/lit/ - Literature

>>5794908
>in college level English course my junior year of high school
>nobody claims to know about literature or even like it
This is how every high school English class was in reality

The Awakening is so fucking good.

>>5794926
Everyone in my class always tried to be smarter than everybody else, so they all pretended to know absolutely everything about literature. I went to a weird school.

The Awakening was boring as shit though. Several hundred pages of a lady complaining about 19th century first-world problems.

"Boo hoo my diamond shoes are too tight, better kill myself!"

>class reads The Bell Jar
>everyone thinks Sylvia Plath is a crazy bitch

>>5794908
>class reads Gatsby
>"is Nick gay?????"

>>5794936
get over here and catch these hands

>>5794979
that's good analysis. his reverence for Gatsby almost reaches romantic love

>class reads Of Mice and Men
>LENNY IS SO CUTE
>class reads Lord of the Flies
>PIGGY IS SO CUTE
it's funny because they both die in the end

>>5794987
Good point. I actually get a better experience from that book if I have the idea that Nick may be gay.

>>5794908
>class reads Shakespeare
>"I can't understand this! This is unreadable!"

>>5795016
>not having a teacher that made you act out Shakespeare

>>5795027
Ugh, I had a teacher who made us do this. She always gave me the lead roles too because I was the only one that could read properly.

>>5795027
It works really well when you go to a school with 50% mexican population.
>So uhhhhh.... to be....uhhh....or not to....uhhhh....be.

Racism aside everyone sucked dick at reading Shakespeare. Shit sucked`

>>5794926
Dual Enrollment bro?

>>5794908

>Repeated every high school grade at least once
>in 11th grade we had our summer reading project/report
>I accidentally read the awakening by Kate Chopin
>The teacher flipped out saying it was only for AP students, but it was too late now
>It was the first book I enjoyed, and the first high school assignment I excelled at
>Got an A for the assignment
>It was at that point I realized maybe I'm not dumb, and all my problems up to this point stemmed from boredom and lack of enthusiasm.


Sorry OP. I just feel a very sentimental attachment to that book. It is really good. It is easier to read if you have a prior knowledge of french since some of it is in french (only a few phrases from what I remember).

Anyways. I do have an honest critique on Kate Chopin.

>>5794936

As this anon said. I like Chopin as a writer, but does anyone else get the impression that women are just awful people? I mean yeah, I get it. You're bored in your marriage and you want some madame bovary's lover type milf fucking the garden boy action. Why do you have to be a cunt about it? It isn't oppression. Its being fucking horny.

When I read The Story of an Hour I was livid. Again, I love her prose, but just the shallow vapidness of 'feminist' characters. Like I don't think I know any guy that would be happy if his family died. I can't fully articulate my thought on this without using presumptuous or anecdotal evidence. Basically though, if a guy is shacked up with a nice lady, and she is sweet to him, yeah, he'll get horny for some strange, but he ain't gunna be wishing for death on himself or his lover. Men are loyal, women are tramps.

Feminist prose does not encourage me to join the movement.

>>5795089
>I like Chopin as a writer, but does anyone else get the impression that women are just awful people?

Ok no. Guy you're responding to here and that's not the point I was trying to make at all.

It's this specific novel I didn't like, not female authors or women in general. Disliking this novel had nothing to do with the author/protagonist being female for me either. I would have disliked it just as much had the whole thing been gender-swapped. It was just boring.

There are other female authors who did similar stuff without it all seeming so tedious.

>>5795089
>>>/r9k/

>>5795067
Yeah, graduating with credits was cool. Too bad they didn't transfer to the university I'm actually attending though.

>>5795115

I didn't say I disliked female authors or women in general. I'm just saying both of the female protagonists in both the novel and short story were not very noble or admirable.

I'm saying if this is the face of the feminist movement then it isn't a good image to present. "I hope my husband dies so I can do as I please."

>>5795089
Please go >>>/r9k/

>>5795122
>>5795232
Calm down

>>5795219
>I'm just saying both of the female protagonists in both the novel and short story were not very noble or admirable.

That doesn't mean that all women everywhere, including real life, are awful. Stay away from /r9k/ it's rotting your brain.

>I'm saying if this is the face of the feminist movement

It isn't really. Might have been a bit radical at the time since back then women were considered to be little more than their husband's property so that thought that a woman could think for herself and even leave her husband if she chose seemed preposterous, but even so it certainly has little relevance to modern feminist issues.

I'm a feminist myself. I just thought the book was dreadfully boring and I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters or their problems.

