Right? I think we had to read The Outsiders.
Huh. We were close to the same time, though not in the same state.
We read that one. It was fine.
We also read the Scarlett Letter, which was fine, but I was probably only interested because there was an illicit affair with a priest. I recall liking it.
I won’t revisit those books, but I wasn’t very conscious of misogyny etc back in the day so a lot of the subtext probably did not sink in. I’d probably read them very differently now.
She cheated on Colin Jost? 
I graduated in 1979. I can’t think of a single book that everyone had to read. At least not in the classes I took. There was a literature class, but I didn’t take it.
The only book I remember reading as a class was The Yearling in junior high, probably 8th grade. We read it in class - the dreaded, where everyone takes a turn reading out loud.
You don’t actually have to read it, of course:
I graduated in 1981 and my high school had a strange set-up- we changed schedules every quarter, so I had 16 English classes each with a different teacher and “theme”. For most classes, the “theme” was what we would be reading. We didn’t have 10th or 11th grade English - we had British Romantic Poetry , Futurism, Journalism, Science Fiction and a bunch of other offerings. The only class I can think of where we might not have read any actual books was journalism.
I can’t even understand the idea of three or four years of English courses without reading multiple books.
This. I’m sure my daughter had to read a dozen or more books in four years of high school English. She took AP English Literature in senior year and that was a LOT of reading.
I took O-levels and A-levels in English Literature back in the dark ages (1980-84). I read a lot of Hardy and Dickens, a lot of Shakespeare plays and sonnets and tons of poetry. Mostly British.
Nor I. My experience is probably much the same as Mighty Mouse’s: and especially at A-level (specialised subjects taken at 18+), we were encouraged to "read around the subject’, especially for EngLit.
I like to imagine he looked like the hot priest in Fleabag.
I would have loved this.
Sometimes I wonder if my problem with AP English was bad teaching. Somewhat to my shame, my college admission essay was about how I wanted to be a better teacher than her. She just couldn’t engage very deeply with the text. She often did not want to come out and say, “this is a work of feminist literature” or “this is about racism,” much less engage deeply with those subjects or pose critical questions about them. She often did not provide context for what we were reading. She seemed more concerned with getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing, than, ya know, teaching.
I did not have a very good high school education, which I learned pretty quickly as a freshman in college. There’s only so far intelligence can take you if you’re never given the tools to think critically.
I read NorthWest Passage for a class.
My Jr. High Social Studies teacher was a cool dude, he would read Kurt Vonnegut to us. Note, this was in very conservative central Illinois.
I went on to read everyone of his books, he inspired a love of reading, at least in me.
Hey!
I found a new infuriation today!
I got a medical bill in the mail. At the top, there’s a line that says “To pay your bill online visit (some ver long URL).” Once you got to that URL, it asks for your account number.
OK, where’s the account number? I teach the bill, and finally find it.
Then it asks for your “Statement ID number.”
I look. And look. And Look.
Finally, I find the “Stmt ID#” in tiny type all by itself below their return address.
Since this bill is 100% printed on demand, there is absolutely no reason they couldn’t have both of those numbers printed directly underneath the “To pay your bill online” text.
Arrgh.
Oh, I hate that bad design shit. What’s even more stupid is how many phone calls that generates to the company, and why somebody didn’t say “Ya know what? If we had the numbers where people will find them, we would get X amount less phone calls”
Department of Redundancy Department fans/employees who write things like “$20 USD”. “Twenty dollars US dollars”? It’s either “$20” or “20 USD”, dammit!
At least they put the dollar sign first.
People typing ‘alot’ when they mean ‘a lot’. Yes I know language evolves and I am sure we could name historic examples where two words have become joined as one (‘another’?). I don’t care; it irritates me more than it should.
This needs a post all of it’s own. Why is the thing WE NEED TO READ EXACTLY always the smallest font on the statement? I don’t give a shit about the name of your company, or How We’re Working To Improve Our Service.” I really just need your phone number/URL and whatever statement/acct numbers are required to identify this bill.
I’ll see your “alot” and raise you “alright”.
(Ironically, my tablet auto-corrected “alot” to “a lot”. So why doesn’t that always happen?)
Ahem,
Autocorrect doesn’t change “alright” but it does “alot.” Alright is a word and it doesn’t look wrong to me.