From my guest post on Steve Bickmore's LSUYAL blog:
English majors in YA classes
A shift occurs every semester in my young adult (YA) literature class after students have read and discussed the first two or three novels. Students have been surprised and challenged by the novels at the beginning of the course. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak or Winter Girls, Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallfower, John Green’s Paper Towns or The Fault in Our Stars, and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate Waror I Am the Cheese have been particularly effective in transforming students’ mis/conceptions of what constitutes YA literature. But then these students invariably opine how another novel, say Mathew Quick’s Sort of Like a Rock Star or Jacqueline Woodson’s Miracle’s Boys, or Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min, Girl Genius, has not met theirliterary standards. They subsequently measure each new novel against the standards they have been formulating as readers and literature scholars for a decade. They have acquired the authority of wide and deep reading experiences and of well-tuned analytical skills, yet these readers neglect to consider that the novels selected for this course were written to engage the 14-18 year old readers they will be teaching in the near future, some who may have different (but not lower) standards and some who may or may not have read much fiction—or may not have read much of anything at all.
To be continued here: http://lsuyalit.weebly.com/blog/look-my-english-teacher-has-five-reading-heads