Shit I have to read for High School

[Smartly Pretty 0]

I figured I'd make a thread for this because it's kind of a downer when right in the middle of a drama-filled Secret Life chat I interrupt an Ashley Juergens monologue to see if anyone's read Fast Food Nation. Plus, I think TSM has a pretty high number of teachers and I'm for whatever reasons always interested in hearing what they teach...

 

Anyway, I was just assigned "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. I have no idea what this is. Any good? Should I actually read this? The nearest book store is legitimately 20 minutes away (welcome to North Florida) and it's a shitty book store at that. Is it worth the money in gas it takes to get over there?

[godthedog 0]

wait...you have to drive twenty whole minutes just to get to a bookstore? not even a fake twenty minutes, but a legitimate twenty minutes? in a legitimate car? how do you survive that? no wonder you're asking us if it's worth the trip, even though you have to read it for class anyway.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

You have to buy your own high school books?

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I think Amusing Ourselves to Death was pretty good. The part I really liked was about the Sesame Streetification of American education.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

If he goes to Fleming High, he lives way out in the sticks. The most happening place around is Whataburger. Also, if my geography's correct, the closest bookstore to him is a Books a Million. Which totally sucks.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

Yeah, Books-A-Million is the closest book store, which is in Orange Park, so I have to actually cross a fucking bridge to get to a book store. Although Fleming Island is becoming a slightly better place to be a teenager...by May we'll have a movie theater.

 

And yeah, I have to buy my own books.

[Vampiro69 0]

For a section of U.S History that I teach, I have the students read Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West.

[Jingus 0]

There are school systems that don't make you buy your own required reading? That's how it always has been at every school I attended. Partly I think because the English teachers often tend to pick out their own list of what they want their kids to read (and usually let them choose from a list of different books), so it's not the same thing as every chemistry class always being taught from the same textbook.

 

20 whole minutes? Jeez, you gotta pack a lunch for a trip like that.

 

And no, I haven't read the first and haven't heard of the second. Although it does sound infinitely cooler than the stuff I had to read in high school, the Famous Dead White Guys list with the usual suspects like Shakespeare and Twain. (Nothing against either of those two fine fellows, but sometimes I'd wind up getting assigned the same required reading book two or even three times over the course of my schoolings, which just felt like overkill.)

[godthedog 0]

true dat. i never thought shakespeare was special until i read a bunch of other playwrights, then went back to him & read him for pleasure.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

I've thus far only read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and I liked both a LOT.

 

No one's ever assigned me Twain, which I'm glad about because I tried to read Tom Sawyer once and I really disliked the first 30 or so pages and stopped reading it.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

Oh man, Twain ruled the world when I was 11. Haven't touched it since.

 

Books I avoided in high school:

 

1. The Scarlet Letter

2. Pride and Prejudice

3. Diary of Anne Frank

4. Pride and Prejudice (a second time)

5. Ethan Frome

 

[Maztinho 0]

Paging "Uncle Tom's Cabin" man was that a horribly boring as shit book that I hated to death. I got a D on the assignment because I said the book was the worst piece of "literature" I'd ever been forced to read, and that spending 9 pages detailing a character who is in the book for 2 pages is the epitome of fluff writing.

 

I got assigned the Scarlett Letter after Uncle Tom's Cabin and it was tolerable by comparison.

[Jingus 0]

I thankfully dodged the Scarlet Letter bullet, double thankful since I hated most of Hawthorne's short stories that we had to read. Unfortunately I didn't dodge Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which might be the most terrible "classic literature" I've ever seen. The only book I can recall just straight-up refusing to finish was Their Eyes Were Watching God; the dialogue was written in Twain-style backwoods phonetic spelling, but the rest of the prose was so ridiculously hifalutin' in its English Major vocabulary that just about every paragraph had a word or two I'd never seen before, and the contrast between the two was unbearable.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I didn't read any of Hawthorne's short stories until college and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them. Well, I might have read "Young Goodman Brown," in high school, I'm not sure. Anyway, they weren't good enough for me to go back and see if The Scarlet Letter would read better than it had when I was 15. It might. I found The Old Man and the Sea brutally boring when I was in the ninth grade; this was enough to steer me away from any Hemingway until I was an adult. Then I read and enjoyed A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. I've lately considered giving Steinbeck another shot. Having hated The Pearl and The Red Pony in my youth indirectly led me to not having read East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath.

