If you were in charge of designing a 4 year high school English curriculum

[XemaSab]

what books would you teach?

What other materials would you use to give the students a broad English education?

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. To Kill A Mockingbird

Some Shakespeare

Uncle Tom's Cabin

At least one Grisham novel.

American poets

This is just off the top of my head.

[shadowknows69]

84. That's mostly what I got

Although we did Mockingbird and at least talked about 'cabin' in 8th grade. The Lord of the Rings really should be in there IMO. Definitely a good amount of Poe, Mary Shelly's opus of course and even Stephen King by now. I know I'm thinking more contemporary.

[Diclotican]

186. shadowknows69

shadowknows69

The Lord of the Rings should possible be little to hard for many to read fully?. Have read the book, in my own native language once, and even that I am a good reader and read a lot of books, I used a whole year to read the whole book.. But I would say, it was wort it.. The first 250 pages was hard, but after that, the books read itself... Many evenings/nights who was been killed by that book...

Some of the big classical english books maybe?. The english language have a lot of marvelous writers, who have given the world a lot of amazing books, from the middle ages, to the contemporary..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad english, not my native language

[shadowknows69]

187. I agree with the difficulty with LOTR

I'm just reading it again after 15 years and it's taking some time. There's certainly no lack of great literature, and that's why I don't envy anyone that actually has to make such a curriculum. I hope they're paid well.

A couple more off the top of my head.

Poets: Blake, Frost, Yeats, Thomas.

Gotta have some O. Henry, Mark Twain, of course. Some classic Science Fiction would be nice. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. Phillip K. Dick for older students. Roger Zelazny and some Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ack, I could go on forever.

[Ex Lurker]

199. Grisham is an entertaining read

but literature?

[SoCalDem]

2. Depends..

We had "College Prep", that focused a LOT on classical literature, and since time was limited, we missed a lot of contemporary stuff..

If I were TEACHING it, I'm afraid my students would HATE me. I would love to see more emphasis on spelling, composition, grammar & the "nuts & bolts"..

But it would have to include
Brit-Lit
Russian Lit
19th century poets

[XemaSab]

5. Can you give some specific examples?

:shrug:

(I like the way you think, and yeah, my students would HATE me).

[SoCalDem]

14. Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Yeats, Tolstoy, Chaucer, Dickens

Dickinson, Poe, Melville, Joyce, Bronte..

to name a few :)

[XemaSab]

15. .

:thumbsup:

[EFerrari]

19. But, why the Russians? I love them but, why put them into an English

program? Curious!

[Oregone]

22. Its incredible literature...

English is about more than teaching what a noun or pronoun is, and learning how to spell things in English.

English class is about more than learning "English", believe it or not.

[EFerrari]

25. Yes, I know that.

I was a doctoral candidate in English at Cal.

But, that doesn't answer the question, does it? :)

[Oregone]

32. I said: English class is about more than learning "English"

[EFerrari]

38. And that still doesn't really answer the question.

I love the Russians. But, why not Latin American magical realism? That's a lot closer to home. Why not the Germans or the South Africans?

:)

It really depends on what one means by a "broad English education". If you're talking about cultural influence on letters, then you'd have to do Montaigne, some early American stuff like the Federalist papers, some Freud and Walter Winchell.

[Oregone]

46. Im lost at where you are getting at...

Part of teaching English is teaching literature. To do so, one would naturally teach the best literature available, as well as different styles which may be influenced by different cultures. Good literature doesn't have geographical borders. Looking back on my own education, we read everything from South American, to Japanese, to Russian, to German, to American (normally presented in different units or grouped by time period or corresponding historical themes). Literature's importance isn't judge by how far from home it is (though it is important to teach how different cultures and events impact how ideas are conveyed).

I would, in no way, present your alternatives in a class. Engrossing literature? I think not. Save that for politics and psychology classes.

[EFerrari]

51. Montaigne invented the essay. The Federalists americanized political tracts.

Freud created a way to talk about interiority. Walter Winchell was the journalist who laid down track for the pop media our students deal with today.

All had a profound influence on our literature and all are of interest to anyone engaging English letters, especially American English letters.

[Oregone]

55. Perhaps those all have their place in different units..

But as far as literature, the Russians stay.

[EFerrari]

59. In comparative literature, not in English. n/t

[Oregone]

64. The problem is that in High School, "English" means...

reading/writing(creative/technical)/literature, etc. 4 years of this curriculum with no comparative literature from foreign sources would not create the most well-rounded education, eh? Im not sure why you don't understand that.

Maybe my teachers were on crack...I don't know. My "English" classes were instead all called "College Prep" classes except for my "AP English" class I took as a senior (which had more foreign lit than the former ones). Reading lit in translation in units was surely not excluded, and I appreciated that opportunity.

[EFerrari]

70. I've no problem understanding that but that wasn't the OP's question.

At my school, we read in translation or even in the original in our foreign language classes. Or, mostly and unfortunately, on our own.

[Oregone]

77. The OP was asking about a "4 year high school English curriculum"

Which should include teaching many units of literature, from some of the most notable literature ever written.

But if you think you have time for vocab, grammar and the Federalist Papers, then by all means, to each their own.

[EFerrari]

85. My students read a SH play 3X and learned the three dick jokes

and the four curses. The Federalist Papers would be less challanging. lol

World literature and English literature are just two different projects. Both great, but different.

[Oregone]

88. Bah, I could barely tolerate the Federalist Papers in college...

Give me the dick jokes to keep me entertained.

"World literature and English literature are just two different projects."

And both critical parts to a "4 year high school English curriculum".

[EFerrari]

90. I'm sorry I came to foreign authors so late.

I didn't even read Neruda until after I was published myself and even though my first language is Spanish.

:mad:

But that's not typically what people mean when they say an English curriculum. :shrug:

[Critters2]

96. Yeah, but they're classy, high-brow, well-educated dick jokes

that they wouldn't have learned if they hadn't read that play.

I even suspect there's an actual reason to learn algebra. Don't know what it would be, but I think there might be one.

[EFerrari]

102. No, they're just OLD dick jokes.

:rofl:

And I love algebra. That's the only way I can balance my checkbook!

[timtom]

175. So, did you find a practical use

for the quadratic equation?

Having worked in a civil engineering environment (though I'm not an engineer), neither I nor the engineers with whom I worked had any occasion to use it.

[EFerrari]

193. Never but I did learn to love algebra almost as much as poetry.

At least the Regents earned their dough. :)

[XemaSab]

83. I was leaving that open to interpretation

FWIW, my English classes covered ALL the bases.

[EFerrari]

86. Something I haven't had to think about for a long time is entrance requirements.

The courses you take in high school have to mesh with the college you want in to. Ugh.

And the Universities do have separate departments for English and World or Comparative Lit.

[Oregone]

89. Mine didn't actually...

"And the Universities do have separate departments for English and World or Comparative Lit."

It was all in the English Department. Yes, one of my German profs taught me German lit in trans, but it was under the English department when he did it.

[EFerrari]

91. Not at Cal. We used to joke about the CompLit students being dressed in all black

all the time.

lol

[XemaSab]

107. I got a science degree here in California

We had to read "100 Years of Solitude," "Race Matters," and not a SINGLE OTHER BOOK in English 1A. (And I took three different English 1A classes :hide: )

[EFerrari]

109. Lucky you didn't get me.

:spank:

:rofl:

[XemaSab]

118. Maybe I did....

Is the entire focus of your class how the white man is keeping you down? Do you start each semester with 40 students and end with three? :hide::scared:

Or are you the twitchy dude, who shifts from chair to chair to chair throughout the lecture? :hide::scared:

Or are you the hotty guy who gave me an A? :9

[EFerrari]

120. I once assigned the longest book in the world to my 1B class.

It was such a mistake. My mentor came down on me like a ton of bricks and she was right.

I'm still sorry!

I was the one who made you talk to each other so you wouldn't stare at me for the whole hour. And, the one who made you grade yourselves. :yoiks:

[Critters2]

52. But English literature should be written in English. At a minimum.

The OP is trying to develop an English curriculum, not a world lit course. So, Russian literature seems a bit far afield. Even good Russian lit.

