What is a realistic and effective school reading list?
4 books per year, 9-12 grade.
What would the point of your curriculum? What would be your end goal? Keep in mind: you've got to cater to a teen's mind, and appeal to the lowest common denominator. Without that, you might as well throw the books in the trash.
9th
>a personal account of WW1
Start off with something dark and realistic to bring them to reality and take further works seriously.
>intro to philosophy book
Once they're snapped into reality, go over some basic philosophy concepts to prep them for the coming years.
>Lord of the Flies
Take some of that philosophy and show why it is important to maintain order and ethics.
>political primer
Something that explains the core tenets of politics and what the different camps claim as important causes, and why.
10th
>Greek myths
Start with the Greeks
>Beowulf
Intro to Anglo-Saxon lit.
>Chaucer
Evolution from Beowulf.
>Shakespeare
Round out the year with everyone's favorite bard. I want this year to be sort of a "this is where we came from" vibe.
11th
>catcher in the rye
Angsty teens buckle up, you're not the first douchebag to feel like this.
>animal farm
Short and sweet- sometimes even the best sounding ideas can be corrupted.
>1984
Like Animal Farm but reaaaaally driving the point home.
>brave new world
180 reversal on the past two, but showing a world that still sucks. I want this year to inspire questioning of ideas, confidence in oneself, and what calling something "Orwellian" actually means.
12th
>not sure
I want a three-part series. Something that will inspire confidence in reading ability. A lot of people graduate without having read a full book. Reading one big one broken down into three parts would eliminate any fear of reading further down the line.
War and Peace, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Bros. K, Gravity's Rainbow come to mind
bruh, nice trips. i have read the same books in 11th grade, in the same order. what the fuck
If it's a private school:
>Selection from the bible
>Selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses
>Dante
>Paradise Lost
fuck the lowest common anything. I would kill myself if I had to teach one book for three months straight.
If kids can't handle reading a hundred page book in a week then you might as well not and just have group discussions about film and music until they start to show basic potential for thought.
I'm assuming you didn't have calculus II in high school?
You have to start off small, especially when trying to nurture a love of reading. Acting like that will only turn people off to the idea of it.
Calc ii was taught at my high school if you came from a feeder gt school.
No child left behind was a mistake.
1. euclid's elements
2. iliad and odyssey (a bit cheating but w/e)
3. bible
4. complete works of plato
math, literature, religion, and philosophy roughly. intensive and extremely autistic studies of the four for all the four years. there would be lessons in learning ancient greek and hebrew. learning the languages are done using very small passages from original texts eventually ramping up to paragraphs and the whole text itself
supplementary texts on the original texts are used to spice the reading up. they would be commentaries on the texts by people like proclus for euclid and plato. for the bible, the early church fathers and aquinas. only honor students study biblical commentary at the last two years and learn latin with it
there should be a movement starting from memorizing the plot to building connections and eventually in depth exegesis
let them fall for the classics meme
Not just that, but reading a book in a week does not necessarily mean they understand what's going on in the book.
You could breeze through animal farm real quick and think the book is anti-communism, or even not get the allusion to communism at all: we're talking about people who are just figuring out Independence as well as finishing up puberty and shit, not some guy who has time to kill after work.
People reading Plato as their first intro to philosophy are awful without guidance against being a douchebag like Socrates. Plato and the rest of the rich kids payed for this annoying asshole to walk around questioning everything without contributing anything other than the fact that if he dies he surely will return. You need to supplement that Plato with some Hume or Locke, probably Descartes, and certainly some crazy shit like Spinoza.
#2 and #4 would probably bore most 9th graders to tears. It's not useful if they're completely disengaged.
Hell, lord of the flies bored me to tears in highschool.
NCLB ruined schooling. I went from learning algebra and geometry in 6th grade to relearning it 3 times in a row so I could get high scores on the fucking tests so the school could get more funding. It was stupid and frustrating. They also cut a lot of advanced classes from the school because there just wasn't enough students in them. The highest math class offered was fucking pre-calculus, and the AP English class watched Romeo + Juliet.
Lately I've been focusing on picking up and reading myself the books my children will read in school. The issue I have is that I didn't read any of them. I watched two versions of Romeo & Juliet, I don't recall reading it. We read some Macbeth I believe. Then it was Young Adult trash - Junk and I'm The King of the Castle. I believe that's all we ever read.
Meditations, Kant's Ethics, Socrates Apology and Moby Dick.
>one book
>DUDE COMPLETE WORKS LOL
just end yourself illiterate shit lol, besides you should probably feed them Kant first0
lel sounds terrible.
t. Finland
you can technically but it in a single volume edition ;)
thats why you have a teacher
(OP)
>4 books per year
step it up. i get that most high schoolers aren't mad on the idea of staying home reading books, but in a few years' time they'll realize they had nothing better to do.
you really decide how much you want to learn in high school. it just sucks that you're a kid at the time you make such an important decision.
anyway i'd have them reading nothing but kierkegaard and cioran.
What is that picture trying to convey?
4 books a year?
Don't fucking bother. Youre never getting into uni. .
>>catcher in the rye
>you've got to cater to a teen's mind, and appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Nah.
YOU AUTISTIC CUNT ARE YOU TRYING TO INDOCTRINATE THE WHOLE SCHOOL WITH YOUR SHITTY POLITICAL LITERATURE???!?!?
LE DRUMPF IS A NAZI STARTER KIT
Assuming honors/ap english in murrica, with a goal of exposing highschoolers to non-shit lit
9th: Entry Level
1984, brave new world, catch 22, lord of the flies, mebbe achebe or little women for diversity, Romeo and Juliet
10th: Step up
Famous Anglo-American Poetry (tennyson, byron, longfellow, dickenson, frost, etc), "coming of age" novels like plath and catcher in the rye, mebbe some joyce carol oates and good nigger lit like song of solomon. Julius Caeser
11th: 19th century anglo-american
Melville, Austen, Hardy, Cooper, Poe, Scott, Doyle, Stoker, Bronte. Richard III.
12th Contemporary/Modern from 1950
Roth, CoL49, Blood Meridian, Coetzee, Nabokov, Graham Greene or Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, mebbe a man booker winner from the last 15 years (like Brief History of Seven Killings) to wrap it up in the last month. Hamlet.
>achebe
Trying to push diversity and make people become Blacked through literature. Please go. Le Magical Yam Nigga isn't even that great. Stick with Heart of Darkness please.
If it wasnt for the last 2 chapters you would be correct. Simply dismissing literature because of skin color is idiotic, and is a good way to lose the entire curriculum over to the left.
You're ignoring the fundamental problem, which isn't the texts students read, but the fact they don't read them regardless of what they are.
I know for a fact that most students at my school never even read the texts outside of what was forced in class.
You are quite right, I'm honestly surprised non-AP courses even attempt to have their kids read anything but trash.
As if students will get that far into a book about dindus when it doesn't even good up until the very end. We loose the curriculum to the modern left by trying to be PC about PoC novelists. We end up erasing Conrad's merits based on the fact that he is "problematic" in the modern sense. If anything I would maybe suggest W.E.B Dubois or Booker T. Washington instead of some modern African leftist shill.
Love of reading doesnt come from occasionally reading passages from a book and painstakingly analysing each line for essay quotations either
I dont see why you keep equating conrad with achebe. If anything, I would teach Achebe alongside Coetzee's disgrace. That would be a fucking interesting section. Maybe not proper for hs though.
I talked to a mom recently who was trying to get her son to read. I told her to find him violent books with plenty of sex, and cut off screens. She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She was picking out books for her son and she literally had a childrens biography of sotomayor.