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My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, "I love this book, it is one of the greatest

My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, "I love this book, it is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced and you are going to love it as well. Pour over it with a fine toothed comb and write a series of essays explaining just how much you love this book and how brilliantly written it is. Don't forget to profess just how much you have internalized the morals it is trying to convey." For some students this approach works. But for people like me it turns what is supposed to be a personalized reflection into a sterile dissection. I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". No, you must profess how elegantly written it is and how you now realize that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. I am not knocking anyone who actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby nor am I actually dismissing what the F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to convey. What I am saying, though, is that the heavy-handed approach the English curriculum took in trying to make me enjoy this book had the opposite effect. In fact, I remember virtually nothing about it, despite having read it cover-to-cover and having written a series of essays on it.

hammock 1y ago
Would be way cooler to assign 2-3 different books and request a critical analysis of competing themes. Or pick you own book, get it approved by the teacher, and analyze that. But some of that is probably too much for younger students In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though
- BitwiseFool 1y ago
  I agree, and the most enjoyable semester of English was one where the professor took this approach. The only downside was that the books to select from were limited and there were no non-fiction options to choose from. However my teacher did appreciate the effort I made in trying to persuade him to allow me to read Meditations instead.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  The book How to Read a Book goes into how to read and evaluate multiple works this way. I'd recommend it to any high schooler, by the way. It also talks more generally about how to read and take notes effectively.
- sngz 1y ago
  Picking a book getting approached by the teacher then writing a book report has been how I was taught to read since 1st grade. After moving to the US for high school, being forced to read through the American classics was what killed any urges I had for reading fiction outside of school work
criddell 1y ago
Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading. Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did. When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful. I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively. Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  I read it close to 20 years ago now, but my recollection was that all of the characters being unlikable and everything they wanted and did (basically, worrying about status) being uncompelling was kind of the point. Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    OK, but it's hard to read fiction where you don't care about any of the characters.
    - soupfordummies 1y ago
      Depends on why you read fiction. If you read it mostly for narrative, sure. If you read it mostly to explore ideas and to enjoy the artistry, probably not.
  - criddell 1y ago
    It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters can be great. My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I spend any time thinking about what these characters do or say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video game NPC. Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually enjoyed or at least didn't hate.
smrtinsert 1y ago
"Love" is very loosely used here. The actual assignment is about meaning, plot, structure etc. You don't have to love anything to get value dissecting it.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  This, parent comment is telling on themselves, they didn't understand what the class was teaching because they chose to be obstinate instead of curious.
  - BitwiseFool 1y ago
    Perhaps, but I think it would be incorrect to say that I didn't understand what the class was trying to teach me. I may be an obstinate person, but I wouldn't attribute a lack of zeal for a particular subject as an overall lack of curiosity. I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as well.
nonameiguess 1y ago
My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text. If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.
- Balgair 1y ago
  Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that most of the assigned books are chosen by the state, right? Obviously it varies a lot, but I can't recall any teacher actually wanting to teach a book, let alone having the freedom to choose just about anything.
jiscariot 1y ago
I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything. I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.
- Rendello 1y ago
  I've tried reading it maybe ten times. The funny thing is that I really enjoy it, I just inevitably put it down and forget about it. I have a hard time finishing books, though I don't have the same issue with audiobooks.
- touisteur 1y ago
  For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.
ikiris 1y ago
Personally loved to read until I had to do this to a river runs through it, which may be one of the most boring books I’ve ever encountered. Put me off course books for years. I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.
gamblor956 1y ago
The problem is that a lot of the themes and topics in the novel simply aren't relevant to teenagers, and won't be for years. It's why English teachers love the novel and students almost universally hate it. My English teacher also said as much at the time: most of us wouldn't appreciate this novel until well after college. We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that). The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)
littlekey 1y ago
My take on it is that a halfway decent teacher will simply want you to notice those themes, not necessarily endorse them. For example, "this book explores the ideas that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. In this essay, I will explain why I disagree with these ideas..."
dyauspitr 1y ago
Absolutely disagree. Well articulated analysis of books are generally accepted in high schools and colleges whether they are positive or critical. What you’re probably referring to is dismissive essays that brusquely say that the content doesn’t apply to them without providing a well researched reason. Those usually come from edgy layabouts that spent 10 minutes on the assignment.
setr 1y ago
Candide and White Noise I accidentally read prior to the class, not knowing they were curriculum books. Both I found absolutely hilarious. Both failed to elicit even a minor chuckle once it entered the classroom. Not from the students, not the teacher, and somehow not even myself. I don’t know what how classrooms are so categorically destructive to the book they purport to teach
kashunstva 1y ago
I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.

