What are the best pieces of literature you read in high school and/or got the most out of? The worst?

I don't get it. Were you ironically into existentialism, or did you go around saying "really into existentialism" a lot?

Ironic how you dismiss ennui from women but your favorite thing about literature, at least when you were younger, is it's ability to express the ennui of a teenage boy. It says something about you. I'm just not sure what.

Not a single one because I was a positivist who thought that only the natural sciences could provide us with meaningful statements. Films though, really affected me.

Arthur Rimbaud was the most influential writer and changed the course of my life at the time. I was expelled from school for selling opium and hashish in the bathroom. Took to the road and lived as a vagabond. Eventually became a forest fire fighter and now i work as a surveyor. I don't know if it is good to expose kids to him.

>not wooing Anasazi Nin

you are living a hell of a life m8

Hamlet
The Metamorphosis
The Catcher in the Rye
The Inferno
Steppenwolf

Those were probably the best. The worst was either Walden or some YA novel I had to read my freshman year.

The thing is, once you give up any notion of truth, everything becomes possible.

Pudd’n head
1984
Hamlet
Grapes of wrath

Pudd'nhead is critical of slavery. I see you went to a lefty school, libcuck. What were they doing teaching 1984? Oh no a paradox!!! My narrow world view strikes pain again.

The art of the deal

I didn’t think trumpfags could read! Daddy trump will be so proud of you:)

yea, i would tell people i was "really into existentialism" and lug a copy of the myth of sisyphus around everywhere and look at edgy Nietzsche quotes on the internet.

ouch, didn't realize that was short-sighted on my part. i guess i always thought that i was afflicted with this deep, tumultuous angst, while ennui was this delicate emotion reserved for effeminate frenchies and feeble-minded women

Heart of Darkness

My two favorite books in high school were A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Atlas Shrugged. In retrospect I think they're pretty good picks for that age even though Rand is pretty cringe-y. My least favorite book in high school was probably The Scarlet Letter because my English teacher was obsessed and I remember hating it at the time.

Favorites
Julius Caesar
Great Gatsby
Crucible
Lysistrata
Heart of Darkness
Candide

Second tier but still highly enjoyable
Rebecca
Hamlet
Robinson Crusoe
1984
Of Mice and Men
Huck Finn (ending is so bad I was crying of laughter)
collected Sherlock Holmes tales
Poisonwood bible
The Quiet American
alchemy of air
in the garden of beasts

absolutly hated
Anything Dickens
Joy Ruck Crub
20,000 leagues under the sea
Midsummer nights dream
Catcher in the Rye
Macbeth (good in sections)
House on Mango street

Considering how good my school was we read a lot of shit. One of my english teachers had a mental breakdown and quit (I honestly thought she was half retarded) and the other got fired for trying to fuck my ex. That probably explains a lot of it.

Id heard that it was pointless to try to teach Joyce to High School Students and having read half of Portrait I have to say that its true.

>Id heard that it was pointless to try to teach Joyce to High School Students and having read half of Portrait I have to say that its true.

Who cares, if it actively reaches one student in a thousand its worth more for the world than teaching a half rate novel to all of them

cunt of montecristo

>I'm trying to decide what I want to teach
If you want to incorporate Twain into your curriculum, look at some of his nonfiction. I think it has a better chance of resonating with young people than any of his fiction does.

Or you could just encourage people read it as adults rather than ruin joyce for the hundreds who lack the maturity to engage with it meaningfully.

favourite: sleeping freshmen never lie

>decide what I want to teach

Teacher here. You don’t decide anything. You teach what you are told to teach by the chair and/or administrators

>tfw I had to actually teach John Green last year

In my senior year at hs we read 1984 and Catcher in the Rye consecutively. I read 1984 in a couple days and Catcher in the Rye plenty of times as a young teen so I went to my own reading. I remember being entrapped in Focault's Pendelum in all of my classes during that time. I've always liked the themes of Focault's Pendelum before I read the novel so it really clicked with me in school.
I never enjoyed any memoirs I was assigned. Tuesday's with Morty was a goddamn snoozer. I read Elie Wesiel's memoir that one of my teachers spent an entire month covering. but I've never liked memoirs so whatever

Did Under Milk Wood during year 11, so when I was 16/17. It kicked me off on a huge Irish lit/poetry/stage play bent, been on it ever since.
Our teacher assigned us all roles and we read it aloud once, got comfy and listened to the radio performance once. I fucking frothed that book.
Got the only A+ on an essay I've ever gotten on that.

There were only a few books I liked from high school each year, and a lot that I grew to dislike the more I tried to get into them.

