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A Separate Peace wasn't on our curriculum but I'd heard a lot of Americans read it in high school so I read it on my own in university and I thought it was a very sweet gay love story I did the same with Grapes of Wrath and drat that poo poo slaps. Wouldn't be surprised if it's no longer taught for being too woke tho
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Apr 5, 2023 15:06
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Killingyouguy! posted:A Separate Peace wasn't on our curriculum but I'd heard a lot of Americans read it in high school so I read it on my own in university and I thought it was a very sweet gay love story i think i got in the space of mind as a teenager that anything i wasn't immediately good at or clicking with was just not worth engaging with, including art. compound that being ASSIGNED to read it and it was the perfect storm to end up writing my "what did I take away from this book" essay about how I took away that I was never going to read A Separate Peace again
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Apr 5, 2023 15:13
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I was definitely lucky to have had very good English class teachers who didn't turn me off reading forever. Turns out some teachers teach Lord of the Flies without providing the full context of where popular literature was at at the time and what the author was responding to?? We had to contrast with other Schoolboys On An Adventure stories from the time. I still thought that book had a really unsatisfying ending though
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Apr 5, 2023 15:24
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I miss those big textbooks of short stories and excerpts from novels that were the foundation of English class. I got so much good literature out of those since I was constantly reading them during class, especially the parts that weren't actually being read as part of the curriculum. I remember reading the original Flowers for Algernon and the part of Malcolm X's autobiography where he conked his hair. Not to mention the Shakespeare! Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare play because it was the only one I read by myself instead of having to do it as part of the class!
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Apr 5, 2023 15:25
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I hated those, but I think we only used them in elementary school, and it was mostly to read a poem with a very forced structure and then our only prompt for a written response would be like 'react to this poem' gently caress man idk it's about what it says it's about. I'm 9
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Apr 5, 2023 16:17
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When I was a freshman we read To Kill a Mockingbird and I ended up enjoying that one so much that I finished it in one sitting. Being a dumb kid I was very proud of myself for having read it all and actually enjoyed the assignment and being enthusiastic about it so I went up to ask the teacher if I could just take the test for it now since I finished it. I had been a very prolific user of the Accelerated Reader program where you'd read a book and take a short quiz on it and then you'd get points, so I was used to being able to test myself right away. She yelled at me in front of the class about how irresponsible it was of me to read ahead and that I needed to keep pace with the class because we were only supposed to be reading like ten pages a week or something Basically I remember very little about TKaM but I definitely remember that the lesson I took from it was that doing anything more than the absolute bare minimum or god forbid actually enjoying any of the work I did in high school basically resulted in the same kind of embarrassments as not doing them at all so I just stopped trying
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Apr 5, 2023 16:33
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Youremother posted:I miss those big textbooks of short stories and excerpts from novels that were the foundation of English class. I got so much good literature out of those since I was constantly reading them during class, especially the parts that weren't actually being read as part of the curriculum. I remember reading the original Flowers for Algernon and the part of Malcolm X's autobiography where he conked his hair. Not to mention the Shakespeare! Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare play because it was the only one I read by myself instead of having to do it as part of the class! Had one in middle school, read some great stories in it. Flowers for Algernon was one of them (we weren't assigned it, but I liked going through the book). I think there was also an Asimov short story (I think the one where Multivac is assigned to predict the results of a presidential election from an interview with one person), which spurred my interest in his writing.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:27
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Killingyouguy! posted:Turns out some teachers teach Lord of the Flies without providing the full context of where popular literature was at at the time and what the author was responding to?? We had to contrast with other Schoolboys On An Adventure stories from the time. Yeah, this didn't come up in our ninth-grade Lord of the Flies unit at all; I don't even remember what we did talk about with it. I wish we'd had the broader context, because I think it would have resonated with us better.
