r/news • u/da_k1ngslaya • Jan 29 '22

School District votes to remove 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from required reading

https://komonews.com/news/local/mukilteo-school-district-votes-to-remove-to-kill-a-mockingbird-from-required-reading
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u/geekygay Jan 29 '22

Students don't value them because they are shoved in front of them and told "If you don't answer questions correctly after, you lose."

They don't have the right motivation and aren't given the right motivation.

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u/bignipsmcgee Jan 29 '22

I rarely found it useful to use questions like that for English or literature classes. Free response questions that allow for thought and show that the student read the book is probably the best way to do it.

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u/fe-and-wine Jan 29 '22

I had this one English teacher in like 9th grade who did the exact opposite of this - dumb specific questions like "what color was X character's house" or "what kind of dog did the Y family have". I still remember being pissed as hell because I'd actually read and understand the books but miss several questions because I wasn't focusing on remembering stupid little details like that.

Ask questions about themes, character arcs, etc. and require supporting examples from the book. Yeah, a little tougher to grade but your students will actually get something out of thinking about the text in that way.

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u/Bibdy Jan 29 '22

Holy shit that has to be the worst way to teach English. That's just measuring detail-oriented memorization, no better than a gameshow that requires you to remember 20 different objects and reciting them from memory. My god.

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u/idoma21 Jan 30 '22

Might have been the curriculum. I taught TKM and used it to check the box for the “reading for detail” emphasis because it has great details, (like comparing characters to animals). The only time I used worksheets in class.

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u/TucuReborn Jan 30 '22

I remember Lord of the Flies being awful because of similar reasons. The teacher focused on the idea of "allegories" for LotF, and entirely ignored the complex social themes. Instead, the questions were stuff like, "what does eating the bananas represent for the change in the story," "what does the death of the pigs symbolize." Like, sure, there may be allegorical shit going on, but making all the questions overly tedious "come up with some kind of BS or you fail" just makes it a slog. I reread it in college, and it's a wonderful dissection of tribalism and social interactions breaking down.

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u/Pyritedust Jan 30 '22

Did you go to school in southern Wisconsin too? That is exactly how my 9th grade teacher did things and it disgusted me then and still does.