[Oregone]

61. Look, literature is an important component of an English course

And foreign lit in translation suffices to allow students to read how other cultures/places/events impact the conveyances of ideas. Something doesn't have to be written originally in English to be literature, and literature that is exceptional should be taught in any reading/writing class.

Its just sort of silly to say only English writers should be taught. So Chinese students should, in their reading/writing classes, only be taught from Chinese authors? And German students only be taught from theirs? That promotes isolationist education and greatly limits the quality of literature any one group of students can read.

[EFerrari]

68. But that's inside out. English letters are English letters.

Chinese students can write in English if they desire, but it's still English. The Remains of the Day is a great example of someone writing in English although it isn't his first culture.

Literature is a broader field than the OP's question, a broad English education.

And there is nothing isolationist about English letters, considering that most of English is a borrowing from someone else. Try excluding other cultures from the most narrow Americanists like Fitzgerald or like Hemingway -- from any of the Modernists. It's not possible. Even Frost incorporates elements from other cultures.

[Hekate]

153. It's amazing how far afield the "tradition in English" goes, thanks to British colonialism...

There's the British Isles, USA, and Canada, of course. But others who write exclusively in English include authors living in India, South Africa, and the Caribbean.

Sigh. Four years of a high school curriculum sounds like a lot of time, but there's so much else going on. Also a lot of kids are not going on to college, so whatever gets taught has to last them a lifetime. High school "English" teachers have a huge mandate.

Hekate

[CTyankee]

185. That's interesting. Tell me how Frost does this and in which poems?

I have a large interest in poetry and would love to explore this...

Thanks!

[EFerrari]

205. I don't have my collected RF any more but iirc,

there's Celtic myth underlying "The Mending Wall"; "Departmental" compares the ants carrying the dead body to janissaries. "For Once Then Something" rewrites Narcissus.

Conversely, "The Gift Outright" speaks as if we are all immigrants denuded of culture, aliens! And that tone of severe dislocation is another thread in the poems -- ("Fred, which way is north?") -- usually balanced against some question of origins ("a tribute of the current to the source"}.

That's not very satisfying and now I have to get a new copy of RF.

[Critters2]

71. I think studying World Lit is a great thing. Indeed, I double majored

in European History and French Lit. Yet, somehow, we never read any Chinese lit in my French Lit classes. The OP asked for advice in designing an English curriculum, not a World Lit course. There's so much good English lit that that's what should be taught in an English lit course. And students should also have opportunities to take courses in World Lit.

[Oregone]

81. Personally, I think you are hung up on the word "English"

"The OP asked for advice in designing an English curriculum, not a World Lit course"

In a High School context, "English" means everything about writing under the sun (vocab, spelling, grammar, writing (essay/creative), reading, literature). It should most certainly include at least a unit of world lit. We had units in a class containing writings grouped in eras (renaissance, modern, post-modern), etc, and we spent some time talking about how culture and history impacts literature (it was world lit).

[Critters2]

94. The word "English" is specific. It means "English". I thik people should read

Tolstoy. But, Tolstoy didn't write in English. The OP is putting together an English Curriculum. You keep talking about your high school. My high school called the "English" department "Language Arts". There courses that were called "English" and studied English grammar, rhetoric, composition and literature. There were also courses in world lit, in mythologies, in poetry (English and others), etc. But the word "English" meant "English".

The OP used the word "English". The OP seems fluent in English. Thus, when the word "English" was used, I assumed it meant "English".

Call me crazy.

[Oregone]

97. Well, Im going to have to call you crazy.....

:)

Yes, Im normally familiar with the term "English" used as an umbrella term in high school to cover all things written/read, etc...Perhaps Language Arts is a more appropriate term though.

So, did the OP mean they wish to design an "4 year English Curriculum" or a "4 year Language Arts curriculum"?

[EFerrari]

104. And that's a great question. What is the hub of the OP'?

Because reading "English literature" and reading "world literature" are two difference tasks.

[Critters2]

125. He said "English". Again, he seems familiar with the language.

So, I'm assuming "English" means "English".

[XemaSab]

129. I'm a she

;)

[Critters2]

130. OMG I never knew that. Wonder why I made the assumption.

Sorry! :hi:

[fishwax]

134. I agree with you that World Lit is an important component of a high school English curriculum

I'm not sure I'd bring in a bunch of Russian novels, necessarily, but I read short stories by Tolstoi and Chekhov in high school English classes, and there are plenty of other non-English sources that are perfectly appropriate for a high school English curriculum.

[wtmusic]

121. Designating "English literature" is a bit arbitrary

Is American literature included? What about literature written in English by foreign writers like Nabokov?

[Critters2]

127. Sure, these would be included. English literature means literature

written in English.

[EFerrari]

171. American lit is a subset of English and Nabokov wrote in English. n/t

[EFerrari]

100. No. "English" means something. It doesn't mean World Literature.

To moosh the two together is fine, if you know what you're doing and what your aim is.

Reading Tolstoy or Derrida or Neruda is not English unless you are doing it to illustrate some part of the English canon.

[Oregone]

105. 4 years of no Russian of French lit. What a cruel world

:)

[EFerrari]

106. Oh, tell me about it. Try wintering with the American Existentialists.

It's enough to GIVE you arthritis. :)

[SoCalDem]

156. No Molière?? that's cruel..n/t

[NuttyFluffers]

168. not possible. the world of ideas permeate through languages. those ideas then affect it.

besides, with that restriction other languages would have such a small corpus with which to work, it would be a waste of time. for example, the sheer influence of the bible alone on euro lit, let alone just english, is so great that it cannot be avoided if you are to talk about the meanings behind even cursory examples in texts. to even attempt literature analysis, let alone structural language analysis, style, even certain migrations in grammar -- essentially to understand and argue your essay's "why" -- one needs to have a background of "who, what, when, where, and how." that cannot be done without real exposure to things outside the language's corpus. looking back and trying to find a "pure state" in language is an arbitrary exercise based on a deliberately biased and endlessly debatable set of parameters. it's basically a wild goose chase of assumptions that a "pure state" of language can ever be found, going completely counter to everything we've ever studied about linguistics and anthropology and the exchange of ideas among humans through language.

but the argument could be fun if you have a few weekends to kill.
:hi:

[EFerrari]

172. It's much simpler than that. We're talking about a body of work

written in English.

lol

:hi:

[fishwax]

181. "English" often includes "Literature" as a whole at the high school level

Even plenty of college English departments dabble in lit from other languages in their offerings--not usually as the focus of a course, but part of a broader/gen ed course on "fiction" or "the short story."

With respect to a broad English curriculum for high school students, I think some world literature should certainly be included, because high school English should provide students with a broad understanding of *literature* and not merely Anglophone literature.

[XemaSab]

62. As the author of the OP

this is exactly the kind of debate I was hoping to spark. :thumbsup:

[Critters2]

74. Well, I'm really anal about such things.

I also love lots of English lit that no one ever reads. I think students should read Moby Dick (complete with whining and complaining) before they read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But that's me. :)

[EFerrari]

87. It's not your anality if that is how this material is divided up all over the country

by the universities.

I don't know if this is the best way to divvy things up. It's just how it is at the moment.

[XemaSab]

110. I just realized:

High School English might be a student's ONLY EXPOSURE TO LITERATURE. :o

Does that change anything? :shrug:

[EFerrari]

112. Our anti-depressant RX?

Omg.

You'd think that a whole high school would find a way to at least lable their shit right.

I'm about to go back to teach there and it scares the cr@p out of me. And not because of the kids.

[SoCalDem]

23. Good literature is never a bad idea:)

I took Russian in High school and we had to read Crime & Punishment IN RUSSIAN../ now that was a trip:)

[EFerrari]

26. Well, that's true. And great lit in translation could be the angle.

Encouraging bi or multi -linguism, you bet! :)

[Sequoia]

208. What? Because they're damn good writers that's why!

We had Russian Literature in high school and that was the best class I had. Beside those Russian writers that were mentioned in the post above wrote about the people dealing with the crap that was about to come down in the coming revolution. Think how fortunate the world is to have the great novel, "War and Peace".

