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It's a little upsetting to me how many great books are collectively ruined by insisting they be inflicted upon ADHD 15-year-olds. How can you possibly appreciate Moby Dick at that age? I'm sure some of you nerds absorbed and appreciated literature as early as high school, but for the rest of us it was a bit of a loving leap to go from YA trash to a book that takes a chapter-long break to talk about knots. Anyway, I obviously hated Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, All Quiet on the Western Front, Great Gatsby, etc at the time. Only Catcher in the Rye resonated with me as a teenager because I had had my own phase of lamenting the lost innocence of childhood and acting like a dork because of it. Since then I've come to enjoy pretty much every high school book aside from Heart of Darkness. Call me a philistine but I think the overall theme of the book is ageless enough that there are plenty of movies and games that get the point across (much) faster and more entertainingly.
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Aug 18, 2021 17:15
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teaching Dostoevsky in high school seems especially wrong, but it still resonated with me so who knows. it just feels wrong to teach crime and punishment without a preceding class on the russian nihilist movement and 19th century russia in general
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Aug 18, 2021 17:21
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Raskolnikov38 posted:teaching Dostoevsky in high school seems especially wrong, but it still resonated with me so who knows. it just feels wrong to teach crime and punishment without a preceding class on the russian nihilist movement and 19th century russia in general lol it enriches the experience a lot but it is a far more deeper exploration about the human condition crime and punishment works after that moment in life where you really ask yourself whether you are capable of doing a bad thing and being capable of living with it
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Aug 18, 2021 18:18
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was a Canadian book I was forced to read and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It takes place in Montréal, Canada, and is about a jewish boy who hustles himself from a state of poverty to becoming a landowner, at the cost of betraying and alienating everyone who cared for him. However, the character himself was a charismatic poo poo disturber that a lot of the scenes that play out for him were humourous and held my attention for the entire book. There is a movie based on it which stars Richard Dreyfuss and, although he hammed up the acting quite a lot, it was a good film. Fun Fact: He originally was going to decline his supporting role in Steven Spielberg's Jaws, but changed his mind after seeing how bad he thought his acting was in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz during filming and worried it would tank his career.
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Aug 19, 2021 00:31
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The_Franz posted:school was really good at taking books that were interesting and making them an absolute slog to read with tight deadlines and tests filled with irrelevant questions about what color the jacket was that some character put on at the beginning of chapter 4. it took me years to be able to read for pleasure again. Red Badge of Courage was such crap. All the patriotic war stories praising bravery and courage in the face of the enemy can gently caress off. Give me Vonnegut or Heller telling about the horrors and nihilism of war Which, I suppose, is why they don't usually teach those kinds of books
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Aug 19, 2021 06:48
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1984 was an utter failure of the novel. All anybody took from it was - "Government bad!" Hey alexa send the address to phone's GPS.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:48
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mazzi Chart Czar posted:1984 was an utter failure of the novel. he was an anarcho-trot and was highly influenced by the conservative fascism of the francisco franco's, mussolini's, and hiter and a lot of books are to the backdrops of atrocities that francos and muss did in particular but lol that's been lost in translation i guess.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:55
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Xaris posted:i would argue that is a lot of orwell's works in general. I can not at this point agree or dis-agree (The other book I know is Animal Farm) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3214731-literary-modernism It mentions Orwell once when Orwell chides W. H. Auden But it talks about the era as a whole: Before the wars everybody was forced to choose an extremist side. People either wanted the whole of the "upper class" dead or the whole of the "middle class" dead. ("Middle class" won after world war II) 1984 written in 1948 is a post world war II book, and the wars changed people a lot, so I don't know how-much-to-hang or how-to-hang those pre-world war 2 influences on 1984. Orwell could have been writing against those influences or with those influences to different degress. I would need to know more about Orwell after wwII. [edit:] Thinking about this book more. The book, at its core is a love story, but the ending is a backstabbing. Then the guy is trained like a dog. - just realizes that the story is the fall of adam and eve again. - but the ending is good because he falls into god/party instead of against it. - Are communists are strangely religious?
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Aug 19, 2021 21:25
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Orwell is an anticommunist snitch so his ubiquity in the American public school system is no surprise. The CIA funded and edited an animated production of Animal Farm in the '50s and circulated it pretty widely in American and British schools during the Cold War.
MeatwadIsGod has issued a correction as of 22:52 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 22:49
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I will never understand why they teach Shakespeare in high school. It's basically written in a completely different language, and none of the stories are in any way relatable because the target audience were medieval royalty. Like, how the gently caress am I supposed to understand what it's like to be King loving Henry the VIII?
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Aug 20, 2021 00:32
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The target audience for Shakespeare was unruly laborers and uncouth peasants. The best of him is subtly mocking those upper class twits.
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Aug 20, 2021 00:43
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Most of the time reading plays sucks because that’s not how they were meant to be experienced. Anytime I’ve seen Shakespeare preformed I’ve enjoyed it even though I’m not a Tudor monarch.
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Aug 20, 2021 00:48
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Yadoppsi posted:The target audience for Shakespeare was unruly laborers and uncouth peasants. The best of him is subtly mocking those upper class twits. Well that went right over my high school head.
