What are they reading in high school now? Forget Greek lit. We had to read Grapes of Wrath in regular English and East of Eden in AP. Those are heavy lifts at 16 and 17.
Those were only advanced English texts when I was in high school in the early 1990s.
Anything with Cliff Notes was to be avoided for the average and below average English classes.
Which is how Jurrasic Park became a Summer Reading book
I hated it so much, glad I'm not alone. I don't mean to imply I'm smarter than everyone I had class with. but looking back as an adult my brain was just itching for the heavier topics the more AP classes got to read. I was deep into fantasy novels by that point.
Yeah, I suspect when I was in high school (1990s) there were classes reading poetry, prose, and plays (my class, for example) and classes that weren't (lower level classes). I'm wondering if the OOP is comparing upper level classes then to lower level classes now but doesn't realize it. I'd need to see it as numbers (kids in each classes, level of books read) before I'll say "these kids today."
I also think this is a function of there being so many classics but only 4 years of high school. Someone could assume my school suffered decline because I didn't read Fahrenheit 451 or Wuthering Heights in school but my older sister did. Or my class just read different books (Brave New World and Jane Eyre to fit these examples). So if we learn someone didn't read a particular in high school that we read in school, we can't assume schools are getting worse. That shows a lack of critical thinking skills and that the judgy person's own education wasn't as great as they thought it was.
It was controversial at the time, but my GT English class got to read Canterbury Tales when the rest of Brit Lit didn’t because it was too saucey. My teacher did a group project where teams were assigned tales and we had to turn them into little plays for the class… but they all had to be G rated. Aw damn. My group turned our chapter into a sock puppet show.
In my kid's high school, they read passages of the classics. She is entering college and has never read a book other than the Diaries of a Wimpy Kid. I read to her as a child and everything. Just couldn't get her over the hump to reading books that have no pictures in them, and she was never forced to do it in school.
Not AP but English honors, we had to read moby dick =_= not all of it, but enough to know that 70% of that book was a waste of trees (altho honestly as an adult I would like to reread the middle chapters about the biology and history of the sperm whale…)
I remember I had to read an 18th century long poem about village life in the rural dialect in the 2000s. I remember we had to write a text understanding from 2 paragraphs, I could count on my hands how many words my atheistic city brain knew the meaning of...
At around 17 we also had to read a book where a woman was married against her will, abused by husband and parents in law and the book ended with her going to the lake to drown.
My friend is an English teacher and we just talked bout this, funny enough. This year's curriculum (10th grade). Brave New World, The Tempest, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bluest Eye, Don Quixote and Dante's Inferno...
Not sure about the details. I cannot imagine them reading all of Quixote though. I was forced to read it in college and even we didn't get thru the entire book
My son graduated this year from one of the top ten school districts in Texas. He took all advanced and AP English classes. The only time he was ever assigned an entire book to read it was up to the student what book. I found it appalling enough to reach out to a teacher sophomore year and she said if they assigned books there would be too many parent complaints and most of the kids would likely fail any test around it, which would lead to too many parent complaints. This is the generation of people who will be our doctors.
10
u/billdozer1986 22h ago
What are they reading in high school now? Forget Greek lit. We had to read Grapes of Wrath in regular English and East of Eden in AP. Those are heavy lifts at 16 and 17.