Go read Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren. It isn’t about high school specifically, but it will wake you up to the reality of a teacher’s workload, and how little time they actually spend teaching as opposed to babysitting, discipline, and other “minor” activities.
If I had done that, the title of the OP would have had a different meaning than it currently does. I did not want to ask what the worst subject is; I wanted to ask which subject is taught worse than all other subjects.
Do you have a suggestion that is concise and yet doesn’t change the meaning of the statement?
How about “Which school subject is taught least adequately?”
It owns its own title. I could have said, “heading of the post”. Can’t anything of the form “X of the Y” be rephrased as “Y’s X”? For example, “dog of my son” can be rewritten as “my son’s dog”. How is “heading of the post” rephrased as “post’s heading” any different?
I’m asking this in all honesty. If I’ve made a mistake, I would like to know it.
(An aside: I know you probably didn’t mean to be condescending, but please don’t call me “hon”. I find it very matronizing.)
I don’t mean to be rude, but “Duh!” 
What is incorrect about its structure? Why is that structure incorrect?
I wear leather for no person! I will wear the kneeguards, although I’m suspicious of their possible utility. 
BK, I can’t speak for Byzantine, but here’s the problem with the subject line:
“Worst” is the superlative form of “bad,” which is an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns. You’re using “worst” to modify “taught,” which is a verb. You need to use an adverb instead.
I agree with you on “post’s heading,” BTW. An inanimate object can possess something.
An excellent suggestion Fretful Porpentine!
I wonder, however, if “least adequately” makes sense. I understand “adequate” to mean “fulfills minimum requirements”. If that is the word’s meaning, then I don’t think “least adequately” holds any meaning. Either something fulfills the minimum requirements, or it does not. If it does, it is adequate; if it does not, it is not adequate.
That is, “least adequately” would require comparing a set of states by some criteria to decide which is “least”. But the requirements for determining adequacy can only be used for determining adequacy. What criteria are used for determining “least”? Something outside of the system for determining adequacy must be used, and therefore one couldn’t rightfully call it “least adequately”. It would more properly be termed “least X adequate state” or something similar. For example, “least pleasant adequate state”.
In other words, “least adequately” tries to make a continuum out of a discrete set of states.
Yes, I know that everyone knows what “least adequately” means. But everyone knows what “taught worst” means as well.
OK. How about this:
Which school subject is worst-taught?
Or even better:
What is the worst-taught school subject?
To answer the OP, my first thought was history as well, for all the reasons mentioned (especially the one about it typically being taught by a coach).
I would also add another reason (although it’s really a reason why history is the worst-learned subject) - most children don’t have a sense of a personal history, much less a larger, shared history. It’s not until we realize we are part of a much larger, complicated world that we understand and appreciate the significance of how that which came before affects that which we are experiencing now.
How about:
“With respect to the subjects presented in school, which is taught with the least skill?”
or
“School Subjects: Which one is the most poorly presented to students?”
Why not? Other than snobbery.
Remember, critics of the time thought Moby Dick was a failed potboiler of a novel. And they thought Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth was the greatest American novelist of the 19th century.
That’s still just bullshit. It’s like looking at an inkblot and saying it’s really a picture of something. You are the one doing all the interpretation and on that basis, any work of literature can mean anything you choose to want it to mean, just so long as you can rationalize your own misperceptions. At the most, Fiedler’s thesis is best stated “Looking at the work through my own prejudices and biases, I can justify the idea that I can find a homoerotic ‘dark other’ if I look hard enough.” That’s trivial and only shows the biases of the critic, not the meaning of the work.
It’s only homoerotic because of you think it is. Melville didn’t think it so, and neither did the readers when the book came out, since at the time two people could share a bed without any sexual implications whatsoever. If you claim it’s homoerotic, you are assuming it was written with you and other 20th century readers in mind. That’s obviously not the case; no one could anticipate how succeeding generations would perceive something.
Why is your interpretation more important than the author’s? Who appointed you the arbiter of what the work is about?
You are now claiming to be a psychologist. Certainly there are subtexts and unconscious motivations in work, but you cannot know what they are by just reading the text. You need to know the history of the author and make a correlation. If you just read your own interpretation into the text your working in a vacuum and are doing nothing but reinforcing your own biases and prejudices.
Nabokov can see the unconscious motivations in his work since he knows something of what went into it. But for anyone else to claim unconscious motivation, they need to show something more than just what they can find in the text. The reader’s biases are not a basis for any meaninful interpretation.