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Apr 5, 2023 22:57
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I think the whole American dream thing would be improved by context. Start them with some Horatio Alger rags to riches claptrap, then The Jungle or Grapes of Wrath about how being poor sucks and hard work doesn't get you anywhere, Death of a Salesman about how trying to be middle class sucks, and then The Great Gatsby or some Edith Wharton about how being rich also sucks (but it is better)
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Apr 5, 2023 23:47
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I won some award for my essay on to kill a mocking bird. im to white to talk about the race problems in it but my essay was on boo radley and my hyopothesis that he had a lobotomy. the main character is told about him in the way you tell a child about a boogie man and atticius basically talks about how he ran wild when atticus was a teenager with him and how alot of people were scared of him. But in the book he is a gentle giant trope. hes always lurking and poo poo but he saved the main character when she broke her arm and gave her presents in the tree hole. also hes described super white because he is a goon and stays inside all day i had to reading the giver and its sequal gathering blue which i blame for my love of distopian fiction. i liked outsiders and the power of one but i loving hated catcher in the rye. those 6 were all i had to read for my hs education. although thinking back to the power of one its kinda wierd. like piss heads whole rivalry with his wetnurse's actual son is loving nuts. snergle fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Apr 6, 2023 |
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Apr 6, 2023 00:57
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my middle school made us read Silas Marner which is probably a crime against humanity
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Apr 6, 2023 02:07
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My 8th grade English teacher read us I Know What You Did Last Summer for some reason. Very strange.
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Apr 6, 2023 02:11
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Augustus Snodgrass posted:My 8th grade English teacher read us I Know What You Did Last Summer for some reason. Very strange. lmao
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Apr 6, 2023 03:02
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Augustus Snodgrass posted:My 8th grade English teacher read us I Know What You Did Last Summer for some reason. Very strange. It was a coded message to a specific student in the class. If you didn't get it, it wasn't you
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Apr 6, 2023 03:46
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redneck nazgul posted:my middle school made us read Silas Marner which is probably a crime against humanity I read that in high school for a summer assignment. Doesn't seem like something a middle schooler would appreciate.
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Apr 6, 2023 18:05
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In college I took a sci-fi class so we read things like The Stars My Destination, The Atrocity Exhibition, Dawn by Octavia Butler, and Schismatrix. All in between watching Blade Runner, The Forbidden Planet, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I also took an ancient Roman comedy class and read The Golden rear end and Miles Gloriosus. I also took an ancient medicine class and read some of the Hippocratic texts.
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Apr 6, 2023 18:44
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Walden. I hated that poo poo. Maybe I could appreciate it as an adult though
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Apr 6, 2023 19:45
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I swear, I hit every possible "this book sucks, is depressing, or both" branch on the way down of falling out of the grade school tree Great Expectations Tess of the D'Urbervilles Deathwatch A Separate Peace Bridge to Terabithia Tuck Everlasting Julie of the Wolves (thanks for having us read a rape scene for sixth grade english class) probably a few other grand stinkers, I can't remember. and then I compounded this by reading the chocolate war (which sucked) and then going and reading the sequel to it anyway (which also sucked) on my own recognizance then I get into college and I say to myself "I'm going to read fun poo poo from here on out" and sign up for a sci-fi lit course and then get three of the most godawful things I've ever had to read on top of that - the novella version of ender's game the novella version of the ship who sang jack williamson's "jamboree" loving dire every so often they would throw me a bone - I actually stole my copy of the old man and the sea from my high school english class because I liked it, and the sci-fi course also gave me some quality pieces like "bears discover fire" or "burning chrome" or "overdrawn at the memory bank" like, I've still never read gatsby, mockingbird, catcher, grapes, slaughterhouse, handmaid's, mice/men, caged bird, cuckoo's, pride/prejudice, eyre, little women etc. etc. etc. but I had to suffer through loving tess, which took approximately a billion years to tell you that everything sucks and you're going to die and you deserve it
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Apr 6, 2023 20:52
