Meg says

Not to force kids to read anything they don't want to read, right here.

I'm not sure everyone resists the books that are forced on them, but no doubt it's extremely common.

Since I just got done making up, oh, my syllabus, I've been kind of thinking about this anyway. The classes aren't literature, fortunately. But even with rhetoric and composition, it can be really hard to get students past "I hate this" about any given piece of reading, to get to the interesting analysis, or even to the point where they can extract the content.

"I hate this" is where resentment of the process carries over to the subject itself. I don't know if any of us ever grow out of that. There are movies I've hated purely because I was on a hideously uncomfortable plane when I saw them. How is that any different?

So at that point I lose a movie that I might have liked otherwise, no great loss. But when it's my own writing I have to work on, dear oh dear. Editing, man. I hate it. And then I hate the writing because I hate the process.

Objectivity. I need some. I would love to hear how Meg deals with editing, which is homework, which is reading forced on you. Because that process is exactly what gets you to like To Kill a Mockingbird when it's assigned in class.

I never had that problem, actually. I like reading pretty much anything, so books they assigned in school were no big deal. Some of them I hated--Billy Budd, yikes--but mostly I liked them just fine. The only problem was that I'd read them the first night and then be four books down the line two weeks later and the teacher would think I hadn't read them at all, because I was thinking about other things already.

It only happened once, with Wind in the Willows, because it smelled funny and my mom kept pushing it at me until nothing on earth would have made me read that book on my own. She finally took away all my library books and grounded me until I read it. I really don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths. And I really disliked that book, as you might expect after all that.

Isn't that an odd story? I read constantly, everything, all the time, so why push that one book? Well, it was one of her favorites when she was that age. That's the big danger when you're making up a literature syllabus, thinking about what you loved instead of what would work for that class. You get waves of this, people assigning Catcher in the Rye because it meant a lot to them when they were in high school. But that's irrelevant. It's not a universal book, seriously. I promise you! I've had multiple classes of freshmen shake their heads in bewilderment and ask me what "you guys" see in that book.

Then again, one of our jobs teaching is to show them the awesomeness of any book. If you can't show a class what's wonderful about a book you love or hate or feel ambivalent about, you really shouldn't be teaching. They still may not like it, but they'll GET it.

So maybe that's my job with editing, right? Look at the book clearly. Figure out what's awesome about that book I'm trying to edit, hold it at arm's length while examining it with a microscope, and be able to explain to myself exactly what's so glorious there. Get past that day-one-freshman thing of going "I love it!" or "I hate it!" or "I don't wanna!" and analyze and think and study and really figure it out.

Good plan.