High school, 1999-2003. Let’s see how long my list ends up being. I have this feeling that my high school didn’t make us read as much as others.
Freshman[ul]
[li]To Kill a Mockingbird[/li][li]Much Ado About Nothing[/li][li]The Pigman[/li][li]The Hobbit (I didn’t read this, as I wasn’t in the right rotation to have Mr. Faherty, the best teacher EVER, long enough to get through it. Instead, my rotation got to read short stories, and I know one was:[/li][li]Bernice Bobs Her Hair[/li][li]The other rotation I was in was grammar, for which we had to read a book a week of our choice and make journal entries on it. For that I know I read Ender’s Game, The Mists of Avalon, Freedom’s Landing, and possibly Lord of the Rings, along with some others.[/ul][/li]Sophomore
(Communications: speech writing and short stories, not too much reading)
[ul]
[li]Catcher in the Rye[/li][li]The Land Remembers*[/li][li]Bernice Bobs Her Hair (again; I liked it!)[/li][li]A Winter’s Tale[/li][/ul]
Junior[ul]
[li]The Grapes of Wrath vomit (stupid turtle)[/li][li] our American Lit text**, which had all the highlights: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, et al[/li][li]The Great Gatsby[/li][li]Death of a Salesman***[/li][li]Oedipus Rex[/li][li]Lysistrata (awesome, compared to Grapes of Wrath)[/li][li]Major Barbara [/li][li]Hamlet[/li][li]Don’t Drink the Water[/li][li]The Pretentious Young Ladies[/ul][/li]Senior[ul]
[li]Dubliners (the tears!)[/li][li]Where Angels Fear to Tread[/li][li]The Taming of the Shrew[/li][li]Hamlet[/li][li]Othello [/li][li]Far From the Madding Crowd[/li][li]A Tale of Two Cities[/li][li]Pride & Prejudice[/li][li]Moll Flanders (painful)[/li][li]assorted poetry, off which Death of the Turret Ball Gunner and this stand out especially[/li][/ul]
Well, there were actually more than that, but I guess we read more than I thought.
*Interesting Note: We got to visit the author, Ben Logan, at his home and he said that I was a great intellectual beauty. While I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that I’m actually kinda cute (though not usually so florid), I’ve no idea what he saw and hope he got glasses shortly after.
** By some sort of weird kismet, somebody in the class got the book my dad used when he was a junior, over twenty years ago. These books were OLD.
***Everything after this is Drama, not America Lit
I went to high school in the early 80’s and thus only remember what I read my senior year:
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Stranger In A Strange Land by Heinlein Othello
Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat and The Pearl by Steinbeck
Machiavelli’s The Prince
Dante’s Inferno
That made me laugh. I had this image of Homer Simpson kicking the turtle from the “Space Coyote” episode when I read that.
I actually liked TGoW. I think that’s because I read it on my own, not for class. High school classes have a habit of sucking the life-blood from a book.
I really want to know what you all discuss or do with these books you’re reading. Let me say, first, that my son is now in grad school, had perfect verbals on both the SAT and GRE, and went to undergraduate school with 31 hours of AP credit.
So I have some idea of what goes on in a decent high school.
Are you tested on these books? Are you given specific questions. . .I mean really specific, such as What does Tom Joad see when. . .type of questions? Do you write papers on them? Do students discuss them in class and have meaningful things to say about them?
I understand summer reading, and out of class reading. It’s there to build a background and give experience. The load on some of these lists amazes me, still. As someone who really enjoyed teaching literature at the University level, I wonder how much is accomplished with such a load.
hroeder, in my high school (Catholic & southern), there was a lot of in class discussion, “compare and contrast” type work. It was extraordinarily rare that we (at least the honors/AP classes) got to just answer questions about what happened.
Testing was almost guaranteed to consist of at least one “compare and contrast” and a “explain the imagery of” question.
Often there weren’t tests on those that were discussed in class, but sometimes there were. For summer reading, there was generally a test at the beginning of the school year, generally essay (though IIRC there was occasionally a multiple choice section on those at least, just to make sure we read the book and not just the Cliff Notes).
I don’t remember the last time I had a ‘typical’ quiz or test on a book for English - it might have been freshman year. Mostly, we write essays on them (lots of essays, at least one per book, plus comparison essays, etc). We discuss them in class: symbolism, philosophy behind the book, character development, etc. I’ve found that generally the discussions are solid: I can only speak for my english class, though, and it’s the ‘the top of the academic pyramid’, so to speak.
This isn’t necessarily complete, just what I remember, by year (88-92) :
The Iliad
Great Expectations
Hiroshima (John Hersey)
Animal Farm
Romeo & Juliet
Lord of the Flies
Oedipus Rex
Julius Caesar
The Glass Menagerie
The Odyssey
A Separate Peace
The Great Gatsby
Ordinary People
The Scarlet Letter
The Old Man & The Sea
Huck Finn
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Red Badge of Courage
Death of a Salesman
Hamlet
1984
Antigone
The Plague
The Metamorphosis
Don Quixote (selected portions)
Candide (selected portions)
The Canterbury Tales (selected tales)
Tartuffe
Becket (Anouilh’s play)
The Inferno
As for what went on in class – Freshman year there was more testing on specifics of the book, with only occasional discussion. More time was given to discussion each year (my Junior year teacher even ridiculed some multiple-choice questions he’d seen on symbolism); by my Senior year you were simply expected to have read the book. Although as seen from the list we didn’t spend much time on each work that year. Each year some of the books would have projects/presentations assigned as well.
hroeder , there were lots of essays, both in-class and out. For the types of essays, see ** Lsura’s ** post. Our teachers also loved quotations. These were especially important on the midterm and final exams, but usually they asked the author of the quotation, the work it came from, and sometimes its significance. This was a private, Episcopalian girl’s school.
