Choose Your Own Adventure

I get this idea in school about letting kids choose the books they want to read in lit class, but it makes me sad too. I started thinking about it last night when The Boy and I were watching Troy (I know, I know) and I was explaining to him who Achilles was. I had to read The Iliad in high school, and told him he'd probably have to as well.

But then I wondered if he really would, and a story in the NYT this morning makes it seem even less likely.

I understand kids don't like to be told what to read, and often the ideas in lit class are a little beyond them (especially if all they've ever read is Capt. Underpants), but it also made for a solidarity of culture that we are really losing. I hate to say I started thinking about this with television and not books, but the idea is still the same.

I know when people are my age because we have a pretty common background of music, television shows and books we all had to read. The TV I really love now plays on that -- shows like Psych and, less recently, I Love the 80s and Buffy. But there are so many shows now, my kids are unlikely to be watching the same shows as the kids next door (and not only because I tend to watch The Rockford Files and Starsky and Hutch on DVD).

And here's kind of a low-brow example: My kids love Psych, but when a recent episode referenced Ferris Bueller, I pulled out the movie. Even though it's a hundred years old, they absolutely loved the movie and had a whole other appreciation for the Psych jokes. They not only know what "plethora" means, but they know not to tell a man he has a plethora of cows if he doesn't. It's like watching Bugs Bunny now that you're older or watching Lost when you know who Locke and Rousseau really were. Or Calvin and Hobbes (do we even have comic strips in the paper anymore?).

Which gets me back to Achilles. Getting an arrow through his Achilles tendon was never even explained in the movie. We were all waiting for it, trying to remember how it would happen. But unless you watched Clash of the Titans (show these effects to your kids; they're hilarious) or read The Iliad in school, how would you know? If you studied anatomy, you might hear Achilles tendon and want to know what the relation was, but in my experience, there are very few people who are as interested as I am in word origins.

Achilles, by the way, seems to be a combination of "grief" and "the people", which is an amazing embodiment of war heroes. See? Those old storytellers were freaking amazing with meaning and symbolism and cautionary tales about glorifying war. Not to mention how we wouldn't have the literary shorthand of "Achilles heel" or "it's like Lord of the Flies out there" or "I feel like the Joads" (that's just me whenever I move, which is a lot).

Aren't teachers, by their very nature, supposed to impart THEIR wisdom? To break you out of your current knowledge to go beyond? To gain points of view other than your own? Will Twilight ever really matter in the way The Jungle or Farewell to Arms do? These show the larger world in a way teens today are both insulated from and overly exposed to at the same time. But these amazing pieces of literature show there is so much more to life than whether your boyfriend is a vampire or a werewolf. It's more likely, in these times, he'll (or she'll, great story here) be a war-scarred, perhaps broken person.

Not that I liked all the books. I certainly enjoyed Twilight more than The Grapes of Wrath (choking on dust just thinking about it). And I could have done without Wuthering Heights, Seize the Day, Lord of the Flies and especially Catcher in the Rye. God, how that book annoyed me. But it's also how I got to understand my own notions of privilege and entitlement. At the time, I thought the whole book was just a way for teenagers to curse in class.

I'm also not saying that comics have nothing to teach. They are the Greek myths of our time, but again, they pull from all these classic and mythic sources. And without the source material they just don't mean as much. I hope Stan Lee would agree with me.

I'm sure Capt Underpants really gets the kids reading, and that's valuable for getting kids to like reading, but if they never move beyond that, are they really learning anything of value?

P.S. Now it's 10, and I'm still on the front page. DAMMIT!