Mandatory reading in high school? What did you have to read?

Oh, blush.

Seriously, I learned from me dad who was a military writer - he hired me to proof-read and index his stuff while I was in high school, because, despite being a techie, I was very capable in English composition and grammar. I just found English classes insufferably boring compared to the exciting world of technology.

My best friend went on from high school direct to Mitel near Kanata when it started up - this is about 1969 or 1970 - he was a high school tech graduate hired right out of high school to design circuit board technology. Son of a gun got rich fast.

I have to tell you, high school tech textbooks - especially electronics -  were excruciatingly tough to get through, usually we had our tech books inside our English texts and tried to avoid attention from the teach. If we didn't bring our tech texts to English classes, then alternatively, we'd be designing fast cars inside our English workbooks. Seriously, high school English was just plain insufferable for us.

Still trying to compose a list of authors - let alone titles - of college and university books read. I'll leave out philosophy, psychology,  and theology because they're all authors you've probably all never heard of, although maybe y'all have heard of Augustine? (he was a boring old fart, actually). Freud was just another miserable old fucker. I don't even want to get started on Paul Tillich. Why did theology attract so many miserable fuckheads???

Ah, yes... I knew I was forgetting something from my list - Heart of Darkness. I guess it's not surprising that I forgot about it since I didn't actually read it, but it was one of the course requirements.

Looking back at what was assigned to us, i'm less bothered by the dearth of Cancon than I am by the fact that of all the authors we were assigned to read, Harper Lee was the only one who wasn't a white dude.

God, tell me about it. I think the relentless exposure to Shakespeare is the foundation of that strategy. I mean I like him, sure, but there are other writers. Definitely the most interesting CanCon in the last thirty years is from writers of colour, and Canada's best author's throughout its history have been women. Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson would be another great HS choice. And why isn't Alice Munro required reading?

Speaking of ToMo, Kaitlin, have you seen this article? Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison?

No I haven't! It is in my "to-read" bookmark -- thanks for the link!

I feel like if I read Toni Morrison in class, I would have spent all the class time crying silently to myself in the back (cuz that's where the cool kids sit) with intermittent periods of yelling 'BUT WHY'.

Having finished high school in the late 60's I can only remember a few books that we read.

Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm were actually read in Grade 7 - we did them again in Grade 12 and the review was completely superficial in comparison.

The usual Shakespeare selection.

Lord Jim (the only time in my life I actually bought a Coles Note on the text)

To Kill a Mockingbird

I totally agree Kaitlin, the lack of women and people of colour writers in high school English classes is a real problem. The perspectives of women and people of colour are super important for everyone -- including for us white guys. If we're ever going to get out of the mess our capitalist society has left us, society is going to have to become a lot less masculine, and a lot less culturally white.

I'd keep Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell -- Both are personal favourites of mine. I'd also Keep To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- a great anti-racist book by a great female author.

I'd keep Anne Frank -- provided it's taught in away that doesn't allow the holocuast to become a justification in peoples minds for the state of Israel and it's crimes against the Palestinian people.

I'd get rid of Lord of the Flies, in spite of the cultural references to it in our society-- I hate the premise that the only thing standing betwee us and pure barbarism is society's rules. I'd also probably give up Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest -- not because they're bad books, but to get away from too many American and British books by white dudes.

I'd also do only one Shakespeare unit -- Five Shakespeare units in five years is overkill, and doesn't leave enough room for other stuff.

That would free up some space for more women and people of colour authors, as well as some CanLit. I'd love to see The Jade Peony by Chinese Vancouver author Wayson Choy as mandatory reading in BC high schools.

My bad, have corrected my previous post.

I love reading and writing, but I didn't like high school English classes much, with a couple of shining exceptions.  I hated Shakespeare, still do.  Boring and completely inaccessible language.  I never understood why it has become The English Literature That All People Must Be Forced To Read.  They should maybe pick one Shakespeare play for the entire high school career, and enthusiasts can then do Shakespeare extracurricularly if they want to.  So much time wasted on that crap when we could have been reading interesting stuff.

Many of the books we read in high school, I didn't actually read in high school.  I did read almost all of them AFTER high school, though, when I didn't have to anymore.  Then I enjoyed most of them.  Let's see...

A Separate Peace - I really liked that book, later on.  The Chrysalids, same thing - I didn't really read it in high school when I was supposed to, but I loved it for years afterwards, and have re-read it many times.  Arsenic and Old Lace - cute, and I think I did read that at the time.  I liked it all right, but I didn't read it for pleasure, I read it because I had to, and wouldn't have bothered otherwise. 

