Let’s see, things I really enjoyed from HighSchool English classes: Lord of the Flies by Golding Animal Farm by Orwell Sons & Lovers by Lawrence, but I’d replace this with Lady Chatterly’s Lover, good call Sunrazor.
My own adds: Player of Games by Iain M. Banks The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Also one of Angela Carter’s short story collections or novels(Bloody Chamber? Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann? ) or a Le Guin collection. One that includes The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, definitely. Lots of material there for discussion
I would also definitely have my kids read from their choice of Watchmen or Sandman.
Where the hell were you when I was taking Lit courses in the 70’s? Arggghhh, why didn’t you save me from the glurge of “A Separate Peace”? And no, I don’t have flies in my eyes, ohh, but wait, do I have apples in my cheeks?
I love to read more than just about any other activity… and yet I cannot express my loathing for A Separate Peace. It was just that boring and awful. Why do teachers make students read crap like that? Are they TRYING to make kids hate reading?
Yes they do. Most schools have a year of British Lit and a year of American lit: if they are AP courses, one year is Language and Composition, focusing on rhetoric and non-fiction and the other is Language and literature, and focuses on the Great Books.
I am an English teacher, and lucky enough to teach in a district that gives me a great deal of latitude on picking books. I teach Junior AP English, which is a hybrid between an American Lit survey and AP Language and Composition. Fiction in my class is mostly a way to talk about ideas–it’s a primary source to better understand the evolving American folkgeist.
I teach:
The Princess Bride as summer reading–fun, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs–introduction to issues of race, gender, and class in American society. Scarlet Letter Introduction to American Romanticism. Huck Finn American Realism. And I teach a very cynical Huck Finn.
“Maggie” by Stephen Crane. American Naturalism. The Great Gatsby Modernism.
In all of these, with the possible exception of The Scarlet Letter, we are talking about race, gender and class more than we are talking about charecter and mood and setting. The Scarlet Letter is an exception because you have to understand the Romantic sensibility it embodies in order to understand the rest of American Literature, as the rest of American lit is really a reaction to those Romantic ideals. And even then we talk about how Romanticism evolved along with the changing roles of women and the growth of the middle class.
We also read LOTS of short works of non-fiction–the obvious things, like excerpts from Thoreau and Emerson, and more obscure works. Some favorites include: John Adams, Douglas MacArthur, bell hooks, Susan B. Anthony, Rachel Carson, W.E. B. DeBois, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hazlitt, Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Jack London, Herman Melville, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allen Poe, Ronald Reagan, Mary Rowlandson, Shel Silverstein, Socrates, Gary Soto, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, et al.
I also try to use a lot of visual art, even though I am totally a verbal person. But I got us some big coffee table books of American artists and we look at paintings by George Bellows, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Cole, Charles Demuth, Ralph Earl, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Charles Sheeler, and others.
I am not actually trying to make anyone fall in love with reading fiction. I don’t really care if they do. I am trying to make them fall in love with arguement and with critical thinking, with ideas, with sophisticated, nuanced thought. But that’s what makes Language and Composition different from the other 11 years of English they get.
Damn, I’d be loving your class, although I never did get into Watership Down, I knew enough about it to win the last piece of the pie in a Trivial Pursuit game w/ it!!! For some reason, even though I’d never read it, I knew it was about rabbits, and honest to god, I will never forget the look on my (now ex) brother-in-law’s face when I “pulled that out of my ying-yang”, in his words…ha!
With a few exceptions, I have read most of what’s been mentioned in high school English classes.
I assumed people would be trying to think out of the box and assign more unlikely stuff, particularly writing that’s more recent and more post-modern. I mean, all the books in this thread are classics and definitely worth reading, so I can’t really argue with them, but if it was my class, my students would get more contemporary reading.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. A story that defined badass for a generation, and an exemplar of the sarcastic Palahniuk writing style that is influencing huge numbers of young writers right now.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. I read this book in 4th grade and I think everyone should read it. It’s extremely complicated and I think a lot of students would get lost/bored, but it has a great cast of memorable characters and a very interesting use of narrative.
