A Christmas Story : Silas Marner? Hahahah I think not

4th graders reading Silas Marner? That's got to be a joke right? I read that novel as an adult and it was still a heavy read no 8 or 9 year old child could possibly !!! Unless I majorly underestimate the intelligence of children of midcentury America ?

or you overestimate yours.

Thank you for your valuable input , you are truly visionary

I never read it, I wouldn't know. I do know Wishbone did an episode about it, which was very good at getting kids to read classic literature that was years beyond their own grade level.

I just find it comical that such a book is being studied by small children. My first thought is that the filmmakers put it in as a nod to how a lot of people feel like the books they read as children, mostly go over their heads

I wasn't around in the 40s so I can't say for sure what their studies consisted of. Very few 4th graders today would enjoy reading Silas Marner. I know that !! Times change I guess.

I loved Wishbone! That was some quality children's television. I'm glad to hear you watched it!! Good stuff.

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Very few 4th graders today would enjoy reading Silas Marner.

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Neither did Ralphie's class, they were all moaning when she said it.

Yes, so true , but can you really imagine a 4th grade teacher putting Silas Marner on a school Reading List? In this year's syllabus? No way

I see how much school has changed since I attended in the 60s and 70s. I don't think it's much of a stretch that they were more advanced a couple decades before that. When my kids were in school, I'd look at their homework and think: "This is all you have to do?" They got off much easier than I did.


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You could also be misremembering things just like Ralphie does.

I grew up in the same exact time frame and I remember there was always 2 feet of snow on the ground when I walked to school uphill both ways teh same exact school my sons' went to. :)

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You could also be misremembering things just like Ralphie does.

I grew up in the same exact time frame and I remember there was always 2 feet of snow on the ground when I walked to school uphill both ways teh same exact school my sons' went to. :)

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LOL I know that DOES happen, but not in this case. Even in grade school, I remember hand writing reports that were 6 or 7 pages long, that included a bibliography with at least 2 sources. That was by the 6th grade. But also consider kids DO have it easier these days. They have few worries about spelling anymore with the omnipresent spell check. Remember how we used to ask "Does spelling count?" every time we were given a writing assignment. LOL Nobody worries about penmanship because no one writes any more. Just think, we had to learn the alphabet TWICE. LOL

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1. In a 1972 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary tries to get a babysitter for Phyllis' daughter, Bess, and the girl who shows up is younger than
12-year-old Bess, although she claims to be "12 or 13". Bess tests her by asking her, "Okay, who's Silas Marner?" and the girl replies, "Who?!" That's how Bess knows she's only 11, because all the kids at school aren't assigned Silas Marner
until they're 12. So maybe it's not such a stretch, and it was taken for granted
that preteens would be exposed to such heavy reading material in past eras.

2. Since this is based on the adult Ralph's memories of childhood, he may be misremembering some things, or exaggerating a little bit about the difficulty of the material that a teacher might assign them to read over the upcoming holiday break.

Children were more likely to be reading classic American literature back then,
and in the original, unabridged form, too, rather than those simplified "Illustrated Classics" that are prevalent today.



I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!

Hewwo.

great context. great book.



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I always thought that was a joke, 9 yos don't read Silas Marner. But at age 11 we did read The Last Mohican, The Scarlet Letter, Tom Sawyer, and Little Women.

The American public school system has been degraded steadily for the past forty or fifty years. A typical grammar school education used to include many actual books, and students were expected to follow the plot lines and know who the characters were, and be able to write (long hand) book reports summarizing them. Often, the books were read aloud during class time, with the teacher reading portions and then having students read some parts. There would be discussion when necessary, to explain vocabulary or aspects of the story line that might not be familiar to the students. I don't now remember exactly which grade I was in for Silas Marner, but we did read it. We also read "Tom Sawyer", "The Yearling", "The Call Of The Wild", "Gulliver's Travels" (in what I later learned was a somewhat expurgated version of the text), and "The Good Earth", among others.

These were all a part of grammar school years from fourth to sixth grade (ages 9 to 11), and comprised only part of the reading (and writing) curriculum, which also included a lot of shorter works covering things such as standard American legends and tall tales (Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, etc.) and other folk tales from around the world (Russian, German, English, Irish, Chinese, Indian the tales by Kipling were among my own favorites). By the end of the sixth grade, children were expected to be able to read at a sixth-grade level, and to write legible papers in grammatical sentences and meaningful paragraphs, and nearly everyone who passed the sixth grade could do so.

