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I once heard it said that it is the job of the wealthy to rule, and the job of the educated to facilitate that rule. Everyone else, I suppose, are unsuspecting victims of the system. Welcome to facilitation 101.Quote:
Originally Posted by readingrainbow
10th grade:
Animal Farm
Little Red Pony
Of mice and Men
grade 11:
Ferenheit 9/11
Barometer
Cat's Cradel
The Chrysalids
Grade 12:
The Wars
Edible Woman
1894
One flew over the cookoo's nest
Maiden's tales ( not sure of the title but from Margeret Atwood...)
p.s this is from a second language class.. from what I remember.....Last year
9th-
Romeo and Juliet
10-
Antigone
Animal Farm
11-
To Kill A Mockingbird
British Lit-
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales- Well, 7 or 8 of them.
this is a place to talk about the books you have and are reading for school
i just finnished Hullabaloo in the guava orchard by Kiran Desai
unless absolutly nessisary i would not sujest any one read this book
now tell me about what your reading....
well since i am in fact a high school student... The joys of low expectationsin the public school system
So far we have started To kill a Mockingbird and stopped at chapter 17 when the trial started then we began reading Romeo and Juliet and never finished that and the odyssey is yet again another book we started and never finished. Thank the lord that I've already read all of these more than once and so I'm not a complete ignoramous and don't form my opinions on the movie adaptations of classical literature. Well i have just been shoved off my soap box but do not dispair I'll soon return to rid the world of all people ignorant of the womderful world of literature.
The Education system in Ireland has changed since i went to secondary school, but if i can remember for the junior cert you did some of the following;
(Certain books where done only by certain levels ie honours, ordinary or foundation. also following is system used within my secondary school.)
Goodnight mr Tom- all levels
Pride and Prejudice- Honours
The Hobbit- all levels
The silver sword- All Levels
To Kill A mocking bird- Honours and Ordinary level
Lord of the flies- Foundation and Ordinary
Romeo and Juliet- Honours and ordinary
Merchant of Venice- Honours and Ordinary
Our day Out- Foundation.
As for poems... cant really remember but i did do some Heaney and Robert Frost.
For the leaving cert it used to vary each year. not sure what its like now though.
I think it rotated something like this.
Hamlet, Playboy of the Western World, Emma (The ones i did)
King Lear, Portrait Of an Artist , Silas Marner?
MacBeth, Juno and the Peacock,.......??????
(cant remember! :( )
I think you also had a choice of plays like ( Pardon my spelling) Philadelpia Here I Come, Rozencranz and Guildenstern are Dead.
As For poetry... We use to have this Book called Soundings. Your teacher selected what poems you would learn according to what they believed might come up on the leaving cert exam. it had everything from Paradise lost- Milton, Keats, Donne, Dickinson, Marvell, Shakespeare, Chaucer etc. There was also an Irish section so had to learn Yeats, Kinsella, Kavanagh. I think there were one or two more.
there was also creative writing and media. (Analysing newpaper articles etc)
now they get to study films as well.
There was definately mre but i cant remember.:) It has been almost seven years since i left.
For the juniors: Huckleberry Finn, Black Boy, The Great Gatsby, The Red Badge of Courage, Spoon River Anthology.
For the seniors: Macbeth, Hamlet, Taming the Shrew, Crime & Punishment, Heart of Darkness, Grapes of Wrath - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (time permitting).
Freshman year, my English class read the The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, Lord of the Flies...Soph year was Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Sister of My Heart... and this year (advanced Am. Lit) we have read the Scarlet Letter, Puddn'head Wilson, Minister's Black Veil, The Things They Carried, Yellow Wallpaper, and about to get started on Great Gatsby.
In middle school (junior high for some), we did things like Midsummer Night's Dream, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc.
we had to read Midsummer Night"s Dream and I hated Shakespeare!
later on in life during the blitz in London, a friend gave me his copy of the complete works of Shakespeare - he said it would help me to sleep!
Far from it - I discovered the tragedies and history plays and forgot all about Hitler and the bombing, it is really marvellous stuff.
I still do not care for the comedies!
I went to school in Australia, and like some of the British people in this forum, I would have to say our syllabus does not require THAT many texts.
Teachers are allowed to choose from a list of texts, and our teacher in year 12 chose for Paired Text study The Crucible and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. For single texts we read King Lear and watched The Piano. In poetry, we did Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and a few other miscellaneous poems. In addition to that, for Individual study I chose to pair up A Doll's House, which happens to be on the list of prescribed texts, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
In year 11, we did Macbeth (which I loved), To Kill a Mockingbird (Which I was not so keen on), and Wilfred Owen.