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Aug 20, 2021 01:02
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Xaris posted:i would argue that is a lot of orwell's works in general. george orwell is good, but then again, I like more his literary critique and journalistic work than animal farm and 1984, so I am rather biased. CSPAM calls him out on a bunch of fair points (especially his critique of the ussr), but at the end of the day, he was a socialist that took upon arms against fascism and did his own fair bit of agitation, which is a lot more and better than many actual trots
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Aug 20, 2021 01:09
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I have a soft spot for Orwell as a fellow middle class dipshit who hates himself*; but 1984 and Animal Farm aren't really his best works and they only get picked up because they're the ones which are (or can be interpreted as) anti communist *this is also why I think it's good to constantly poo poo on him for being a snitch, pour encourager les autres
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Aug 20, 2021 01:13
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StashAugustine posted:I have a soft spot for Orwell as a fellow middle class dipshit who hates himself*; but 1984 and Animal Farm aren't really his best works and they only get picked up because they're the ones which are (or can be interpreted as) anti communist that's a fantastic way to put it, thank you
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Aug 20, 2021 01:14
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Huckleberry Finn was the first assigned book that I actually enjoyed. I ended up reading a lot of Twain later, he's really good. I like the travelogues like Roughing It and the critical essays. I don't know if he was familiar with Marx (probably), but he was very anti-imperialist later in life, and much of his work is very class conscious.
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Aug 20, 2021 18:07
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One English teacher made us read Animal Farm and Atlas Shrugged but I was too dumb or something to really get it thankfully. Another teacher had us read The Great Gatsby and I was able to understand that one and I think it was foundational in my "gently caress these rich assholes" mentality.
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Aug 20, 2021 18:18
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net work error posted:One English teacher made us read Animal Farm and Atlas Shrugged but I was too dumb or something to really get it thankfully. I honestly don’t know how a high school kid could read atlas shrugged. I tried reading it in college and I gave up because it was so god awful.
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Aug 20, 2021 18:28
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VideoKid posted:I honestly don’t know how a high school kid could read atlas shrugged. I tried reading it in college and I gave up because it was so god awful. We had to read it as a class so basically the teacher would pick a kid to read a few paragraphs at a time. Might be why I just tuned out. Thinking back though since I did take an AP European history course I did read some history books on my own and those were cool. Edit: it was Anthem not Atlas Shrugged net work error has issued a correction as of 19:06 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 20, 2021 18:32
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Isn't supposedly the only actually readable Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead
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Aug 20, 2021 19:30
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Feldegast42 posted:Isn't supposedly the only actually readable Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead well, I read it all the way through. i guess that's a criteron for "readability". It's still intensely stupid.
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Aug 20, 2021 20:04
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Yadoppsi posted:The target audience for Shakespeare was unruly laborers and uncouth peasants. The best of him is subtly mocking those upper class twits. Yeah but it's still written in a what might as well be dutch, something close to but not mutually intelligible with modern english, so it is completely bizarre ask middle and high school students to read it.
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Aug 20, 2021 20:14
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net work error posted:We had to read it as a class so basically the teacher would pick a kid to read a few paragraphs at a time. Might be why I just tuned out. Atlas Shrugged was just completely unreadable for me and because of this I’ve never tried to read anything by Rand. IAMKOREA posted:Yeah but it's still written in a what might as well be dutch, something close to but not mutually intelligible with modern english, so it is completely bizarre ask middle and high school students to read it. If you watch a performance that is put on by decent actors it shouldn’t be hard to understand. I think it’s also really funny that because of Shakespeare like half of Americans think that everyone in Elizabethan England spoke in iambic pentameter.
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Aug 20, 2021 20:41
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Feldegast42 posted:Isn't supposedly the only actually readable Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead it sucks op
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Aug 20, 2021 20:47
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VideoKid posted:Atlas Shrugged was just completely unreadable for me and because of this I’ve never tried to read anything by Rand. yeah watching Shakespeare is okay but making 13 year olds *READ* it is just cruelty e: like i can barely understand the language of the slavic country i currently live in but i understand most of what is happening when i go to the theater because of context, acting, set, costumes, props, etc... give me a friend who speaks the language and gives me hints from time to time and i'm able to really enjoy a play or movie even though i don't speak the language. i stand by my point that Shakespeare might as well be dutch. IAMKOREA has issued a correction as of 20:58 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 20, 2021 20:53
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atlas shrugged got foisted on me in grad school and my heart goes out to anyone similarly abused by the educational apparatus it helped me to understand it in the same context as twilight: it's porn. It's a pornographic fantasy that was intended solely for the author that somehow escaped to find an audience elsewhere
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Aug 20, 2021 21:23
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I think Rand even admitted this in an interview at some point
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Aug 20, 2021 21:25
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how in the gently caress, I ask like a naive dumbass, atlas shrugged becomes school reading
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Aug 20, 2021 21:42
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dead gay comedy forums posted:how in the gently caress, I ask like a naive dumbass, atlas shrugged becomes school reading when you make the mistake of studying at an extremely libertarian private institution
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Aug 20, 2021 21:43
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dead gay comedy forums posted:how in the gently caress, I ask like a naive dumbass, atlas shrugged becomes school reading lol who do you think runs for school boards
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Aug 20, 2021 21:43
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A Separate Peace was so bad I almost failed the semester because I couldn't bring myself to give a gently caress about it. Ended up in remedial English the next year and we just watched movies in class. My Name is Asher Lev was pretty good. I also enjoyed Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain. Going After Cacciato was a good pairing with Catch-22. We also read some book I forget the name of about a high school football player who had an accident and became quadriplegic, then spent the rest of the story plotting to commit suicide, except for the one time his girlfriend let him feel her up out of pity.