I mean I get that she was supposed to have depression, and that depression doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how good or bad your life situation is, but that doesn't make it interesting to read about. Especially not in high school where I'd have rather been watching chinese cartoons or whatever.

>>5795431

Depression has everything to do with your life situation. What the hell?

>>5794979
>when nick wakes up in the photographer's bed in his underwear
deffo gay

>>5795061
Seriously what the fuck is up with people who can not read out loud. How can people be so fucking retarded that it takes them longer to figure out how the word is said then it takes to say it.

>taking summer school math class, girlfriend is taking summer school lit themes class
>16 week, 8 book/essay course condensed into six weeks, 8 essays
>steal a backpack full of books from B&N as a reward for her trouble
>spend most hours of summer school math class book-clubbing for girlfriend's lit themes class because no one reads the same shit and she was going to drown in the requirements

it's like they didn't even want her to learn about literature

>be in high school
>syllabus says we will be taught shakespeare next
>"finally something of substance," i think
>class begins and hands out our text
>it's a seven page synopsis of hamlet
>ask teacher when we are going to get the actual text that we're studying
>he tells me that is the text we're studying

>teacher assigns a list of classic novels
>have to read 2 and compare them in an essay
>class complains why there isn't Harry Potter or Twilight
>teacher explains that "this is AP English. You have to learn how to read the classics."
>we also have to learn how to do literary research, and sources are easier to find for the classics
>teacher says if we can find 5 good literary analyses for Harry Potter and Twilight, we can read them for the essay
>student attempts to prove her wrong
>she prints out a few reviews from Goodreads
>she gets upset when the teacher doesn't accept them

This was the same class who argued that the teacher was "reading too deep into things" when she talked about the symbolism from The Great Gatsby.

>>5795736
Go to bed Pepe.

>>5796428
>she prints out a few reviews from Goodreads
Fuck me.

Literary analysis of HP is easy as shit to find, what a fucking pleb.

>>5794908
>reading The Canterbury Tales in high school
>"this is so difficult! I hate this!"
>it's a fucking modern English translation
>we only have to read three selections

>>5796428
>goodreads
Was she even trying?

>>5796389
>studying Shakespeare in class
>modern English translation

Fuck me.

>>5796773

>Canterbury Tales

ayy

>participate in High School Literary Criticism contest
>read required books, analyze them
>take test and it's just multiple choice literary terms and questions to see if you actually read the book
>essay on poem is only a tie breaker
>lose to some other team
>sit behind them afterwards
>they're all reading Divergent

Ethan frome and the awakening probably destroys reading for thousands of his students a year. Both are insufferably boring.

>>5796988
pleeeb

>>5797006
Sorry, I read for enjoyment, not to watch Edith wharton extract emotional torment out of her protagonists page by insufferable page. Anyone on this board who criticizes dumas or hugo for being romanticists with no nuance but praise these two books are the real plebs

>>5796854
I fucking love Canterbury Tales

>Oh boy can't wait to read that western canon rev up those books

>Dozens of white guilt, male guilt, ayn rand, and religious propaganda
>Throw on great gatsby at the end

Fucking american education is an eternal comedy

>AP Lit
>Entire first term is feminist novels

>Take AP world history
>Professor was a balding, sturdy built tough guy from New York who's dream was becoming a librarian
>Would threaten to throw the girls through the wall if they didn't do their homework.

He was my favorite teacher.

>>5797097
>ayn rand in school
Jesus fucking christ.

>>5794908
but long books such in lit classes

half the classes are spent on people trying to be smug on not reading the book, and half the lessons are half-assed analysis which misses massive proportions of the book

>>5797158
It was two of her books - and a short story. They must be really worried the new brown america wont vote right

>Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South.

>>5796785
>studying Romeo and Juliet
>it's the 1996 film

>go to catholic school
>never get to read augustine or aquinas or any other based christian theologians and philosophers

Reading plays in high school was the worst, since everybody was a pleb and we had to read out loud in class. Especially Shakespeare.

Nobody knows
How to read
Passages written
Like this

So they read. Them like. This. It sounds. Fucking. Infuriating.

Combine that with the utterly soulless readings of the most dramatic passages. I cringed so hard reading Macbeth and hearing this randomly assigned girl next to me mumble "Lay on, Macduff. And damned be him. That first cries hold. Enough."

I overcompensated by putting my heart and soul into any reading I did for a play. Me and my non-pleb friend begged our teacher to let us read for Algernon and Jack when we read The Importance of Being Earnest and it was a huge relief from the usual garbage.