Lord of the Flies was an assigned book that I never bothered reading in high school OR afterwards.  The one thing I remember about it is that we were supposed to analyze it for the Christ-like figure in it (I think a kid dies because he couldn't move from innocence to experience or some such crapola).  Yawwwwwn.  Maybe someday I'll get over it and just read the book and see if I like it.  Or, maybe not.

I took a grade 13 English course in summer school one year (ahead of time, just after grade 11, not because I failed previously - I wanted to avoid a certain teacher, as did many who took the summer school course).  That teacher was rumoured to have hated that summer school course, probably because it made students actually enjoy English and escape her clutches and evil plan to make every student hate English literature - most of us had already had her for grade 9, 10, or 11 English so we knew what was in store for us if we had her again for grade 13.  We did King Lear, which was excruciatingly boring, but that's okay because I didn't bother reading it, just as I didn't bother reading any Shakespeare in high school or since.  But at least he tried to make it interesting by having an extracurricular excursion one evening to see a subtitled foreign movie that was playing at the arthouse theatre in town, "Ran".  I think it was a Japanese movie, and it was based on the plot of King Lear.  We read The Stone Angel by Margeret Lawrence, and while it was the dreariest book I ever read, I actually liked it, and it actually made me look for other books by her and read them during the school year the next year.  I forget the other novels we did - but we also focused a lot on writing and creative writing and I particularly remember learning and writing sonnets, and I really loved that course.

I always took Advanced Placement English courses, except for grade 12.  I decided to "slack off" and take a "General Placement" English course.  It was the best decision I ever made in high school.  It was a fantastic course.  It was relevant.  It taught real writing skills.  The teacher was an amazing guy who really tried to make English class relevant to the students and interesting.  We did Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare, and we watched the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton movie by Zefarelli (I think?) to introduce it, and wow, Shakespeare actually came to life for a change.  It was a very funny play, I thought, although of course the theme of it was quite sexist, I agree, Kaitlynn.  I think because Elizabeth Taylor played such a strong role in the movie, it mitigated the sexism a bit for me.

We also focused on writing skills for real life - how to write letters, how to write resumes, the technical stuff around writing essays and effective, punchy first sentences in paragraphs and such - things that the Advanced classes assumed that kids would just learn by osmosis or something, because I had never been taught those skills in such an in-depth way before.  I credit that class alone with the fact that I can write at all now.  A general placement English course.  Probably hands down the best course I ever took in high school.

I think I've mentioned before that I dropped out of high school, worked for a year, then went back for a semester and finished.  Well, when I went back to high school, I took a grade 13 Canadian Literature course (which was a separate course from the regular Grade 13 English course which I had taken in summer school).  I very much enjoyed the books I had to read for that, and strangely enough, with a couple of exceptions, I actually read them.  And the best part of all?  No fracking SHAKESPEARE.  Yes!

My love for Robertson Davies books started in that class.  We had to read A Mixture of Frailties and I absolutely loved it.  The cool thing is that it was a Canadian novel set in a fictional Kingston, Ontario, and that's where I was going to school.  So that was neat.  I read the rest of the novels in that trilogy on my own time, and then read all his other novels during the next few years.  I haven't read his books in a long time, though - I have re-read many of them many times, but not for a number of years now.  I wonder if I would like them as much now?  I'm a lot more conscious now of sexism and racism, and his books were undeniably sexist and racist, but damn, his writing was great, and funny, despite his privileged white male thing.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - what a fabulous book.  I still love it.  I know it's dated and it's misogynist as hell, but it was also hysterical in parts.  I still laugh out loud when I re-read it and get to the part where Duddy's showing the Bar Mitzvah movie to the family who commissioned it, with the description of the "art film" crap the blacklisted director put all through it, and all the audience comments during the showing.  So great. The movie doesn't even begin to do justice to the book.  And yet...I've tried to read other Mordecai Richler books since, and I just can't get into them.  He's a one-hit wonder for me, I guess, although I know so many others love everything he's done.

I think I read The Edible Woman by Atwood in that course too - or was it Cat's Eye?  I can't remember which.  It was one or the other, and then I read the other on my own time.  Or maybe I had to read them both, one for that grade 13 course, and the other for the grade 13 summer school course.  I can't remember now.  But I loved both of them, and it was one of those courses that got me started reading Atwood. 

