I don’t think we diagrammed a sentence past my freshman year. We read Tennessee Williams (the Glass Menagerie and a Streetcar Named Desire) and Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Ceasar, King Lear). I remember thinking John Milton must have been a real asshole and Thoreau sounded like a leech and a bum. (I still don’t care much for Milton or the Transcendentalists). Chaucer I remember. I don’t remember doing a lot of poetry in high school, but we did have to create a poetry notebook one year and I used my mother’s old college anthology which is when I discovered I like Housman’s gloomy outlook. Most of what I remember is what I read on my own.
The thing is, this was back in the late 70’s. I guarantee you that half of the people I went to school with don’t remember anything we read. There are people who don’t absorb and don’t want to absorb books or literature that way. It was that way back then and it’s that way now and it was before.
Jean Kerr wrote an article called “The Children’s Hour after Hour after Hour” about teaching her children poetry because she wanted them to know and understand it. That was in the early 50’s that she was saying the same thing: how can they not know this stuff?
I graduated from high school 31 years ago and I was in honors English for at least some of the time. We read (mixing authors and titles) Shakespeare, Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen (both of these were really boring), Ethan Frome, Moby Dick (also both deadly dull), Billy Budd (the gay subtext seemed obvious to us, but the teacher denied it was present) and Dickens. Unlike some of the other nineteenth century literature, I generally enjoyed the Dickens, particularly when we read A Tale of Two Cities in junior high school (perhaps because it’s bloody). And because it was honors English, I never read some of the old high school standbys like To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye.
I also took an International Baccalaureate English class once and that emphasized South American literature to a certain extent. And I remember reading an analysis of the Gettysburg Address and explaining the use of triple phrases in it.
I would have thought it’d be more appropriate to read the things you mention in an American History class.
From your link:
I have read somewhere that some schools have misunderstood this criterion and made 70 percent of the reading in English classes be nonfiction, when it actually calls for 70 percent of all readings for all classes to be nonfiction.
A canon? I doubt it. There’s been resistance to “teaching the canon” (especially if it’s all “dead white males”) for quite some time now.
Yes: don’t confuse what people learn with what they remember learning.
Yes. I have two brothers who teach high school English, and at least one of them complains that, in recent years, he’s had less freedom to really teach, because there’s been more pressure to teach to the test and follow a formula.
I graduated 2004. I still have some of my old high school English essays. Looks like we studied Lord Byron, Coleridge, Keats, William Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost, Shelley, and T.S. Eliot. Would I remember a random quote? Not unless it was a super famous one, like “water, water, everywhere…” or something from The Second Coming, or Ozymandias.
I graduated from high school in 1987, I studied, I loved literature. I’m pretty sure that today, most of the poetry I could quote is Ogden Nash! Memorizing literature just wasn’t the thing in my school system ('tho I can still recite the preamble to the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address, both learned in seventh grade.) Also, I remember my teachers griping about “teaching the test,” various “new” and annoying bureaucratic paradigms that had to be followed - Quality Basic Education is the only name I remember, but there were others - and so forth.
I think it’s reasonable to expect young adults seeking professional educations to know who the great authors are, but not necessarily to recognize any except the quotes that have worked their way into everyday references - “to be or not to be,” “for whom the bell tolls,” etc.
I was in high school 1966-1969. I’ll be damned if I can remember anything I studied, except very superficially the names of a few books.
Tale of Two Cities, Lord of the Flies and Catch-22. Yeah, maybe a bit of Shakespeare I’m sure but I sure don’t remember what. Lots of short stories.
Oh yeah, To Kill A Mockingbird fer sure.
Mostly we read anthologies of short stories, and all we actually had to learn about them was memorize all the titles and their authors. The only memorable one, perhaps, was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by Whatshisname.
And that mushy story about the girl who went ice skating on a frozen lake and fell in love with a boy she met there and then sat by the phone waiting for him to call but he never did. A gay friend of mine once told me that the first time he knew he was gay was after he read that story and the teacher asked the class “Who liked that story” and ALL the girls raised their hands and he was the only male who did.
