What's required reading in English schools?

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