Legitimately hate:
Wuthering Heights

Only kinda hate:
Things Fall Apart

Disliked:
Hamlet
Kaffir Boy
Poisonwood Bible
Death of a Salesman
Dante's Inferno
El Senor Presidente
Julius Caesar
Romeo and Juliet
The Scarlet Letter
The Crucible
Gulliver's Travels

"It was Alright":
Great Gatsby
Enrique's Journey
Of Mice and Men
Catcher in the Rye

Liked:
The Alchemist
In Cold Blood
Fahrenheit 451

Oddly enough my favorite book I've read for school, and the only one on this list I've actually cared enough about afterwards to reread, was one I read in the fifth grade: The Outsiders. Still a good book; I was surprised it held up so well for me.

>The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck, 1931)
Didn't see anyone else mentioning this, had to read it my first year of high school. I greatly enjoyed it, much more so than any other required K-12 reading, and I think it can teach children valuable things about real poverty, hard work, and rudimentary business sense. What they get out of it depends somewhat on how you couch it though, of course. Brainlet-tier is using it to talk about foot binding and muh patriarchy like my school did, while the best use of it would be to introduce students to the nuances of U.S.-China relations throughout the 20th century.

I hated Shakespeare, partially because I was surrounded by hood rats that could hardly read a word of it and we always read it aloud.

Why Irish. Dylan is Welsh

The best things I read in high school were the ones I chose on my own for our practice AP essays from outside the reading list with the approval of my teacher. The two most notable examples I can remember are A Clockwork Orange and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Don't really remember the bad ones. Guess I've managed to forget about them in the 10+ years that have passed since then.

The best of the books we read, of which there were very little, would no doubt be Jurassic Park. What a roller-coaster! Wahoooo!

I am also a teacher and I have been given pretty wide latitude in terms of what I teach. There are certain core works I am "required" to teach each quarter, but I even get away with not covering these fully. For instance Q1 I am supposed to teach my freshman MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech", but I refuse to cover it in depth as my students have all been exposed to it so many times by the time they get to me that there is no way they'll give it their full attention. Instead, I give them Mandela's speech from when he was released from prison as the core work for that unit and we then examine portions of MLK's speech to compare and contrast it to Mandela's. My department head and administrators are fully aware and even encourage such practices.

My leeway expanded far more significantly when I moved to our district's "alternative" high school. We are already so different in our policies and structure, plus we have phenomenal success in terms of getting students to graduate who otherwise never would have (and we also get them into college, technical schools, legitimate careers, etc at an extraordinary rate), that I can do basically whatever I want, within reason, as long as I contribute to our school's ongoing successes.

read a lot of things in highschool, mcluhan to dh lawrence to timmy pinecone to faulkner to dfw to chris hedges to walt whitman to bolano searching to get something out of it, slowly checking out of society and almost flunking out of american public school

read Bartleby the scrivener in my early 20s and saw myself written into a book

>hated withering heights
>disliked hamlet, death of a salesman, the inferno, julius caesar, romeo and juliet, the scarlet letter, the crucible
>liked the alchemist
you are everything I hate in the world

The single worst book that I had to read in high school was "Their Eyes Were Watching God". The ebonics was disgusting and who the hell cares about some stupid love story between niggers.

It's interesting if you're trying to either (a) understand a different perspective or (b) looking at commonalities of human experiences

not everything is a contest to be the most edgy

>I Have a Dream
>Not the letter from Birmingham jail + Thomas Aquinas
That school sounds gay, brah.

Literally never read a book as a part of curriculum after elementary school. So I guess what I'm saying is I haven't read a book since I was a kid.

We do also cover the Letter from Birmingham Jail in that same unit, it just isn't considered a core text. What of Aquinas' would you suggest as fitting into such a unit?

>Mandela
>not garvey or excerpts from other black authors from before the 1950s
> not even an excerpt from the many people mlk plagarized
>fucking mandela

I can respect that you may have others in mind that would also work for my purposes, but why so much hatred for using Mandela? Are you familiar with the speech? Not only is it a great speech for many reasons, but it also provides great examples of several rhetorical devices that are supposed to be introduced as part of the unit I use it for.

You all do realize that there are specific rhetorical/literary devices and strategies, etc. that I have to teach my students, right? I can expose them to certain works and ideas in an effort to show them more than what another teacher would, but I also do have to get them to pass at least one standardized test and hopefully perform well enough on another to get them into college if that's the path they choose.

almost anything you personally enjoy in your maturity will be shrugged off by apathetic school children
anything over 400 pages, with more than ten characters, or with sentences longer than two lines will be virtually ignored.
I dated a high school teacher and she used to show me students' work on Romeo and Juliet, she'd google "romeo and juliet summary" and would find half the students' descriptions of any scene in the play within the first three results.
I had an extremely positive experience in high school with several teachers, where we studied Marlowe's Faustus, King Lear, Jane Eyre, and Madame Bovary, but 60% of the class never gave even the slightest shit. Normies are normies from birth, and will shrug off anything you hold close to your heart without a second glance.