>>5794908
>teacher makes us act out Hedda Gabler
>everyone complains the whole way through

If you have a hard time reading Ibsen, I don't know what to tell you.

>>5797030
So the book was too intense for you? Okay stick to gardening books, seems your level m8

>>5797185
>studying Romeo and Juliet
>teacher makes us watch 1996 version along with West Side Story
>well at least one of those movies are good

>>5797224
We watched the one with titties in my class.

>High School English
>Senior year
>Reading Ayn Rand
>mfw

>>5796988
But they're easy to read.

>>5797185
>study Titanic at film school
>it's actually the ship

>>5797302
>I didn't go to film school, I went to ships.
OH IT SHOWS ANON, IT SHOWS.

>>5797315

>>5796370
>9th grade English
>mfw some borderline retarded girl who literally stumbled over words like "the" volunteered to read every time the teacher asked

>>5797365
>9th grade English
>everyone is a borderline illiterate redneck

>>5797141
The AP World teacher at my school was a former Israeli commando, glad I didn't have that class.

I found The Awakening dull and inconsequential.
>marry for money
>my husband expects me to bear some responsibility
>complain
>so unfair, much oppress
>have an affair with some tight piece of ass
>husband keeps getting on my case
>leave him and my kids
>live in a shack
>lover doesn't want to peruse our relationship
>drown self
Of course its a oversimplification of the story but, reading from the point of view that Léonce is the protagonist made the read a bit more enjoyable.

>>5795128
:^) idktf

>>5797413
these types of deconstructions remind me of the type of people who complain about The Catcher in the Rye being bad because of Holden. Good job at not getting it lel

>>5794908
I tended to not complain in English, unless to had anything to do with Last of the Mohicans. I fucking hate that book.

>>5797387
Why? The trolling possiblities are endless. All you'd have to do is mention Palestinian statehood. And its not like he can do anything about it because mah first amendment.

>>5797981
>palestinian
>statehood
kek, pick one

>>5797194

>I overcompensated by putting my heart and soul into any reading I did for a play

>no shame fedora detected

>>5798020
>israeli
>legitimate state
kek, pick one

>>5798089
>delusions of a world sovereign
tell me, what makes a state legitimate?

>>5797981
>implying he wouldn't have had the anon kicked out of the class regardless of muh furst amenmen

>>5797097
Can you remember what you read specifically?

>>5797571
Doesn't he rape his sister?

>>5798110
>Implying voicing an opinion is grounds for getting kicked out of class.
>Implying implications

lrn2constitutionallaw

>>5798547
Take your own advice
People don't have rights in the States until they turn 18

Because it's horrible and drenched with incredibly obvious symbolism. I love my English AP teacher, except with her opinions on this book. I didn't like it, I must've been some lazy idiot or I just didn't "get it".

There was nothing to get! She was virtually a fucking princess. She didn't have to take care of the children, she had a loving husband. She got to spend her days relaxing, talking to people and drawing. Oh, poor you, you don't get to fuck some random guy! Boo Hoo. Well, just kill yourself! Don't think of the children... just jump. Fucking idiot.

>>5798568
I'm sure the same cunt who has been calling this shitty books detractors plebs all thread will call you out on this boring, useless book.

Stay at home dad here, shit is cash.

>>5798641
My dad was a stay at home dad as well anon.
One bit of advice for you: don't forget to feed and bathe your child.

;_;

>>5798684
I believe people judge me by my kids cleanliness behavior and speech

>>5794908
>High School English
>Reading Beowulf
>Not even old English version or anything
>Fucking Beowulf
>A story about a goddamn badass going to slay fucking monsters
>"This is so boring"
>"Ughhh"
>"Can't we read Harry Potter"
>"Anon you just like this because you're 'into reading'"

>>5798858
School poisons the mind.

>>5794908
>question about book that was read a month ago shows up on a test
>"that's not fair!" aka everyone forgot everything about the book within an astoundingly small amount of time

>>5798858
>you just like reading because you're into reading

What point was that dumbass trying to make?

>Be me
>Book Report thyme
>Gotta compare two novels on an underlying theme
>Compare Handmaids Tale and Faith of the Fallen from Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series
>Religion is a mechanism of controlling the masses
>Misprounce tithe during presentation
>Tip fedora

>>5794908
>caring about things that happened in high school

neckbeards sure 'nough

>>5794991
Fuck you, I hadn't read LOtF yet.

>>5798963
that he's a dumb autist who'll enjoy garbage like beowulf because it's ebin XD

>>5799014
>Book Report thyme
what a coincidence! I had Compendium Reading Oregano just a week ago.

