Junior year was when we were all told about a new English elective. Readers' Choice was brought to us for a chance to try it out. Everyone had a general idea of what it would be like. We all assumed it would be like a book club; we'd read books and talk about them. We weren't completely wrong, but we were not correct at all.
There is a lot of work. Most of it can be too much to handle. No one, literally no one, wants to read 150 pages for each reading checkpoint which could be in a week or it could be three days. Especially because it's reading for school, it feels so much worse. Books on books on project on project. I feel like the class could be better if it was less stressful. A few less books and way less projects. No senior or junior at this time of year wants to be doing this much work or can handle making sure everything gets in for this project on this book on this day.
No one saw this coming when they signed up...
When choosing to take readers' choice I thought it was going to be a "glorified book club", like we were told. I understand that in order for it to be a real class we cannot just read, but must complete some assignments. But, the assignments we were given seemed much like busy work that didn't serve a real purpose in proving that you read the book. As a senior this was definitely the class that I had the most work in. I also agree that many of the reading checkpoints that we were given required us to read too many pages in too little time. I often felt stressed out and forced to spend a majority of my time on this class, leaving very little time to complete work for the rest of my classes. I think the idea of a class that students can choose their own books is a very good idea, but things need to be changed before offering this class again.
ReplyDeleteI think it will be really hard to find someone who doesn't agree with this post, providing they took the class. I didn't personally have a problem with buying the books or even the checkpoints. What this class showed me the most was how unorganized I am, when the projects are piled on top of eachother sometimes 3 times over, I had a tendency to do the most recent one and completely forget about the previous projects. The idea of the class is great and has definately opened me up to some new books, and I will probably continue to buy and read books after this, but the pointless stacking of projects made this class a real drag. Every trip to the computer lab there was a question in my head about what the next project was.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that Readers' Choice is not what I expected. I was expecting more discussion, which in reality I guess we did more of than in a regular English class, but I was expecting more. I was not expecting these long assignment such as the independent reading assignments and the blogs. Usually I would be fine with this, but as you pointed out, the work is stacked on top of each other. It was almost impossible to complete all the assignments, sometimes having 4 or 5 assignments due in the same time period. For a non-ap class it's a lot of work.
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