(no subject)

[proximoception]

Maybe I didn't so much hate texts assigned in high school as violently resist them. They had to win me over, and even in the cases where they did I was mad at them for all those hours of mistrust, misunderstanding, and exhausting widenings (temporally, spatially, and in categories transcending both) of my habitual spheres of sympathy. A sort of learning I didn't become used to - partly because each book was at least one more such sort, and never of a kind external hints really prepared you for, even the blurb on the back or the fairly simple ethical lesson the book had glaringly been selected to convey; whereas physics and math gave you little, intelligible bits at a time where you weren't pushed up against glass very long before falling through into comprehension. And those were math, physics: you knew what they were for, you couldn't argue they weren't important. Whereas a book some fool adult made up. Each author had to prove her selective unfoolishness in the face of a near-total skepticism. And usually I wouldn't acknowledge that they had - their various successes, my grudging and tentative agreements with them, started out as probationary hypotheses floating in my head, the way most teenage thoughts are hypotheses, contrary recurrences in a glial continuum of all the ways at once (hence similarly hypothetical) that any fresh missive from adults could be suspected as scornworthy propaganda. For good reason - surly teenagers have a similarly high batting accuracy in their assumptions about the world as depressives do, but unlike depressives aren't in danger of losing the few moments that really count through too high a rate of false negatives. Even what they hate they retain.

Assigned, booklength high school texts that had me and I knew it by halfway through: A Tale of Two Cities, My Life and Hard Times

By the end I was coming around: Silas Marner, Red Badge of Courage, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Stranger, Winesburg Ohio

Ended still annoyed or ambivalent, but thought about with increasing respect thereafter: The Sun Also Rises, The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, Oedipus Rex, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Inherit the Wind, Hemingway's stories, The Scarlet Letter, Brave New World, Flowers for Algernon

Thought I'd pretty much bounced off of, and yet remembered well years later: Animal Farm, Billy Budd, The Death of a Salesman, Of Mice and Men, Antigone, A Separate Peace, a couple Reginald Rose teleplays where I forget the titles

Skimmed or didn't finish at the time: Huck Finn, Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, A Christmas Carol

Genuinely lost on me: Beowulf

Hard to state how divergent this is from how I'd rank these books now, of course. Clearly my high school had some kind of policy against long novels - I remember my sister's public school (an arts-centered one) had her reading things like The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this from the last post. In my junior year of high school I was allowed to take classes at UCLA, and I read a bunch of books through that - I read everything that was assigned - and loved just about all of it. Why? First among all those things was All the King's Men.

I've often wondered at myself what the difference was. I don't really think it was the books. I suspect if Bovary had been assigned I've have read it. And it's not that the discussion was amazing. I didn't feel that same pressure of everything I wasn't allowed to talk about. It may be a fairly impossible task to teach literature in high school, where every teacher is some mix of a god and a jailor. This is not presented as an argument for teaching Malcolm Gladwell.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I had a somewhat similar experience with the independent reading they let us do for AP - I selected the books pretty much randomly, but the very fact of their not being chosen by the teacher made reading much more fun, because less of an act of hostile submission.

Though I'm not sure I felt there was much I couldn't say. I remember testing the priests and religion class teachers about God a lot, the civics guy about socialism, and they were tolerant as long as I stayed polite. But sex was a non-sequitur topic given it was an all male school.

It was more about being convinced nothing very relevant would be said back. The Catholics were good at creating institutional molasses such that even your rebellion seemed like part of their scheduled day, not far from the movie If....; you could push all you liked and they'd just adjust their dance around you.

green years

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

That's actually funny, because I remember being envious of the boys' schools. The idea that boys should be educated was not new, and so there was institutional tolerance. Always, always, there was anxiety about teaching us. I started the world's dumbest fight amongst faculty members in my high school when I wrote a paper comparing cultural practices of marriage for a religion project. The religion teacher tried to get me taken off the honor roll, and didn't speak with one of the English teachers for about a year, I found out later.

I remember being angry and depressed at the time, when I found out as much of the situation as anyone would tell me. My feeling: if the world is going to end when a 16 year-old girl writes a paper decrying the patriarchy... Really it ends there. I was confounded. It was like I was the first 16 year-old anyone had ever met.

It was less that the school moved around us than that the rich blonde volleyball players of which the school was mostly composed were expert at ignoring everyone but each other, for which I envied also them.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

About their male counterparts the less said the better.

It did become clear that the wants of the moneyed were the stream that fed everything. I was always full scholarship, one of a handful of poorer kids brought in to raise averages, thus help convince the parents of the rich that they could buy their kids smarts. Not the nicest way for me to look at that, but it became too glaring that even the nicer aspects invariably only stuck around when they served certain interests.