 

As for what I did like back then. I dug some of Shakespeare's stuff, but the only books I had to read for high school that I actually enjoyed were Nineteen Eighty-Four (I read and liked Animal Farm, too, but I was never assigned it in any class) and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I also read, on my own, Slaughterhouse Five around my junior or senior year. That was my gateway to "serious" literature.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Oh man, Twain ruled the world when I was 11. Haven't touched it since.

 

Books I avoided in high school:

 

1. The Scarlet Letter

2. Pride and Prejudice

3. Diary of Anne Frank

4. Pride and Prejudice (a second time)

5. Ethan Frome

 

Good calls all around except Anne Frank.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

I didn't read any of Hawthorne's short stories until college and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them. Anyway, they weren't good enough for me to go back and see if The Scarlet Letter would read better than it had when I was 15. It might

 

Hawthorne's short stories are fantastic. I've never read The Scarlett Letter, but I thought The House of Seven Gables was kind of boring and nowhere near as good as his short fiction. Maybe the dude just wasn't a very good novelist?

 

As for high school reading, my faves were The Great Gatsby (I think I was the only person in my whole class who actually appreciated it) and The Remains of the Day. My school's English curriculum was skewed pretty heavily toward modern and American literature, so I mostly avoided Dickens/Wharton/Austen/et al. I'm sort of thankful for that, really. I'm sure that if I was forced to read Jane Austen back in 10th grade I would have absolutely hated it and probably would have been put off from ever revisiting her work, which would have been a shame because her stuff's actually really great.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

We read Gatsby over the summer and most of us enjoyed it. The Honors and Standard English students (I'm AP) are reading it now and they seem to like it pretty well too.

 

I have kind of an odd list of books I read because I started high school in standard English, then moved to honors, then moved to AP, so I missed stuff like 1984 because that's what the higher classes were doing, but then now I'm missing The Scarlet Letter because that's what the lower classes are doing. I'd like to read some of the Orwell stuff. The Scarlett Letter sounds boring.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Hey, Smartly Pretty, are there any books being taught at your school that require the student's parents to fill out a permission slip before they read it? I wonder what the current standards are; years ago, I had to get my mom to sign off on The Picture of Dorian Gray because of a brief and rather tame reference to pornography.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

I haven't encountered that yet, but I haven't really read anything too graphic. When we get to the satire unit in the 4th quarter my teacher plans on using The Onion, I'd imagine if you need a permission slip to read anything it's The Onion. I'll get back to you.

[Copper Feel 0]

Much Ado About Nothing

Spies

The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy

Existentialism Is a Humanism

European History: 1895 - 1945

Hamlet

The Lyrical Ballads

 

There's everything I've had to read for school since I turned 16. This year I had to compare two pieces of literature of my choice (I went with Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and I'll have to read some war literature before a test in May.

 

No other subjects really have much required reading at this stage of education in England.

[Jingus 0]

I was about to say I can't understand how anyone would like any of Hawthorne's stories, until I remember I actually kinda enjoyed "Rapaccinni's Daughter". Still, stuff like Young Goodman Brown were so thunderingly unsubtle with their metaphors, shoving the subtext in your face like you wouldn't get it otherwise, that even as a teenager I found them to be far too blunt and inelegant.

 

I wonder what the current standards are; years ago, I had to get my mom to sign off on The Picture of Dorian Gray because of a brief and rather tame reference to pornography.

We had to do the same thing for Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land due to the sex stuff in there, although it was fairly softcore and pretty vague about the specifics. Which was ironic for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this was senior year, so at least half the kids there had already definitely had sex themselves. Secondly, nobody gave a shit about the violence in that and other books, which was described in way more graphic detail than the sex ever was. And thirdly, in this same class for some reason we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail and didn't need permission for that. Although one girl did complain about the line of dialogue which mentioned oral sex, but nobody cared since that girl herself had once been caught giving some guy a blowjob in the back of a schoolbus.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Permission slips I remember in high school:

 

1) Beloved, 11th grade. Failing a signature, the alternate was Invisible Man. This was 1999.

2) The Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, which we watched in 9th grade. Brief flashes of nudity for our scandalized little 14-year-old eyes.

 

 

[Jingus 0]

1) Beloved, 11th grade. Failing a signature, the alternate was Invisible Man. This was 1999.

I assume you mean Ellison Invisible Man and not Wells? Weird, cuz that book had plenty of its own controversial content. Some sex, a little bit of abortion talk, a shitload of various racisms, violence, and even a segment where the main character becomes a Communist.

