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Doctor Yiff posted:I (just me) was assigned a Wizard of Earthsea in like 6th grade English. s/o to that teacher. Getting individual assignments in school could sometimes own. In like 7th grade science we had to read... Something. I don't know what it was because about a minute into reading it the teacher tapped my shoulder and pulled me aside to talk and was just like "This is going to be incredibly boring for you, I know, so if you want, would you like to put my new pitcher plant in the terrarium?" So I spent that time gardening while everyone else fell asleep reading about I dunno nematodes or something.
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Apr 16, 2023 18:03
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:I took Shakespearean Studies in highschool and I didn't give a poo poo about Shakespeare before but that class made me realize how much it rules, we went through Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream basically line by line, and our teacher deconstructed all of it and gave us a lot of insight into how the plays were performed back in the day and for who. She really removed the dumbass haughty mystique from it and introduced us to the ribald and goofy rear end reality of it all. Titus Andronicus is straight up one of the dumbest things I've ever read and it's awesome. It does hurt seeing someone else live your dream.
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Apr 16, 2023 18:38
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There was literally like 6 people in that class but still.
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Apr 16, 2023 18:48
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I had to read some of the old classics like The Odyssey, Jane Eyre, and The Great Gatsby, but we also read a mix of works literature such as: Julys People Wide Sargasso Sea Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) Woman at Point Zero Chronicle of a Death Foretold Siddhartha And it really hammered home how much good literature can be enjoyed universally, as the themes and motifs can be appreciated even as a white poor kid in the US. I am now a book nerd.
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Apr 16, 2023 21:41
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Doctor Yiff posted:I (just me) was assigned a Wizard of Earthsea in like 6th grade English. s/o to that teacher. My fourth grade teacher assigned me A Wrinkle in Time. Same
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Apr 16, 2023 21:59
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Oh, God, yeah, in grade 9 science we had to pick a science fiction book (any one) and write about it, I got to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
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Apr 16, 2023 22:52
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UwUnabomber posted:My fourth grade teacher assigned me A Wrinkle in Time. Same A Wrinkle in Time was exclusively for the Academically Gifted kids when I was in 4th or 5th grade. I enjoyed it so much I picked up two other L'Engle books: - The Arm of the Starfish, which was kind of a "Michael Crichton 4 Kidz" thing where a teen boy gets swept up into shadowy espionage surrounding medical research - Many Waters, which was the book where she went all-in on Biblical Fanfic. The Murray Twins are transported into the Noah's Ark story, where they essentially spent like a whole summer maturing into young men while dealing with the schemes of some horny angels I also recall not liking either book, but I know I finished them out of a sense of obligation; "I got almost halfway into this thing before it lost me, I should see it through"
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Apr 17, 2023 00:10
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JethroMcB posted:A Wrinkle in Time was exclusively for the Academically Gifted kids when I was in 4th or 5th grade. That was the same year I got referred to the "Get this poor kid out of my class a day a week and let him study Greek mythology or some poo poo, he's so loving bored" program so that tracks.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:32
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Our gifted kids got sent to Sudoku Prison I was glad to not be one
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Apr 17, 2023 00:46
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:
i completely forgot about reading that book until seeing this post. all i can remember is that it's very sad
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Apr 17, 2023 12:22
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I remember we read The Westing Game in like second grade and everyone got so into it that the teacher had to ask us not to read ahead and spoil the other kids. That was a fun couple of weeks. Other good books I recall reading in school: Inherit the Wind The Great Gatsby we did Greek theater one year which was my introduction to Aristophanes, who owns. I think we did The Frogs? we also did a Shakespeare play every year in high school. Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, and Hamlet. books I didn't like that I read in school: The Secret Life of Bees Memoirs of a Geisha
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Apr 18, 2023 03:57
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i loved Hatchet and read a bunch more by Paulsen. my favorite was The Transall Saga - Hatchet and sci-fi mixed into one, it owned!! also 1984 is good
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Apr 18, 2023 16:36
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oh yeah i read that one too. forgot it was the same guy
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Apr 18, 2023 17:01
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InediblePenguin posted:The only book I remember strongly - because I hated it so much that I still hate it all these years later - was Ethan Frome. Miserable sack of poo poo goes around being a miserable sack of poo poo then fails a murder-suicide so he can be even more of a miserable sack of poo poo forever and nobody learns nothin'. Goddamn I hated reading that book so much, absolutely pathetic characters.
