School Literature: A Terror no more

The notoriously boring books that have been presented in Language Arts classrooms have been prevalent for decades. Whether it has been The Jungle by Upton Sinclair or Macbeth by William Shakespeare, students have long dreaded to open the covers to find tiny characters of some seemingly foreign language inscribed upon these pages. Now I have long considered it the school's failure to supply teachers with modern and updated materials, thus allowing the students to connect better with the tale.

For example, a 7-th grade student will connect better to Harry Potter than to Othello, and each are just as potent in their ability to teach children the Hero's Journey idea. In my AP Literature class, our teacher was given a generous budget and thus was able to handpick some very good quality materials for us to read. Titles such Beowulf ( which has been made into a major motion picture) and the hilarity of the Canterbury Tales are examples pointing to it. Of course, many of the reasons why students love certain pieces of literature is how good the teacher is. For some, the presentation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno is more important than the actual reading, which is ridiculously complicated and far beyond most high schoolers level.

With more and more teachers forcing their adminstrators to give them a larger budget, the advantages toward children's willingness to learn through reading has gone through the roof.