[chimpymustgo]

145. Agree. But please add Langson Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrisson,

Ralph Ellison...

so many great African American authors...so little time.

[SoCalDem]

155. I concentrated on the "oldies"..but of course the contemporary authors

should be covered as well.. It helps to build on the past, so I would start with the oldies:)

[JerseygirlCT]

201. Yes, and Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare ... nt

[SoCalDem]

206. Eek.. I forgot the Bard

:spank:--->me

[jhrobbins]

119. The grammatical issue has become a pet peeve of mine of late-

while watching a lot of news the spokesmen (and I know this is gonna PO a lot of folks) for police departments (and maybe it's because most items of this nature are police matters) cannot use the helpers have and had properly. I cannot tell how many times I hear, I seen or I had saw and I just don't know what happened to our English education. Otherwise these folks seem well spoken and educated

[JerseygirlCT]

200. Yeah. It would include a lot of actual reading, too

Not watching videos.

I can't believe how few actual plays and novels my child read each year in high school!

And yes, I'd tilt toward the classics. They're classics for a reason, after all.

[opihimoimoi]

3. More Mangas.....

[crimsonblue]

4. hmmm...

To Kill a Mockingbird

1984

The Scarlet Letter

Beowulf

Grendel

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Walden

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Letters of Seneca

Plato's Apologia

The Audacity of Hope

[Thothmes]

141. How about some Cooper or Melvil

[crimsonblue]

146. blech

I think cooper was a crappy writer, and I'd never put anybody through the boring hell of reading Moby Dick.

[tosh]

6. Some Zora Neal Hurston,

Edwidge Danticat, and Jubilee by Margaret Walker.

[XemaSab]

10. I was just reading the blurb of "Their Eyes Were Watching God" on Wikipedia

I read it in school, and I retained NOTHING from it. :hide:

[tosh]

16. Mules and Men was my introduction to Zora.

[EFerrari]

20. You HAVE to read TEWWG in order to get Toni Morrison.

That is all. :)

[roody]

7. Beloved

[Chipper Chat]

8. First source material: Webster's Dictionary.

This is an isolated pet-peeve, but I want to throw something at the TV screen when actors in commercials say PER-tection instead of PRO-tection. Other mangles of the English language abound in ads. Oh yeah, and Sarah Palin didn't help with her g-droppings. All those home-schooled kids will be forever sayin':
"Daddy was preachin to me agayn 'bout losin' my virginity dontcha know golly gee I'm feelin soooooooo swingin bout raht nahooo".

[ColbertWatcher]

9. LOL!

[ThomWV]

11. I would not care what they read, as long as they read a lot of it

[rvablue]

12. Here are my suggestions:

If you live in a well-off district or where your local newspaper might provide free copies, make them read the newspaper every day....it will make them aware of what is going on, expose them to new concepts and increase their vocabulary.

And my votes on the reading list:

"On the Road" which was suggested by my junior year English teacher and completely changed the course of my life.

And anything by Will Cather.

[Fireweed247]

76. "On the Road" was life changing to me as well

:fistbump:

Also, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[shadowknows69]

93. "On the Road"

Read on a bus to California. Good times.

[lpbk2713]

13. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner to start with.

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens.

Poets and playwrights.

This list could go on and on, particularly if it were to cover a span of four years.

[EFerrari]

17. What is a broad English education?

In four years, all you can do is indicate the canon across forms, try to point out how to keep track of new stuff, and how to read and to weigh pop media.

Maybe it would be easier to say what books I was taught that were useful: Paradise Lost. I had to wrestle that sucker to the ground and it opened me up to all kinds of things. History, philosophy, multiculturalism, patriarchy, pacifism.

Fiction by black women, the real revolutionaries in the later 20th. Arguing with their white male predecessors and also, going off into their own way and to hell with everyone else. lol

Poetry. Because it's fun to bend your brain.

Bible. Because eventually you find out that someone wrote it at some point. Reading Paul cursing in his letters will set your back.

Learning how to compare different accounts of the same event in the mass media. That's a small step to enabling cultural literacy.

Play texts are cool, too. They haven't changed much in four hundred years except the government doesn't censor them as openly. Having students take on roles is another short cut to teaching cultural specificity as an idea. As when my Cal hockey players created roles for all the guys in Pride and Prejudice that didn't get a love scene. :)

Maybe I'd suck at this job!

[Lancer]

18. Poetry

Teenaged kids can easily memorize lengthy hip hop song lyrics. There's nothing wrong with that. But at that age they can easily learn some of Shakespeare's sonnets, a little Keats and a sprinkling of Frost. Not to mention Langston Hughes and Marianne Moore.

I was in H.S. in the late 70s, and I had an English teacher who made the "Canterbury Tales" the highlight of the semester. She assigned each student one of the tales and to learn it well enough to be able to tell it in the style of a well-known comedian, a newscaster or sports announcer. Some of the presentations were just
:rofl:

That teacher's name was Jean Newman. She deserves props for being so clever and creative that for an hour a day, 27 teenagers forgot they were in z-z-z-z-z-z *yawn* English class. She did that for 31 years.

[Odin2005]

150. A 20-something's suggestion on Shakespeare...

...If I was an English teacher doing Shakespeare I would use the fact that his plays were the popular low-brow entertainment of the time, a lot of the language Shakespeare used was the common language spoken on the street at the time. Shakespeare was the pop culture master of his time so, IMO it is best to compare his works to modern pop culture in order to get people into his stuff.


Canterbury Tales? My God, did she force you to use Middle English pronunciation, LOL? That women sounded obsessed. :rofl:

[JerseygirlCT]

203. It's funny, but if you listen to someone read it who knows how

to read it aloud, suddenly nothing sounds all that strange anymore.

My college professor did a brilliant job with CT.

On Shakespeare - sad, but funny conversation overheard years ago at a bagel store between two high school girls:

"Oh yes, well, I've had a Shakespeare course, so I can translate from the old English".

Oy. I don't know if I want to know who taught that course.

[JerseygirlCT]

202. Yes, not nearly enough poetry in the curriculum, either

from what I saw. Or enough good teaching of it.

[CatBO]

21. Here are a few...

The Color Purple
The Glass Menagerie
The Kite Runner
Dreams from my Father ;)

Edited to add (as soon as I hit post several more hit me):
1984
Animal Farm
The Jungle
The Pearl
The Grapes of Wrath

[Tansy_Gold]

37. BALANCE BALANCE BALANCE

The Pearl is too depressing. So is The Jungle. So is Romeo and Juliet. And The Old Man and The Sea. They have to be countered with something that doesn't leave the reader suicidal.

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody
Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes by Jack Douglas
The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
The Well at the World's End by William Morris
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

I would also include background information from Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler. When kids understand how stories are built and what they mean, they tend to be more interested in them.

But what do I know?


Tansy Gold

[CatBO]

50. Ehh...

I agree balance is good, but those books that I listed were all the ones that moved me the most when I was in school. Hitchiker's Guide is fun reading, but I don't find it terribly through provoking. If you want lighthearted with great storytelling, I'd prefer Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods". Or for inspirational, uplifting and terribly current, Lance Armstrong's "It's Not About the Bike".

[Tansy_Gold]

116. I was assigned "The Pearl" twice.

Disclaimer: I used to write historical romance novels, and I wrote my undergrad honors thesis in 2000 (I went back to college at age 50) on a particular aspect of the social relevance of popular fiction.

Read "The Pearl" the first time in 8th grade, was assigned it again junior year (Am. Lit.) in high school. I found it utterly depressing the first time, couldn't touch it the second.

Freshman year high school we read The Old Man and the Sea. I confronted my English teacher with "What's the point? that life is a futile struggle? Maybe we should all just kill ourselves and avoid the frustration." The next thing we read was Romeo and Juliet. That was a real upper!

