Challenge: Books I Read In School And Didn't Like

Right, so, the usual bit of context: Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. Hit their homepage to see the current week's responses, and add a link to your own if you're so inclined.

This week's challenge is Books I Had To Read In School And Didn't Like.

There really weren't a lot of these, but then I went to an unusual school. Unusual how? Well...

All right, an example: in ninth grade, we were due to read The Scarlet Pimpernel. I'd found a copy of it in my desk the previous year, so I'd read it already. So instead... they gave me The Name of the Rose, with the condition that I had to translate the Latin. (No easy trick in those pre-Google days; I was doing pretty well until I hit a passage that I just could not parse... because, as it turns out, it was in Old High German. But I digress...)

So, yeah: a lot of books, not many I didn't like. But I will note that there is a very distinct genre of Books I Read In School that seemed design less to teach us the joys of reading or the beauties of literature, and more as an exercise in sadism. And for that, I need to send you over to the Secret Cabal's guide to Traumatizing Children With Literature.

Traumatizing Children With Literature

This article was reproduced from a stolen copy of the Secret Liberal Instruction Book For Teachers. Don't bother asking your teachers or other educational professionals about it. In order to become teachers, they swear dark and pagan oaths - oaths which require them to follow the directives contained in The Book and forbid them to reveal The Book's existence. Just read, and understand. Perhaps, if you are still in the early stages of your school career, you can use this information to protect yourself.

Chapter 7: Breaking Their Wills
William Tecumseh Sherman famously observed that war is hell, and while most students' experience of school will never rise to the level of full-on armed conflict, you (as an educator) can still expose them to a choice slice of purgatory during their time in your care.

For the most part, this is too easy to merit much discussion of methodology. Physical Education, Art, and Music all offer clear and obvious opportunities to shatter students' fragile egos, using brutal criticism, unearned praise, or both. Topics such as Algebra are so intrinsically torturous that little or no extra effort will be required on the teacher's part. And the Sciences, of course, are where we tear down students' faith in Almighty God in order to keep them vulnerable to our Evil Secular Humanist instructions.

There is, however, one area in which the best methods for following the directives of the Secret Liberal Cabal are neither obvious nor easy: English classes. Spelling tests and grammar are enough to make anyone a little crazy, but most students slog through them despite. Sentence diagrams work better, but they still don't inflict the sort of massive psychological trauma that brought you into teaching in the first place. Fortunately, English teachers have a secret weapon: literature.

To get the full effect, you'll need to use books that seem wholesome and uplifting, but cruelly break their readers' impressionable little hearts. You'll also want to arrange for a strategic escalation, to ensure that your reading choices continue to traumatize your students throughout their time in school. Too little, and they won't require therapy; too much, and they'll become too desensitized to be affected by future readings. Current studies suggest the following titles as an optimum progression:

Step One (4th or 5th grade): Where The Red Fern Grows (Wilson Rawls). Lead your students through the exciting story of Billy Coleman and his two coon-hunting dogs, then watch their heads implode when they reach the tragic ending. Guaranteed to scar their psyches until at least middle school.

Step Two (6th - 8th grade): Bridge To Terabithia (Katherine Patterson). Introduce students to Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke. Encourage young readers to really feel for these two, as their friendship grows and they invent their own magical kingdom in the woods beyond the creek. Revel in the heartbroken anguish of your students when Leslie dies in a horrible random accident. Should keep students in mourning for at least six months.

Step Three (9th or 10th grade): A Separate Peace (John Knowles). Introduce your students to another unlikely friendship, between the misfit Gene and the charismatic Phineas. As with the previous book recommendations, you can savor your students shock as a tragic accident disrupts the friendship... but this time, the initial tragedy doesn't mark the end of the book! After Phineas falls out of the tree, you can watch your students wade through Gene's angst-filled conflict between sympathy and schadenfreude, until the Second Tragic Moment when Phineas kicks the bucket. And then, while your students are still shell-shocked, the book delivers the final blow: the revelation that Gene himself was responsible for Phineas' accident. If that doesn't leave your entire class grieving, moping, and feeling vaguely guilty, then nothing will.

With any luck, this will keep them broken and biddable until they graduate.

Important Note: While we encourage you to explore other heart-rending works of literature and even substitute them for the titles given above, we must caution you to avoid Lord of the Flies (William Golding) at all costs. Not only does this book frequently fail to adequately traumatize students, there have been several unfortunate cases where it appears to have given them ideas. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) should also be avoided, and for similar reasons; the results are generally less violent, but they are no less disruptive to efforts to cultivate a cowed and submissive classroom. And if we don't keep our classrooms submissive, how will we control our workers?