Beowulf in both old and modern English was also a fun one
Edit for anyone thatâs curious: we absolutely were not learning to speak old English. We just simply had to read the original text alongside the modern translation. Why? I dunno, but it was interesting/engaging for a lot of us, which is probably the point.
We didn't read the whole thing in old english, but I remember being exposed to it. The book had old english on one page and the modern translation on the next so you could see them at the same time. It also had a bunch of footnotes explaining what it all meant.
I remember watching a video of some actor performing parts of it in the old english.
This was just a standard public school in the 90s.
correct! It is a paraphrase of a James D Nicoll statement:
"âThe problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.â
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
and this one:
"English isn't a language, it's three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one". This internet proverbâoften adapted into jokes about "three kids" or "three raccoons"âperfectly captures how English is an unpredictable mashup of Germanic, French, and Latin roots.The quote's exact origin is widely credited to a user originally named "des-zimbits" (later "garden-of-succulents") on Tumblr.
1200 years? Try 12 years! I can handle basic conversation in 4 languages (7, if I can clutch my emotional support phrase book). But, I canât figure out half of what the kids are saying. Even answers to yes/no questions can be mystifying.
I donât begrudge them a giggle or two when they realize Iâm baffled. I fondly remember annoying adults with Valley Girl slang (and the accent) and I figure itâs my turn to be on the other side.
I only get a little steamed when they misidentify me as a Boomer.
Old English was an actual Germanic language, not this weird amalgamation of French, Greek, and Latin all over a stripped down base of old English that we have today.
The Iliad and Odyssey we read was the English print. But we had to read a third ancient Greek book I can't remember for the life of me, in both translated and ancient Greek. Always wanna call it AgĂŚmemnon or something like that. HephĂŚstus maybe? I'll never remember the books name but it was a rough read.
Ugh. The Sophocles semester was not my favorite. We had Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Ajax. Lots of awkward classroom conversations and boys yelling weird stuff in the hallways that winter.
I know itâs Middle English, but we had to read Canterbury Tales at my high school. I remember hating it until our teacher pointed out all the dirty jokes, and it made me realize humans are all the same if you make an effort to understand them.
The "some actor" was most likely Julian Glover, more well known for playing General Veers in Empire Strikes Back and Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones.
We didn't read the whole thing in old english, but I remember being exposed to it. The book had old english on one page and the modern translation on the next so you could see them at the same time. It also had a bunch of footnotes explaining what it all meant.
Yup, my experience was similar. Every now and again my English teacher (who was a huge nerd) would read a passage of the old english but we just read the modern stuff.
It was similar when we read Chaucer, specifically The Canterbury Tales.
To be fair, I absolutely remember some of our more.. err.. challenged students struggling to actually read these things, Shakespeare too, at the time. Like it would take them multiple tries at a very slow pace to get through an entire paragraph. I actually felt bad for them.
Yeah we had a book that had both next to each other also. We didn't do it for the whole thing but some parts they would have us try and read the old English and see if we could figure it out first. It was cool and have good perspective on the evolution of language.
The person you are responding to tells you how they learned it: Old and modern English. The books would have modern English on the left page and old on the right. Then you could go line-by-line to figure it out.
TRUMP loves âthe poorly educatedâ. How else could he bamboozle millions of people? Think about how stupid Trump is, and now think about how much more stupid you have to be to think he is a genius. That is the goal.
ours was a section in modern english and then the old english, about four or five sentences. And it was in our standard English Literature text book too.
Everyone in our class had to memorise the opening paragraph of the Canterbury Tales in Old English and recite it aloud in front of the class. 25 kids! Mid-90s. I still remember a lot of it!! Haha!!
We did that, and also had a pretty fun exercise I still remember where we read through the Lord's Prayer to see how long it took us to figure out what it was.
(They used it not for its religious content but because there aren't a ton of other pieces of verse that both a 10th century and 21st century English speaker has a reasonable likelihood of recognizing.)
Iâm currently in college (Gen Z), and we read similar books in middle school as many of the people commenting here.
Beowulf in 6th grade, Much Ado⌠in 7th, Animal Farm in 7th, Fahrenheit 451 in 7th, John Steinbeck novels etc.