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It's funny, the good books I was required to read in school don't jump out in my memory, just the turds. The Scarlet Letter can get bent, much like Moby-Dick. The mid-19th century American literary scene comes across to me as a bunch of writers who just figured out symbolism, then set about writing 400 pages of dense, circuitous 50-word sentences to obfuscate the obvious nature of their central conceit. I tried reading The Hobbit for Battle of the Books in 5th or 6th grade and I just couldn't do it. It felt like I should have been the resource for this fantasy novel, the dorkiest kid in a group of dorks, but right around the time that Bilbo met Gollum I just hit a breaking point. Tolkien is not my thing. Sorry, team, I'll read It's Like This, Cat or Walk Two Moons twice instead. hexwren posted:but I had to suffer through loving tess, which took approximately a billion years to tell you that everything sucks and you're going to die and you deserve it Tess of the d'Urbervilles is like literary torture porn, a case that I made in a B+ college paper. Hardy just heaping a series of tragedies and indignities on this woman, all while bemoaning those things - that he came up with! - in his overwrought narrative voice. Piss off. DeadFatDuckFat posted:Walden. I hated that poo poo. Maybe I could appreciate it as an adult though No, Transcendentalism sucks and Walden is bad. Nerd play-acts at being a rugged individual by building a cabin on his rich friend's property, then routinely takes a walk to town for supplies and socialization. vyelkin posted:We read Catcher in the Rye at one point and I was just the right age to passionately hate Holden Caulfield snergle posted:i liked outsiders and the power of one but i loving hated catcher in the rye. I never read Catcher in the Rye in school, but picked it up when I was college. I don't know if it was just that I was long past whatever age you need to be in order to be on Holden's wavelength, or if it was the circumstances (I was reading it during breaks at my 12-and-a-half hour shift summer job in a plastics factory,) but I remember sitting there in the cafeteria, aching legs and feet up on the bench, sipping a Mountain Dew and thinking "Rich kid needs to shut his rear end up" after every page. Maybe he's meant to be loathsome and I missed the entire conceit of the book. I just know that popular culture had built it up as a towering work, a pinnacle of 20th Century American Literature that broke new ground in writing, and what I got was a slim volume about some "crumby" kid who wants to let you know how bad he's got it at every given opportunity. And he says "goddam" the way old telegrams said "STOP," and apparently that's was enough to brand it as a scandalous work for over half a century.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:14
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I'm pretty sure you're supposed to recognize that Holden came from an abusive background (or has some other kind of trauma?) and see the whole story as a tragedy but it's been a real long time since I read it
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Apr 6, 2023 21:18
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JethroMcB posted:Battle of the Books Was this a widespread thing? I always assumed it was local to where I grew up; I've mentioned it a few times to friends down here and gotten blank stares. (Shout-out to my fifth-grade team -- district champs, and then immediately defeated at States, gently caress yeah) This thread is reminding me of The Great Gilly Hopkins, a book from sixth grade that I remember exactly three things about : 1) The main character's name was short for Galadriel, presumably because of hippy-dippy parents; 2) The MC was in foster care, I'm guessing once again because of hippy-dippy parents; 3) I hated this book with an incoherent, all-consuming rage. I should probably reread it at this point and try to figure out what my past self was on about, but I kind of don't want to? Understanding this any more would spoil the idiot adolescent memory.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:43
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There is a central organizing body for Battle of the Books with a great Web 1.0 homepage. In elementary school I think the competition may have been entirely within the school? Unless we were the host for the county finals; I know that my team won, but that was the end of it. In middle school we won a local half-day competition against the other county middle schools and lost at the regional competition, which was a full day trip.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:56
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I think the best thing I ever 'had' to read for school was Catch-22, but even then it was one of those 'write a report on one of these books I don't care which one' and I kinda just lucked out picking that one because it could've been so much worse; Catch-22 remains one of my favorite books.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:57
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I got assigned a bunch of cool stuff in high school English. Bless Me Ultima and Like Water for Chocolate stick out in my mind. Seventeen years later I'm still mad about the time I wasted on As I Lay Dying though.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:14
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I was in Honor's English and took a college level class in high school so I was reading more stuff than a lot of my classmates at points- this all seems standard from what this thread is saying though so I guess a lot of people were reading like Doctor Seuss or something? Just off the top of my head here I, like others in here, thought Catcher In The Rye was insufferable, The Glass Menagerie was interesting to me but looking back is very much a "writer writing about writer's" thing, I actually really liked The Scarlet Letter but I was an edgy atheist at the time, The Old Man And The Sea was ok but not riveting to me as a kid, Shakespeare is ya know Shakespeare but I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead right before we did anything on it in school so I thought I was smarter than it the entire time, and the only one I remember being really into is this short story we read in the college level class that was like a comedy-horror story set in an office and like just really coldly explains how you need to pay 25 cents for coffee and in the same tone juxtaposes it with how people often break down crying and ghosts stalk the halls and everyone needs to say they didn't see their coworker turning to serial killing- just this really absurd but frank depiction of how office work grinds you down. I can not remember the name of it so if anyone knows what I'm talking about please say so lol. If you can't tell from the way I talk about these I was loving insufferable in school lol. We once did a study on dystopian fiction and at the end of it we got to outline and write a short section of our own dystopian story and I basically shitposted a parody story out for it because I thought I could do anything or not try at all and still get a B and I wasn't wrong.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:54
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was surprised to learn that The Giver was part of a quartet years later while looking it up.