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Apr 21, 2023 06:59
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Leraika posted:we also did a Shakespeare play every year in high school. Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, and Hamlet. for some reason I find this really intriguing because we read nearly the same quartet but with A Midsummer Night's Dream instead of Much Ado About Nothing
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Apr 21, 2023 13:52
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A Midsummers Nights Dream seems really popular with teachers (we certainly read it as well) I think because they think that the fairies and stuff will make it more fun and accessible, but imo it makes the whole play much harder to engage with
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Apr 21, 2023 14:08
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we read Twelth Night and had a really interesting conversation about historical crossdressing and now I'm really sad that conversation probably couldn't happen today even in my old liberalish district. the closest we got to a book controversy was Snow Falling on Cedars freshmen year because it had a detailed description of a scrotum lol.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:13
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vyelkin posted:for some reason I find this really intriguing because we read nearly the same quartet but with A Midsummer Night's Dream instead of Much Ado About Nothing We did Midsummer in sixth grade, I remember that. Baby's first Shakespeare. Leraika fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 17:18
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Leraika posted:We did Midsummer in sixth grade, I remember that. Baby's first Shakespeare. I honestly can;t remember what Shakespeare - or really most other books - we read in high school because that was peak Wishbone time for me and it's hard to remember if we read the Tempest or if I only watched a cute Jack Russel dramatize it. I do specifically remember Cyrano de Bergerac, though because I remember being the only student in the class who could pronounce the name - because I'd seen the Wishbone episode. Also we watched a bit of 'Roxanne' for that bit.
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Apr 21, 2023 19:11
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We did Romeo & Juliet in 9th grade, which was British lit, and that's literally the only thing I remember in that class. Then 10th grade was world lit (Siddhartha, A Doll's House...another novel that escapes me,) 11th grade was American (The only novels I recall were Scarlet Letter and Great Gatsby), and senior year was...I honestly don't remember! I just remember reading MacBeth that year as a class assignment and Dante's Inferno for one of my three elective reading assignments.Leraika posted:I remember we read The Westing Game in like second grade and everyone got so into it that the teacher had to ask us not to read ahead and spoil the other kids. That was a fun couple of weeks. We did The Westing Game in sixth grade. I remember we had to do a project on it - maybe designing a dust jacket? - that involved writing a synopsis like you'd find on the inside flap or rear cover. My teacher accused me of plagiarism because she thought mine sounded too much like actual publisher's copy. My mom helped me polish it, sure, but it was otherwise my original work. (We definitely had a "make a dust jacket" project in seventh grade, but this time we got to choose our own book. I did mine on Cujo and used red food coloring to give the paper a weathered blood drip and splatter effect, because we didn't have a color printer at the time. There are a ton of things that stick with me about that book and almost none of them are connected to the actual plot.) JethroMcB fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 19:12
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Three friends and I taped, edited, and produced a Macbeth-cum-Mel-Brooks comedy video for our Macbeth final project for Grade 11. I’ve never had so much fun making a project in my life. I still go watch it every now and then. Jesus we laughed so much, I understood how actors break in comedy scenes.
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Apr 21, 2023 21:17
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I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird for English literature. But I didn't, I just watched the film, in class. I got an A.