>>5799037
It's good, right?

>>5798089
>legitimate

Legitimate as most other states anon

>>5797169
>implying that American Public Schools would ever assign Ayn Rand

>>5798475
Not that anon, but I always thought that Holden has such a negative view of everything because he was sexually abused in the past. This is why he has so much resentment for adults, why he couldn't sleep with a hooker, and why he got uncomfortable real quick when his professor(?) started getting kinda touchy.

>>5799030
It was in spoiler tags you dumb cunt.

>>5799367
....
so much misinterpretation.

I feel physically ill after this one.

>>5799385
I don't ever have to worry about that shit! 99% of the time spoilers are used for laffs.

>>5799446
Not even mad, I really want to know. What's the general consensus as to what the symbolism/meaning is in Catcher in the Rye?

I've tried to work out something, and that's the best I could do.

>>5794987
I think Nick waking up in the photographer's bed answers that question.

I think High Schools should teach appreciation of texts by giving students shit works and directing the students to rip it apart. That's how you teach kids to think critically about a text. Instead they just give them shit texts and have them look for symbolism or other banal nonsense.

I had a tolerable high school experience
>Othello
>Midsummer Night's Dream
>Gatsby
>Scarlet Letter
>Wuthering Heights
>Captain Corelli's Mandolin (it was alright)
>Tonsapoetry
>All the rhetorical analysis
At least I learned how to critical thinking.

Basically to sum up the dumbest parts of my honors and AP Literature
>Women falling in love with Heathcliff from "Wuthering Heights", despite him being a sociopath
>Reading Huck Finn and nearly prevented from using the word "nigger"
>Reading shitty feminist novels that were supposed to represent Women authors, like Awakening or Wuthering Heights (Edith Wharton was based though)


Besides that, we were taught the Odyssey and Illiad, though that was taken out a few years ago. Fuck was I mad

My AP class was almost entirely 20th century short story thematic interpretation with the Shakespeare component being sonnets and structure.

It was awesome.

>>5800629
Women are retarded, deal with it.

>16 years old
>reading A Brave New World in 11th Grade
I'm not joking
>less than half way through students complain about it so much that the teacher actually caves and says we can move on to the next on our list

Even at 16 I thought what she did was ridiculous

My Highschool was a daycare. My freshman class of 900 students turned into a graduating class of 250 by senior year

>>5801820
I read BNW in year 10, but my teacher gave us some choice. I think the options were Looking for Alibrandi, 1984, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and, obviously, Brave New World.

The book I remember disliking the most in high school was Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. But that was before I really got serious about literature, so I want to give it another chance

>>5801825

Rereading what I wrote, it sounds like I'm complaining that she assigned it to us, but what really pisses me off to no end is that she actually stopped the instruction because of whiny teenagers. They're sixteen! Be a fucking adult and stand your ground!

I was enjoying it, and I'm still bitter about it.

>>5801852
What a shame. My high school british literature class never got to finish 1984, but it was due to time constraints

>>5794908
>college English course
>teacher assigns several dogshit books

look i get what you're doing but go fuck yourself

>>5801886
Such as?

>>5794979
>Read gatsby
>only one to notice all his shady friends have jewish names.
>Ask
>Get in school suspension.

>>5797097
they have you reading atlas shrugged around 14 at my school.

Wonder who funds my public school.

>high school senior English
>for every piece of literature we read, we do 10 worksheets
>every class period is just a rush to finish the worksheets then mess around until the end
>made me hate literature
>4 years later am a Math major and English minor who reads for fun

>Book reports
>Read brave new world.
>Present report to class
>Go full /pol/ Hitler tier speech about how we are becoming docile by being given what we want.
>Teacher pulls me aside next day saying i upset her.
>Tells my parents my speech scared her.
>Tells principle my speech scared members of class.

>>5801852
>book about people becoming cattle by being given happy feelies and no hard struggle.
>let's them get out of reading it.

Kill me

>>5801892
he never prompted us for thoughts on their quality to see if we'd spot flaws ourselves, and working out their themes and ideologies was exercise for our tastes and an attempt to wean us off the comforts of notions about "serious literature". and when I say dogshit I don't mean they were hilariously and obviously bad, I mean they were frustratingly mediocre and occasionally propagandistic. and the good stuff was good but entry-level.

in other words, he laid a foundation for independent studies. I don't know if you can ask for more than that, and I never will

>AP Lit teacher makes you write and perform slam poetry

>go through pleb english
>get to take the ap test anyway
>get college credit despite being in pleb english

Everyone in AP English had to read shitty books and write essays all year while I got to take an easy class, read whatever I wanted in my free time. Was a pretty sweet deal.

