living in the South, I’m sure that part of the reason for these continued white sausage fests is that they’re afraid of tea-party complaints should they try to add any color. They need to know that whitewashing also leads to parent concerns. Even if it just means swapping out Into the Wild with The Joy Luck Club (which is taught in Sophomore Pre-AP this year), our teens deserve better.
I’m still really mad. AND I have to actually buy copies of these @#$ing books. My work friend offered to loan me A Separate Peace because pre-AP has to read it too, so I think I’m fine there (her son annotated the book for class, but DC1 can annotate with post-it notes instead of writing on the paper itself).
While I was writing this, DC1 walked in and complained that hir English teacher wants them to make presentations using worst practices– bright colors and animations that distract from the presentation itself. *sigh* I told hir to think of it as a chance to get all those bad practices out of hir system.
What was your high school English reading selection like in terms of diversity? If you have kids, what are they being assigned?