hammock 1y ago

Would be way cooler to assign 2-3 different books and request a critical analysis of competing themes. Or pick you own book, get it approved by the teacher, and analyze that. But some of that is probably too much for younger students In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though

BitwiseFool 1y ago
I agree, and the most enjoyable semester of English was one where the professor took this approach. The only downside was that the books to select from were limited and there were no non-fiction options to choose from. However my teacher did appreciate the effort I made in trying to persuade him to allow me to read Meditations instead.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
The book How to Read a Book goes into how to read and evaluate multiple works this way. I'd recommend it to any high schooler, by the way. It also talks more generally about how to read and take notes effectively.
sngz 1y ago
Picking a book getting approached by the teacher then writing a book report has been how I was taught to read since 1st grade. After moving to the US for high school, being forced to read through the American classics was what killed any urges I had for reading fiction outside of school work

criddell 1y ago

Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading. Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did. When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful. I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively. Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.

ndriscoll 1y ago
I read it close to 20 years ago now, but my recollection was that all of the characters being unlikable and everything they wanted and did (basically, worrying about status) being uncompelling was kind of the point. Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  OK, but it's hard to read fiction where you don't care about any of the characters.
  - soupfordummies 1y ago
    Depends on why you read fiction. If you read it mostly for narrative, sure. If you read it mostly to explore ideas and to enjoy the artistry, probably not.
- criddell 1y ago
  It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters can be great. My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I spend any time thinking about what these characters do or say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video game NPC. Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually enjoyed or at least didn't hate.

smrtinsert 1y ago

"Love" is very loosely used here. The actual assignment is about meaning, plot, structure etc. You don't have to love anything to get value dissecting it.

Suppafly 1y ago
This, parent comment is telling on themselves, they didn't understand what the class was teaching because they chose to be obstinate instead of curious.
- BitwiseFool 1y ago
  Perhaps, but I think it would be incorrect to say that I didn't understand what the class was trying to teach me. I may be an obstinate person, but I wouldn't attribute a lack of zeal for a particular subject as an overall lack of curiosity. I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as well.

nonameiguess 1y ago

My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text. If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.

Balgair 1y ago
Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that most of the assigned books are chosen by the state, right? Obviously it varies a lot, but I can't recall any teacher actually wanting to teach a book, let alone having the freedom to choose just about anything.

jiscariot 1y ago

I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything. I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.

Rendello 1y ago
I've tried reading it maybe ten times. The funny thing is that I really enjoy it, I just inevitably put it down and forget about it. I have a hard time finishing books, though I don't have the same issue with audiobooks.
touisteur 1y ago
For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.

ikiris 1y ago

Personally loved to read until I had to do this to a river runs through it, which may be one of the most boring books I’ve ever encountered. Put me off course books for years. I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.

gamblor956 1y ago

The problem is that a lot of the themes and topics in the novel simply aren't relevant to teenagers, and won't be for years. It's why English teachers love the novel and students almost universally hate it. My English teacher also said as much at the time: most of us wouldn't appreciate this novel until well after college. We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that). The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)

littlekey 1y ago

My take on it is that a halfway decent teacher will simply want you to notice those themes, not necessarily endorse them. For example, "this book explores the ideas that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. In this essay, I will explain why I disagree with these ideas..."

dyauspitr 1y ago

Absolutely disagree. Well articulated analysis of books are generally accepted in high schools and colleges whether they are positive or critical. What you’re probably referring to is dismissive essays that brusquely say that the content doesn’t apply to them without providing a well researched reason. Those usually come from edgy layabouts that spent 10 minutes on the assignment.

setr 1y ago

Candide and White Noise I accidentally read prior to the class, not knowing they were curriculum books. Both I found absolutely hilarious. Both failed to elicit even a minor chuckle once it entered the classroom. Not from the students, not the teacher, and somehow not even myself. I don’t know what how classrooms are so categorically destructive to the book they purport to teach

kashunstva 1y ago

I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.