I have since discovered that Year 10 had to read The Lord of the Flies, which our class didn't read in year 10. The other year 12 english class studied Frankenstein (I was extremely jealous) and The Great Gatsby. All I can say about Year 10 English was that I was none too impressed by the choice of texts. We had to do Romeo and Juliet, although I would have liked to do a Shakespeare comedy, since we did tragedies in years 11 and 12.
You say that's a lot? You can count yourself lucky, our syllabus for the test we have to sit on the end of highschool consists of 30 books :P
(unlucky though from English literature we have only 'Macbeth' and "Heart of darkness')
I would hazard the guess that the reason the SSABSA education board in South Australia only allows such a small number of texts to be studied is mainly because it's believed that you simply can't go in depth with more than the four texts and the one thousand lines of poetry. And this is because the exam is only three hours long, and in that time you are required to write two essays and answer a Critical Reading section (which you can't really 'prepare' for). So really, if we had been given thirty texts in one year, that would make studying for the exam 'slightly' more complicated.
But anyway, I am in awe of anyone who can manage to study thirty texts in depth in one year!
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was rather good and I loved it. I read it Freshman Year in High School.
We had to choose from a list of books which book to do for literary criticism and I choose The Iliad by Homer.
Hello - I am an English teacher and have worked in 3 public schools in California...Each level is required Shakespeare. American Lit. is Junior year and British Lit is Senior year...the rest depends on the parents, book availbility, money, and so on...
For GCSE, we studied:
Of Mice and Men,
A View From the Bridge,
Romeo and Juliet and whatever poetry we wanted
And for AS, I'm studying;
The Mayor of Casterbridge
King Lear,
Carol Ann Duffy and
The Glass Menagerie
In Ohio, we read our freshman year - Julius Caesar, Antigone, To Kill a Mockingbird. Sophomore - all I can remember is The Birds and I Am the Cheese
junior Year - all American Authors. Senior - Macbeth, The Giver, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales
I read To Kill a Mockingbird, after getting halfway through it at school and them deciding they didn't have enough books, so we switched to Of Mice and Men, I love To Kill a Mockingbird.
Oh let's see...
Grade 9-
Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee
Lamb to the Slaughter by Dahl(and some other short stories)
Grade 10-
Othello by Shakespeare
Great Gastby by Fitzgerald
Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
Grade 11-
Macbeth by Shakespeare
The Crucible by Miller
Frankenstein by Shelley
A study of Genesis (studying the Bible in English was interesting)
The Rhyme of the ancient Mariner by Coleridge
Great Expectations by Dickens(for an Independant Study Unit)
Grade 12-
King Lear by Shakespeare
Odeipus Rex by Sophocles
The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
Heart of Darkness by Conrad
Dante's Inferno (a few cantos in depth, the rest more generally)
Atonement by McEwan (for an Independant Study Unit)
Well we're reading Sense and Sensibility and Dracula. hmm...
Here's what I can remember as the reading when I was in HS (in no particular order):
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Animal Farm
The Inferno
The Odysser
Lord of the Flies
Frankenstein
Beowulf
Antigone
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
The Importance of Being Ernest
The Sound and the Fury
Gilgamesh
For GCSE we did
To Kill A Mockingbird
Twelth Night/Romeo and Juliet
The Mayor of Castorbridge/Far From The Madding Crowd/Great Expectationsand a poetry anthology, with two sections on poetry from different cultures and some by Carol Anne Duffy (I espeially loved <i>Havisham</i>) and oher poets that I don't recall.
AS level this year I am doing
A Streetcar Named Desire
Frankenstein (Some classes are doing Emma)
A poetry anothogy with loads of poems spanning eras and countries
and Hamlet For which unfortunatly my teacher is a drip, and most uninspiring, which is a shame as I really love Shakespeare
Oh, and The Crucible at GCSE, for English and Drama (Man that got confusing exam wise)
I'm still only in my GCSE year, but we've studied:
Pride and Prejudice - Coursework
Macbeth - Coursework
A selection of WWI poets - Coursework
Lord of the Flies - Exam
An Inspector Calls - Exam
A selection of pre-1914 poems, including work by Keats, Donne, Browning, Shakespeare and others - Exam
And now we're studying a selection of "poems from other cultures".
