That sounds ideal! And the way they made you study Othello... Agh! What on earth were they thinking? And then they wonder why so many young people think these things are boring...!
The "reading only extracts" thing is a product of the Literacy Hour, introduced by the government ten years ago in an attempt to improve literacy standards. It's worked in that children are getting better at passing tests. It's not worked in that they're visibly worse (visibly to us librarians, that is) at actually reading books, and the number of children who say they enjoy reading has fallen over those ten years. The Literary Hour is very structured. The introduction of the Literacy Hour (coupled, I should add, with health and safety rules) caused a massive drop in the number of schools taking their children to the local library. "We're do busy doing literacy to let them read", was effectively what they day.
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The "reading only extracts" thing is a product of the Literacy Hour, introduced by the government ten years ago in an attempt to improve literacy standards. It's worked in that children are getting better at passing tests. It's not worked in that they're visibly worse (visibly to us librarians, that is) at actually reading books, and the number of children who say they enjoy reading has fallen over those ten years. The Literary Hour is very structured. The introduction of the Literacy Hour (coupled, I should add, with health and safety rules) caused a massive drop in the number of schools taking their children to the local library. "We're do busy doing literacy to let them read", was effectively what they day.