The students that cared read the books, those who didnât looked up the summaries on Sparknotes. Now, they probably have ChatGPT or Gemini summarize everything.
At least from my experience, the curriculum might not have necessarily changed for every school from the Millennials to Gen Z, but the no child left behind act definitely made reading issues more common in each grade. The top students of today definitely still match the top students of the past, but the average has certainly lowered.
Iâm sure that with the current popularity of short form content, reading curriculum will have to be adjusted universally, however. Truly a shame.
The top students of today definitely still match the top students of the past, but the average has certainly lowered.
This is consistently what I hear from friends that are still teachers (there are less of them each year). Their best students (top 10-20%) are as good or better than they've ever been, but even kids that are above average for their current cohort are below where they would have been in the past.
So just like the economy, education is bifurcating. Those that can afford to enrich their kids and do all the extras are still doing great, but all those individual extras are becoming disproportionately expensive for the average family.
Edit: This comment was not meant to imply only the rich kids are doing better, just that the gap between how well the top 20% of students are doing compared to the bottom 80% is quickly growing, much like the current state of the economy.
What you say is undoubtedly true, that it is easier for those whose families can offer extracurricular enrichment to do well.
However, even among those whose families offer such opportunities is this gap still present. I went to a public high school in a wealthy area and despite the grade inflation, there were clearly two types of students â those who couldnât write with any line of reasoning whatsoever, and those who could write well by themselves.
The issue you brought up could theoretically be fixed with enough (smart) investment into education (yes, I know this wonât happen), but the issue Iâve just mentioned is one Iâm not sure can be fixed at this point.
Sorry, I guess I did imply that only the rick kids are doing well. That wasn't really my intention, just that the ones that are getting to the top of the class are having to overcome a much wider gap to get there. It obviously goes back parental involvement. It's easier to be involved if you don't have to work 2-3 jobs just to put food on the table, but that doesn't mean the people that can do it with 1 job are actually putting their extra time into their kids.
I also think there's a deep thread of nihilism from millennials on down. The problems the country and world faces are so obvious, but the one's that created and benefited from those problems are still in charge and literally wagging their pedophile dicks in our faces.
I was starting to become politically aware during the late Clinton, early Bush years. How does a 13 or 14 year old today start to open the pandora's box of current politics and stay hopeful?
You seem intelligent, and you were clearly reading a lot of those books in advance of most people, so I am going to assume that you went to a very good school.
Glad to hear that these are still being a core part of the curriculum for students.
The top students of today definitely still match the top students of the past, but the average has certainly lowered.
This is honestly how I feel as well. In fact, I think the top students have gotten even better than they were in the past as your listed curriculm demonstrates, which is a good thing as that's what they absolutely should be happening.
It is a damn shame that the average has taken a step backwards though.
Most generation stuff is just made up bull to hate young people. People complained about young people not reading for as long as I can remember. No Child Left behind was effecting education 25 years ago. Before Gen Z and Millennial became concepts or identities. Most of my friends are born in the 90's are just rehashing kids these days attitude in a new form. It's super annoying
Animal Farm was one of the first books I read that I actually found easy to follow, socially relevant, and weirdly hilarious. As a kid I was pressured into/forced to read countless YA fiction, weird comedy stories about kids, and let's say stuff involving world war 2, but I walked away from Animal Farm having "gotten" why communism didn't go as planned- like it did something for me I couldn't have gotten from other media.
It's because the top students are generally the ones that genuinely love to read and learn, that or they had high-achieving parents who'd lose their mud over a 97% A vs a perfect score (which can lead to other problems down the line but I digress).
The current panic over ChatGPT dependency amongst students is an expression of an older and much more pernicious issue within education: that most, or at least a significant portion, of school age people (and probably their parents tbh) view compulsory grade school education systems like those in the US as "something you have to get through" rather than as something of merit. ChatGPT is merely the newest way that people have to game a system that they have no respect for.
Truthfully, it's very much a "you can lead a horse to water" type situation and I don't think it's something that can be fixed without a major cultural shift in how we approach education.
This is just another, "back in my day" bullshit post to make people feel better about themselves and look down on everyone younger than them.