-Lil
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lord of the Flies
(Our freshman English teacher was a lazy, sexist, racist SOB.)
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
The Old Man and the Sea
Catcher in the Rye
Othello
Medea
Oedipus Rex
Still to come, this year and next:
Hamlet
Les Miserables
King Lear
Frankenstein
Siddhartha
The Inferno
Slaughterhouse Five
The Stranger
Illusions
Life of Pi
Beowulf
Gilgamesh
Taming of the Shrew
Probably some more too. And then there’s my Social Studies Humanities class which will have ‘The Prince’, and ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence’ and AP Lit class…
Freshmen year, it was a ‘read and present’ sort of ordeal. We’d read the book, then would be tested and have a project. Sophomore year, more of an emphasis on papers and the symbolism behind the books. This year we’re discussing the books and the ideas mostly with a paper thrown in from time to time.
Next year will be along the lines read, write in depth, discuss in depth. The same teacher from sophomore year, which is a good thing.
In my Eng III AP class (I’m the teacher) so far this year we have read: The Tempest Narrative of Frederick Douglass Scarlet Letter
and we are currently working on Gatsby.
Summer reading was a packet of short stories and non-fiction pieces.
I am not sure if we will do another novel this year or not: generally the spring has a stronger emphasis on shorter non-fiction as we move towards the AP exam.
hroeder, what I typically work on with my kids is close reading of selected passgaes: we begin each novel with an over all reading that that is pretty much just basic questions to see if they read the book. We do this because bulk reading is needed to teach them to be fluid readers–something that many of them are not: even if not everything gets discussed in class, it’s important that they have the experience of reading whole novels. After the reading test, we focus in on the holy mantra of AP Language and Composition: how does the author use language to convey tone/purpose/whatever? We answer this basic question a million different ways with different novels: we answer it by writing parodies, by writing out of class papers, by writing in-class papers, by revising those in class papers, by running small and large group discussions, through a class message board, and, when all other options are avalible, when I corner them in the hall on the way to lunch and quiz them.
Furthermore, the other AP English class–Literature and Comp.–always has an open ended question that requires you to answer a specific question using a great “novel-length” work of literature. As a result, AP Eng Lit teachers often focus almost entirely on novels so that their students will have many works to potentially pull examples from.
In my regular Eng III class we just read one novel a year: this year we
hroeder, I went to a pretty small high school (300 kids total, max), so class sizes for me were never above 25-27 kids. Thanks to some awesome, awesome teachers, you could basically discuss whatever you wanted in the book (within reason; if you wanted to go on and on about what STDs Moll Flanders probably had*, you probably wouldn’t get very far).
Our grades were based on participation in class discussion plus tests/quizzes. After reading a book or two, we generally had essay tests, where we were asked to compare and/or contrast different elements of the books, or pick one book and give an abstract of the main theme and use key events from the book to support it. (This didn’t happen much before senior year, in AP Composition.)
There was only one teacher that gave quizzes (so big they might as well have been tests) to test our “reading comprehension.” “What color suit was Tom Joad wearing when he arrived home?”** I fail to see how that enriched my understanding of the material. She was evil, anyway, so we came to expect to be tested on inanity.
Freshly out of high school and freshly in college, I find that I miss having my classes meet every day. It seems like we were able to engage the text in greater detail and so milk it for all it was worth.
*For the record, my friends and I came to the conclusion that she probably had syphillis, herpes, and possibly some form of lice at some point. Repentant my ass. She was just happy her hair hadn’t fallen out.
**Blue, shiny, if I remember correctly.
My English classes sound exactly like Lsura’s classes. We were never asked questions only about the plot, though we definitely had to know what happened. I don’t think we were ever asked ridiculously specific questions, like describe the route Julia tells Winston to take to meet her or anything, because there’s so much more to reading a book than memorizing all the minute details. Our tests and discussions focused symbolism, compare/contrast, author’s idealogy, etc. By the time we finished a book, we were definitely familiar with all these aspects of it; it wasn’t like we breezed through them, took a test on the fluff concepts, and moved on.
Here’s a good example of how my senior English teacher conducted class - on the last day of school before winter break, we spent almost all of class discussing a particular poem or short story (can’t remember which). After we finished discussing it, there was still 5 minutes left before the bell rang. I think any other teacher would have said, “Oh, take some time to talk to your friends. There’s just five minutes left, and you’ve been working hard. Have a nice break.” This teacher just wrote another very short poem (about 5 lines) on the board and told us to analyze it as thoroughly as we could in the time left. We started to complain, “Come on, there’s just five minutes left,” and she said she knew we were eager for break, but we had so much to cover that we couldn’t waste any time, not even five minutes.
We were very efficient. I suppose that was a big factor in how we were able to thoroughly discuss many novels. To tell the truth though, it just doesn’t seem so infeasible to me that we read seven novels in one academic year (not counting Les Mis and The Fountainhead, but I forgot to mention The Great Gatsby in my original list). It didn’t feel rushed at all, and it was an AP class, so of course we read a lot. And I think almost everyone in my class got a 4 or 5 on their English AP test.
Your teacher was probably checking to see if you had read the book or seen the movie (I believe it was in black and white).
I used to have a little fun with any students who chose to read Rebecca for a book report. The book is so skillfully narrated that often the reader doesn’t realize that the name of the person telling the story is never revealed. Naturally, in my private book report conferences, I would ask for that name. I would get the usual deer-in-headlights look from them. Sometimes I would prolong their misery by saying, “You expect me to believe that you read the entire book and don’t know the name of the character telling the story?”
