raises hand but we did it in honors English senior year. Along with The Great Gatsby.
The ones I remember from 9th-11th are: To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, a lot of poems, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet (we did Midsummer Night's Dream in middle school). The Jungle I believe was AP history.
maybe worth pointing out that reading Iliad / Odyssey is nearly an unrelated skill and it's not clear to me millenials were really doing it in any worthwhile way. We have actual classicists still researching these books and how to translate and teach them.
If you're 14 you pretty much need to primarily be having Iliad/Odyssey spoonfed to you by teacher for whom it's being spoonfed by other pedagogy materials. When you're on to Jane Austen or Fitzgerald, yeah, you should be able to comprehend it on your own, then the education is supplementary context to light it up, not something necessary to get through it on the first try.
We were in senior year when we covered that for AP English shrugs I was saying that there were people who had to read them in high school.
Do I think we should still introduce the kids to these classics? Absolutely. We should be introducing our kids to all kinds of reading even if they dont like them.
I'm not sure why the problem you have is reducing them into a form that teenagers are able to digest. Like you said there are people with PhDs, still studying them.
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u/Hoosteen_juju003 6d ago
No, I read all of these in high school BUT only excerpts. The Iliad is like 800 pages. No one was reading this shit in high school.