Troubling Reading for Troubled Kids

Older Daughter is now back at the local public high school for junior year (long story).  I've been helping her write an essay on "Death of a Salesman" for English class.  True confession:  I haven't actually read "Death of a Salesman", but I skimmed the wikipedia article, from which I deduce that "D of a S" is one bleak, dismal bummer of a play.

Here's a partial list of OD's assigned reading at school:  Into the Wild (a misguided dreamer starves to death alone in Alaska), Catcher in the Rye (a depressed prep-school kid), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (racism and child rape), Persepolis (a girl growing up in Iran learns that her grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah; the revolution is not an improvement), Night (a horrific first-person account of the Holocaust), and Romeo and Juliet (two teenagers fall in love and wind up committing suicide). Notice a pattern?

Depressed people are commonly advised to avoid "ruminating", or chewing over depressive thoughts.  I think this is good advice.  In an ideal world OD should be avoiding depressing reading, but that's just not possible when she's going to high school.

Why is high school English reading such a downer? I can think of a couple of reasons (both idiotic, but that's par for the course):

1.)  Dismal = Deep.  A light-hearted or happy book can't be an Important Work of Literature. If we're going to be taken seriously, we must be seen to suffer.  (This also happens in art education, where making the students suffer proves the seriousness of the course.)

2.)  Since teenagers are often troubled, moody and depressed, and complain that the world is unjust and cruel, it's thought to be appropriate to give them books full of troubled, moody and depressed characters living in an unjust and cruel world.  This is the theory that people can only understand books that relate directly to their own experience -- the old "text-to-self" concept.  Bah, humbug! I say.

Same Old Same Old

In the New York Times, Room for Debate: Should Parents Help their Children with Homework? featuring many of the usual suspects:  Sara Bennett, Alfie Kohn, and Jessica Lahey.

Sigh.  It's all the same stuff.  It seems like nothing has changed since Sara wrote The Case Against Homework (2006!)

I'm writing this post mostly to bookmark the article, which for some reason is not easy to find.


Also, I liked this comment:

Julie

New York, NY Yesterday

Assigning so much homework that young people with after school jobs or household responsibilities (caring for a younger sibling or sick family member) cannot possibly finish the homework and also show up for their other responsibilities sure separates the rich from the poor in a hurry.

Good point.

Life is a Job

From the New York Times,  Our Mommy Problem., by a woman who objects to random adults addressing her as "Mom".   As usual, the comments are more interesting than the article. I was struck by this one:

Bismarck North Dakota

I am a Mom but also sooooooo much more - runner, spouse, head of a department at a Fortune 500 company, motherhood does not define me. I'm not up to my eyeballs in my kids stuff. I monitor their grades, their work and occasionally turn up at their athletic, dance and orchestra events. They are building their own lives with my and their Dad's support. The author hit the right tone - something has to change and it starts with us. We can take the conversation back and redefine ourselves as a mom, not as "Mom". This is the first salvo - thank you.

For this commenter, motherhood is a low-level managerial job. The mother's responsibility is to monitor her kids' performance and ensure that it's up to snuff. If their assessments are high, she's managed them well.

I see a lot of this where I live. The corporate paradigm is the filter through which we see the rest of life. School is a job for kids, which prepares them for adult jobs by forcing them to be show up on time, put in their hours (plus extensive overtime!), and get their paperwork filled out correctly and submitted to the appropriate supervisor. The kid who performs well at school is rewarded with a credential which will eventually result in a well-paid adult job.

In my high-achieving professional-class district, we have "good schools", which means that a lot of our kids go on to competitive colleges and high-salary jobs. Are the kids knowledgeable in real subjects, like math and history? Can they write clearly and intelligently? Are they happy? Do they have friends? Do they have a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives? Who the hell cares? All we need to know is the name of the highest-ranked college they got into and we know where they stand.