What do students learn today in high school English?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been teaching a class of paralegal students lately. My students are in their late teens and early twenties. Not too far out of high school, in other words.

We always have a coffee break during class, and when I returned from such a break recently, the students were talking about something involving names and cats. As I often join in with their break-time conversations, I waited for a suitable break, and then said,

The naming of cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have three different names.

I was greeted with blank stares and silence. “You’ve never heard that before?” I asked. A forest of headshakes greeted my question.

“T.S. Eliot? Old Possum’s Book of Impractical Cats? The book on which the musical “Cats” was based?”

More headshakes. I tried again, with a few familiar quotations from literature: Kipling, Donne, Dickens, Wordsworth. No recognition.

“Okay, so what did you guys study in high school English?”

The only answer that came was “Shakespeare.” But I knew there had to be more; they just won’t admit it. I’ve already proven myself to be ancient by the fact that I have no idea of the music they talk about on breaks, which is why they may not want to mention their high school English-class experiences.

Of course, this is not an English class, and I made it clear to the students that we’re just having a friendly break-time conversation that will not affect their marks. But I also said that I was surprised that they had never heard of Eliot, Donne, and Kipling.

So, I’m turning to the Dope. My question to high school English teachers and parents of high schoolers: what do your kids study in high school English nowadays?

2

I couldn’t have cited the passage, though I have a slight familiarity with Eliot’s cat book.

That is to say, I knew vaguely that Eliot had written a cat book.

Of course, I’m not who the OP is looking for, since I have no children and my last English class was 25 years ago.

3

There was an article in the Sunday New York Times about this recently. Secondary school students taking English read a lot more nonfiction now. They still read Twain, but they also read Supreme Court opinions and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail".
Here’s the link: June 19: English Class in Common Core Era: ‘Tom Sawyer’ and Court Opinions - The New York Times

4

My son was a junior this past year. Some of the things they read second semester:

Emerson and Thoreau
Into the Wild
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Also, some information about the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t remember if it was a book or essay, but they did a presentation on it.
They read a lot of articles, essays and other things that aren’t “books”.

The theme for the year was “The American Dream” and everything they read and wrote about had to do with that subject.

5

Hey Spoons.

I don’t think I’m THAT much younger than you, but in Ontario I never learned any of your quoted authors in high school. Shakespeare was about as … sophisticated as we got.

I know some Dickens, but mainly because of movies.

Hey, don’t blame me. That’s what the curriculum called for.

6

I appreciate the answers so far, and thank the contributors.

However, I am not in the United States, so answers involving US documents (the Declaration of Independence) and other similar American patriotic themes, won’t help me much. For example, the following (and I thank Rhiannon for her contribution) won’t really answer my question:

Rhiannon, with all due respect, we’re dealing with Canadians here, though I owe you thanks for your contribution, as it allows me to narrow my original question.

If we stick to “English literature,” that being defined as “literature [i.e. fiction or poetry] first published in English,” no matter in which English-speaking country it came from and when; can we come up with a list of authors and works that I can reasonably expect my students to know?

7

Sadly (for you) Leaffan, but luckily (for me), any meeting over beer will consist mainly of poetry quotations I learned in high school. Be prepared. :smiley:

8

The Boy would have been exposed to Eliot (in some form) as a freshman in high school - Shakespeare and Dickens and Chaucer and Wilde and such in the ninth grade (Brit Lit,) and World Lit in tenth grade - Tolstoy and Khaled Hosseini and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a wide range of authors who aren’t British or American, then American Literature in eleventh - Hawthorne and Mark Twain and Maya Angelou and so forth. I don’t remember how much they concentrated on TS Eliot back in freshman English - it was his class, not mine - but I do remember how much the Boy hated the poetry bits. Girl 2.0 will take the same freshman English class this year, and will have a totally different experience, and will fall in love with Eliot’s cats. The Boy was born to be an engineer, and the girl has the soul of a poet.