Kids should be exposed to "good" "literature," but they should also understand that there are worthwhile "messages" in popular literature, too. It's not just about the symbolism of the lions in TOMATS; it's about the journey the characters take and the vicarious adventure the reader engages in.

I think it's less what reading material is used than HOW it is used. How can reading and understanding become a life-long habit? What makes Shakespeare's plays -- written for commercial purposes to please the popular appetite -- so universal that they remain popular 400 years later? What context were they written in? What political motives informed them? Same thing with Dickens, with Tolstoy, Hugo, Bronte, Austen.

That's why I recommend Campbell and Vogler, if not for the students then at least for the teachers. That way whether the kids read Ludlum and Grisham, Tolkien or Adams, the teacher can approach The Story and then see how it's constructed.



Tansy Gold

[FloridaJudy]

24. Kurt Vonnegutt

Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, along with the usual modern classics like Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald.

That's assuming you teach in a relatively liberal community. Some folks here still think Huckleberry Finn is a subversive book. I agree, but to me "subversive" is a compliment.

[EFerrari]

30. You could take Phillip Sidney's pop stuff, hop off at Twain and head into Vonnegutt.

That would be so much fun.

lol

[XemaSab]

65. I would guess that a lot of the problem with teaching "Huck Finn" is the use of the n-word

The liberal communities might be the MOST offended. :o

[noamnety]

73. I spent two days last week in a seminar with Glenn Singleton

he made a great point about having to read huck finn, as a black male. He had some major issues with Yet Another White Dude trying to portray the black experience.

He was pretty openly disdainful - during our seminar and when he read the book - of the basic premise.

"I remember sitting back in middle school and saying to myself, 'I don't think Twain is a satirist, I think he's a racist. I don't think Huck and Jim are having this great relationship. I can't really understand why Jim keeps talking to Huck. I would think if I just got out of this period of slavery-with no freedom-I wouldn't want to spend all my time on a raft with a white boy answering questions.'"

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/27257.html

[LiberalEsto]

27. I'd include fewer DWM's

Dead White Males are still overly represented, even in some of the previous posts.

[noamnety]

43. My thoughts exactly.

Select diverse authors. Don't represent people of color by picking books by white people about people of color.

While I like To Kill A Mockingbird, it does represent a certain problematic and recurring theme in white literature of heroic white folks rescuing poor disempowered black folks.

[noamnety]

142. I wish I could still edit this post

But I'll add here - I subbed recently for a class reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and there was a large segment that just hated the book.

Putting myself in the shoes of one of my kids from Detroit, I can see how the epic tale of a black man being convicted and shot for raping a white woman (both denying - but also subtly reinforcing that stereotype for the white students in the room), and then refocusing on the tragedy of the misunderstood white guy protecting the white kids ... eh, I can understand their eye-rolling reaction. Just subbing there for the one class during my prep, I ended up with a totally different view of that book.

In that environment, I suddenly got that the book is about racism and how tragic it is, but also it's kind of about how deeply it affects white people (oh and by the way a black guy was shot but really, let's talk about how hard this was for the white folks involved).

[MillieJo]

179. In the UK we did Maya Angelou..

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Too Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice And Men and The Colour Purple, for part of our studies in English Literature, as well as Shakespeare, Bronte, Tom Stoppard, Thomas Hardy and WW1 poetry. It is possible for English Literature to be very varied.

[XemaSab]

67. Can you suggest some non-DWM's?

:shrug:

(I think it's tough to balance Great Literature with multiculturalism, and not have it smack of tokenism.)

[noamnety]

111. nonDWM authors

Shamelessly copied from a friend's email about great women writers: Annie Dillard, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Walker, Tillie Olsen, and Harriet Arnow

Also, http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/aframlit.htm

http://www.lasculturas.com/library/famous/authors

I would encourage you to drop the idea that multiculturalism has to be "balanced" with Great Literature (as opposed to being part of it).

[Igel]

101. I followed this kind of discussion in a Russian program.

They wanted more women writers.

So they dug and they found obscure women writers from the 19th century. Problem was, they sucked. Truly miserable writing, the object of research primarily because of their genitalia, not of the excellence of their writing; it was of interest because it gave a female perspective, but that's literature as a window into sociology, not literature for literature's sake. Most of those writers are again forgotten.

For prior centuries ... zip.

So they had the choice: Do they continue to say that their students are widely read in Medieval, 18th, 19th, *and* 20th century works? Or, in the interest of making sure that women and men writers are present in somewhat proportionate amounts, do they essentially minimize the men writers from the 20th century, and limit pre-20th century works?

The response was mixed: Most still have lots of DRMs, since if you do pre-20th century lit, that's where the action was, and is. For modern writers, there's a focus on women writers, even though there are at least as many men as women.

Point: DWMs are going to be overrepresented. Even in contemporary English lit there are probably about equal numbers of worthy men and women writers; if you do older English literatures, you have fewer women of note, so you get to either overlook great literature for middling literature, or have "too many" men. I go with the later; it's also a point of sociology, but a minor one.

[Critters2]

28. Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Canterbury Tales for starters.

In modern translation, but I'd at least give 'em a taste of the old and middle English.

Shakespeare--probably ones they've been exposed to in the culture: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth; and a few of the sonnets.

The poetry of John Donne

Pilgrim's Progress

Paradise Lost

Moll Flanders

Robinson Crusoe

Gulliver's Travels

Something by John Locke

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Frankenstein

Ivanhoe

Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights

Something by Dickens

The Scarlet Letter

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Moby Dick

Some Faulkner and Hemingway

Some Stein or Woolf

In Cold Blood

Robert Frost

Vonnegut (I'd use Slaughterhouse 5)


Wow. That's a lot. And some heavy stuff, but there are good abridged editions of things like Moby Dick.

[EFerrari]

34. But once you read in translation or in an abridged edition

you don't get the original art.

Another thing: That's basically the straight white male English canon. That's what I was taught and had to reach out to get helpings of other kinds of work. We only have four years here. :P

[Critters2]

42. Well, you certainly can add minority and women's voices.

I might add Zora Neale Huston, and Oscar Wilde.

For me, the purpose of an English curriculum is to demonstrate the development of the language and the ways it's been used to reflect the ideas and world views of different times. But then, my undergrad degree is in European History, so I don't mind the dead white guys--and I did include some women's works.

I was reacting, to some degree, to those who were suggesting Seneca, Plato, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other non-English lit. The English language has produced such rich literature, and has proven so adaptable and flexible, as to be really amazing. If I were teaching English, that's what I'd want my students to see.

As to abridged works--Moby Dick is LOOOOONG. You can get a taste for the art and ideas being expressed in many of the abridged versions. As to translations, you're free to teach Beowulf in the original if you read old English. Be my guest. I think your students will have trouble following it. But it makes TONS more sense than reading Plato in translation, and calling it "English".

[EFerrari]

44. You know what's fun, is to take translations of Plato over a few hundred years

and read them together. Because it tells you a lot about the culture that translated him. :)

Imho, there's no use reading Moby Dick abridged. The suffering is part of the experience.

lol

:)

[Critters2]

47. LOL!! Agreed! You gotta find yourself wishing

you could get off that DAMN BOAT!!!

You're probably right about the comparison of translations of Plato. I was well prepared to learn text criticism in seminary by having studied Piers Plowman and the Pirenne Thesis in college. These things can teach a body a lot.

[EFerrari]

60. I had the great privilege to study the parallel gospels with a biblical scholar

and I don't think I've ever recovered. And part of that course was to track the very carefully political release of all the early English language bibles. They're all very different.

And taken together, you really get to see the people at those moments in time, working together to get their text out. It's a good experience to have. :)

[Odin2005]

152. LOL, Old English could as well be German to us modern speakers.

English has evolved a lot, certainly more then any other Germanic language. And yet, there are many words that are pronounced almost exactly the same then and now: Father, Today, Guilt, Loaf, Heaven, Rich (cognate with German "reich"), Will, Forgive, Evil, Earth, Lord, etc.

[Pyrzqxgl]

29. A pretty wide range of stuff: Steinbeck, Jack London, L Frank Baum, Jules Verne,

J.R.R Toelken, Jack Karoac, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll,
Robert Lewis Stevenson, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Isaac Asimov, Thomas Wolfe,
James Joyce, Lorenz Hart, Edna St Vincent Mallay, Robert Benchley, Hank Williams,
Franklin W. Dixon, F Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Browning, Robert Johnson, Charles
Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Heinlein, Adolph Von Tiltzer, Dorothy Parker,
Donald Ogen Stewart, P.G. Wodehouse, Walter Donaldson, e.e. cummings, Kenneth
Patchen, Bret Harte, Zane Gray, Thomas A Dorsey, Johnny Mercer, Chuck Berry,
Lieber & Stoller, James Whitcomb Riley, L Sprague de Camp, and a whole lot more
(note: some of these are musicians who write. Listen to the words)

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

31. Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath, Portrait of a Lady,

A Delicate Balance, and War and Peace.

[Critters2]

48. Anna Karenina and War and Peace aren't English.

Just sayin'.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

57. Great(est) literature even when translated into English.

Tolstoy isn't known as the greatest novelist ever for no reason.

[Critters2]

69. Indeed. But the OP asked about English curriculum specifically. nt

[EFerrari]

78. In an English class, not a Lit class, you'd do Tolstoy as a prequel

to someone like James or Faulkner. (I hope those dates work! :silly:) And, that would be fine. But, the goal would be to track English letters.

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[Speck Tater]

35. English as in English Literature, or English grammar, or composition, or...

Personally, I would spend the first three years on:

"alot" is NOT a word.
"there", "their" and "they're" are three different words with three different meanings.
"them" and "those" are NOT interchangeable.
Verbs should agree in person and number with their nouns and pronouns: "Them dogs is mean." doesn't cut it.
There is a difference between "affected" and "effected".
Know when to use "its" and when to use "it's".
Same for "who's" and "whose".

etc., etc. ...

The fourth year would concentrate on expositional writing.

[EFerrari]

41. Don't you mean "expository"?

lol

:evilgrin:

[Speck Tater]

143. hehe. Nothing like being made a fool of in public. ;-) NT

[EFerrari]

151. Ah, come on. This isn't public, it's just us fooling around.

I'm sure I'm overdue for my turn. :)

[Speck Tater]

166. If I'm not making mistakes, I'm not doing anything. NT

[Odin2005]

154. Prescriptivist Grammar Nazis suck.

I hate English teachers that take what should be learning what is and is not appropriate language in FORMAL situations and turn it into the classist bashing of dialect differences in common speech.

[LWolf]

189. Please don't forget "loose" and "lose."

Not that I don't already hammer these points for 3 years in a row in middle school.

[kristopher]

195. Start with videos of Sarah Palin interviews and

have the students transcribe her responses.

Then have them attempt to derive meaning from the transcriptions; first without the related question, then with the question.

Time: 4 hours.

[Initech]

36. 1984 should be mandatory reading.

[Critters2]

49. Agreed. My God, there's a lot of great lit in this language. nt

[RC]

39. In a 4 year English course you would need a semester of the 'root' languages

that comprise English. That would allow the students to understand all the contradictory rules we have for the 'correct' use of and spellings of words in the English language.

Maybe this semester could be opened to the members of DU to improve their language skills. :evilgrin:

[Hekate]

40. Whatever you have them read, be sure to include plenty of writing ...

At *least* a year's foundation in grammar and spelling would not be amiss, reinforced constantly by dual grades for every paper: one for content, and one for the ability to spell and construct the English language competently. The dual grades should go through the entire four years. Spell-check features are a great innovation, but they don't help the writer with homonyms like to-two-too or their-they're-there.

Teachers in inner cities who have their students keep a daily journal, ungraded, show vast improvements in writing ability by the end of the year. College prep students should be doing the same.

I say this as someone who really detested grammar studies, but I also had the advantage of a mother who corrected us every time we opened our mouths so my internal grammarian was/is extremely strong. Mr. H, otoh, really liked studying it -- but then again, he really liked studying Logic as well. He grew up to be a computer programmer. I believe there is a connection, and you might point that out.

Many people will have good suggestions for reading, and out of my vast library I would be hard put to add to it. Required reading lists should go out at the beginning of the school year, and suggested summer reading lists should go out at the end of the school year. Summer reading may not get achieved, but you know it is sending a message.

Push them, and they will learn.

Hekate

[janx]

45. I teach college undergrads English...

and it would take me a month to answer your question. The only thing I can tell you right now is that my decision would differ a lot from what is being taught now--what has essentially been taught for the last decade or two.

Francine Prose published an essay in Harper's that raised this very question. She found that high school students were being taught the very same literature year after year after year...and she got some horrible letters from high school teachers as a result.

I'm rushed now, but I can revisit this later and show you what I teach on an undergraduate level in college. My degrees are in English rather than education, and I tend to have an unorthodox syllabus.

I can tell you this for now: Not enough literature is being taught in many high schools. There seems to be too much pop culture crap going on there. The same thing exists, to an extent, in the college undergraduate "readers"--books marketed to faculty--in college. The same writers show up over and over, and sometimes these writers aren't exactly stimulating; they're just fad. Young people don't read enough art, enough pure pleasure literature. As a result, they don't develop those critical thinking skills that are developed by the osmosis of doing so.

;-)

Feel free to PM me.

[XemaSab]

92. I would appreciate it if you could revisit this thread later and share your experiences

:thumbsup:

Is this the article?

I know why the caged bird cannot read:
How American high school students learn to loathe literature

http://www.harpers.org/archive/1999/09/0060648

[Obamanaut]

53. Harbrace College Handbook nt

[timtom]

183. My favorite.

Keep it by the computer desk.

And American Heritage Dictionary on the computer for quick reference.

Perhaps you'll appreciate the fact that in High School Senior English, we had to diagram the last verse of Bryant's "Thanatopsis" (it is just one sentence).

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Damned if I could do it now, though.

[Obamanaut]

188. I have the Harbrace and an old Webster's, so old it has duct tape on

the corners from losing battles with children, grandchildren, and puppies.

My favorite teacher of all time was in high school, and we were stuck with, er, allowed to enjoy "Evangeline". A group of graduates from the 1958 - 63 years gathers monthly for an evening of chatting and eating. This teacher was a regular participant. I was fortunate to have been in his class twice - 9th and 11th grades. When he died not too long ago, hundreds of former high school and college students attended.

He was a good man, and a superb teacher. He is missed.

[OswegoAtheist]

54. *Takes notes*

As an English teacher-to-be, I've come up with a few books I'd use:

"American Born Chinese" - A great graphic novel about the son of two Chinese immigrants. The three main story arcs all relate to how the main character deals with living in two different cultures.

"Maus I & II" - Art Spiegelman's masterpiece of survival in Nazi-conquered Poland.

"Black Rain" - Ibuse Masuji's novel of a family's ordeals after the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima.

"The Road to Wigan Pier" - Yeah, if I want parents burning the school down.

Oswego "Suggestions welcome" Atheist

[RedCappedBandit]

75. Greetings from another atheist in oswego!

Maus.. great books. Read them last year for a social studies course.

[flvegan]

56. I'd ask my retired senior high school English honors teaching mom.

Were it up to me, I'd be sending a bunch of idiots out of my school. I'm in no way qualified.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

58. split it into classic, modern, diverse,

Introduce with medieval literature and work upwards and out to the "colonies"

[noamnety]

66. Eh, that made me cringe

as if white dead dudes are the "real" literature that needs to be studied, and "diverse" authors are some kind of fringe separate category.

I would avoid starting with medieval lit myself, because it's the least accessible to teens. Why start by disenfranchising them? That's not a great motivating strategy.

[Critters2]

80. Beowulf and Piers Plowman are great lit! And fully accessible to teens.

The relationship between Piers Plowman and the Great Rising of 1381 should make it interesting to progressives and to rebellious teens. We need to get past the notion that everything that matters happened after 1900.

[noamnety]

98. Now I've moved from cringing to laughing

It's not a matter of everything having to happen post 1900.

Maybe you are in a different situation than I am, but many of my high school kids come to us reading at an elementary school level. If you start by having to work through an additional language barrier on top of the basic literacy one - you've done just that - started with a barrier to accessibility.

Again, it's not that they CAN'T do it, but the more barriers you erect between the language and relevance in their own lives, the less motivation you should expect. I was at the top of my English classes in high school, and honestly my eyes just glazed over when I had to stare at a page of that stuff, knowing I would need every line of it explained for me. Ugh. I was even a Russian linguist for the military, studied sign language after that ... I consider myself a linguist of sorts ... and I still feel disengaged when I look at a block of olde thymy text. I'm sure there are exceptions to that among us, and you may be one, but I suspect the VAST majority of teens and adults would prefer to curl up with a book written in modern day English rather than wading through the other sort.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

131. 'diverse' is a very large component disregarded by many school systems

keeping a good balance is important. Incorporating a 'world cultures' component in literature is also very important.

[noamnety]

136. I agree with that completely.

(I was just making a snide comment about the way the academic powers that be have a formal name for Great Literature that applies only to the white european guys.)

I think there are a lot of educators unfortunately who don't get the concept of marginalizing entire groups of students, they don't get that lotsa books about white people is not the same curriculum to a white person as it is to a person of color. (Some of these people probably go home and watch sitcoms on tv that are a bunch of white people and automatically flip past the channels with black sitcoms - but they don't see a connection there.)

[XemaSab]

140. On the other hand

I felt like some of the stuff we read was included FOR diversity. It seemed patronizing.

[noamnety]

144. What made you feel that way?

Do you think it was something in the way it was presented to you?

What would make a student feel that inclusion of a book by a white male is normal, inclusion of a book by someone else is patronizing?

[XemaSab]

160. To give a slightly broader perspective on my own life:

For the first 14 years of my life I lived in Oakland, California, where a large part of the community was black.

For high school I moved to Marin, where almost the whole school was white.

It bothered me then and it bothers me now the way February is "black history month," where you learn little black history factoids unconnected with the rest of history, and some authors are "black authors," who are not really part of *real* American literature, but their own thing. Why not teach AMERICAN history? Why not teach AMERICAN authors? Oh, wait, black history IS American history, and black authors ARE American authors. But black history and literature seems to be an eddy and not part of the larger stream, and that bothers me.

It just seems self-conscious and patronizing. And I feel like a bigot feeling like it's patronizing that "black authors" are taught in a patronizing way. Does that make me a bigot? Or patronizing? :shrug:

[noamnety]

169. I have the same complaint about multiculturalism

when it's shoved aside and parceled out like a special event.

I am not arguing against black history month, for now we need it, and we will continue to need it until the curriculum is written to do exactly what you said - incorporate it as a main part of American history, and American literature. Our texts marginalize them, when they are included in history it's often in ways that acknowledge their existence but whitewash (pun intended) many of the real challenges they made to the power structure.

I run into that sort of thing in my classroom sometimes - I want to highlight that women are involved in computer engineering, but I don't want to act like it's a "Thing" that there's a woman engineer. So I will talk excited about a cool electronic gadget, and then when the class is all hooked on it and enthusiastic, instead of saying "how cool is this, a woman designed it" I might instead say "how cool is this - the person who designed it also does glass blowing - and she likes photography, too." Just a small pronoun tossed in as no big deal; it's very deliberate on my part to include, yet downplay, her gender as an issue.

I don't know if there's a better way to handle it. I know I am more comfortable with that approach, with showing off the creations of diverse people just because the creations are cool, instead of saying "now we will look at this product because a woman made it and we're supposed to look at what women made this week."

That's why I don't like the approach of teaching what some call Great Literature and then moving to - I think someone called it "colonies." You and I might have some of the same underlying negative reaction to that approach.

[AngryAmish]

63. Penthouse Forum

[ColbertWatcher]

72. My (too) long answer ...

I'm not too much of an "English" person (I'm more of a math and science nerd), but here goes ...

First some basics:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Story-of-English/Robert-McCrum/e/9780142002315/?itm=1">The Story of English and even let them watch the PBS mini series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198245/)

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Professor-and-the-Madman/Simon-Winchester/e/9780060839789/?itm=12">The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-New-Dictionary-of-Cultural-Literacy/E-D-Hirsch/e/9780618226474/?itm=40">The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Mythology/Edith-Hamilton/e/9780446607254/?itm=1">Edith Hamilton's Mythology

Also, as odd as it may sound, they need to read the newspaper everyday. Start the reading habit early.

Now, the fun stuff:

Then, once they get all that, any and every book that has fun with words. I would also include any kind of writing that relies heavily on visuals, like poetry, plays, movie scripts and art reviews.

As far as authors go:

* you can never go wrong with Orwell (essays included)
* anything and everything by Italo Calvino
* anything and everything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Then, get them interested in modern short stories. There are several magazines that publish short stories and essays. Let them discover stuff in the anthologies, too.

I used to have a subscription to "Story" magazine, which came every other month and when it finally arrived in the mailbox, it was like a gift.

[KitSileya]

79. Oh. my

I'd love to do that. Emily Dickinson. Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange land. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. George Orwell's 1984. The Declaration of Independence. Hamlet. Langston Hughes. Willa Cather's My Antonia. Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Color Purple.The Handmaid's Tale. John Donne. Nadime Gordimer. W.B.Yeats. So many other's already mentioned on this thread. Newspapers. Analysis of scenes from great movies, from Blade Runner to 300. Getting the students writing, writing, writing.

But then, I teach English as a foreign language, and would love to teach 4 year course of high school English.

[shadowknows69]

82. Wow great question XemaSab

I'd have to chew on that one for quite a while. Where do you even start?

[Greyhound]

95. Chomsky fer sure. Linguistics is essential and usually neglected.

He's the best so...

[nickgutierrez]

99. I would include historical context with each book.

Literature can be as useful as any history book in really explaining the times in which the book was written. It would probably help if each semester was broken into a number of time/place segments, covering some of the more important eras in literature.

[XemaSab]

113. At my high school they tried to tie English to History

It didn't work so well.

But I agree that exploration by "era" with historical information included is a solid way to go.

The other night I was throwing around the idea of a semester of historical fiction, with The Crucible, the Scarlet Letter, some of Steinbeck, and other authors writing about events prior to their own time. I was even thinking you could throw in Zorro, Gone With The Wind, Poisonwood Bible, or some other less traditional choices, and talk about, for example, why Arthur Miller wanted to write about witch trials in the early 50's. :P

[EFerrari]

117. The New Historicism strikes again.

There are LOTS of great novels that came out of that. Criticism, not so much. lol

[noamnety]

133. Any thoughts about why that didn't work so well?

On the surface, it sounds like a natural pairing, what went wrong?

[XemaSab]

139. Freshman year was both world history and English

For English we read Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Chosen, and The Long Walk.

I think that might be it for the whole year. Obviously, those books tie into ancient history, the Renaissance, the Victorian era, World War I, the Jewish experience following WWII, and the Soviet Union.

Not only was it just not enough reading material, but since the history class moved so quickly, there was very little time to actually learn about the history behind the books. It also seemed like some of the books were (to put it kindly) not the greatest Western Literature had to offer.

[Cleita]

103. Who are you teaching?

Kids who speak English at home or those who speak another language at home? When I was in high school we had an extensive English curriculum with heavy emphasis on Shakespeare and other definitive literati from Canterbury Tales up until present times as well as translations of world literature like "The Odyssey". The English at home speaking kids were able to do the work, but the kids who were being raised in immigrant homes really couldn't keep up and started dropping out. These weren't just Mexican kids but a lot of immigrant kids from Europe, who had moved here after WWII, whose parents still spoke Polish or German or any number of other European languages. One of my English teachers who was also a friend in later years once said that she felt they should have stuck to a program for those children with good, contemporary literature and strong emphasis on basic grammar.