 

2) The Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, which we watched in 9th grade. Brief flashes of nudity for our scandalized little 14-year-old eyes.

Heh, we had the same film shown in 9th grade too, though I don't recall if permission slips were involved or not. (This is only made better by that old maybe-true story about 16-year-old Olivia Hussey being denied entrance to watching that movie back in the day, since it featured nudity... her own nipples.) Why do English teachers invariably hit kids with Romeo & Juliet anyway? Just because the main characters are roughly their age? It's not one of Shakespeare's better masterpieces, and you'd think that having two idiot kids who commit suicide over their puppy love would not be a role model you'd want to teach to impressionable teenagers.

[At Home 0]

I had to read a bunch of multi-cultural books, which has led me to this conclusion: books not about white people are boring. Not to mention every single book I read was met with the statement "you'll be reading this again in college, so at least just get a leg up." Great, I get to unlearn whatever you're teaching me just so I can learn the correct version of it in college. The only books I liked were books/plays written or containing white people, such as The Stranger, Great Gatsby, Glass Menagerie, Hamlet, and Macbeth. I had the pleasure of reading a plethora of plays in a Dramatic Literature class, my favorites being Endgame and M. Butterfly.

 

My AP English teacher was big on Freud. She did not like me telling her that Freud is really useless psychology.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

I had to read a bunch of multi-cultural books, which has led me to this conclusion: books not about white people are boring.

 

What actual books did you read?

 

My AP English teacher was big on Freud. She did not like me telling her that Freud is really useless psychology.

 

Whether or not Freud is "useless psychology" has absolutely no bearing on whether or not his work is useful for literary analysis.

[King Kamala 0]

Former honors English student here. I would've done AP but I had a personal vendetta against the teacher. Kind of regret not taking it now but it didn't work out with my schedule. Plus having to actually do work during the second semester of my senior year.

 

Off the top of my head, besides the ones that are a staple of every high school curriculum (Scarlett Letter, Catcher In The Rye), I only remember the ones we had to read during the summer before.

 

Freshman Year: We had to pick three books off of a list of a dozen or so books and then discuss them over the course of the first week or so in small groups. I picked It's Not About The Bike (Lance Armstrong's autobiography- seriously don't know what qualified this to be on the reading list of an honors English class), Haroun and The Sea of Stories by Salaman Rushdie, and Smack (a book about teenage anarchist heroin addicts in England. Pretty captivating stuff for a fourteen he movie saying we wouldn't like it because it was in black and white and was boring. Man, I hated that guy, though I still get a chuckle whenever I recall the moment wyear old).

 

Sophomore: Krik Krak by Edwige Dundicat. Book about the plight of Haitian women. Good lord, everybody hated this one and practically demanded it be taken off the list of summer reading. This book was just begging to be called Krik Krap. It's weird, it seems like they changed the book the sophomores had to read every year because they all hated it so much. You'd think they just would've stuck with a classic staple but no, they kept trying something new and everybody kept on hating.

 

Junior Year: The Grapes of Wrath. Probably my favorite book out of all my summer reading assignments. I was pretty alone in my belief here. Everybody else thought it was boring and long. Philistines! My teacher wasn't much better...he wouldn't show us the movie version cause it was "black and white and boring" (as if there was a correlation). Though I still get quite the chuckle when I remember him describing the novel he was writing as The Godfather with aliens thrown in.

Senior Year: The Kite Runner---meh.

[Guest cobainwasmurdered]

We had to read "To The Lighthouse" in Grade 12 Lit and I just couldn't get past the first chapter no matter how many times I tried.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Pretty captivating stuff for a fourteen he movie saying we wouldn't like it because it was in black and white and was boring. Man, I hated that guy, though I still get a chuckle whenever I recall the moment wyear old).

 

[...]

 

he said he wouldn't show us then the class' snarky asshole asked him if he was a writing a book and he responsed that he was writing a novel that was like "The Godfather with aliens thrown in." If there was any way to improve on The Godfather, it would be to put some aliens in there.

 

How did this happen?

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Also, was I the only person here who had the pleasure of reading Ayn Rand in high school? We had to read Anthem in 11th grade. Terrible, terrible book. In fact, thinking back on it, the whole reading list for that class was pretty bad: The House on Mango Street, The Lord of the Flies, Anthem, Brave New World and some stupid fucking Neil Simon plays. What dumb class.

[King Kamala 0]

How did this happen?

 

Wow, I have no idea. That's certainly not the way I wrote it...I'm tired but not that tired.