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Already a classic, there’s absolutely no reason why Thompson should not be taught in English classes. His work was hugely influential, and he pioneered a journalism style unlike anything before it. His writing style is fascinating to read, both hilarious and horrifying. And it’s a great example of the influence of drugs on artistic media - why should that concept be ignored? It’s just part of life.
I Am Charlotte Simmons and Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe gets lumped in with Thompson as a “new journalist,” but his work is a whole other animal stylistically and in terms of the way his opinions color the writing. Charlotte Simmons lets us see the raunchy world of youth culture through the eyes of an old man (I think I might be one of the only people who picked up on the significance of the title - Tom Wolfe IS Charlotte Simmons; that’s the point - he is expressing his own views through her character.) Hooking Up contains some amazing writing about the way the internet and neuroscience are changing human culture. Fascinating and uncompromisingly sarcastic.
I would not inflict Camus on anyone. I had to read his crap for Freshman English in college and the memory still turns my stomach 40 years later.
If I were teaching the class, I’d give them a list with around 50 titles on it and tell them to pick 10, read them and turn in a one-page report on each book. Since each book would be selected from my own personal library, I would know from the report whether or not they had read it. The list would have a mixture of classic, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery and history.
Authors included, among others:
Robert Heinlein
Terry Pratchett
J. A. Jance
Dashiel Hammet
Dick Francis
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
Isaac Asimov
Jonathon Kellerman
Parke Godwin
I’m prejudiced here, because as far as I’m concerned, I had the best high school English class ever–11th grade, AP Literature. I always liked to read, but I owe my (I hope good) taste in literature and ability to write coherently and meaningfully to that one class. I also can’t remember hating any of the things we read there–they were all great, solid pieces of literature, and they served me well then and after.
So, for the format of the class’s writing, I have to go like this–every week (every single week!), a 500-word out-of-class essay on a given question, and an in-class essay on a given question. This is so the students learn both to think about a problem and tweak a short essay, and to sit down and get their thoughts onto paper without hesitation.
The rest of the class time will be spent going through the class readings, page by page, with the instructor pointing out what’s important–famous passages, important plot points, interpretation of characters’ actions, symbolism–and the students chiming in when they have something to say. I’m sorry, you cannot just tell high school students to read a book and write a report with no outside input! This is precisely the age when they need to be smacked upside the head and made to understand that there’s more to it than just an interesting story.
For the readings, I’m perfectly happy to use the same books and plays… with some notes at the end.
Novels 1984
Jane Eyre
Great Expectations*
Heart of Darkness
Lord of the Flies
The Great Gatsby*
Drama Hamlet
MacBeth
The Glass Menagerie
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Short stories & poetry selected from a reader, and going all over the place–countries, eras, etc.
About Jane Eyre: in college, I found out that Jane Eyre is the kindergarten of the Bronte novels; I think that Villette is far more sophisticated, interesting, and plain old titillating… but it’s also much longer and that much harder to grasp. A book for college, not high school.
About Great Expectations: this falls nicely near the middle of the Dickens canon, meaning that it can appeal to the two principal kinds of people in the world, those who like early Dickens and those who like late Dickens. It also gets exponentially better each time it is read, so it’s good to get the kids started on it now. Except for maybe Oliver Twist, it is the most widely recognized Dickens novel, so they get some culture points for having read it. I myself FAR prefer Our Mutual Friend, but recognize that it is complicated and damned long–also a book for college and not high school.
A lot of the philosophy behind The Canon as represented in hs English reading lists is teaching cultural literacy. Things like Canterbury Tales and the Inferno (to take a couple of selections from my own list) are still referenced in modern culture and most people are expected to know what they mean. (When’s the last time you consigned someone to the ninth circle of Hell, for example? I did it just the other day.) That was the reasoning behind the “classic” selections on my own list. That and Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale are excuses to read dirty stories in class.
