For the first couple of months of the seventh grade, I attended Girls’ 
the University Education of Women and Henry Durant, president of
Shortly after I began Latin School, a series of events occurred that resulted in my moving to a suburb of Boston and changing schools, but I always look back at Girls’ Latin School at that time as a shining example of what a public school education can be, despite the fact that the time I attended was when bussing began in Boston and the buses were stoned every day for the first week or so.
I was thinking about the school, about the rigorous liberal arts curriculum that did, of course include Latin, French, Art and Music and wondering what the school would be like today. Now, as it was when I briefly attended, admission is based on an admissions test and students are accepted either in the seventh or the ninth grade.
I did find some great information on their website that relates to the question I posted last week about works that might endure and be taught in schools. There is a summer reading list for each grade, seventh through twelfth with fairly lengthy selections listed and I thought it probably indicative of those works that will probably endure. I was impressed that the list includes many multi-cultural works, as well as quite a few genre selections. Links to all of the reading lists can be found here.
The following is the summer reading list for 2007 for students entering grade twelve. Returning students are required to read five books. This is the list for that grade:
Required
War
Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
*Going After Cacciato, Tim O’Brian
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brian
Perfect Soldiers (9/11 hijackers), Terry McDermott
A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah
*Terrorist, John Updike
Sports
The Natural (baseball), Bernard Malamud
Eleven Seconds (hockey), Travis Roy
Friday Night Lights (football), H.G. Bissinger
The Teammates (baseball), David Halbertstam
Moneyball (baseball), Michael Lewis
Memoirs/Autobiographical
Paula, Isabel Allende
Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston
October Sky, Homer Hickman
Gifted Hands (YA), Dr. Ben Carson
Under and Alone, William Queen
Young Adult
In Country, Bobbie Ann Mason
Ceremony, Leslie Silko
Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
*Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Multicultural/Ethnic
Kite Runner (
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
Women of Silk (
The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama
*The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
*Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desani
By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Alice Walker
*The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros
*The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley
Snow in August, Peter Hamill
Mystery
*The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Dance Hall of the Dead, Tony Hillerman
The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare, Lilian Jackson Braun
Bad Business, Robert Parker
Q is For Quarry, Sue Grafton
The Intelligencer, Leslie Silbert
The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl
Social/Political
All Souls, Michael MacDonald
Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
Eternal Hostility, Frederick Clarkson
Inside the Wire, Erick Saar
Presidential Courage, Michael Beschloss
Miscellaneous
*A Brief History of Time (non-fiction: science), Stephen Hawking
The Immense Journey (non-fiction: science), Loren Eiseley
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
The categories and parenthetical notes are all taken from the web site and there is a huge list of other selections for each of the other grades. I'm guessing the categories refer to the themes, and not publishers' categories. I was surprised, but impressed with the number of new books included. There are some of the older classics scattered throughout as well, but some of the authors that are conspicuously absent include Joyce, Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Austen.
It will be interesting to see how many of these books do stand the test of time.
2 comments:
I also recognized one or two selections from your post about contemporary works that may become classics in the future.
This is a great reading list. Certainly a cut above what my public school required going into 12th grade. In fact, I don't even remember having summer reading lists back in the late seventies. Either I was at the wrong school, or this is a relatively new thing? Even my soon-to-be 1st grader had a summer reading list this year!
I don't remember having them either, but Latin school is one of only three in the Boston Public School System that requires an admission test, so I suspect they levy more on the students there than they do in some of the other schools. I think it's great though. I always thought that from purely an educational standpoint, summer vacation was a little too long. I think kids lose lot on a long break and it takes a lot of time to get that "thinking" momentum going again.
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