Nowadays, of course, the majority of children who are given high-school diplomas cannot write in grammatical sentences or paragraphs, have read no books more complex than The Cat In The Hat, and are almost entirely unaware of any of the legends or folk tales of their own culture, much less those of anywhere else in the world.

So it isn't that the events in the movie are absurd or hard to believe; it's the nature of education in the "information age" that's hard to fathom.

I like your reply a lot. That's very interesting info. Thank you for a nice, intelligent and respectful post!! You're great !

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Nowadays, of course, the majority of children who are given high-school diplomas cannot write in grammatical sentences or paragraphs

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The reason for that is the schools don't teach writing skills, grammar or punctuation. Several years ago, a friend complained to his kid's middle school English teacher about the fact that his kid wasn't learning these skills. The teacher agreed with him, but said they weren't allowed to teach it anymore because it was too hard.

I also remember reading an article somewhere about a JC instructor who was aghast at his student's writing ability, or lack thereof. He actually had to teach them about basic sentence structuresubject, verb, object, adjectives, adverbs. They had never learned any of this and had no idea how to write a coherent sentenceand this was college level.

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I also remember reading an article somewhere about a JC instructor who was aghast at his student's writing ability, or lack thereof. He actually had to teach them about basic sentence structuresubject, verb, object, adjectives, adverbs. They had never learned any of this and had no idea how to write a coherent sentenceand this was college level.

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My wife went to college many years after high school. A few of the classes she took were online. A percentage of her grade involved posting to discussions on the class message board. One evening she called out: "Hey, you gotta see this." She showed me some of her classmates' postings. Most wasn't bad, but a few were absolutely horrid. We couldn't believe they were actually in college, let alone held high school diplomas.

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I was so burned out from high school I took a bit of a break before going to college, and when I did I went to a community college, because of cost, location, and the fact I really wasn't considering a bachelor's at the time. In one my history classes the professor actually asked us before our first big test how many people had ever done an essay test before and I was shocked that less than half of us raised our hands! I had been in all the honor and AP classes I could since 7th grade, and essays were the NORM and I had probaby done hundreds of them. I couldn't believe these people had never done any for a test AT ALL.
Crappy school systems.

I always liked essay questions on tests. With a true/false or multiple choice, you were either right or wrong. With essay questions you had a chance to at least BS your way to getting the answer partially right.

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Same here, from my college experience years after high school. Every single one of my professors has put in the syllabus that message board posts should contain correct spelling and grammar, with no text speak or emoticons. The boards in classes toward my Associate of Arts were particularly bad. It did get better as I progressed through my degrees, but never went away.

I think that diminishes the value of a college degree. There was a time when getting a degree meant you performed college level work. Not any more.

The saga of getting my first novel on Kindle
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I've always wondered about 4th graders reading Silas Mariner too. I had no difficulty understanding it when I was a freshman in high school but I am not sure if I would have at 10 years old.

In third grade I started reading stuff like The Invisible Man, Time Machine, and The Hobbit.

I don't know what my reading level was in the fourth grade. I think that was the year that we had color coded reading books. There were three or four colors that represented advancing grade levels in the books. We would read a selection, take a quiz, and then read the next, advancing at our own pace. I finished the entire series pretty early on. I think that by the time we came back from the Christmas break the teacher was sending me to the library to help out there during the reading exercise.

In the fifth grade we took an achievement test and my reading level was measured as being in the twelfth grade; in arithmetic I was only performing at the ninth grade level. Then the teacher explained to my mother that he had been grossly mistaken. He thought I had been a trouble maker in class because I was frustrated over not being able to understand the material he was covering. The achievement test, along with a couple of other events convinced him that I was a trouble maker because I was bored.

I am sure that there were students in 1939 to 1941 that were in the same or similar position. I don't think that I've ever read Silas Marner, though the story seems familiar. I have probably seen it at least once in a teleplay. I am sure that the vocabulary would be well within the range of a fourth grader who is reading at grade level. The challenge would be in keeping a modern fourth grader involved in the story and motivated to read the entire novel.

The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.

daniel deronda is a good book too.


Season's Greetings!