(no subject)

[shadowkat]

LJ has been dead lately.

Spent time on Good Reads playing the Never Ending Book Quiz. My favorite question and answer bit?

What did Camus Satre consider hell in No Exit? [My bad, not Good Reads, remembered it wrong. I get the two authors confused in my head.]

(the correct answer is other people, but one of the options:

"answering endless questions in a literary book quiz about Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Twilight."

LOL! So true. At least I haven't seen a 50 Shades of Grey question yet, but give it time, I'm only 1.5% of the way through. They repeat some of the same questions too, so if you get it wrong on the first try...rest assured it will pop up again.

Should add Christopher Paolini's Eragon series. And a lot of YA novels I've never heard of.
On the Catcher in the Rye discussion thread, a teacher asks if she should teach this to high school students. One 15/16 year old replies: "As long as you don't call it a coming of age story - people call EVERYTHING that is YA - a coming of age story." I had to physically restrain myself from replying: "That's because all YA fiction is a coming of age story, seriously, name one YA tv show, book or film that isn't? I can't think of any."

I don't remembering reading YA fiction that much as an adolescent or teen. I was reading Lord of the Rings, Dune, Advise and Consent, Leon Uris novels, and various adult novels. There wasn't that much out there...or there was, but it got really repetitive after a bit.
In school? We read Edith Wharton. And in Boarding Schools and Prep Schools - kids read Faulkner, Hemingway, Cather, etc.

The public schools need to spice up their act. [ETC: Some public schools need to. Clearly not all are created equal.]

Comments

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

The public schools need to spice up their act.

Just popping in to say that all the YA stuff is actually aimed at middle school-aged kids. My daughter in (public) high school is doing 20th Century American Lit this year, and it's all Fitzgerald, Cather, Faulkner, etc. Though Salinger is an option. Last year was World Lit, which included some graphic novels, such as Maus, but not the lower age group stuff. My kid refuses to take Honors English, so her classes are the standard, run of the mill ones.

*gets prickly about people dissing public school*

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Don't have children, so going by what people on Good Reads are posting and my own public school experience, along with the stories various parents have reported.

There's really good public schools and really bad ones - it depends on which district you get into.

Nice to know the wealthier districts have gotten progressively better since I went to it. Public schools sucked beans in the 1980s and I went to one of the better ones or in a better district. Had the experience of going to the lowest rated and highest rated public schools.

I'm guessing you live in a wealthier area? So as a result - have a good school?

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing you live in a wealthier area? So as a result - have a good school?

Um, no. I mean, I do think her school is good. We're in one of the better performing "urban districts" in California, but when people say "urban" what they mean is "more brown/black kids" and therefore undesirable. Grrr. Even in lefty San Francisco, there's been a fantastic amount of white flight from the public schools, for a variety of reasons. It's not like the wealthier suburban school districts, which are much more homogenized. About one-third of families here send their kids to private/parochial schools, so the more affluent families are not widely represented in the public schools. Which means they have less investment in making sure the schools are adequately funded through taxation, etc. The interesting thing is that in the past decade or two, the public schools have gradually (and unevenly) been "gentrified" by arty and involved families, much as Brooklyn has been changed in the past few decades. All those eyes and all that attention, as well as a super-dedicated cadre of teachers and administrators, has lead to some amazing things. In some ways, things are much better than when I was in school (in another, crappier, district), but there are other things that are much worse, such as facilities. The budgets are incredibly tight, and everybody wants every penny going "into the classroom", so everything else gets deferred.

The families that are paying for private school are not getting a tremendously better education, necessarily, though they may get something they wouldn't get in public school: one school has an incredible library, another offers Latin, yet another gives every kid a laptop. What they are ALL getting is not "too many" black and brown kids sitting next to their little darlings. (Not true of the parochial schools, however.) That, to me, was one more reason to send my kid to public school. Her Rainbow Coalition of really smart, nice, talented, and amazing girlfriends has proven to me that it was the right thing to do. Two years to go!

This is a subject I could go on about at length, as you can probably tell. ;-)

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

What did Camus consider hell in No Exit?

"No Exit" is Jean-Paul Sarte.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh damn, I remembered it wrong. I knew it was either Sarte or Camus.
I confuse those two, will go back and correct.