Here's what your 10th-graders will be tested on under Common Core: Ovid

[wickerwoman]

81. But I bet reading him helped you improve your skills at critique.

I think Hemingway was a jackass but I'm glad I read his stuff so that I could develop an informed opinion about it.

Teens don't like reading Shakespeare and the classics because they are hard, not because they are not interesting. It's easier to watch a movie or play Call of Duty. But that doesn't mean that kids can't be supplied with the tools to become interested in classical literature. I was reading Shakespeare when I was nine because I saw the Flying Karamazov Brothers version on PBS. I taped it, watched it about a billion times, then read the play, then read more plays. If I'd never been exposed to it in the first place, I probably never would have developed the skills to be able to read Elizabethen prose let alone middle and old English.

And the standard in school cannot be "if it's hard and it bores kids they shouldn't have to do it" or no one would ever major in math or science. I taught college freshmen for years and we had some pretty dry and dense material (Foucault anyone?) but most of them got through it with some support and encouragement. It's struggling with the difficult stuff that helps us reach the next level, not cruising along on whatever grabs our attention.

A lot of what these kids are going to be reading in college and at their jobs and in the newspapers isn't immediately interesting or entertaining or easy. They need to learn how to find their own points of interest in difficult texts or else, frankly, they should stay in high school or flipping burgers at McDonalds.