During elementary and middle school I was a total bookworm. I used to get in trouble a lot for reading during class, that’s how obsessed I was. I would finish 400-page novels in a week and I was pretty close with my school librarians. Bottom line is, I used to absolutely love reading.
I started to lose interest in reading around the beginning of my freshman year. This was partially because I didn’t have the same amount of free time both in school and out of school that I had previously had. I had to make time for homework and other responsibilities I hadn’t had before high school. The other factor that contributed to my loss of interest was the fact that I couldn’t get through a single chapter of any book we were reading without having to take a break out of pure boredom.
My distaste for reading developed during my first semester of freshman English. I loved my teacher and the class itself, but every single book we read was extremely bland and boring – almost to the point where reading became a chore that I had to force myself to do. I didn’t understand the language, the plot, the characters, or really anything going on within the book. I couldn’t relate or draw any kind of connection to the book that we were reading, which I was able to do when reading books of my choosing.  This attitude towards reading has continued into my sophomore year, even though I thought things might start to look up after my freshman year.
For whatever reason people think that the publication date of a book determines its educational value –but I don’t really find that to be the case. Why are “the classics” such as The Odyssey, The Count of Monte Cristo, and A Tale of Two Cities considered to be so much more educational than a book written in the last twenty years? Or even within the last century? I think it’s safe to say that like many other things, literature has evolved over the last hundred years or so. Times have changed, so why haven’t the book that we read in our English classes changed with them?
My current English teacher told me that the teachers at Central do and do not pick the books we read in class. OPS has an approved list of books that we are able to read each year that teachers can choose from, but there are also a few required books for each grade level. She also said that the books we read are limited to what books are available at a particular school. So we’re obviously not going to read The Great Gatsby if Central doesn’t have it.
There are many contemporary novels that contain similar themes to the boring classics that we’re forced to read. The Huffington Post comprised a list of “8 Modern YA Novels to Pair With Classroom Classics” that match contemporary novels to some of the “most-taught books in the country”. The current books include bestsellers such as The Fault in Our Stars and The Hunger Games to traditional novels such as Romeo and Juliet and Lord of the Flies.
The same concepts and lessons that appear in classic books can appear in some newer books as well. Educational value isn’t exclusive to books written before the 20th Century. Ways of life have changed, popular culture has evolved, it’s a given that life is completely different today in 2017 than it was 100 or 200 years ago. So why are we hanging onto these outdated books?