Watching Jay read "To Kill a Mockingbird" got me thinking back to my own high school English classes. Between British Lit and American Lit, we read quite a few of the classics. Ensuring that I fully understood and appreciated each one of them was the world's greatest teacher of all time -- Mr. Barry Swan. I did my best to follow all of his careful instruction. Getting kicked out of class (or, more specifically, being told to go stand outside in the hall) on a pretty regular basis made that a little more difficult than it should have been.
Anyway, I've pulled together my top 3 from all the Great Books we read back at EFA. Here they are:
- Silas Marner. This is in the top 3 not because it was good but because it was so gosh-darn awful. I tried to care about poor Silas' ongoing travails, his misery, and his attempts to rehabilitate his life. No matter how hard I tried, nothing worked. As bad as this book was, it's almost always the first one that comes to mind when I think back about the books we had to read in high school. I may actually force myself to go back and read it again to try and understand what it is that made this a "classic."
- The Scarlet Letter. I remember most of my fellow classmates complaining about this one almost as much as they did about Silas Marner. Hester Prynne's life was as miserable at times as Silas Marner's had been. But, Hester had a great combination of resiliency, pride, and stubborness. She took everything that the townspeople threw at her and just kept on going. She had an attitude. As a teenager, I liked that.
- The Last of the Mohicans. Growing up in upstate New York, we got to read quite a bit of James Fennimore Cooper. I loved everything of his that we read. I remember reading The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer. I don't remember much of The Pioneers and The Deerslayer. But, The Last of the Mohicans really stuck with me. It had everything -- warring Indian tribes and Frenchmen, kidnappings and bold rescues, star-crossed lovers and untimely deaths. It was the pure definition of a page-turner. Even the movie that they made of this one with Daniel Day-Lewis was good. I know that Mr. Swan is retired but I hope his successor is still teaching this one. And, if there's a kid standing outside that new teacher's room, cooling off for a while after a heated "discussion" with that teacher, I hope he (or she) still has a chance to read this one.