And that really might answer your question: many of your students may have been exposed to authors, but many won’t have given a rip. My own budding engineer has certainly read John Donne, made a good grade on that test, and then promptly cleared that memory cache, because it’s not all that important to him to ponder whether the bell tolls for him. He can recite a bit of Shakespeare, because he’s been a drama student for 3 years and has performed in a couple of the Bard’s plays. (Ditto Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” Clare Booth Luce’s “The Women,” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”) It’s probably not about whether your students have been exposed to a particular author, but whether they cared enough to retain that information!

9

This isn’t a “today” question, but a question for the times. Think of it like this: how many times do people say about maths, “Oh, I’ll never use this in my lifetime,” and then promptly forget it after passing their class?

Literature is much the same for lots of people. Sure, we’ll remember Shakespeare because although we design cars and bridges and public works, we’ll look like idiots if we don’t know about Romeo and Juliet. There’s no pressure to know about Donne, Wordsworth, Dickens, unless you work at Starbuck’s.

Wait, Dickens, you said? What a bunch of idiots. He’s definitely up there in literature of a defining nature. I would expect them to know about the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” guy, too (I can’t remember his name presently, but he’s important enough to know, too).

10

No, because it doesn’t work that way–especially in a state which is adopting the CCS. Every district–nay, every teacher–is going to have a different list. What you can do is go to the web page of any given state’s department of education and see some texts which are provided as examples that satisfy the CCS.

The idea of a cannon for three years of high school education isn’t that realistic anyway. Your Eliot would just push out someone else’s Marlowe, etc.

11

The “Two roads diverged” poet was Robert Frost. The poem is “The Road Not Taken.”

No worries–Robert Frost is a favourite. I have a number of his committed to memory.

Maybe that’s the problem–I had to learn poems by heart in school. Do they do that nowadays?

12

Graduated HS in 2003, never read any of the stuff mentioned by the OP. And even if I had, would certainly not have been likely to recognize random quotes from it.

13

OK. Here goes. I’m going to try to recall the soliloquy from MacBeth that I was required to memorize in grade 10.

I just Googled it, and I guess I didn’t do too bad. When the class was due to present this I was sick and wasn’t at school, so the teacher made me present it the next day. I had no idea what other kids did, but I went up in front of the class and truly acted out the scene, with intonations, gesticulations, and full-blown Shakespearean emotion.

The class was amazed and my teacher praised me enormously. I learned later that everyone else just got up and monotonously recited what they could remember.

I guess I’m kinda highjacking this, eh?

14

Likewise, I didn’t study any of those authors in my Canadian high school English classes (and especially not any poetry).

I remember Shakespeare (Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, etc.) and To Kill a Mockingbird, The Chosen, and Lord of the Flies (and other such modern classic novels).

The weirdest thing we studied was the (tele)play “Flight Into Danger” that the movie “Airplane!” was based on.

15

That sounds about right, but are you sure you’re not thinking about “No Highway” by Nevil Shute, for the airplane novel?

16

Re the thread title: they don’t diagram sentences anymore, that’s for sure. Subject-verb agreement is a thing of the past. I even hear/read mistakes on NPR and in the New York Times.

17

I graduated too long ago to be of any help answering your question, so I texted a friend and asked her, “During high school, what literature/authors did they have you study in English?” She is 25 years old, so I can’t imagine that’s too far off your target group.

Her answer:

When prompted with, “Lord of the Flies?” she immediately came back with “William Golding!!” She has told me before that English was one of her favorite classes, so she may have retained more than most.

18

Don’t high school courses teach for assessment tests?

19

Back in prehistoric days when I was in high school and the year after graduation, I had friends who could recite poetry, just like that. Robert Frost, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman. I was inspired to try and memorize some poetry myself, or just read some poetry just for the heck of it. Back then we had a lot more time to pursue such interests, not having cell phones. I memorized ‘The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere’!

20

In my son’s sophomore year last year they did To Kill A Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, The Time Machine and then they had to select a non-fiction book from a list and mine did The Tipping Point.

Someone mentioned Kipling above. He hasn’t had it assigned to him although he did once mention seeing the Disney “classic” cartoon and I gave him a copy of The Jungle Book which he agreed was infinitely more awesome in its depiction of Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa and the rest.