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Aug 20, 2021 22:07
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i had to read Romeo and Juliet - sucked great expectations - megasucked tale of two cities - alright, iirc to kill a mockingbird - OK great expectations - cannot recall a thing about it and i read king's "the green mile" for some english class and that was ok. im sure there were others as i took 8 semesters of God damned english but those are what i remember in college I took a 400 level english class called "contemporary pop fiction" and i had to read the first harry potter by notorious TERF jk rowling, bridget jones' diary, the kite runner, and life of pi. i got free tuition but i couldn't imagine paying $2 grand or whatever to do a book report on the first fuckin harry potter lol
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Aug 21, 2021 01:51
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Eat This Glob posted:i had to read Romeo and Juliet - sucked for my college English req. I took one about "Heroic Journeys" were we read different translations of the Odyssey and one day the professor wheeled in a TV and showed us The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. it ruled. I think the curriculum changed every single year.
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Aug 21, 2021 02:06
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Eat This Glob posted:in college I took a 400 level english class called "contemporary pop fiction" and i had to read oof that sounds like a pretty terrible list. That's like something I would read in a high school English elective by the teacher that still has boy band posters covering her classroom
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Aug 21, 2021 02:22
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Probably Magic posted:What was cool in freshman English is we got assigned Hiroshima, probably due to it being the height of the Iraq War, so got to learn all sorts of gory details about people's skin coming off from the bomb and the like. Also A Separate Peace, which was way less good, just a by-the-numbers coming of age book. Watching Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with my mom was the better WW2 coming of age media experience to be honest. did we go to the same school with horrible taste
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Aug 21, 2021 02:35
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Aglet56 posted:there was a brief derail in the afghanistan thread about the great gatsby. people on the internet are often dismissive of required reading books in american education like the great gatsby, pride and prejudice, huck finn, etc., but i hate this blanket dismissal. Just finished reading the grapes of wrath for the first time, and I am genuinely blown away by Steinbeck's whole writing style. It's been a while since I have actually read anything he wrote, since highschool, but I am probably going to be digging up some of his other works drat near spent the whole second half of the book in tears TeenageArchipelago has issued a correction as of 02:56 on Aug 21, 2021 |
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Aug 21, 2021 02:42
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Eat This Glob posted:the first harry potter by notorious TERF jk rowling, bridget jones' diary, the kite runner, and life of pi. i got free tuition but i couldn't imagine paying $2 grand or whatever to do a book report on the first fuckin harry potter lol fwiw I really liked david foster wallace's take on english literature and syllabus quote:AIMS OF COURSE that's a good approach on contemporary pop literature. to build upon that, doing a Full Zizek to cleave apart commercially successful fiction is something that is sorely missing from letters courses. nobody should be subjected to do massive essays on bad poo poo to read ofc, but a cursory study to glean the appeal of those titles is important imho. At least it makes the students get closer to figuring out the audiences and thus understand people better
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Aug 21, 2021 04:34
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I will never understand why they teach Shakespeare in high school. It's basically written in a completely different language, and none of the stories are in any way relatable because the target audience were medieval royalty. Like, how the gently caress am I supposed to understand what it's like to be King loving Henry the VIII? Shakespeare's stuff still resonates, but you get the most out of it when its performed. It was cheesy as hell but the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo + Juliet really gave the context of 'feuding families with overly dramatic children', and theres a Richard the Third set in WW1 England with Ian McKellen thats fun. Shakespeare changed up the story of Macbeth for his patron (he was thought to be distantly related to Banquo, who is usually a co-conspirator in the murders) but I think it still has a timelessness to it. Othello still holds up as a tale of betrayal and revenge too. His comedies thought didn't age well, at least for me. I don't 'get' Midsummer Night's Dream. It had to have been funnier back in his day. Jon Irenicus posted:for my college English req. I took one about "Heroic Journeys" were we read different translations of the Odyssey and one day the professor wheeled in a TV and showed us The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. it ruled. I think the curriculum changed every single year. I did an assignment on heroic epics with the novelization of The Princes Bride, because the novelization is written as though it was a condensed version of a much longer epic. The teacher let me get away with it
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Aug 21, 2021 04:50
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Yeah I didn't really realize it until I saw Romeo + Juliet that its basically the Burn After Reading of Shakespeare plays. Its not a tragic love story, its a dark comedy about two dumbass kids with crushes on each other and their equally dumbass feuding families. A pox on both your houses indeed.
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Aug 21, 2021 05:35
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