I’m currently a grad student in multicultural literature, so a lot of my list also came from teaching a greater multicultural awareness in modern American society. My high school was pretty forward thinking for the 90s because it had a specific Black Lit elective. Most others in the area didn’t. I find most canonical American literature dull and preachy, hence why I picked a couple of more modern things for my eleventh grade list and really went to town on the tenth grade list. There’s more to the world than the Northern Hemisphere and I wish the textbooks and anthologies reflected it.
Anyway, that’s my pedagogical reasoning. Do with it what you will.
I think that kids who love to read will more likely seek out cultural literacy on their own, or in college. Getting HS kids to love reading is the stumbling block, and why I would choose more enjoyable books over “classics” in an effort to not make reading a boring chore and reinforcing their notion that reading sucks.
There are certain books that you need to read as a teenager. Jack Kerouac bugs the shit out of me now, but I loved him in high school. Books about alienation and the absurd are especially resonant. My list would include Kerouac’s On the Road, Camus’s The Plague * or The Stranger, Catch-22, something by Vonnegut, Sartre’s No Exit, Heart of Darkness * and The Great Gatsby. Also Their Eyes Were Watching God, simply because it’s a good book and I like it.
Academically, I’m a conservative. I believe in the canon, though I think it can be expanded. Students will discover Pratchett and Palahniuk on their own, but they’re less likely to pick up Camus or Sartre just for kicks.
Manda JO’s class sounds awesome and I wish I’d been able to take it in high school.
I think it is extremely important to convince students that reading is not meant to be a hideous drag. I also think it is really important that a high school graduate has some clue about ‘cultural literacy’ as others have said.
I think at least one book a quarter would have to be chosen by the student on a topic they were interested in, and one book should be from ‘the canon’.
One thing that would have been great in in my HS English classes is if we had read some more ‘classic’ non-fiction (my school for reasons unknown did not have AP Lang and Comp which was a shame).
I agree with Mando Jo that critical thinking is the most important thing HS students can learn from discussing literature.
The Jungle
The Pearl
More Steinbeck, either Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden
The Good Earth
The Stranger
Lord of the Flies
ETA - Invisible Man
NO Dostoyevsky or Dickens
I’d also like to put together a big (but not huge) list of good contemporary literature, and at that point let the students choose, and have their reaction papers reflect their knowledge of canonical literature. I would definitely not include any formulaic series novels on this list. I enjoy reading some series (heck, I’m current on Sue Grafton!) but that is not literature to me.
On the contemporary list I would include some Barbara Kingsolver, Prep, The Hobbit, Emperor of Ocean Park, The Corrections, Michener (Hawaii or The Source or Chesapeake), the Color Purple, some Toni Morrison, Arturo Perez-Reverte…
I disliked English classes by 10th grade, and hated mine in 11th and 12th grade, but I love to read and most of the stuff we read was okay as far as I was concerned. My problem was 99% with the way we were taught the material, not the material itself. Reading Wuthering Heights, The Plague, Heart of Darkness, etc wasn’t bad, but having to do the bullshit “psychoanalytic,” “Marxist,” “feminist,” “deconstructions” of it ruined any potential they might have had. I had such a miserable time in my AP English course that I was tempted to become an English teacher because I thought the potential of the course was wasted so thoroughly. How’s that for a subversion of the standard paradigm, Mrs. I?
Anyway, the only stuff we read that I actually considered unpleasant to read was the Toni Morrison. I would appreciate 8675309 elaborating on his/her choice of Beloved, because we read that and Sula and I can’t say a single one of us (pretty bright, Englishy kids) either enjoyed them or even “got” them.
As for The Good Earth, it’s been too long since I read it for me to really criticize, but I would just go ahead and add an actual piece of Chinese literature instead. They do have some good stuff of their own.
:mad: 
:rolleyes: