I grew up in a polar opposite environment (Decile 10, North Shore, Private School), and reading this made me so sad. My little nephews absolutely love being read to every night and the idea that children don't grow up with that is just sad. I wish everyone had the same access to education. Goes to show just being physically in the class is meaningless if children aren't actually learning anything.
When I was writing this I thought about interviewing a bunch of decile 10 students as well but it didn't pan out that way.... I'm interested though, what novels did you study at school? Did you do Shakespeare? And could you take the books home to read them? My school was bang-average (decile 5) so i'm unfamiliar with both ends, we could def take our books home to read them though and I can't imagine how I would have read the thing otherwise
I did the IB program so it's quite different to NCEA - we read a LOT of books for English, or as it was officially titled World Literature, and it was compulsory all the way through to year 13. Off the top of my head at school we studied Othello and also Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare sonnets. I remember The House Of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, the play Antigone, Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, L'Etranger (translated and then also in French class too). Poems from Carol Ann Duffy. Rarely did we study a movie - but I know in NCEA that seems to be quite a thing in English. There will have been a lot more. We could definitely take them home and we also had a school library that we could take books out from and I read a lot of them. We were expected to have read the books we studied back and forward, in depth and I'd say 99% of kids did.
Man that's so interesting, thanks. I'm always amazed when I hear people talking about great books/classics and they're like "I first read this at high school"... I read a lot for fun as a teen but it was airport crap and I don't think anyone put a classic under my nose until I did a few English papers at uni. No films is interesting, one of the things that came up again and again in my interviews was "we hardly ever studied books, we always did movies". Different worlds eh, real interesting imo
I grew up in a polar opposite environment (Decile 10, North Shore, Private School), and reading this made me so sad. My little nephews absolutely love being read to every night and the idea that children don't grow up with that is just sad. I wish everyone had the same access to education. Goes to show just being physically in the class is meaningless if children aren't actually learning anything.
When I was writing this I thought about interviewing a bunch of decile 10 students as well but it didn't pan out that way.... I'm interested though, what novels did you study at school? Did you do Shakespeare? And could you take the books home to read them? My school was bang-average (decile 5) so i'm unfamiliar with both ends, we could def take our books home to read them though and I can't imagine how I would have read the thing otherwise
I did the IB program so it's quite different to NCEA - we read a LOT of books for English, or as it was officially titled World Literature, and it was compulsory all the way through to year 13. Off the top of my head at school we studied Othello and also Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare sonnets. I remember The House Of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, the play Antigone, Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, L'Etranger (translated and then also in French class too). Poems from Carol Ann Duffy. Rarely did we study a movie - but I know in NCEA that seems to be quite a thing in English. There will have been a lot more. We could definitely take them home and we also had a school library that we could take books out from and I read a lot of them. We were expected to have read the books we studied back and forward, in depth and I'd say 99% of kids did.
Man that's so interesting, thanks. I'm always amazed when I hear people talking about great books/classics and they're like "I first read this at high school"... I read a lot for fun as a teen but it was airport crap and I don't think anyone put a classic under my nose until I did a few English papers at uni. No films is interesting, one of the things that came up again and again in my interviews was "we hardly ever studied books, we always did movies". Different worlds eh, real interesting imo
Thanks so much Maddie. Bleak. Especially the last part.
The last part sooooo bleak