Apparently there’s a phenomenon in American high schools right now of not assigning full novels to students, but only having them read excerpts. I graduated a decade ago, and I distinctly remember us reading Gatsby and Slaughterhouse Five. What novels, if any, were you made to read in high school?
>>24951097Slaughterhouse Five, Great Gatsby, Tale of Two Cities, a few Shakespeare plays, a few really awful contemporary lit novels, As I Lay Dying, Moby Dick, a number of other ones I can't remember. Senior year was pretty much all poetry and for that we did read from anthologies instead of published poetry books. Freshman year was the only year they focused on essays over novels but we always read complete works as opposed to excerpts.
>>24951097The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice & Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Old Man and the Sea, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Ethan Frome, The Call of the Wild... That's what I remember, but I might be mixing middle and high school together. Of all those, Hawthorne and Steinbeck are far and away the best.>Where Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style,--a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated:--a man who means no meanings. But there is no man, in whom humor and love, like mountain peaks, soar to such a rapt height, as to receive the irradiations of the upper skies;--there is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius; no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet. Or, love and humor are only the eyes, through which such an intellect views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength.>In treating of Hawthorne, or rather of Hawthorne in his writings (for I never saw the man; and in the chances of a quiet plantation life, remote from his haunts, perhaps never shall) in treating of his works, I say, I have thus far omitted all mention of his "Twice Told Tales," and "Scarlet Letter." Both are excellent, but full of such manifold, strange and diffusive beauties, that time would all but fail me, to point the half of them out. But there are things in those two books, which, had they been written in England a century ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne had utterly displaced many of the bright names we now revere on authority. But I content to leave Hawthorne to himself, and to the infallible finding of posterity; and however great may be the praise I have bestowed upon him, I feel, that in so doing, I have more served and honored myself, than him. For at bottom, great excellence is praise enough to itself; but the feeling of a sincere and appreciative love and admiration towards it, this is relieved by utterance; and warm, honest praise ever leaves a pleasant flavor in the mouth; and it is an honorable thing to confess to what is honorable in others.
>>24951097This is what I remember reading. I'm sure there were a few others.>To Kill a Mockingbird>Lord of the Flies>Frankenstein>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer>1984>The Jungle, Sinclair>The Great Gatsby>The Trial>My Antonia, Cathar>Out Stealing Horses, Petterson>Harrison Bergeron>The Lottery>The Metamorphosis>A&P>The Tell-Tale Heart>The Cask of Amontillado>The Yellow Wallpaper>A bit of Emily Dickinson>A bit of William Blake
>>24951097I graduated more than a decade ago. I went to two schools -- one a public school that was supposedly the best in our district, and the other a charter school. At the public school, we only read excerpts. I think we read one short story -- The Scarlet Ibis -- and a few poems.My second school was much better and we'd usually read eight to ten books a year, along with a lot of poetry, essays, and short stories.Even college classes don't require full books anymore. It's embarrassing to compare a syllabus from 2025 with one from 1985.
>>24951097we were supposed to, but virtually no one actually fully read the books
i think it was a mix of excerpts and full, the excerpts were more on the short side not like half the book, this is ages ago. same goes for college but with novels there i think it was full
>>24951097My english education was almost completely worthless with the notable exceptions of Of Mice and Men and Macbeth which I quite enjoyed. However I already read Of Mice and Men before we did it in class so that doesn't count either. Essentially what I'm getting at is the only redeemable part of my english education was getting to watch Polanski's Macbeth as a class
>>24951097The smart kids read the entire thing and everyone else used CliffsNotes. I think people are rewriting reality to sell a story about “kids these days”. Maybe there are fewer smart kids or the dumb ones got dumber. But let’s not fucking pretend everyone did the work 40 years ago.
>The Catcher in the Rye>To Kill a Mockingbird>1984>Beowulf>Oedipus Trilogy>Siddhartha>A Streetcar Named Desire>Of Mice and Men>Romeo and Juliet>A Midsummer Night's Dream>Othello>The Outsiders>The Crucible>Lord of the Flies>The Great Gatsby>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn>The Kite Runner>Into the Wild>The Alchemist>The Things They Carried
>>24951654Forty years ago, most people, even high schoolers, had the attention span and focus to read Gatsby in one sitting, if need be; so it is trivially easy to imagine that more than half of a class could (and did) read the novel across the span of two weeks for a unit.
>>24951097gen alpha will only know animal farm as a seth rogen moviehttps://youtu.be/g8wLmj9SiKM
>>24951097probably graduated later than everyone in this thread.>things fall apart>hamlet>macbeth>beloved>night>brave new world>to kill a mockingbird>the new york trilogyin our latin course we read>metamorphoses>aeneid
anyone remember this book?
>>24951672>most people, even high schoolers, had the attention span and focus to read Gatsby in one sittingi think you are lying
>>24951727first read: fun, exciting, don't understand everything but whateversecond read: minor details, some excitement lost because you already know what's going to happenorsecond read: even more exciting because you loved the book so much and you want to learn everything about it
>>24951727It’s less than 50,000 words, bro.
>>24951822holy yap
>>24951727niggas used to read more than one sentence at a time? fk you mean
>>24951097Most of us here were either in Honors Engish type courses or went to private school so we can't be compared with what the regular kids were doing or reading. Who knows what or how they were teaching those retards.
Math teacher here. Our English department has shared that they are not permitted to assign most novels. The students still read The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and a few Shakespearean plays, but they do not read as many books as we used to. Also, they usually listen to the audiobooks in class and watch the movie adaptations. It's a sad state.
>>24951872our brains used to be huge graphics cards with immense capability for parallel processinghow far we have fallen
im from bongland. we read of mice and men, dr jekyll and mr hyde, and lord of the flies. dr jekyll and mr hyde made a great impact on me
>>24951928gpt summarize this post and write a 200 word eassay. make it as humanlike as possible with some slang thrown in so the old head won't catch on. no capitals.
My 10th grade English teacher made an off-hand remark that we were reading books that she studied in college. You could interpret that as either a compliment to our intelligence or a worry that we weren't ready for such books. If a second grader finished 1984, would you trust that he understood it at a meaningful level? So maybe it's good that we're not reading Moby Dick in high school.
>>24951906>Our English department has shared that they are not permitted to assign most novelsBy who? Some fat black woman in Administration? These people need to start being ignored, holy shit. Human resources are servants of the Devil wherever they are placed.
