High School English Classes

How is it possible that OP has a Zuckerbergian unfamiliarity with a common experience like schooling?

English classes are excellent because analyzing literature gives you freedom to talk about anything as long as there is an argument to be made on how something in the analyzed literature relates.

pretty much. My school did an A/B schedule since we were dual credit (I went to college and high school). So we had 8 periods in all, but they were split up over 2 days. (Friday we just had all our classes).

The teachers get a break period and they more or less repeat the same stuff each period. Though, apparently, it wasn't uncommon for some classes to be slightly ahead of others.

We only read books by women or PoC. We were told men can’t be raped, black people cant be fascist, and that gender has no correlation whatsoever with biological sex. I could go on, but this was pretty unorthodox for most highschool classes I hope.

I remember learning about different parts of speech. Further than that I can't recall.

Anyway, to answer more of your original question:

>Are there different types of English classes? (E.g. fiction writing, critical writing, memo and non-fiction writing, etc.)

English class covered several different forms of writing as the year progressed.

>Are classes referred to by what "period" of the day they're in; viz. would your specific class be "Mr. Washington's 5th period English composition class" or something like that?

English class was always referred to simply as English.

If you were talking to someone who was in your English class you would call it "English", if you were talking to someone who wasn't in your English class you would say "My English class" (they would probably know who your teacher was).

Here in New Zealand, English was split into three different studies in the later years of high school: Shakespeare, contemporary, and film studies.

Sometimes but most of that happens before high school
My high school english was mostly text analyzation, 5 paragraph essays, and reading in class

Black people cant be racist*
Though I’m sure they’d agree with the first sentiment.

What highschool did you go to? What state nigga?

wtf kind of teacher did you have?
My english teachers had us read (and fucking annotate) authors from Hemingway to Ayn Rand.

Actual answer:
Depends on how wealthy your high school was. My highschool was top 300 in the US (even though it was public), the texts read are generally:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Metamorphosis (AP Lit, honors classes)
Scarlett Letter (20 years ago)
Frankenstein
Poetry by Poe
1984
The Great Gatsby

Discussion is seminar style that's based on worksheets. You get a series a questions/quizzes about the plot to guarentee you read, and then you form arguments about the texts.

Top tier boarding schools are the same add more difficulty, foreign language requirements, and citing sources in anaylsis
Middle income is the same but tests are plot based and the essays themselves are graded on arguments not quality of thought (the above two get graded on quality of thought)
Low income is entirely retention based, questions are entirely plot and character focused

Theres also a growing over emphasis on standardized testing.

Do you frequently have students from your English class in other classes with you. Is the cohort the same for every class, I mean, or is it based on ability, randomized for each class, etc.?

I was home schooled in the Mid-West as a teenager.

In public schools, it was random. Sometimes you would have the same kids, sometimes you didnt. It was really based on where they could fit you.

I went to a pretty good private school in Minnesota. The English department was just really really awful.

anything you can imagine can happen, think outside the ole' hypercube

Answer depends on size of schoo
small school=yes
large=probably not the same students

Depends greatly on whether it's public school and what area the school is in. If you're in AP/IB or something similar you'll generally be assigned books and then in class taking quizzes or discussing them, though in mine (IB) most days were just busywork while the teacher graded essays.
In public schools a lot of people are genuinely illiterate and straight-up refuse to do any work, and teachers will be reprimanded if they don't pass x% of their class because it makes the school board look bad, so you get stuff like "come up with a twitter #hashtag about Holden Caufield" as a final exam, and even then a good chunk of the kids don't do it.
Same, I still remember junior year's reading list
>The Awakening
>Handmaid's Tale
>Some other book by the Awakening author about a woman cucking her loving husband
>We were going to read/study The Vagina Monologues until parents caused an uproar
>Some book about an Indian woman coming to America and fucking a bunch of guys, don't even remember what it was called
You could write borderline incoherent rambling about how brave and strong the women were and get a 100 every time. The first essay was The Awakening, I wrote a great essay arguing that the woman was acting insane, she pulled me aside after class and said a bunch of passive-aggressive digs suggesting I was threatened by women. That year was a trip, luckily I had a teacher with good taste next two years, read some great shit there. Despite this we never did anything, the class (and everything else run by IB) was garbage.

I think the public school system is too far gone at this point, there's no solution that can fix the ineptitude of the teachers and the corruption of the admins and the majority of students' utter refusal to do anything but the bare minimum, it creates a feedback loop of "none of us want to be here" and only stifles students with any interest in learning shit.

First time posting in Veeky Forums.