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Apr 6, 2023 23:28
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The Giver was a Battle of the Books entry one year. The whole bit about the apple "changing" was driving me mad, pushing me to fly through the book, then the reveal of what that change was absolutely floored me. I must have been 10 or 11 and hadn't encountered the narrative trick of "The author strategically withheld one detail to make something mundane seem alien and incredible" in a book before (Plus Lowry just executed it very, very well.) I believe Maniac Magee was also on the BotB list for that year; I don't remember much at all about the book itself but I vividly remember the experience of reading it. Something about it hooked me so hard that I read half of it without stopping, and when I realized how far in I was I committed to finishing the entire thing in one sitting.
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Apr 6, 2023 23:52
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Killingyouguy! posted:I did the same with Grapes of Wrath and drat that poo poo slaps. Wouldn't be surprised if it's no longer taught for being too woke tho We were told we could read any Steinbeck except that.
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Apr 7, 2023 00:06
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We read The Giver in 5th grade. During the discussion of the ending the teacher floated the theory that Jonas and Gabriel died, citing the apparent symptoms of hypothermia, and the class fell into absolute chaos. Kids were yelling denials at him and each other, one girl couldn't stop crying, a kid tried to throw their chair but hurt themselves in the process I've never seen anything like it before or since, but it ruled and I think that the first time I realized that books could be more than just game guides and Boxcar Children mysteries It's a very treasured memory. Years ago someone created a Facebook group that was called "Survivors of Mr. Flaherty's The Giver Roundtable" where a bunch of us joined and shared our oral history of the event. Two of my former classmates had gone onto English Lit degrees and cited that class as a big reason why (including one who used the anecdote in their college application letter) Later that same year we read Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain and then two years later I ran away from home to live in the woods because I thought I could be like those characters. All in all, it was a very influential english class.
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Apr 7, 2023 00:24
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WarpDogs posted:We read The Giver in 5th grade. During the discussion of the ending the teacher floated the theory that Jonas and Gabriel died, citing the apparent symptoms of hypothermia, and the class fell into absolute chaos. Kids were yelling denials at him and each other, one girl couldn't stop crying, a kid tried to throw their chair but hurt themselves in the process that rules I remember to introduce Lord of the Flies, my teacher split us into groups and laid out the rules for some kind of building challenge for marks, i think like a marshmallows and spaghetti thing, and purposefully gave each group too few of all the supplies. Everyone kind of hit a point where they realized they couldn't continue and the teacher refused to provide any input at all, then one group realized the rules were worded such that it just said 'use spaghetti and marshmallows', nothing about using your spaghetti and marshmallows. Then all hell broke loose, there was physical violence in that high school English room to protect your own tower and steal from the other teams. I don't know that this taught us anything about Lord of the Flies, but I do still remember it because it was fun as hell Killingyouguy! fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Apr 7, 2023 |
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Apr 7, 2023 00:30
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i was a maniac with a crazy high reading level and occasionally got incredibly bored with assigned books and would sometimes get a teacher to let me find something else in the library to do for a book report or whatever which is how i went through How Green Was My Valley at like 13 instead of James and the Giant Peach, a book i had already gone through about ten times
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Apr 7, 2023 01:19
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KittenJucerSupreme posted:a comedy-horror story set in an office and like just really coldly explains how you need to pay 25 cents for coffee and in the same tone juxtaposes it with how people often break down crying and ghosts stalk the halls and everyone needs to say they didn't see their coworker turning to serial killing- just this really absurd but frank depiction of how office work grinds you down. I can not remember the name of it so if anyone knows what I'm talking about please say so lol. This sounds like Daniel Orozco's "Orientation," which is one of my favorites of all time. It's in a collection by the same name that is also great.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:42
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I took AP English and Shakespeare classes in high school but somehow ended up a half credit short in my English requirement. So my last semester of senior year I took some basic sophomore English course. I basically spent the entire semester sitting in the corner reading more Shakespeare while the teacher tried to handle the rest of the class (who were not destined for AP studies). I think she recognized I was only there for a credit and was happy to just let me read. I think my favorite read in high school was probably The Crucible.
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Apr 7, 2023 03:07
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Killingyouguy! posted:that rules lmao I've always been far stronger in math, but English teachers were consistently my favorite. they could pull off some proper hijinks
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Apr 7, 2023 03:13
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KittenJucerSupreme posted:the only one I remember being really into is this short story we read in the college level class that was like a comedy-horror story set in an office and like just really coldly explains how you need to pay 25 cents for coffee and in the same tone juxtaposes it with how people often break down crying and ghosts stalk the halls and everyone needs to say they didn't see their coworker turning to serial killing- just this really absurd but frank depiction of how office work grinds you down. I can not remember the name of it so if anyone knows what I'm talking about please say so lol. not a short story, but there's Company by Max Barry that's a about a company that's bland as gently caress and layered with increasingly corporate weirdness - high drama involving the theft of donuts, departments selling services not to outside entities but other departments. The main character eventually goes digging until the big reveal The entire company is a psychological experiment. The CEO is running them like rats in mazes of corporate 'efficiency' initiatives, recording them all and selling the strategies that work to other companies. I don't remember a whole else about it but one line has stuck with me: "The worst thing that can happen to a company is that it gets customers."
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Apr 7, 2023 03:15
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Antivehicular posted:This sounds like Daniel Orozco's "Orientation," which is one of my favorites of all time. It's in a collection by the same name that is also great. Cthulu Carl posted:not a short story, but there's Company by Max Barry that's a about a company that's bland as gently caress and layered with increasingly corporate weirdness - high drama involving the theft of donuts, departments selling services not to outside entities but other departments.
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Apr 7, 2023 04:39
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Pepe Silvia Browne posted:Why do I feel like I read Hatchet like at least three times between elementary and middle school? i also read this multiple times in school as well as brian's winter and that other one
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Apr 7, 2023 04:44
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Hatchet ruled
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Apr 7, 2023 04:50
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Heath posted:Hatchet ruled about the only two books i can remember having to read for school are hatchet and then years later tkam in year 11 my english classroom had a bookshelf that we could take a book from if we forgot our own for reading time. this bookshelf was almost entirely copies of atlas shrugged. I fell for this once, stole the book and threw it out lol
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Apr 7, 2023 10:00
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WarpDogs posted:We read The Giver in 5th grade. During the discussion of the ending the teacher floated the theory that Jonas and Gabriel died, citing the apparent symptoms of hypothermia, and the class fell into absolute chaos. Kids were yelling denials at him and each other, one girl couldn't stop crying, a kid tried to throw their chair but hurt themselves in the process I absolutely love this story. When I was in high school I did other people's English essays for money, so I was choking down more books than I initially realised. In a pre-smartphone period I was also one of the only people in an AP literature class that could stand Vanity Fair, on which we had a weekly multiple-choice quiz, so kids would pay me $5 to text them the answers. It's only in recent years that I realised I was hustling hard back then. The first time I got shitfaced drunk as a teen I had to wake up in the middle of the night to read and then write somebody's final term paper on The Skin of Our Teeth. I remember my dislike for it sobered me quickly. I won an essay contest for writing on The Bell Jar. I haven't reread it since, but that experience is likely foundational to my pursuit of a women's studies minor in university, which is one of the best things I ever did for myself. Compulsory education in literature is such a monumental undertaking if I rotate it in the mind palace for a second - I'm truly sympathetic to the kind of disengagement my peers were evidently experiencing, to have paid me to read and write for them - but it awakens some wonderful things in people. People who teach literature decently have answered a calling, IMO
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Apr 7, 2023 11:18
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