i'll try to remember most of the stuff i've done (stretch my mind a bit :p )
GCSE
Lord of The Flies
Hamlet
something by D.H.Lawrence
poetry by Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy etc. (went to a terribly dull poetry reading by all of the authors)
AS level
Othello
poetry by John Donne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
A level
Top Girls - play by Carol Churchill
poetry by Emily Dickinson
The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Measure for Measure - Shakespeare
1st Year University (different Modules)
The Literary Canon
Hamlet
Paradise Lost - Milton
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Lyrical Ballads - Wordsworth
Pride and Prejudice - Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Dubliners - James Joyce
The Wasteland - T.S.Eliot
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Other Canons
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Carol Ann Duffy poetry
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S.Lewis
US Genre Writing
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson poetry
Robert Frost poetry
Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Edgar Allan Poe
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee
Special Author - Thomas Hardy
Far From the Madding Crowd
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
2nd Year University
Writing Women
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil - Fay Weldon
Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Identity and Writing
The Knight's Tale - Chaucer
The Duchess of Malfi - Webster
John Donne poetry
Aphra Behn poetry
The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
Othello
The Tempest
Shakespeare's sonnets
Post War US writing
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
The Crucible - Arthur Miller
Sylvia Plath poetry
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D.Salinger
Elizabeth Bishop poetry
Novel and Narrative
Bleak House - Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
phew! i must admit the list looks longer than i thought it would, i guess i've had to read a lot. As you can see uni is all about many books, don't do literature at uni unless you REALLY enjoy reading! This list also highlights that i've had to do a few books twice (carol ann duffy, othello, hamlet, the bloody chamber)
That is one of the best plays i have ever seen! When i was fifteen my english teacher brought my class to see it when it was on in the theatre. I was more afraid of that ghostly woman in black than i've ever been afraid of a horror movie. The intensity the actors created on the stage was amazing!Quote:
Originally Posted by liesl
For AP English we did/have done:
Summer Reading (picked three):
-Brave New World
-Life of Pi
-Pride and Prejudice
-White Noise
-Jane Eyre
-and something else...
During school we read:
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
-Waterland
-Beloved
-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
-Maus (comic book)
In debate class we read 1984
I don't really remember 9 or 10th grade, but last year's choice made an impression and so did this years' books.
The Crucible
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Great Gatsby
Ceremony (by Leslie Silko)
Hughes poetry and Walt Whitman
this year:
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Running in the Family
Siddharta
The Stranger
The Baron in the Trees
A Midsummer's Night Dream
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Hamlet
No Exit (currently)
I was looking at all the other book lists and I realized that, true West Coast style, the district and teachers had us reading mostly Modernist and Postmodernist literature. Philosophy wise, we mostly dipped our toes back and forth in the same two pools, Existentialism and anything dealing with a spiritual cavity and hollow society unfit for whatever our true desires are. And no philosophies with absolutes of any kind, religious or not, really, don't even ask. I just thought it was interesting that O'Riley tags California as a "secular progressive state" and that we seem to read accordingly. Though I wonder if any nonsecular-progressive state reads almost the opposite, whether they have more of the Classics of American Literature in their curriculum....
As for Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Chronicle...) , does anyone not next to Mexico have him constantly mentioned in class? I personally loved his Chronicle of a Death Foretold but cursed his 100 Years of Solitude.
although i am not fortunate enough to have seen the play i would still recommend the book to anyone, either without seeing it acted out the character of the woman in black had me terrified. More terrified than i ever was from any other book or film..i had to sleep with the light on whilst i read it! :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Niamh
I'm in school in the Netherlands and for English we read:
- Cal, by Bernard MacLaverty
- Of Mice and Men
- Pride and Prejudice
And we did some other books, I don't really remember...
For Dutch we read a few more books ofcourse:P
Indeed, a few more, still not many, what is it, 10-15 books? depending on Havo or VWO level.Quote:
Originally Posted by tinustijger
Errr... what is GCSE? And what age is "grade 10"? :eek:
In my country, we have
elementary school, which has 9 grades, age 6 (if the kid's birthday is before August 31) to 14,
secondary school, which is 4-5 years (usually 4, but some private, bilingual etc. have 5), age 14 - 18,
university (called "high" school :))
Kids are supposed to read a lot - they usually get a list of books, 1 book for each month of school year (well except smallest kids in first grades of course).