It varies from high school to high school, but for mine, it was basically reading a book, answering REALLY specific questions about what we just read, and repeating that for a long time. My favorite literature classes were in my last two years of high school; we would read the books we wanted to read in the class, and then discuss them. None of that really bizarre Shakespearean shit.

Occasionally we would have to write essays involving the book, and about a lot of their themes. One time I had to write a persuasive speech about anything, so I wrote about how time travel could never happen, and I got an A.

Some teachers hate their jobs in the English departments, so I'm lucky to have a few that didn't. A lot of what I said can only really apply to my experiences, though.

Hope some of this helps.

Personally, it highly depends what class you're in and who your teacher is. Luckily all of my English teachers in HS was relaxed, open minded, and mostly importantly thrilled about teaching English. I took regular English 1,2, and 3 from Freshman to Junior year. Senior year I picked Independent Literature which was a great class since you get to pick what book you wanted to read as long as it the genre was diverse.

A little more on the regular English classes:

Freshman year, we read of mice and men. We were taught basic shit like how to write essays, exploring themes, plots, and whatnot. I think we got to read Romeo & Juliet too. All I remember was that it was hard as shit to understand and I didn't care too much. And for the end of the year we got to watch the movie adaptation. Oh and the diary of a part time Indian.

Sophomore year, I got this teacher that was really very clearly into his job. We had much fun as a class. Had a lot of stories and if we had time we'd play trivia games. That year we got to read Macbeth, To kill a Mockingbird, and shit I forgot the other ones. He also taught us roots of words which I really was lucky to be introduced to because it helps a lot not having to look up the definition for every unknown word I come into. I think we were also taught poetry, but only for a little though. Great year.

Junior year, I was blessed with another passionate teacher. So we got Gatsby, The Crucible, Emerson, stuff written by the founding fathers. I forget what we wrote about but that year got me interested in reading. 3rd year of HS we got the big test that would determine what college we'd get into, fuck I forgot the name. So to prepare we went back to the basics and learned some grammars. I was pretty disappointed in learning that I don't know shit about grammar. That shit's so hard.

Last year of HS, like I said you get to pick what book you want. Basically like a little book club. In the end you had to talk a little bit about your book.

And yeah. That's high school.

You've got honors and not-honors classes, which I'm going to leave as vague, flexible categories. Some schools are basically just honors schools. Some schools divide up the kids into honors and not-honors courses. Some schools are basically just shit.

In the shit schools or not-honors courses, you don't learn anything. You do crosswords and memorize things on study guides the day before the test and get an A if you're not retarded.

In the good schools or the honors classes of the moderate schools, you'll learn something if you're actually interested. I would still say people in my highschool managed to find ways to float through those classes with little to no comprehension though, but that wasn't usually the path of least resistance in the better classes I took.

Obligatory Shakespeare unit that nobody cares about, and a fair handful of the class never reads entirely. Just a nostalgia boner that never actually teaches us what the text is about beyond a summary and a list of the most obvious themes.

Novel study, which is jsut the shakespeare unit, but with less author praising and more independent study. This one is really hit or miss depending on what you read, and whether or not you have any say in what it is.

Poetry. "Muh sophistication", the unit.
What's a poem?
Why read poetry?
what makes a good poem?
How do poems work?
These are all things you do not discuss.

spice with "scraping the lid of the barrel" philosophy and being taught about essay structure (only ever the five-paragraph kind) and maybe watching the movie of one of the books covered in class, and you have highschool english.

An absolute waste in which you are taught nothing and the windows into enthusiasm and actual learning are so dusty they look like dingy sheets of drywall that you don't even want to get close to, let alone wipe down and look through.

>To Kill a Mockingbird
Man niggers had it rough eh? isn't scout so cool, free-thinking and independent?

>Great Gatsby
Just ceaseless ranting about the abyss of symbolism that the book is drowning in and how everything in the book represents something makes it a good book.

Is there really anything that makes TGG good? The prose wasn't appalling, but as far as I can tell, it's just a list of symbols connecting to character traits or things relevant to the time period, with "Wanting is better than having" being stamped on the last page.

Oh, and one time I had to read a feminist essay about "The Yellow Wallpaper" which connected the funky-stank wallpaper to vaginas having a stronger aroma than penises, and that that stronger smell equals her being oppressed because she's a woman.

Does feminist theory have any merit at all?
At this point I just disregard anything that has to do with gender politics.

meant for

The last time I learned anything of any use in English was middle school. High school was 4 years of "How to write a 5-paragraph essay + shitty books/YA."

>Does feminist theory have any merit at all
Yes. Read Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft. Modern feminism is an absolute joke, however.