Well, that’s a large part of the motivation behind the Common Core, which stresses competencies that generalize, rather than memorizing and regurgitating specific things. That’s usually not an efficient way to engage cognitive growth, and is only a small part of what workforce conditions require. I would say that this applies just as much to great works of literature. It may be fun (for some) to memorize them, but that shouldn’t be the goal of high schools. As for a cannon, as I mentioned above, it’s not really a practical goal–forcing a long list of works on students is just as likely to backfire. (And I say this as someone who went on to major in English lit at Berkeley.)
You know, I’ve got a Ph.D. in English literature, and I wouldn’t have recognized that Eliot quote (although it’s possible that I could have made an educated guess). Light verse isn’t typically taught in lit classes; if they’d encountered any Eliot, I’d expect it to be “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which hits the sweet spot between serious and accessible.
Judging by what I’ve seen as an AP exam reader, novels and plays that seem to be widely taught at the high school level include The Great Gatsby, Crime and Punishment, A Streetcar Named Desire, Heart of Darkness, and Huckleberry Finn, as well as some more contemporary works such as Beloved and The Kite Runner. And lots and lots of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet and Macbeth.
I’m less sure about poetry, since writing about a poem is not usually an option for the free-response AP exam questions, but based on my own high school experiences, I’d expect lots of the more accessible nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets (Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes), maybe some of the Romantics, almost certainly not Kipling, who’s no longer part of the canon in the ways he might have been a few generations ago. Probably not Donne, either – I love him, but the vocabulary and wordplay are hard enough for my college students to wrap their heads around, and I’d imagine he’d be a lot harder to teach in high school, especially since most of his poetry is openly sexual or openly religious or both, and high schools tend to have a hair-trigger response to parental complaints.
I graduated in Ontario in '99 and poetry, if covered at all, was a one or two week topic in English classes. And focused on composition, not memorizing famous works.
We would study one Shakespearian play, one novel in common, a bunch of short stories, and a novel we would chose from a list to study independantly.
I’d recognize names of the poets mentioned so far from examples I read in class (except Donne), but it’s pretty unlikely that I’d have been able to correctly identify the author of a randomly quoted part of their works.
Heck, one of my English lit courses as a major in college was specifically on Eliot, Auden, and Hopkins, and we didn’t discuss Old Possum’s Book of Impractical Cats. (That said, I recognize the quote, or at least the first line, probably from reading somewhere that Cats was inspired by an Eliot work.) I don’t recall discussing any Eliot in high school, except maybe “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But we did a spell of Frost, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Byron, William Blake, that sort of stuff back in the early 90s. Don’t recall doing Kipling, though. No memorization ever. The only time I recall memorizing anything was for a grammar school play.
I have a California Teaching Credential in English, and the only time the OP’s quote would have come up is if some student had asked about the origin of the single worst assault on American Musical Theater in the last 100 years.
At my high school, the answers would be wildly different depending on which track you’re talking about (remedial, standard or honors/AP). I have no clue what the other two read, but I remember at the time being surprised at HOW completely different each one was.
Back when I was in high school, the Eliot we got was “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men”. Which is a real shame, because Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a lot more fun, and more likely to hook kids on poetry.
Blame Weber for that, not Eliot. The stage show is a butchery of the original work.
I know a couple of kids who studied Shakespeare <i>in translation</i>. They had the original text in parallel, in case they wanted to refer to it, but the main text was in modern english.
(And yes, I was familiar with those older texts where a modern english translation was provided. This was the other way around)
step back and consider the breadth and depth of English literature out there. it is virtually impossible for students to read and remember even a significant fraction of it, especially if it’s not really one of their interests. Schools/teachers have to choose what they’ll present in classes. So to answer your question:
The answer is “Something different than what you studied in high school.”
I’ve never understood how people get locked into a mindset of how things were when they were kids was perfect and anything done differently now is inferior.
This was my point (two times above). High schools can’t possibly include every work ever considered “great” literature in their curriculum. Rather, their objective–at least with the Common Core–is to instill the student with the skills to apperceive why we consider any given work great.
Memorizing things is not a very practical way to do that, for the vast majority of learners.