[XemaSab]

122. Good point

Let's assume you're teaching a class of reasonably bright, fluent, native English speakers. It's a fantasy exercise. :D

[Cleita]

137. I would throw everything at them that they were capable of absorbing

like my teachers did. We also were encourage to write fiction in the style of to get the feel of writing our own fiction one day. We read so many classics that when I got to college I had already read the required reading.

[noamnety]

138. can you break it down further?

Class, race, cultural/ethnic background, gender?

[ebdarcy]

108. Ooh, fun subject.

These aren't in any particular order: Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, 1984, Walden, Raisin in the Sun, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, The Handmaid's Tale, various versions of Arthurian legend, Canterbury Tales, Night.

Those are just the beginning. I think you got to teach classical literature, like The Odyssey, The Iliad, Medea, Oedipus.

Plus, I would assign a reading list that lets the students' choose something. My school did this, and I ended up reading Roots, Exodus, The Color Purple, etc.

Poetry, speeches, essays should be read too. MLK Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail, Douglass' What to the Slave. Dickinson and Hughes.

[EFerrari]

115. Speeches from recent political leaders!

:thumbsup:

[ebdarcy]

123. I've got a friend who's in an upper level rhetoric class.

They discussed Obama's victory speech in class right after the election. I got to admit, I was kind of jealous. Our President-elect is going to be a source of inspiration for a long, long time.

[Igel]

114. Grammar.

Since there are still some strong social judgments about what is correct and incorrect, and many students still speak dialect. By all means, I'd include information on styles and registers--no real language lacks styles and registers, and systematic variation between them. (Grammar Nazis have a nearly one-dimension view of language; everything must be formal English, apart from some lexical variation and variation in the frequency of some grammatical structures.)

I'd also include information on dialects--the major US dialects, both social (i.e., racial/class) and geographical, and how they spread, plus some features of them. I'd slight the British dialects, but include info on World Englishes.

I rather like how my high school curriculum went, but it was slow and stopped early. British lit until 1750; then British and American lit until about 1900. Then nearly, but not entirely, American lit until 1950. There it ended. I'd include a wide range of writers after 1950; before then most non-traditional Englishes aren't prominent, the writers were fairly few (and often expats, in any event).

So I would not exclude writers like Naipaul, by any stretch of the imagination. Their native language, or working language, is English, so they contribute to English literature, even it's from Aruba, India, South Africa.

However, in addition to sentence grammar (which includes things like morphology), I'd include text grammar: discourse pragmatics, and how to make a text both coherent and cohesive. It's formal linguistics, beyond what the grammar Nazis pay attention to (fortunately), and contributes to a lot of dismally poor writing. If nothing else, this gets into how focus is implemented, since "aboutness" is a Big Deal both in traditional classes and on standardized tests, there are formal methods of expressing focus, and students are always supposed to just learn them by osmosis.

More than that, I'd spend a while doing Gricean maxims (or some other transmogrification of the same points, Grice's formulation being among the easiest to approach), and looking at the role of presupposition in arguments (the old "Do you still beat your wife?" where "you beat your wife" is the presupposition).

[wtmusic]

124. I don't know but my son's teacher is knocking me out

Book reports with synopsis, analysis, critique. Essays. Creative writing.

Students pick their own books for reports, but must provide the teacher with justification of their choice in a "business letter" (proposal) with emphasis on form, grammar and spelling (working world English).

[KittyWampus]

126. Jane Austen. With the right teacher, she's fun. Sense and Sensibility? Oh, and MacBeth

[screembloodymurder]

128. The Great American Novel

Moby Dick

[Shardik]

132. Strunk & White's Elements of Style.

Holt's Handbook.

Now, if it were an American Literature class, the answer would be very different.

Huck Finn, Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, Old Man & the Sea, Pale Horse Pale Rider, Omoo, Works of Poe, Sister Carrie, The Shining, Rainy and The Invisible Man.

[XemaSab]

135. My mom says:

The Scarlet Letter, Poe, Walden Pond, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Abraham Lincoln's speeches, MLK's speeches and letters, the Little House books, Carson McCullers, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, Great Gatsby, the Sun Also Rises, Pablo Neruda, Catch 22, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Philip Levine, Omar Salinas, Steinbeck, Amy Tan, autobiography of John Lewis, Shakespere, Robert Frost (the DARKER POEMS), Jack London, Heart of Darkness, Dylan Thomas, Gary Snyder, Joan Didion, Stegner, Catcher in the Rye, and Red Badge of Courage.

[Odin2005]

147. My 2 cents is not to forget non-fiction writting.

I have seen plenty of incredible writing in non-fiction works. My favorite example is A Study of History, the master-work of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee on the various economic, sociological, and ideological forces governing the rise and fall of civilizations, and also the longest written work in the English language. Toynbee's works are the most amazing history writing I have ever read!

Some other excellent non-fiction authors in the English language:
Carl Sagan
Charles Darwin
Stephen J. Gould
David Hume
Bertrand Russell


Hume, especially, is a great starting point for English language philosophy, he was a very clear and witty writer who is easily accessible to people who don't know much philosophy.

[XemaSab]

159. Toynbee gave us the word

Toynbeeesque.

For that I salute him. :patriot:

[Odin2005]

162. He also coined the term "Great Society" to refer to the post WW2 Western welfare state.

Hence LBJ's programs getting that name.

[EFerrari]

194. The political essays of Joan Didion and Gore Vidal.

:thumbsup:

[HCE SuiGeneris]

148. Seán Ó Faoláin

Collected Stories of Sean O'Faolain I (1980, short stories)

[HCE SuiGeneris]

149. Morte D'Urban

By J.F. Powers
http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=29

[Odin2005]

157. 2 more cents that just popped into my head:

Don't forget to teach some stuff on the history of the English language; it's Germanic origins and foundation, the massive infusion of French vocabulary following the Norman Conquest, the collapse of much of the old Indo-European grammatical structures in the language during the Middle Ages (turning English into a language with an Isolating grammatical structure, like Chinese), the Great Vowel Shift and and it screwed up English spelling, and the development of English dialects throughout the world.

[ColbertWatcher]

164. GMTA ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=4469365&mesg_id=4469826

[XemaSab]

158. I'm going to break it down by semesters:

First Year: Composition, grammar, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, and critical thinking.

Newspapers, Harper's, Nat Geo, the Constitution, Civil Disobedience, the letters and speeches of MLK and Lincoln, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Diary of Anne Frank, Albion's Seed, advertising, some biographies (I am not educated enough to specify which ones), and a LOT of writing and grammar.

After that, I would break it down by regions.

Second Year: California and the West. (Or whatever region or state you live in).

Mark Twain, Isabelle Allende, Bret Harte, Wallace Stegner, Ken Kesey, Amy Tan, Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, William Saroyan, Tule Lake, some of the Lewis and Clark diaries, Jack London, The Land of Little Rain, Norman McLean, Joan Didion, David Guterson, Powell, and John Muir, among others.

Third Year: The South, Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Great Plains.

Faulkner, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, slave narratives, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Gone With the Wind (in a very critical light), Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, My Antonia, Appalachian poetry and music, The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, Eliot, and Sandburg, among others.


Fourth Year: The Northeast and England.

Thoreau, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Frost, William Carlos Willams, the Harlem renaissance, ee cummings, Chaim Potok, Edith Wharton, the Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Norman Mailer, Yeats, Wuthering Heights, Chaucer, Shakespere, Dickens, Austin, Wordsworth, Keats, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Coleridge, and Wodehouse, among others.

Good times.

[ColbertWatcher]

165. For a good biography, may I suggest Rachel Carson's? (link inside)

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Rachel-Carson/Linda-J-Lear/e/9780805034288/?itm=4

[XemaSab]

182. I forgot Orwell

:banghead:

[RadicalTexan]

161. I'd teach logic

Basic logic, common fallacies, proper argument, critical thinking, logical writing structures, etc.