Someone mentioned upthread that they hated The Edible Woman.  I absolutely loved it and still do whenever I re-read it.  Maybe as a young woman, I could relate to it better then.  So many young women get stuck in stupid relationship ruts, stupid job ruts, stupid life ruts, and boy, that was me at the time.  And I thought it was so funny!  The ridiculous situations she got herself into, the weird and funny ways she sort of found herself rebelling, almost from outside herself.  I loved it.  A great cautionary tale, lots of simmering rage below the nice surface, and a great send-up of the conventional and not so conventional options that were open to women at the time, career and relationship wise.  And unfortunately, it's not completely dated in that way either.  So many young women still find themselves falling into the trap of gendered jobs and falling into stupid relationship ruts.

I was actually surprised in that Canadian Literature course at a couple of the selections.  (Well, not surprised then, but later when I realized why so many Canadian novels don't make it into the curriculum - Ess-Eee-Exx!)  Edible Woman had a couple of sex scenes in it (although Margaret Atwood always writes sex scenes in a way that makes sex seem so unpleasant, mundane, boring, and even clinical in most of the novels I've read by her).  A Mixture of Frailties has a sex scene in it, and an "immoral" one, at that - a young college woman being taken to bed by her prof, and the rest of the novel has the girl thinking about it a lot afterwards and wondering why the prof isn't showing any interest in her sexually afterwards, not to mention the stuff around the love philtre.  When I look back at the book now, though, I realize how racist it was as well - a white man writing about a "Gypsy" family in such a stereotyped way...wow.

Strangely enough, we never did the Anne books in high school or elementary school.  I remember that high school teacher I mentioned upthread mourning in our grade 10 class (the other class I took with her, which is why I avoided her like the plague for grade 13) the lack of established female authors writing about female experiences and female heroines in English literature.  So I raised my hand and asked her, "What about Lucy Maud Montgomery?" I still remember her scornful reaction to that.  "Oh, please.  Anne of Green Gables?  She lives a happy life where she's happy happy, so sweet, so adorable, she does nothing notable, no real growth of character, nothing bad ever happens to her, a completely charmed life..."

I didn't contradict her because I was intimidated at the time.  But now when I think about what I wish I would have said...yeah, no real growth, nothing notable.  She is just the first female teacher in Avonlea, the first woman in Avonlea to get a B.A., she goes through the death of the only guardian who showed her unrestrained love in the first novel; goes through the death of a childhood friend in the third novel, which makes her become more aware of her own mortality and the important things in life; has to grow up enough in the third novel to figure out what real love looks like - whether it's the dashing tall-dark-and-handsome charm thing or a love that grows out of a deep friendship.  She becomes a principal of a high school in the fourth book and has to deal with moving to a small community where everyone is set against her and to try to make it work without giving up.  In the fifth novel, her firstborn child dies within 24 hours of birth and she deals with that, and also with a new best friend who has been forced to marry a brute against her will and is stuck being his caretaker after he comes home from a sea voyage brain-injured.  In the sixth novel, she has to deal with a mean in-law relative who has come for an extended stay, and in both the sixth and seventh novels there are many tales set around her children and their friends and how kids interact with each other, including themes such as bullying, fighting, getting into trouble, and kids' adventures and the way her kids learn lessons and grow, and god forbid, "move from innocence to experience" which should warm the cockles of any boring English teacher's heart.  And the eighth novel is a fictional account of Anne's daughter growing up during the first world war, and is filled with tragedy (her beloved and sensitive brother and Anne's son, Walter, dies in the war - made particularly tragic by the fact that he didn't want to sign up to fight in the first place and did so out of bullying and peer pressure, despite being afraid to go to war), and a social history of the time, although it's also interesting war propaganda (the peacenik in town is made out to be a horrendous bully and nasty guy, while everyone who supports "the war effort" is a hero) and could be analyzed that way too.

Not to mention Montgomery's other books, particularly The Blue Castle, where Montgomery takes a well-worn novel theme (a woman thinks she's going to die, so she starts living her life for today, then finds out she's not going to die) and turns it into practically a first-wave feminist manifesto about how to live your life out from under the thumb of your family and convention. 

Unfortunately, I didn't get to learn any of that in high school English class.  Because LM Montgomery wasn't "deep" enough, I guess.

Cool thread.

I was in high school from 1980 to 1985. During that time the TDSB banned The Catcher in the Rye (for swearing and for "depictions of sexuality" I assume). Which of course made all of us run out and read it from the library. My mom, an anti-censorship advocate (she was a teacher-librarian) gave me her old copy to read. It may have inspired me to use the word "fuck" as much as I do.

Who Has Seen the Wind, The Stone Angel (hated it, and Laurence, until I read The Diviners in grade 11 or 12), the various Atwoods, many of the novels that people have mentioned already.

What I really got into was the Shakespeare sonnets. I loved the romantic and flowery language "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove". I didn't understand some of it, but my young romantic heart swooned.