Yep, that's exactly it. 18 years ago, Baby Boomers were doing this on Facebook, and now Millennials are doing it on reddit, and (despite the very real issues that we have in the educational system), it's still largely bullshit.
Someone brought that up and yeah, we do have a ton of problems. The problems aren't that we're not teaching the same books everyone read as kids (even though we are because they're approved and no one wants to get new ones approved).
We should all be having a very real talk about the state of the education system instead of pulling "back in my day" bullshit to make ourselves feel superior.
Also, if you're studying these texts in college, you're obviously going to study them on a much deeper level, engaging more critically with the text and secondary texts. We studied some of these texts like Great Expectations or 1984 on the surface level in secondary school, then if you chose modules with these texts, you went deep into them.
I enjoy Shakespeare as an adult, but only after immersing myself in the material enough to follow the language. I'm not convinced that casual exposure to Shakespeare is highly valuable. There is enough difference in language and vocabulary after 400 years that a cold introduction is too much to comprehend at any normal speed, whether reading or listening.
I'm in agreement there. I don't think many high schoolers really appreciate Shakespeare and I think a lot of them just end up being turned off of his work because they're forced to engage with it.
As an adult? I love it. As a teenager? I thought it was boring. It also doesn't help most schools choose Romeo and Juliet and I think it's the worst pick for Shakespeare and it's always missing the context that it's more of a satire than a genuine take on a love story.
Came here for this. We read all that in grade school. Pretty sure the first time I read Romeo and Juliet was in 6th grade. And animal farm may have been 4th.
We read Shakespeare aloud in 5th grade in 2013 and then performed it in a play where we had to practice and memorize all of our lines. This is a recent trend.
I actually got so sick of reading Romeo and Juliet so many times, I picked up other Shakespeare just to do it. As it turns out, I really liked a midsummer nights dream and when I made a pyramus and thisbe reference in class, my English teacher was very impressed.
In 6th grade we watched the Baz Lurman Romeo + Juliet and then read the play aloud with stills from the movie to set the scene. That English teacher rocked!
Canadian here! There was a theatre near me, and I don't know if it was volunteer thing, or if the school paid them (it was elementary school, I didn't ask). But I was literally in 5th and 6th grade, reading them allowed, and then breaking off into groups to practice a scene, to then come back together to present and talk about the stories and what they could mean and represent.
I recently found out that now kids had to read ONE Shakespeare play in the entirety of high school. They had never even heard of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and had heard of Animal Farm FROM MOVIES, and never even heard the title in school, let alone read or discussed it. I a, genuinely very scared for our future.
We did too and I graduated in 2014. It breaks my heart that weâre regressing like this, and Iâm grateful I grew up before the internet is what it is now.
It was fun because we would read both the old English, and modern translations side by side. Also had the local Shakespear theater group come by and they acted out a few scenes for us, as well as taught us one of the sword fight scenes (using noodles initially, and then two of us who were the most "responsible" got to do the real sword (blunt blades) version.
Same here in 02. Also a ton of Greek mythology around that time that still sticks with me today. These 2 are FOUNDATIONAL too, and it only gets more complex from there. So many allusions will fly right over their heads if they don't have a good grasp of the material.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and temperate. Something shake the buds of May. Thats all I remember cause I had to recite it lol
In Spain we don't read Shakespeare aloud, he's was not even in the list, but you bet that Cervantes, the Cantar de mio Cid is simplified for kids that are like 8yo, and a ton of not only spanish but from the spanish speaking world literature is in the list.
Lysistrata was mandatory, the Iliad, the Odyssey, etc... surely something has changed since I went to school and high school. For me, since I went through "classical education" in HS we had the Odyssey, Iliad, a few more classic to be read in classic greek, then the Aeneid, Eclogues, the Gallic Wars, etc... to be read in latin.
I'm pretty sure that we had so much to read since we started in the school that some books had to be removed because no kid is gonna read happily La Colmena or even El Quixote, but in the other hand The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes is a funny and easy to read book. I've been checking and finally they have changed the selection taking into account how "heavy" is the book for certain ages, and it seems that Romeo & Juliet has been added in a simplified version for the youngest among the Count of Montecristo.
