Usual 8th grade books

Yes, these are usually high school books, both in difficulty and in content. The content of several of these is going to go right over the heads of most eighth-graders.

Who is choosing these books for the class?

If the teacher is making her own choices, she usually works from a list of approved or suggested texts from the district or state — quite seriously, has she been given the wrong list? Same question if it’s the principal or a text adoption committee making the choice.

In particular if the principal or an English “specialist” is making the choices, they may be people who were trained only for high school, or (especially the principal) they may have no training in literature or reading levels at all.

In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to “raise standards”, someone may have chosen the highest level off the books without any experience in an eighth-grade class.

You should look into these questions very seriously and put pressure on to get appropriate books for the junior high level.

I read A Separate Peace in ninth grade (but if we misspelled separate we had to copy it 25, then 50, then 100 times…) — and I’ve known middle schoolers to tackle TKAM, but Catcher in the Rye? Mice & Men? *Maybe* Romeo & Juliet if you worked hard on translating it… but obviously reading that many books in a year they’re not taking any time with it.
What this smells of pungently to me is a teacher or administrator who finds it just incredibly important to be “teaching” the hardest and the most. It doesn’t matter if education is happening, as long as the students are going through the motions. I would be willing to bed that a lot of cheating is going on, too.

My thoughts of what is going on is that they are teaching to the top students. The school is rated in the top 10% in the nation. On recent national testing they scored above average in every subject. The students who have been in the district since day 1 do very well. We just moved to the district in July of 00. The standards at the old school were so much different. I have a meeting with this teacher next week, I will see who is making the choices. Thanks for the suggestions. On a postive note his reading tutor let me know that when she retested him his reading level is up to the 7th grade level, when he got here in 00 he was on a weak 4th grade level. She suggested she continue working with him and increase the time over the summer until he hits 9th grade next year. Her hopes is by then he will be on grade level. I am so very pleased with the progress he has made—but this grade was a real hit to his self-esteem and I need to do something about it. Thanks for the input.

Even if you are teaching to the top 10%, brilliant thirteen-year-olds in Grade 8 are still thirteen-year-olds. The content in most of the literature books you listed is just not appropriate. They deal with sex, sexual love, death, severe mental disability, violence, violent sexuality, loss, guilt for causing death, and so on. Yes, the kids may be smart, but they are still in early adolescence and neither their bodies nor their emotions are mature yet. Some of these topics won’t be understood and others may distress them badly. These are almost all “serious” books of a sort which, as an adult reader, I still do not like very much, an existential “life is meaningless and full of loss and suffering” point of view - perfectly defensible view for an adult novelist, but very questionable as a steady diet for adolescents still in the process of forming their own characters and world-views.
Kids of this age, if they are gifted, can get a lot more out of appropriate tales of adventure and action and growing up, chosen from classics with lots of vocabulary and depth. I think of Treasure Island as a classic, possibly Oliver Twist, Never Cry Wolf, Gerald Durrell especially My Family and Other Animals (oozing with vocabulary), Moonfleet, and many others.