English literary tradition has produces a number of great works with which we should all be familiar. Schools are doing a good thing when their required reading list includes such works as Of Mice and Men, Moby Dick, Lord of the Flies, and, as much as I despised reading it, maybe even Jane Eyre.
But like any good student, you want to get out of as much work as possible. So, in combining the old and the new, you buy a set of Cliffs Notes and pop popcorn with a movie rental to see if you can glean enough of the story line to pass the test. Noticing the spike in literary movie sales at exam crunch time, MGM marketing director Chris Franchino and his colleagues at Fox Home Entertainment decided to make things even easier by repackaging a few classic movie titles together with the popular study guides.
“Maybe this isn’t a bad idea,” Franchino says of the strategy involved in the new series. “The students are already doing it and maybe we can actually try to make it more educational.” jam!
Thus the Cliffs Notes Ultimate Study Guide was born. And available at my grocery store.
But wait! Why stop at high school and college kids trying to cut a few corners in their reading list? There is also a new Follow Along series aimed at young children to help improve reading skills. Busy parents no longer have to sit down and read to their children to promote literacy in early childhood. Now, it is as simple as turning on the captioning button.
As a word is spoken, it lights up in the oversized captions. American educator Helen Hoffner, who has spent two decades researching the potential of captioning before consulting on these DVDs, tells Sun Media that the series has a simple, elegant benefit.“I see it building language skills. It is something very easy and inexpensive for parents because it is as easy as turning on the captioning button. Children, when they’re two or two years old, have to get the idea that these squiggly symbols that are letters really represent words.” Ibid.
We have talked about what happens to the brain during television viewing before. But even very young children are already being immersed in media, and most parents think it is good for children. With reviews like this, who is going to question that? So now we will attempt to learn to read with captioning and learn about our literary tradition with MGM. I guess it fits.
Welcome to Roscommon Acres, my little home in the country. I write here about life more abundantly, from the joy of a baby’s smile to the almost unbearable grief of losing a son. I am seeking beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair (Isaiah 61:3).
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DESPISED Jane Eyre????? I don’t think I can comment on your blog anymore !
An English teacher who noticed my voracious reading loaned me that book. It was a stay-up-all-nighter.
At any rate, aren’t teachers still foiling the watch-the-movie scam with the compare-and-contrast-the-book-with the-movie essay assignment?
I am sorry, Rebecca. For you, I might reread it, but I can’t make myself like it. Austin is NOT my thing.
At least in the compare and contrast assignment, you have to read the book. : )
I am not at all surprised. A few years ago my children came home with the highschool reading list and I was distressed to see that none of the classics were listed–not one. Instead were books like I Know What You Did Last Summer. They did read a few works like The Scarlet Letter in class, but…as they read, they watched the movie as well! And then they wonder why our children cannot read at an appropriate level, why our newspapers are written at a 6th to 8th grade reading levels.
And what do people and businesses and coorporations do, they find a way to profit off of it. And as you point out, parents blindly go along with it. Very, very sad…and very, very disturbing.
And I must agree with Rebecca. JANE EYRE????? One of my favorites LOL That first paragraph took my breath away
I remember this book being checked out and read from the school library;
“When Daddy Killed Mom”
……and the English teacher had no idea the student was failing the class, let alone in it. All attempts sometimes seem just futile.
I guess that’s what you get when teachers are taught in Elementary Schools, then Middle Schools, then High Schools, then Universities and end up as YOUNG qualified teachers with no experience of real life except what the government has told them.
Simply, hen the government has you in it’s grips as such, you’ll raise the nest generation with a little less liberty, a little more ignorant and a far less capacity to know it’s occuring… etc as your generation.
Well you get it;
– Give me your children…
Don’t You?
Just sitting here, shaking my head, mulling the future.
OK, so now that I have revealed my lack of taste for the great Charlotte Bronte, am I going to lose ALL my readers? Shawna, Rebecca and who knows how many people who just shook their heads and moved on?