That and how to write a correct sentence in general. Since so many people seem unable to do so.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

163. Since so many people seem unable to do so.

Can I buy a verb for $2000, Alex?

[RadicalTexan]

180. This is a message board

[sandnsea]

167. and how literature helps us to expand our thinking

read, think, write - repeat. As long as its quality literature and a teacher empasized the importance of grammar to clearly express thoughts, the specific literature isn't that important.

[SoCalDem]

173. "...Since so many people seem unable to do so. ..."

:)

something's missing:)

But seriously, I agree 1000% on the critical thinking part.. My own kids were NOT taught it in school, so I taught them myself :)

Can't push any BS past MY kids :)

[hughee99]

170. For 4 years, I'd probably do it somewhat similar to what I had

Freshmen - English composition, how to write a paper (for those MLA Nazis). If they can't clearly write about what they've read, how will the next three teachers know. Short stories and short novels from any time used as a basis for writing.

Sophomore year (roughly 1300-1840) - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Beowulf, James Fenimore Cooper, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Swift.

Junior year (roughly 1840-1920) - Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Tennyson, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Kipling, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Bronte sisters, Emerson and Thoreau.

Senior year (roughly 1920 to modern) - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Hemingway, Huxley, James Joyce, Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and (ug) Ayn Rand.

this isn't really a full list, but it's the general idea.

We also had to read a few Non-English works as well, usually over the summer (Homer, assorted Russians, Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo).

Overall, I think it was pretty good, but we didn't have a pure literature class so it was, to some degree, at the expense of non-english literature.

[Seldona]

174. Just a few off the top of my head.

Take your pick with Ernest Hemingway, "1984" or pretty much anything by George Orwell, "Walden and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau.

Cheers!

[timtom]

176. I like the selections I got in high school in Florida in the late

1950's and 1960.

Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, MacBeth)
Silas Marner
Treasure Island

I would most emphatically add "The Sot-Weed Factor" by John Barth (as an excellent sendup of the picaresque novel)

and

any of Vonnegut's earlier works

and some works from African American literature (maybe some James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, for example)

and

some Native American works (can't cite any because I haven't read any).

[H2O Man]

177. A few "oldies"

such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X; anything by Mark Twain; and Peter Maas' Serpico.

This weekend, my 14-year old daughter asked me a question about a controversial (recent) historic event. We will venture to the bookstore soon, and I'll get her two books -- each one taking a position that is just the opposite of the other. I try to use this approach when encouraging "reading skills" as well as political awareness.

[HamdenRice]

178. Single most important book: "Points of View" by Moffet (ed.)

It is a collection of short stories across many genres and including some European short stories in translation.

But most important is its revolutionary and revelatory way of teaching students how to look at writers' technique and in particular the many "points of view" that writers adopt -- first person, third person, interior monologue, epistolary, and so on -- with short introductory essays explaining how they work and what psychological effects they have on the reader.

Young people who read this (and I was one many years ago) will never look at literature again in the same way. Teachers rave about it, and Moffet himself was probably one of the greatest English teachers of the modern era.

As for the debate about "English" versus "World Literature," that's mostly a red herring in my opinion. English and American writers have been deeply influenced by European writers, especially French and Russian writers. You cannot understand Virginia Wolf or James Joyce without understanding the French.

Also, I second the posters above who recommended African American writers. There is no justification whatsoever for the continued ghettoization of African American literature, especially considering that the last American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature was Toni Morrison.

For the same reason, I would strongly emphasize world literature in English, especially of the former British Empire, considering almost all the Nobel Prize winners for literature who are English speakers have been from or had roots British colonies in Africa (Lessing, Gordimer, Woyinka, Coetzee), the Caribbean (Walcott), Heaney (Ireland) or were African American (Morrison), with Harold Pinter (British) being the lone exception.

[DireStrike]

184. A full year of your/you're there/their/they're and apostrophe use.

The other three years could be whatever books you want. You can only read and write when you have a good grasp of the language.

But on every test, every year after the first, there would still be questions about your/you're, there/their/they're, apostrophe useage, and pluralization. Missing even one question on the subject after the first year will result in an automatic F on the test.

Also, "alot", as fiziwig pointed out, and other such things.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

190. .....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

[Zomby Woof]

191. Kesey, Orwell, and Twain

London, McMurtry, and Vonnegut.

Baldwin, Lewis, and Melville.

Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift.

Faulkner, Crane, and Cather.

[dailykoff]

192. Whatever you do don't leave out Fitzgerald!

You can save "The Great Gatsby" for college but a lot of the stories are gems, like "Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy," and "This Side of Paradise" will always be a hit, although it doesn't get the credit it deserves. It's an early college novel and progenitor of "Catcher in the Rye." It's also the book that made his nut, and was justifiably very popular in the twenties. He married Zelda on the proceeds.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

196. See Dick Run

[jakefrep]

197. Grammar, Speech, Composition

I am utterly clueless about the literature aspect of things. I'm skeptical of what people call "great literature." I still have nightmares about "The Scarlet Letter." I had so-called great literature thrown at me, but I don't remember much about any of it.

Did I mention grammar?

[jmowreader]

198. I would include four years of spelling

The company I work for wrapped seven box trucks for an air conditioning company. All of them have this word on them:

REFRIDGERATION

Come on.

[haele]

204. Twain - Mysterious Stranger and/or segments of "Letters to the Earth"

Comparison - Twain's "Gilded Age" and Wharton's "Age of Mirth".
Vonnegut - "Slaughterhouse 5"
James Baldwin "Go Tell it on the Mountain"
Heinlein - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
Sinclare Lewis - "The Jungle"
Orwell - "Down and Out in Paris and London"
These novels are classic and critical socio-political studies that show how writing can impact and or change viewpoints in society. The current feeling in most of the high school texts is to use both an entire novel or to focus on segments of either style or context, so instead of slogging through some of the more dated material in some of the novels above, one could take a critical segment and discuss what the author was portraying and how the style could affect the reader.

English writing for style -
Hawthorn, Austin, Irving (Washington) Poe, Hemingway, O'Henry, Maugham, Heller, Capote, King for style, marketing, and character development. (Breakfast at Tiffany's is a great novel for the post-tweeners who "are too cool for school")

Historical English Writing, including poetry and playwriting -
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Shelly, Blake, Wordsworth, Swift, Frost, Washington (Brooker T), Wells, Shaw, Yeats ("The Second Coming")Browning - ah, the standards.

Just don't do Plath's "The Bell Jar" - we did that in High School and half the girls nearly decided to commit suicide.

Haele

[Lydia Leftcoast]

207. Lots of expository writing about topics that matter to the students

Most writing in English courses is writing about literature, but few students will ever have to do this kind of writing in real life. Judging from what I've seen lately, though, writing seems to be a weak point in the current high school curriculum.

The best writing course I had in college taught techniques of writing, with the topics left entirely up to the students. For example, we had to write opinion pieces using both inductive and deductive reason. We had to write up a historical event as if it were a newspaper article. We had to summarize a movie we had seen. We had to take a controversial issue, describe the arguments given by both sides, evaluate them, and defend our own conclusions. Those are just some of the assignments that I remember.

Throughout the course, we reviewed standard English usage and learned about paragraph cohesion, types of arguments, and rhetorical techniques. (Did anyone spot the parallelism in the previous paragraph?)

As far as literature is concerned, I'd like to see a wide variety of literature from a wide variety of eras and countries. When I was teaching, I revised every course every year, enhancing and emphasizing ideas that worked and discarding or modifying the ones that didn't. Throw a bunch of wildly different books and plays at the students and see what sticks.

You may be surprised. There's a theater troupe in the Twin Cities that performs Shakespeare in prisons, homeless shelters, and housing projects, followed by discussions with the audience. One of their comments was that these very non-traditional audiences really get into the plays, once they're accustomed to the language, and that they identify with the characters and situations.

At the same time, I'd like to see each assigned reading given some historical context. This is another things that today's students tend to be shaky on.