Oh, I think we had Black History Month too, it was just in elementary school, and I don't think it affected what we read. I remember mostly lectures and class projects, no Gwendolyn Brooks or any any poetry.

By high school or even junior high, there was one textbook per subject and we went linearly through it. So what we covered in February had nothing to do with black history but had to do with how far we'd gotten in textbook.

we'd have a reader, and the reader had poetry in it, and I'd read the entire thing in the first few weeks of school, including the poetry.

Oh, wow. I liked reading and would read things that weren't assigned, and would read ahead in what we were assigned, but I don't think I read those entire giant hulking tomes that were our readers through *ever*, much less every year!

Btw, you commented in salon, with reference to my alien brain, about how I dislike the fact that we read literature linearly in school and were expected to talk about one chapter at a time without having ifnished the book. I want to point out that a lot of my objection to this had to do with the fact that the literature they assigned us was way over our heads. I didn't have this problem when we were reading things I could understand: I could engage in a discussion going one chapter at a time. (Although I rarely did, because I was the kid who read ahead--I don't think that made a huge difference.)

It's just that we went in 6th grade that we went from having From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler read to us aloud by the teacher, with discussion as we went, to in 7th grade being assigned adult books to read alone at home, and worse, come to class prepared to talk about and have opinions about them.

Opinions! I ask you! I was light years ahead of the rest of the class in my love of reading and reading ability, and I could not follow the plot or keep track of the characters when we switched on a dime from reading Mixed-Up Files as a group to reading Great Expectations alone. Neither could anyone else!

So what we learned about literature was that it is stressful and incomprehensible.

In ninth grade, when I got a reprieve because I had a teacher who assigned books that were challenging without being incomprehensible, like To Kill a Mockingbird or A Separate Peace, and we read aloud in class and discussed what was happening, I liked the assigned literature a lot better! I could discuss it one chapter at a time! This cannot be a coincidence.

When I got to grad school and was the TA for undergrad literature courses, we were assigning students material that was above their reading level and expecting them to come to class with opinions, then criticizing them for having bad opinions based on their poor understanding of the text. I.e. using the same method that had been used to teach us. I was advised by one of the Classics professors to start from the premise that the students didn't understand the assigned reading. And yet to hold them responsible for reading it on their own and expressing opinions on it. (??!)

So while I definitely have an alien brain, some of this is not my fault! We were assigned Great Expectations in 8th grade! (selenak, I promise you, any preface was equally over our heads. Oh, except that one time in senior year AP English when there was one preface that was actually helpful, and we all remembered its content better than the actual text. So when it came time for the closed-book final exam, several of us remembered the material in the preface but forgot it came from the preface. So we covered material from the preface in our essays that were supposed to be on the text itself--since we didn't have the material in front of us, we were relying on our memories of what was part of the text proper and what wasn't--and thus we got Ds and Fs on the exam. Yours truly included. But for the most part, a preface was just one more confusing piece of material to inflict on yourself.)

cahn, I maintain that you're learning more in salon from us giving you the information you need to follow a book first, then recommending you a text that is challenging but not incomprehensible, like Blanning or Massie (and even allowing you to choose texts that are of interest to you, gasp!), than you would if we'd assigned you The War of the Spanish Succession in the first month of salon. Then had you read one chapter at a time, and made you come to salon after each chapter prepared to express your opinions about the battle tactics in the chapter you'd just read. Then explained to you why your military opinions were wrong and told you to try again. <-- How I (didn't) learn to write essays analyzing literature in school.