Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish which has now found a lovely new home at That Artsy Reader Girl. The prompt this week is a bit of a freebie as long as it is somehow school related! Being a teacher this is right up my street and it took me a while to settle on what my focus would be. I’ve decided to go with 10 YA books I’d like to see on a secondary school curriculum. A disclaimer here that I am not an English teacher myself but each of these books has a quality that I think makes it an excellent reading and learning experience for young people. So if I had my way these books would appear somewhere on our curriculum (needless to say, age appropriately).
The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Radio Silence | George | A Monster Calls | A Quiet Kind of Thunder | Doing It: Let’s Talk About Sex | The State of Grace | The Hate U Give | Am I Normal Yet? | I Am Thunder
This selection of books cover such a wide range of issues and topics varying from mental health, racism and race issues, sex and gender, grief and identity. I think they offer such a wonderful world of literature for young people to explore and possibly discover themselves or at least something about themselves. If only we lived in this dream world of creating our own curriculum!
When I was in high school we had a few set texts for GCSE. My favourite was To Kill A Mockingbird and to this day I still adore the book. I think it massively helped that I had a brilliant teacher who showed me how to appreciate the book. I often see people talk about how they can’t read the books they studied in school because they have such bad memories of doing so. Teachers really can make the difference!
What books would you love to see on our curriculum?
What books did you read in school? Did you love or loathe them?
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Bloglovin’ or Goodreads. Comments are always warmly welcome.
kellysrambles.com 
I’ve no idea what the high school curriculum is like these days but I would absolutely love to see any of these books on it. Especially I Am Thunder or An I Normal Yet?
LikeLiked by 1 person
To be fair, I don’t teach English so I’m not fully aware but I’m pretty sure most of these wouldn’t be on it. I think it would be better just to have more YA on there in general!
LikeLike
Pingback: August: Book & Blog Wrap Up! | Kelly's Rambles·
I totally put THUG on my list too – such an important and impactful book!
LikeLike
My biggest lament is that I didn’t really read many books featuring teens, let alone, geared towards teens. There was kind of no excuse, since YA has been around, officially, since the 1940s. This is such a great list. AQKoT was one of my faves last year. It’s on my list of “makes me happy” books. State of Grace has such good ASD rep, and I absolutely loved Grace. So happy to see it on your list.
LikeLike
at school they tried to only select Australian authors and at the time there was barely any YA books that fell into this category. I would love to study the Illuminae Files and the different media formats
LikeLike
Perks WAS assigned reading at my school so progress!! =D Nice post!
Feel free to check mine out here: http://bit.ly/2MzRJnz
LikeLike
YES TO ALL THESE TITLES! YES, YES, YES!
* TTT: 10 spreadsheet hacks to step up your blogging game
LikeLike
Yes, A Monster Calls would make a wonderful read for a classroom. It’s a modern classic in my opinion.
Here is our Top Ten Tuesday.
LikeLike
Wow, such great choices here. I’ve only read Radio Silence and Perks of Being A Wallflower but definitely think you could have great discussions about them in class!
My TTT: https://jjbookblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/top-ten-tuesday-174/
LikeLike
We learned about The Phantom of Opera in high school and I love it. It’s not classics lol but the novel is one of the good ones that my country offers for English required reading.
LikeLike
This is such a good prompt and you picked amazing books! x
LikeLike
What an excellent take on the theme!
I totally agree with Doing It.
We read Great Expectations, which I absolutely loathed. But I deeply despise most classics so… Ha.
That said, I do absolutely love Birdsong. I think you’re right in that the teacher makes all of the difference, because every single book/anthology/collection I studied for A Levels I love and have gone back to, whereas with my GCSEs there are only a few (we have multiple teachers).
Cora | http://www.teapartyprincess.co.uk/
LikeLike
I feel very lucky that I read Radio Silence while I was sitting my first set of exams, and I think it’d make a phenomenal addition to the curriculum as I’ve never seen a book that describes exam pressure (or at least mine) so well. I think everything you’ve mentioned would be great as well. I’ve always been quite ambivalent about any books I read in school; the only one I was significantly less keen on was Noughts and Crosses as one of the narrators really annoyed me, but in general I’ve liked the others well enough. I LOVED Tally’s Blood when I did that for my National 5 though. Sorry fot rambling on 😂
Amy x
LikeLiked by 1 person
I love comments like these, yours are always so thoughtful, Amy! Radio Silence is such a wonderful book, I may reread it actually!
LikeLiked by 1 person