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Apr 21, 2023 21:48
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vyelkin posted:for some reason I find this really intriguing because we read nearly the same quartet but with A Midsummer Night's Dream instead of Much Ado About Nothing those were the four we did, and Midsummer ended up being my favorite. The character of Puck resonated well with a classroom full of junior high preteens I think it was also the only one of the 4 we didn't have to read out loud round robin style
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Apr 21, 2023 21:55
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This is a cool idea for a thread. In elementary school I only really remember reading the Rats of NIMH, or Secret of NIMH maybe was it's actual name? Anyway I loved it. Oh there was also basically the off-brand The Giver, I don't remember the actual name but I distinctly remember some kid got pieces of paper with red dots on them and they granted wishes but it was like Monkey's Paw rules where it was bad. Or something, it's been like 25 years. In middle school we read poo poo like Johnny Tremain (I think, that's the one about the blacksmith that fucks up his hand right?) and some book about a teenage girl that ended up on a pirate ship or maybe an actual navy ship but anyway it was ~unheard of~ for a woman to be on board. Oh actually I just remembered we read Rocket Boys, aka October Sky (it's an anagram!) and it was pretty enjoyable, though I don't think I appreciated it enough. Should go back and reread. High school of course had a lot of the usual suspects but I distinctly remember not liking Great Gatsby, at first, but then really liking it at the end. I think it's because my teacher was pretty poo poo and once I got ahead of the lessons I could read it without her (often off base) interpretation of stuff. Like she directly said that Gatsby is the main character! Even at 14 I knew it was bullshit that just because the book is named after him, he was the main character (this was her reasoning). The summer before 9th grade we were required to read Their Eyes Were Watching God and I hated it. Hated every second. Sometimes I think I should give it another try but then I remember how even aside from the style (which was really my main problem) I just didn't give a gently caress about the story anyway. I think we had all of one assignment about it too. High school did have some gems though; Brave New World and Alas, Babylon (which I think was assigned solely because it took place in Florida, much like Their Eyes) both rule and I've been meaning to reread those to see if they're what I remember. Oh, the one time I actually spent money on SparkNotes was for Cry, the Beloved Country. It was actually the last assigned reading of high school and I guess by that time I couldn't be assed to even skim the book. That teacher was actually pretty cool, I don't remember what 12th grade was supposed to be but almost all the books we read were modern(ish) as opposed to like Scarlet Letter and poo poo from the 50s like every other year.
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Apr 21, 2023 22:49
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Sir Sidney Poitier posted:I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird for English literature. But I didn't, I just watched the film, in class. I got an A. I was plodding my way through To Kill a Mockingbird, barely keeping up with the assigned chapter readings, until they finally got to the courtroom battle and I couldn't put the book down until I was finished.
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Apr 21, 2023 23:24
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Humerus posted:some book about a teenage girl that ended up on a pirate ship or maybe an actual navy ship but anyway it was ~unheard of~ for a woman to be on board. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi? (Pretty sure that was a Battle of the Books title and I remember nothing other than "girl on boat" and the author having a mononym.) quote:Oh actually I just remembered we read Rocket Boys, aka October Sky (it's an anagram!) and it was pretty enjoyable, though I don't think I appreciated it enough. Should go back and reread. I read October Sky ("Now a Major Motion Picture" mass market paperback) of my own volition during high school, in between classes/in lieu of whatever the actual class assignment was. (For some reason that I don't remember but can assure you was absolute bullshit, I got this weird "lunch detention" punishment our school had, where you had to spend your lunch period sitting in silence in an otherwise unused classroom by the gym/offices for like 45 minutes. October Sky kept me occupied in there for a few days.) I remember really enjoying it but also thinking "Homer Hickham Jr., sir? This bit about the older proto-rockabilly bad girl pulling you into the back of a car the night of the Big Dance, steaming up the windows and moaning about how she'll always be your first? I think this is some Grade-A poo poo That Didn't Happen, But You Wish It Did." quote:Cry, the Beloved Country THAT is the other major work from my world lit class that I remember reading but nothing about (other than it was African literature and dealt with race.) JethroMcB fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Apr 22, 2023 |
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Apr 22, 2023 00:44
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I remember having to read this in sixth grade social studies and I think the teacher missed the point because she started making everyone stand up when they talked like in the book
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Apr 22, 2023 18:15
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I grew up in suburban Texas and one of the books we had to read in tenth grade was an Ayn Rand novella about a guy living in a spooky evil collectivist society where they use "we" as the first person pronoun learning to rebel and say "I." Extremely stupid book.
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Apr 27, 2023 04:28
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