Sophomoric English

If there's one thing my children have gleaned from their English/Language Arts & Reading (ELAR) classes over the years, is how to suck the joy out of reading.

As parents, we've tried very hard to cultivate a love of reading and language in our children.  From their earliest days we've read to them, with them and encouraged them to find books they love and read to their hearts’  content.  We've also encouraged them to develop a healthy sense of humor and perspective. It’s fun to watch them as they grow and mature in both their understanding and knowledge and their wit.

During one of Ethan’s middle school ELAR classes, the teacher told the kids to pick some books that were a little above their reading level (lexile score) in order to stretch them.  They know their lexile score from the state testing they're required to take. I don't put much stock in the lexile scores--they aren’t that useful to me when lexile-appropriate book searches for your 8th grader come back with titles like Solar Energy, Technology Policy and Institutional Values, because, for better or worse, they don't typically stock college textbooks in middle school class rooms or libraries—so the teacher took a look at his score and just told him to read whatever he enjoys--which is really my approach.

Last year, freshman English was a great success for the teacher, if not for Ethan.  He came out of that class with a newfound joyless view of literature generally and an understanding that reading can be used as an instrument of torture.  Case in point,  despite my love for Shakespeare, the teacher managed to instill in Ethan, an utter hatred for the playwright.  Rather than helping him to enjoy the richness and beauty of the language, the course sucked him dry of any future desire not just to read, but to watch anything remotely related to the Bard.  In fact, I would not be surprised, knowing that threads of Shakespeare run throughout much of even modern literature and entertainment, if Ethan, noticing any such thread, promptly shuts down and refuses to ever be subjected to even a suggestion of Shakespeare ever, ever again.

Fortunately, Ethan hasn't refused to read for pleasure entirely (yet), and is striving to recover from Freshman English.  We have had hopes that Sophomore English will be a better experience for him, despite his repeated claims that high school English has nothing to offer, and is looking for a way to test out and skip it altogether.  Nonetheless, we have reason to hope that this year will be better--if not in content, at least in perspective.  Ethan's taken a bit snarkier approach.  Today he told me that the teacher asked the students to set a personal goal for English.  Since, "to avoid taking another joy-sucking high school English class" probably wouldn't have gone over well with the teacher, the goal he wrote down, he told me with a smirk was: "to achieve an 1800 lexile score."  Which I found to be hilarious as we plugged 1800 into the lexile score book search for Science and Technology, and came back with International Handbook on Chemical Weapons Proliferation.  I'll put in a request at the library so I can get in the hold queue for that one.

Perhaps I should have clued into my future back when he was a preschooler.