My biggest formative moment in high school reading was a first edition copy of Infinite Jest I got from an older sister who passed away, ignored it until she was gone and read it after her passing.

Anything you get from any of us is subject to extreme response bias (we all love books already) so this question is virtually useless

Aquinas wrote about the differences between Human Law and Natural Law and their potential conflict in Summa Theologica. I believe MLK mentions him by name in his Letter, even. By the way, good on you for doing that "alternative" school thing, more diverse avenues of success in schooling is a great thing.

mandelas a terrorist whos fight was against a segregation institutes not as "subaltern" and "superaltern" but of rabid niggers at the gates and a tiny sliver of civilization in a god forsaken continent

MLK was a non-violent provocateur of a government dragging its feet on guaranteed rights of nigger citizens

I had a teacher who taught us "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and contrasted it with Plato's Crito, it was a 10/10 discussion on whether or not civil disobedience is just

damn that IS a cool combo

>whether or not civil disobedience is just
most contemporary niggers of the time talked about revolutionary violence, peaceful protest was the least controversial to elites who wondered why the niggers were so uppity and figured niggers should wait another 100 years to have basic human rights

Best: Count of Monte Cristo

Worst: Night

not a /pol/yp it was just a fucking awful stupid book, All quiet was better not meme’ing

Short stories (as in no more than 300 pages, preferably no longer than 230 pages.)
It will motivate them to finish them and encourage reading more.

Interesting suggestion with Aquinas. Its been almost ten years since I read anything of his and I actually only read a handful of excerpts, so I will have to look more into it myself but I feel like it would be such a challenge to get my student's to actually parse through Aquinas that I just might do it.

And thanks for the supportive words. I honestly fell into it because it was the only open position teaching high school English in my district after I was pushed out of where I was due to budget cuts leading to positions being eliminated. I was the most recent hire in the school so I automatically got the boot. I was extremely disappointed (the school I left was my alma mater so I was especially excited to be there, teaching in the very classroom where I once sat as an AP Lang/Lit student) and I wasn't sure I would like teaching students who mostly had sub-2.0 GPAs and/or criminal records and/or kids of their own, etc. Now I can't imagine teaching anywhere else. I can honestly say I help make a difference in many kids' lives each year, much more so than at a traditional school.

I'm almost embarrassed I hadn't thought of this pairing. I will have to seriously consider trying this out next year. Thanks, user.

My favorite I read was Stoner.

My favorite that we discussed was Native Son. The teacher trying to explain to the class what the book is 'about' while everybody is in an uproar over a nigger nigging(suffocates a white girl, cuts her head off and burns the body) was pretty funny. I really don't get why we read that book. Is it supposed to make everybody see blacks as savages and communists as spineless wimps? Because that's what it did.

Just a cycle of 'inspired by' and 'loved by', Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog led me to Joyce, led me to O'Brien and Roddy Doyle, etc

I've always thought novellas are generally the best option for high schoolers, it's just that a novel of over 300 pages would be at least half a semester if not more of reading for most classes, and leads to a lack of variety being available

OP here,

I am getting some leeway in terms of what I can teach, so long as it's on the book list. I've already got my favorite text when I was in high school lined up "The Things they Carried" but I'm saving that for Third Quarter.

He's quoting A.E. Housman, which is one of the first poets I fell in love with, so start there. Anything that fits a conventional rhyme scheme while still saying something powerful or at least novel is good for catching the attention of teenagers.

And yet here you are, asking 4chins for advice.

I teach at one of the “college ready” schools in Arizona. We teach animal farm, the odyssey, fahrenheit, etc. to junior high kids.....

I taught The things They Carried last year. Went very well. You can order the ration food on amazon. Really adds perspective.

damn, i wish he was my teacher too

What the fuck I would kill to have had a curriculum including most of that instead of tepid shit like the chosen and a separate peace.
>The Alchemist
What are you doing on this board?

Maybe Cather's Paul's Case.

Great:
Shakespeare: Julius Caesar/Romero & Juliet/Othello/Midsummer Night's Dream (didn't read Hamlet then, but would also be good)
Inferno
Siddhartha

Good:
1984
Animal Farm
All The King's Men
Heart of Darkness

OK:
The Great Gatsby
The Chosen
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Cry, The Beloved Country
Black Boy
Huckleberry Finn
The Metamorphosis

Bad:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Stranger
The Joy Luck Club

Shit:
The Scarlet Letter
A Tale of Two Cities
A Separate Peace

>A Tale of Two Cities
>shit
nigga 1v1 me irl

Nobody remembers anything about that except for "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." and "it is a far, far better thing...". Although I was amused by Dickens's early-Victorian moralizing re: the Regency. Maybe I should upgrade it to "bad".