And now I see I even accidentally referred to the author as Jane Austen, and misspelled it at that.
Didn’t I say that I at least thought it might have been good for me to suffer through it?
I could say it is a product of growing up in public school, but I think that has little to do with it. I do not like much of any literary work that can be labeled “romantic.” Except some of Goethe’s stuff.
I have always preferred nonfiction.
I’ve loved all the Jane Austen miniseries/movies I’ve seen and Jane Eyre movie adaptations. But when I’ve tried to read Jane Austen, I haven’t had as much success. Her witty dialogs lose something when they go from the page through my eyes to my brain. I’m not sure what that says about me.
I liked Wuthering Heights, though. Both the movie and the book.
I am one of those old fashioned girls. I want my child to be read to so that they have to listen, stay focused and imagine the characters, the setting and the action scenes.
Marissa has an auditory processing problem. She hates, hates, hates getting information strictly orally. I read to her every day. Not long enough for her to feel like she is getting tortured, just long enough for her to practice staying focused on what she is receiving verbally and to practice her imagination skills.
It’s funny. I posted a blog entry about school reading material yesterday, too! Must be “in the wind.”
Dana, I confess… *sigh* …. I HATED “Jane Eyre,” too. But I loved the movie with Joan Fontaine!
Anyway, I have often pondered the quality and choices of reading material often doled out to the students. I wonder how much freedom teachers are given in assignig them. The most depressed and negative teachers always assigned the most depressing and negative books. Or maybe the cause was the other way around…
At any rate, kids should read more non-fiction, IMHO. There is EXCELLENT non-fiction out there. I loved Mark Twain’s books, there is also Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography– a knee-slapping bag of tales if there ever was, and educational and true (well, true with embellishments) if ever there was. C.S. Lewis Narnia books- pure fiction but uplifting and deep, are stunning. Like I said in my blog, “Death of a Saleman” is a very poor choice for kids.
I think schools want to depress the kids on purpose– so they won’t read, and– God forbid– get any moral lessons to any story.
Tim’s Mom, I distinctly remember reading about a cow in a field and the description went on and on and all I could think was, “Get to the point already.” That is all I remember about Jane Eyre.
Julie, I think that is wonderful that you do that for your daughter. It is important to help strengthen weaknesses, too, but not every child needs to love all of English and American literature. But a familiarity with it promotes a variety of good cultural values.
Cato, thank you for directing my attention to your post. I must have missed it while skimming headlines last night. I shall go back and read it tonight.
I have always wondered about the tracking. I was in honor’s classes throughout Jr. and Sr. High. The Academic classes read the same things we did. Sophomore year, I had a scheduling conflict between a special history course and honors English so I chose to take a semester of academic English.
That was the most boring semester of English I have ever suffered through. Worse even than Jane Eyre. Now, maybe it is because of skill differences between honors and academic classes, and maybe it cannot be helped. But up to that point, I had always enjoyed the class discussions and the essays we wrote. Suddenly “all” I was expected to do was pull out discrete details, summarize story lines and be prepared to answer multiple choice questions on tests. No ideas were discussed or elaborated. I felt sorry for the other kids. The curriculum was dry and completely uninspiring.
btw, Tim’s Mom…What is your blog? The link on your name takes me to a profile with no link to a blog. If it isn’t private, I’d like to visit you over there. We don’t use Charlotte Mason, but the Principle Approach has a lot of similarities in philosophy and I really enjoy most of the CM blogs I read.
As a huge Austin fan I had to gasp. Not like Jane Eyre? How can you say such a thing?
I fear that someday they will just stop teaching kids to read altogether, and instead thre will be lessons in working the DVD player.
I came back to say something else and realized I wrote Austin instead of Bronte. *sigh* Clearly I need a nap. LOL
Yeah, I’m not the only one who messed up!
And is that all y’all have to say about the entry? My taste in literature? Maybe I should start up a literary blog and you can all defend the books I define as good for you, but not necessarily good reading!