This month’s Very Short Introduction column comes from Dr. ‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion, an Honorary Reader in Quaker Studies at the University of Birmingham. We have recently published his book The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction, and he has kindly answered a few questions on the subject for OUPblog.
OUP: Has the Quakers’ anti-war stance meant that the movement has seen an increase in interest and/or membership since the beginning of the Iraq War?
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...for "what problems did the rabbits encounter in building a new warren in the book watership down"�I implore you to read the book yourself and find out!
Did a teacher assign it for summer reading? It's too soon, surely, for you to have been assigned a paper for this semester's classes.
Listen, even if you blow the back-to-school quiz, don't hold that against the book. Give it a try.
You've never met anyone like Hazel and Fiver. Or Bigwig and Kehaar. You want them in your your life, trust me.
I guarantee you the "problems they encountered" aren't the sort of challenges you might anticipate. They aren't easily boiled down to quiz answers, either. Those rabbits' experiences will make your heart pound, and they'll heat up your brain, too, because what happens down in those warrens is, well, human history.
But wait, if I start spouting in that direction you'll never pick up the book. Let's just stick with the fact that it's a tremendously gripping story. With characters who will burrow into your heart and live there forever.
I know I'm too late. You already landed on my site and Googled right back out again, not having found your pat answers here. (Or there.)
I hope that wherever you wound up, there was something in the information you cribbed that made you want to go back and read the book yourself. Not for a grade, not because you had to, but because some essay you skimmed about Hazel-rah, an average rabbit who was surprised by his own capabilities, whispered to you that you, too, might have latent strengths and gifts to call upon when life bares its pointed teeth at you.
Teacher Patrick Welsh offers up an interesting opinion piece in the USAToday.
At issue? The dreaded summer reading list and how effective it really is. Central to Welsh's concerns are classic vs. relevant literature, reading vs. technology, and challenges from parents regarding almost every book out there. It's a very interesting column and a fascinating issue.
I'd add one more concern: what do
As a teen, I hated summer reading lists. It's not that I hated reading. I loved to read. I just liked to choose what I read and when I read it. I had an 'attitude' problem with all of the required reading in high school. Much of the required reading were what I deemed boy books--books like Treasure Island and The Old Man and the Sea and A Separate Peace. Books that I had 0% interest in on a good day.
I am NOT a fan of summer reading assignments because rarely does anything happen with them when the kids come back to school. When I have students who need some help to be encouraged to read over the summer I work with him/her and his parents to select some books to read. But no more. My niece and nephew had some very odd choices for summer reading in their high school and they never did anything with them.
As a teen I never had summer reading lists or assignments, which is surprising looking back. I went to public schools in middle-class neighborhoods, where "college track" was the norm. I might have appreciated a good suggestion now and then but was such a reader already that I would also have seen them as annoying.
In direct opposition to many of my own principles I a made a summer reading list for my three orphan daughters this summer. My 12 and 15 year olds read lots of elementary classics to earn back to school cash. I'm gradually working to lure them into bookworld.
I didn't have a summer list until I was going into my senior year, back in the dark ages....
Anyway, the list that summer was Huckleberry Finn, Death Comes to the Archbishop, another I cannot remember, and War and Peace. Well, I read three out of the four, and I bet you can guess which three. And of the four the ONLY one that was discussed was the one I didn't read: War and Peace, which I had to fake my way through that fall.
I was actually looking forward to discussing the others. And I was pissed off we didn't even mention good old Huck.
Just today, I had to call one of my son's schools to get the list faxed to me, so he can squeeze it in reluctantly before he returns, and write the damn paper.
I hate forced summer reading, but I hate summer homework even more.
Barbjn
Becky: Yikes! They should have at least given you a choice.
Monica: It's the "not doing anything with them" issue that's so troubling. Thanks for stopping the madness!
Amy: But YOU made the lists and you probably kept their interests in mind. That's a different thing. My son has a reading list too--because he needs the practice. But we picked out the books together with the help of the kidlitosphere.
Ewww...summer HOMEWORK, Barbara?!? That's just awful. And no Huck discussion? Equally terrible. (I'm a huge fan of "War and Peace," though :) )
In general, there is too much emphasis on "You must HAVE read this classic (or be a cultural retard)" than on, "You might really love this book, try it if you like."
Some newspapers publish these lists of "100 books every school-leaver should have read." Note, not "should read" but "should have read". Some seem to treat books like bottletops to collect, rather than what they are. Better to read just one great book and be really moved by it, than a hundred just for the sake of it.
Summer reading lists stink, at least those I had experience with. I was always in advanced English classes in high school, as well as social studies course and both felt the need to give summer reading lists with incredibly difficult books on them. Books that we never discussed once the school year began. I loved to read since I was a baby, but I hated those lists. The summer before 9th grade I was to read "Their Eyes Were Watching God" a very difficult book for adults, let alone a 14 year old. I also struggled through The Scarlet Letter and several others. These summer reading lists need to be revised, desperately!
At our school, the elementary librarian and I (JH & HS) create annual summer reading "lists," which are really annotated reading guides. Students are required to read any 5 books they want (and if they can't find 5 they like out of the hundreds in our lists, they can read anything else they want). So the kid who really prefers to read Madame Bovary can, and the one who is fired up by Tom Clancy or Bill Bryson has choices too. So far, (15 years) it works wonderfully.