But no way they could read Hobbit or LotR! These books are not considered appropriate to shape young reader's literary taste... though new generations of teachers disagree... From "world" literature, higher grades of elementary shools, and secondary schools are supposed to read books by Dickens, Hemingway, Salinger, Stendhal, Moliere, Voltaire, Gogol, Remarque, Rolland, Wilde, Mann... to mention just few. But usually they consider it all boring and cheat anyway. :D
Yes, it's a few,, I'm doing VWO and in three years we had to read 12 books. That's doable anyway :P
But I don't mind reading the books, love reading them as a matter of fact, I just hate it that you're so busy with analysing and everything,, it's nice for a few books, but sometimes I just wat to read!
I had a teacher who was asking details on a book I read two years ago, how am I supposed to know what colour raincoat it was, it might have been significant, but Aaarrrghhh... I DON'T CARE! I don't memorize details like that, but oh well, just another example of the wonders of dutch education in regards to literature. I was actually one of the few who read and enjoyed the books, but don't ask me for weird details or to explain it in a way that's pleasing to the teacher... Suffice to say, in the end I got a 5 on my diploma for literature, while people who just read a downloaded essay got a higher mark. :flare:Quote:
Originally Posted by tinustijger
It's good to know not much has changed over the years. :)
I am amazed at how much you guys read at school. We didn't read any novels. Here the books are recommended by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). For English we had two books that contained short stories by Indian as well as other authors. If we wanted to read novels we could get those issued from the library. I remember even when I was in a higher standard (don't remember which class), I would read Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, etc. Well, actually I had no idea what else to read, but, once when I was in the library my English teacher caught me and scolded me and said that these books are suited for 4-5 class students. She said that she doesn't want to see me with such books next time. I went in the other section and picked up Anne of Green Gables, LM Montegomery. I used to think that books that have very small font and no pictures will be very boring reads. But, I soon found out that I was wrong and this book made a lasting impression on me. I still remember it's story. :D Thanks to my teacher I have read some good novels so far. I doubt if anything has changed in the curriculum (rigid authorities :rolleyes: ), except for a few short stories included or excluded.
Besides all this we used to write essays, learn grammar, read poems etc.
EDIT -- I just realised that Anne of Green Gables also comes under children novels, which means, I never grew out of kids section ~sigh~ :rolleyes:
I had a class that required:
Life of Pi
Peace Like a River
Man's Search for Meaning
Three books that were very different from the other required reading for my other English classes, e.g. Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath)
Well I'm a homeschooled high school student in the US so I don't know exactly if this will answer you question but I'll give it a go. We combine both my literature and history together--in other words when we studied the Medieval era we read Chaucer, Sir Arthur Malory, the Koran, Beowulf, etc.
Obviously they're not all original in English, but I've included world lit. Since that's what I do for "English/literature class"
In middle school here's a few (I can remember):
Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night
9th-------------------------
The Consolation of Philosophy
The Koran
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Beowulf
Dante's The Divine Comedy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
Le Morte d' Arthur
The Prince
Utopia
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Henry V
Hamlet
King John
Julius Caesar
10th--------------------------------------
Meditations by Rene Descartes
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge
Pride and Prejudice
Frankenstein
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Oliver Twist
Jane Eyre
The Scarlet Letter
*sorry I did this fast if there's any typos*
The Koran?! What all of it.... how do you study an interpritation Koran as a text I Imagine alot of the languge contextal points ae lost pluss alot ties in with Islamic history and people....although I suppose one with a tafseer.
Who's interpritation/translation?
the new curriculum in Ireland for junior certificate now consists of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Artemis fowl, as well as all the ones they had when i was doing my junior cert (ten years ago:sick: )
We get to read Of Mice and Men, I only just started 3rd Year so I don't know all the books we are going to read, although we may read Animal Farm, which I have already read.
On the syllabus I know for GCSE, the amount of reading required is pathetically low.
For the exam:
- one modern novel, usually Of Mice and Men or Lord of the Flies
- a selection of poetry (around 25 poems usually covers the exam requirements).
For coursework:
- one Shakespeare play (usually just extracts - they can get away with two scenes and a basic knowledge of the plot)
- one modern play (An Inspector Calls or something akin)
- one pre 1914 novel (Usually done through short extracts from Dickens).
And that's it for two whole years. In my opinion, the A level course is also really light. For example, in the first term all they really have to read is one modern novel and one Shakespeare play.
in comparison to courses in other countries, I think this leaves students who go on to study English at University really very unprepared, unless they have read more widely independently.