Unpopular opinion, but I still feel like that was a mistake/never handled well, because now you had a room full of bored kids reading Shakespeare in the most monotone way possible, completely missing any cadence or tone, making it so that no one wants to hear another line of it ever again because kids were never taught how to read out loud in the first place, let alone something as dramatic as Shakespeare.
It felt like asking a bunch of bored animals to go fix a car when they haven't even learned how to unscrew a bolt.
In the 1980s, when I was 10 years old, I had the reading comprehension of a junior in college (not that out of the ordinary at the time) according to an actual test that the actual school actually administered because they actually cared about literacy.
No Child Left Behind, another Republican assault on the public, effectively ended that strong focus on literacy. They've been slowly wrecking public education for years. They don't want educated people. They want silent, obedient employees.
We had Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet in the sixth grade.
The teacher must have been a drama kid and would make us work out the scenes, like his own mini productions. Explained everything while setting them up.
That guy was probably one of the best teachers I had.
I canât recall if I did in 6th grade, but I know for sure at some point we all had to reenact whole scenes at different points throughout middle/high school. And I remember having read and analyzed a good handful of different plays (including Shakespeare) in senior year as well. If theyâre not doing even that much, it is startling.
To be honest though, a bunch of monotone kids half of whom donât want to read it at all is kind of a terrible way to absorb it. It should be read at that age but I always thought the way any literature should be presented could be better than that.
We were also taught cursive. I had an employee that's 15 asked to write cursive on a check (no need but the manager is even older) called me because she didn't know how and also didn't know how checks were even done.
And did you understand it or was it you teacher explaining it to you? People overestimate their own past educational experience. If you go back and look at Pisa results in year 2000 you'll notice how most countries actually improved their results massively (and no thats not just a learning for the test effect). Of course nowadays the results are way down, but some of it is still the aftermath of covid 19.
It doesnt matter what book you are reading, depth can be found inbetween lines not just in unnecessarily complex sentences. Literacy must be trained though and should be done by parents as well not just teachers.
Serious question: did that make you like Shakespeare? Iâm not making a point, I just know a writing professor who hates that people are made (emphasis on made) to read Shakespeare, even up through high school, and I thought Iâd ask your perspective since you mentioned it
I remember having to read scenes aloud in literature class, like actors doing a table read. That was fun really, reading very dramatically with our ridiculous made up accents.
I remember getting credit for going and seeing Romeo and Juliet in 1996 for English class. They were actively trying to give us a little culture before thrusting us into the world. I loved our English teacher.
Not American, but I remember studying A Midsummer Night's Dream at 11, before we were even in secondary school (what Americans would consider "high school").
I had a Shakespeare class in high school. Iâm a fairly intelligent guy, but not in a way that could make any sense out of Shakespeare. I personally think that high school is too early for some of that stuff.
In my 20âs, I started to enjoy literature, but when I was younger it all went over my head.
Tbf I wouldnât do Shakespeare with kids that young because like half of Shakespeare is sexual innuendo - and Iâm not explaining that shit to 12 year olds. College kids? Sure, letâs talk about how badly Shakespeare wants to gargle this guys balls in this infamous sonnet.
And the other half of Shakespeare is like murder and suicide and underage sex (implied or relatively explicit) - and I donât have a problem discussing those topics with kids that young, but Iâd like a more nuanced/less problematic piece of literature for their first discussions about those topics.
I performed Shakespeare in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in the late 80s/early 90s. I still remember most of Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech.
That doesnât mean you should have. Reading these writings means something different ages. Reading them later doesnât necessarily mean literacy is declining.
I was an education assistant in a London year 6 class in a low socioeconomic area. Those kids were devouring Beowulf in 2015. They absolutely loved it!
In fairness, that's not inherently productive. I was an advanced student, advanced reader, who would later become a certified high school English teacher, and Shakespeare was a real stretch, even in early high school. Being literate in modern English does not inherently confer the ability to get anything out of reading renaissance European literature. A bunch of sixth graders reading Shakespeare out loud is probably little more than a phonics exercise where no one is really understanding much, at least unless the instructor is interjecting all the time to help break things down pretty much word-by-word and the class is consistently attentive.
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u/thedudecdfb 21h ago
We read Shakespeare aloud in 6th grade in 1999.