You know, I really would like an explanation of what’s incorrect about the thread title too.
I’m taking a grammar course right now against my will. We were taught that most words can take on more than one part of speech. Therefore, worst could be an adjective OR an adverb. I could be wrong, since it’s tough as hell not to fall asleep in that class, but that’s the understanding I came away with. gasp OH NO! I ended a sentence with a preposition! [Mr. Burns voice] Release the hounds! [/Mr. Burns voice]
I propose a system in which anything that sounds right is right. In my system, the title of the thread would be fine, but a sentence like “We be cuttin’ up” would cause the speaker to be dragged out into the street and shot.
I know that the “me too” posts aren’t encouraged, but I wanted to say a big AMEN to Reality Chuck’s last post.
Exactly what I’ve always thought about reader interpretation.
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Just as “Dogs Playing Poker” or “Elvis on Black Velvet” is not visual art. Accusation of snobbery is the last resort of the aesthetically challenged. Since when is discrimination in artistic taste snobbery? I had this same discussion with my brother this past weekend, and he made the same logical fallacy; assumption that professional and aesthetic judgement was the same as personal taste. I personally can’t stand much of Fitzgerald or Toni Morrison, but I will admit their aesthetic prowess. They’re both excellent writers of depth and meaning, but they don’t speak to me. Others who speak to me may not be writers of depth and meaning.
That would be the British critics, and it was due to the loss of the plate for the last page (in which Ishmael is shown alive on the coffin) in shipping.
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That’s still just bullshit. It’s like looking at an inkblot and saying it’s really a picture of something. You are the one doing all the interpretation and on that basis, any work of literature can mean anything you choose to want it to mean, just so long as you can rationalize your own misperceptions. At the most, Fiedler’s thesis is best stated “Looking at the work through my own prejudices and biases, I can justify the idea that I can find a homoerotic ‘dark other’ if I look hard enough.” That’s trivial and only shows the biases of the critic, not the meaning of the work.
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Did you read the book, or even the chapters on the “dark other” in the short time it took you to reply? Fiedler’s thesis is that American fiction, more than any other, explores the loss of innocence that American society pretends never to have lost. We can start another thread on this one, and I’ll run over to my office to get my well-thumbed copy of the book. We can quote and misquote to our hearts’ contents. But talk to someone who’s versed in the insides of the books instead of the sticker on the outsides before you use him/her as a source.
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It’s only homoerotic because of you think it is. Melville didn’t think it so, and neither did the readers when the book came out, since at the time two people could share a bed without any sexual implications whatsoever. If you claim it’s homoerotic, you are assuming it was written with you and other 20th century readers in mind. That’s obviously not the case; no one could anticipate how succeeding generations would perceive something.
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Actually, I was seconding Fiedler. Melville didn’t think so? Cite that for me, please. There were no homosexuals in 18th Century America? Really? Wow. Tell that to Whitman when you see him, would you? You’re assuming a sexual innocence in our ancestors that didn’t exist; there were homosexuals back then–it’s not a 20th (or 21st, for that matter) Century phenomenon.
If you’d finished reading my post, you would have seen that I said, “Pure authorial intent is a dead critical style, as is pure reader-response. But there is a happy medium between the two.”
You may think that Stephen King is the lord of literature for all I care. You may think that Oprah’s book club is the end-all and be-all of what’s worth reading. But the purpose of the academic literary critic is to decide what is and what isn’t aesthetically artistic, to prove what the author may or may not have intentionally put in the text. In Appel’s annotations to Nabokov’s Lolita, Nabokov denies that the phrase “under the shadow of red rocks” has anything to do with Eliot’s “The WasteLand.” Bullshit. Either he won’t admit it, or he wasn’t consciously thinking of it at the time, but you can’t say “shadow” and “red rocks” without invoking Eliot. Check out (hell, why am I saying this–you didn’t bother to read Fiedler before responding) David Cowart’s Literary Symbiosis for other ideas in conscious and subconscious intertextuality.
Knowing that Nabokov was familiar with Eliot (as he was familiar with damn near every other good writer in the world), we can assume that, despite his personal denial, Eliot was an influence on the novel. In fact, he admits other influences from time to time, just not that one. Nabokov’s history and biography (to continue with my example and Proustian parentheses) add to the interpretation of Lolita, but do not limit it. By taking a purely authorial-intent point of view, you’re committing the same fallacy as the purely reader-response readers.