For those of you who want to say nice job for not writing anything yesterday I will counter by saying that I posted my Superbowl prediction on my sports blog: http://mostlyeaglesandpsufootball.blogspot.com/2011/02/superbowl.html. So I just finished reading Lord of the Flies for a class and I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed by it. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy when I said that I had never read it before and quite frankly I don't feel like I was missing out on much. I guess this is just one example of how something that so many people liked didn't really do anything for me. Take the TV show Dexter; so many people that I know swear that it's the best show on television. I tried watching the first two episodes and it didn't really do too much for me. I've heard that as it goes on it starts to get better but I don't know if I want to wait around for a show to captivate me after a season or two. Like most books, if a TV show or movie doesn't capture my interest in the first five to ten minutes I'm probably just going to tune out. Shows like Weeds, Californication, Entourage, Sons of Anarchy, and Spartacus all instantly drew me in and I'm just not feeling the same type of satisfaction from Dexter. It could also be that I have lots of schoolwork to do plus the fact that I need to be studying for Praxis II, so in result I feel guilty for any unnecessary TV watching. I haven't done any prep yet for Praxis, I've got to get on that. I only have to have taken it for student teaching but the test costs $130 bucks so I'm trying to just take it once and be done with it.
I'm gonna go back to my little bit about Lord of the Flies from earlier. Currently I have a much more significant interest for reading than I had in High School (age when most kids read this book) and I really didn't enjoy it very much. If I didn't enjoy it very much, and I like reading for fun, are High School kids likely to enjoy it? I mean who knows maybe it's just me, that this specific book didn't appeal to me, but I believe that this book represents a problem in schools with kids who don't like to read because of the books that they are forced to read. Assigned reading books in school really turned me off to reading until I started reading for pleasure, and really until I hot into Harry Potter. Now Lord of the Flies could fall into the genre of YA (young adult) literature because all of the characters are children and adolescents but it's written in this sophisticated British tongue that doesn't make it feel like YA Lit. I think YA lit is great for high school kids because it gives them books with characters their own age that they would have an easier time relating to than other characters from 'classic' novels. Sure the classics are necessary in the field of academia but I think that YA fun reads like Harry Potter, Twilight, Narnia, and others have their place in schools simply for the fact that they can make reading fun before kids have to move on to the tougher reads like Shakespeare and other classics. I guess you can tell I'm going to be a teacher, and an English teacher at that, but I honestly feel that books like Lord of the Flies can turn students like myself (when I was in High School) off to reading, and that is something that has to be changed so that our future generations will feature avid readers.
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