One exciting aspect of writing a new English department (well, okay, "Communication Arts" department) curriculum has been serving on the committee making the choices of everything from what district assessments will look like to the much more exciting decision of which books will be approved for each grade level to read. The process involved a tragic slashing of the dead white males of the literary canon, thanks to a modern belief that we should be teaching the skills, not particular works. I have strong feelings about that, knowing full well that kids aren't going to pick up Steinbeck just because they have the skills to do so, but I'll keep politics out of this particular post and focus on the task at hand, which is to tell you about what I'll be reading this summer.
The Common Core curriculum, as formed by the PARCC assessment team our district is following, requires that about half of the year-long curriculum be informational/nonfiction texts and the other half be fiction, including world literature. In other words, even in my year-long sophomore journalism class, I'll be teaching a minimum of two extended works of fiction. That will explain why most of what you'll see on this list is actually nonfiction, where I'll be placing greater emphasis and where I'll even be affording my students more choice at various times during the year.
1) "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I'm actually excited to read this one, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago and a work that I fear will confirm my suspicions that our kids don't understand research or even the concept of cheating today because of the convenience of Google. If I end up liking this book as much as I like the idea of it, I will probably end up teaching it next year.
2) "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. Described by many as an odd choice for reading that you'll be surprised you're so engrossed in (and grossed-in) once you decide to pick it up, I've heard great things about this and have even witnessed reading-averse students stay engaged in this one.
3) "Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won" by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Why do all nonfiction books have subtitles? In any case, this book looks like "Freakonomics" crossed with sports. I'm curious to see how it destroys my love of any games I currently love.
4) "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah. Color me embarrassed, but I never did pick up a copy of this one and read it, even as I brushed past it on countless Starbucks counters. Apparently my jonesin' for a grande skinny iced hazelnut latte won out over my desire to absorb the atrocities of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, but I will correct this amoral decision making in the coming weeks.
5) "Dead Man Walking" by Sister Helen Prejean. Not sure how I can escape memories of the fantastic film when I read this, especially when the cover of my copy has Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn on it, but I'm told that the book is actually quite different from the film, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this is the case.
6) "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich. As with "A Long Way Gone," this is already a staple work of nonfiction in school classrooms and a source of embarrassment for me, not having read it yet. It seems to me that it will occupy similar space in my mind to Alex Kotlowitz' "There Are No Children Here," and I'm already nervous that a lot of what I'll read will feel by now outdated, seeing as how this was written in 2001. But my 10th anniversary edition copy has a new afterword! So we'll see...
7) "The Fiddler in the Subway" by Gene Weingarten. I'm cheating a bit by putting this book on the list in the sense that I was the one who got the title approved for this class and have already read most of it, though not all. Written by one of the most fantastic feature newspaper writers in America, the two-time Pulitzer-winning writer for the Washington Post collects his favorite works here, including the piece after which this book is titled, a must-read for all people who believe in the power and beauty of the arts and the result of a social experiment conducted by Weingarten and violinist Joshua Bell, in which the virtuoso dressed as a peasant and played his Stradavarias outside of a D.C. subway station for handouts to see if people would stop to appreciate beautiful music. But just as good, I think, is his piece called "The Great Zucchini," about a child-party entertainer who takes spoiled kids off the hands of their rich and entitled suburban mothers for hundreds of dollars during the day and returns at night to his unfurnished apartment, his money sent directly to pay off his substantial gambling debts.
8) "One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko." One of the true masters of newspaper writing, period. I'll be fishing for pieces from this collection to use at various points during my class as I do currently with pieces by Studs Terkel, who wrote the forward for this collection.
9) "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil. This one is a reread. I originally received it as a gift from a student and was instantly drawn to its careful research and clear organization. I like the book so much that I got it approved for this year and am requiring all of my incoming sophomores to read it over the summer, so I'll be rereading it as well.
10) "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare. How do I teach the Scottish play in a journalism context? That's what I'll be working out in my head as I reread one of my absolute favorite works by Willie. Somehow, the connection between political deception and corrupt power struggles and the modern world seems ripe for the picking.
Now that I've written this, I must end with a question. How in the hell am I going to get all of this read?
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