Blog Post 6

I think we should be adding more genre fiction, such as fantasy, dystopia, sci-fi, mystery, etc., to the school’s curriculum. I think that is what the 21^st century English class reading list should look like. If those are the kinds of books being made from this century, why are we reading books from different centuries? Some of the books are not that old, but they are still older writing. What can we learn from those books that we can’t learn from genre fiction books? Obviously genre fiction books aren’t real, but we can still learn many things from them. We can still learn ways of writing, bigger vocabularies, etc. From older books we can learn an older way of speaking, but why should we need to know older English? Last time I checked we aren’t speaking the same way as Shakespeare. When we read Romeo and Juliet in class, the whole time I didn’t understand why we were reading it. We mainly just learned how to read older English, that’s all we learned from Romeo and Juliet that we couldn’t learn from a genre fiction book. That’s not what we speak now, so why should we know it? Why should we be studying it? When I go out and look for a job, even if I were writing a book, I am most likely never going to need to know old English. Unless I was writing a book in old English, but that’s not the kind of writing people like to read now! If you looked at the kind of books kids liked to read, the majority would show genre fiction. Sometimes I feel like teachers wonder why their students sometimes don’t read their books that they chose. But the majority of their students don’t like the kind of genre they are reading. We should be learning what people are reading now. Bestselling books from now, not from many years ago! Kids are more likely to read it if they like it. They won’t be dreading every single page they are reading. Of course that sounds like an opinion, but when kids are asked in most studies the majority is genre fiction. So I think the school’s English curriculum should be changed.