Thank you so much for your input. Sadly, the approved book list is lacking originality and interesting choices. My Sophomores are currently reading Lord of the Flies and the majority of them are interested, but there's another handful that hate it. That's to be expected, but I would really like to reach these kids. Once I started talking about anarchy in the classroom, they perked up. :D
Animal Farm and Speak are on the approved novel list, so I think they will go better than LOTF.
My Juniors on the other hand....they are stuck with American Literature. 1984 is considered a Senior book, so I can't teach it. :( We just finished "The Crucible" and will be starting American Revolutionary next week. I basically just want to breeze through that unit and get on to the Romantic Period, which includes Poe. Around this time I'll introduce Regionalism with The Color Purple, which lends itself to the Harlem Renaissance and then Contemporary Writings. Catcher in the Rye , The Jungle, and Catch 22 are also available to me, but I'm not sure how the kids will take those selections. I think we may have enough copies of Black Boy, but I'm not sure. The horrible thing about working in this district is that there aren't enough books for all of my classes to have a copy to take home, so we end up reading everything in class.
Anyway, it was good to hear a bit about your classroom memories. I just hope that I'm as memorable (in a good way) as some of your teachers.
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