One of my English teachers made us memorize a monologue from Macbeth, and another from Hamlet. While I cursed him at the time, the fact that I can still (mostly) spout off "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death" freaks the hell out of most people who know me.

I say there is absolutely room to bring in writers from a greater diversity of backgrounds than the current pale Canadian offerings. I think The Jade Peony is taught in high schools occasionally, other Canadian authors to include could be Judy Fong Bates, Dionne Brand, Farzana Doctor and many more.

The main problem with how Shakespeare is taught is that it wasn't written to be read.  It was written to be spoken, to be performed.  And in the hands of (voice of?) someone who knows what they are doing, it is wonderful. 

Oh good.   Nice to see I wasn't alone in being bored by Thomas Hardy.   We did "Far From the Madding Crowd" in Grade 12.   I never bothered to actually read it.   I discovered "Coles Notes" that year.   Hey for $2.99 I managed to bullshit my way through it.

My experience with Shakespeare was more mixed.   If the teacher was good, so was Shakespeare.   One of my high school English teachers was an actor...who was a scream at times.    I later saw him appear in some bit parts in the CBC's "Street Legal" where he'd usually play a judge.   His most "famous" role was in a Norwich Union insurance commercial.    "It's Patrick.   He took out life insurance!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70EckDbokB4

Grade 12 for me was a bit short.    There was a secondary school teacher's strike that year.   I was involved in the high school student strike support committee...met most of the other lefty high school kids that year.    I think there were maybe about a dozen of us at most.

The right-wing students organized an "I'm a Loser" campaign calling for back to work legislation.   They organized a demo at Queen's Park and we counter picketed them...got into a snowball fight.   Hey...they threw the first snowball.    ....anyway...thread drift.

I saw a one-man Hamlet at a Fringe Festival many moons ago - very fun.

I've taken my kids to see Shakespeare being performed before they're exposed to it in school.  That way, they have an idea what it's supposed to be like as they read it.  I also have a very large, annotated complete works from my university days.  They both love Shakespeare.  Ms B took the first class that included S in high school this past year, Midsummer Night's Dream, and did well.  She also chose MacBeth as a supplementary reading project. 

In uni, I found Shakespeare taught via the English department much different than when taught via the Theatre department. 

I had a chance to go to Stratford on Avon. Rollcoaster and picking shells off the beach at Skegness appealed to me more then. Oh well, my loss at the time. Buses took you anywhere and seemed like a good reason at the time. I was just a day tripper then. Took me so long to find out.

Ayup. Some day trip buses were double deckers at the time. I thought they were pretty cool. Cream cakes and tea in a thermos. Didn't take much to please me and me sista then. 

Worst thing I ever had to memorize was the first page of the Cantebury Tales by Jeffry Chaucer in the original middle English for our Literature 12 course. The text had the first page in both the original middle English, and the mordern English translation. Thing is that when we went over it our teacher told us something along the lines of "look it over at home and see how much of it you can learn." Since it was not worth any marks at that point, I didn't bother to look at it.

Then three weeks later, one day before the test, our teacher tells us that one item on the test will be a section of the first page of the Cantebury Tales in modern English which we will have to translate into the original middle Englsih -- so basically memorization. I looked at it for about five minutes that night, came to the conclusion that I had no hope whatsoever of memorizing it, so gave up. Didn't figure it would be worth that much on the test.

Next day we found out that translating the first two stanzas of the Cantebury Tales back into middle English was worth 10 out of 20 points on the test -- so 50% of the test. I had memorized precisely the first line of however many there were. I can still remember it -- One dae, in a soores soote. Needless to say I got 0.5/10 on that one item. Then, despite getting 8.5/10 on the rest of the test -- the rest of the test being about 80% of what we'd covered in the course -- I wound up with only 9/20 on the test.

This one test was the only test in the first term of the course. There were two terms each worth 50% of the couse -- we were on a semester system.

To make matters worse, the teacher had this insane rule that if we missed class, even for a legit reason, we were NOT to ask him what we'd missed. Instead we were to pick a homework buddy and ask this person. So anyhoo, one day I missed class for an orthodontist appointment. Next day when I asked my homework buddy what I'd missed, he told me I'd not missed anything important. Following day we were told to hand in the assignment that had been assigned the day i'd missed. The teacher had this other insane rule that no late assignments would be accepted under any circumstances -- even if you never knew about the assignment. So I got 0/10 on the assignment, which was one of only 3 assignments in the first term.

Suffice to say I got 55% in the first term of the course. Fortunately, I did well enough in the second term and on the final to barely eek out a C+ in the course (C+ in BC is from 66.5%-72%).