(no subject)

[owlectomy]

Teachers, principals, school administrators:

Please do not assign the entire school, or the entire grade, to read a book that's been out of print for a decade and that costs $50 on AbeBooks.

Please do not assign them a book that's only out in hardcover.

Unless your school district is so wealthy that you're sure that 95% of your students will be able to buy the book outright, go to the public library catalog and check how many copies we own. It may be a classic, but that's no guarantee. We don't have 400 copies of anything except the latest two or three Wimpy Kid books. (And those have an astonishing rate of getting ripped and chewed.)

I can put on my Stephen Krashen hat and implore people to let children read whatever books they want to over the summer, but if you must choose a single book for your whole class, keep it to one class. 30 or 35 people. Or supply the books through the school, rather than shifting the financial burden onto kids who don't want to read the book in the first place.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

Ouch. What was the book?

[owlectomy]

The book that's out of print is a biography of Cleopatra whose precise title I don't remember; the book that's only out in hardcover is "Wonder" by R.J. Palacio, which gets chosen because it has a good message, but there are lots of books with pro-tolerance anti-bullying messages that are out in paperback. It can be taught next year instead.

But in general this is a thing that happens every year: the parents get upset because we don't have the books, they yell at their kids for not taking care of things earlier, the teachers get upset because the kids come to school not having read the books... it seems designed to separate out the people who start their summer reading on the first day of summer vacation from the people who don't, to very little purpose.

[deborah]

every time I assigned a book that was out-of-print, I didn't do so until I had checked the local library networks to see how many copies there were, and then I told my students how many copies there were, and I talked to them about sharing.