>>5795219
I haven't read The Awakening (or anything by Chopin, really), but perhaps the book was more about critiquing men/the patriarchy and less about empowering women. To elaborate, the fact that the protagonist could only be free pursue her desires if her husband died shows how utterly powerless she is. Not only is her freedom constrained by her live husband, but her final freedom is still dependent on him in that he needs to die for it to happen. This does not call for women to hate their husbands or propagate misandry, but rather represents the female struggle in a patriarchal system. The protagonist is likely not a role model, then, but an every(wo)man.

>>5803191
To be fair though, they get very good at writing essays, or the ones at ny school did.

>>5797097
Where the fuck did you go to school? I've never heard of Rand being assigned to high school kids.

>AP teacher obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald
>he could never admit that Tender is the Night and This Side of Paradise are actually shit

>>5796988
I liked Ethan Frome. No other book I've read has evoked that winter atmosphere as well.

>>5794908
>AP teacher and I had opposite tastes in literature
>we never got along because of that

>AP English 2 years ago
>All we have to read is The Poisonwood Bible and 1984
kek

>>5803191
Was it Lang or Lit? The Lang test is extremely easy.

>High School Freshman English class
>teacher we had for the class was in her first year at my school
>teacher is talking about our first essay for the class
>mentions that every paragraph should be at least 12 sentences long, and not doing so would cost you points
>applies this to all writing assignments
>everyone writes a bunch of unnecessary shit to get points on each paragraphs that wouldn't be needed to get their point across, people merge different topics that they would make into different paragraphs just so it would qualify the requirement
>ingrains in everybody's brain

>meanwhile, next year's English class
>different English teacher
>class finishes their first essay for the class
>teacher turns back the essays and mentions to the class that we all needed work to build our paragraph structure, saying that they were too long and stretched out

Some fucking teachers

>>5803489
Not OP, but at my old high school the honors sophomore English classes read Anthem.

>>5804878
>tfw I failed the lang test b/c i speak a nonstandard dialect

>>5797230
you mean the one with naked 15 years old qt in it? From 1966?
Imo best version
best tits too

>>5801959
Should she have given them a choice?

>>5801948

Pretty much exactly the same but replace math with genetics.

>>5794908
>Heart of Darkness
>everyone in AP class groaning through the whole thing

>>5800629
In what fucking way is Wuthering Heights a feminist book? Anyway, I personally enjoyed it even more than Jane Eyre, that is to say, a lot.

>>5806715
I didn't read Heart of Darkness until a history class in uni and everyone loved it.

>>5795431
Oh my god, if I have to read another defense of Kate crapin I'm going to vomit

I've been able to 'get' most literature I've read, but when white women start complaining about their lives my brain shuts down and the words I think are: "CUNT"

>tfw you get the feeling OP describes on /lit/ and in undergrad
>go to grad school thinking you'll finally find collegiality
>tfw you get the feeling OP describes in grad school

>>5797177
Sounds like the formula for a really shitty book

>People in my AP Lit Class
>Pretended to be the intellectuals of our class
>Got confused and angry when we had to read Shakespeare

>>5797571
>implying there's something to get

>>5798568
Best review top lel

>>5795115
I'm not your guy, friend.

>>5801952
Fight the good fight

>>5803301
That idea is fucking retarded, too.

I have read Chopin and she's really talentless

>>5806870
Americans are really, really, really, really, really dumb

>>5794908
>read Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies while in high school sophomore year
>there's always around 70% of the class at any time complaining about what we're reading
>drop after that year
>go to community college
>English 101
>same type of kids, with no interest in the course at all
>1st day
>teacher rants about not using text talk i.e.
>American Literature, poems, Dickens, and more good shit
>class pretty okay, size doesn't change much ~20, good discussions

Fucking CC

>>5806947
I'm not your friend, buddy.

>>5807045
American TV culture is poison. You could tell which kids didnt watch TV

>Young male teacher assigns Johnny Got His Gun
>Complaints from EVERYONE, parents, teachers, female students, dumb males, etc
>he shelves it half way through
>stole my copy from rotting piles of never to be used books

>>5807408

>Complaints from EVERYONE, parents, teachers, female students, dumb males, etc

for a reason
a good way to make people hate anti-war novels
those who like to read such stuff are usually enjoy to read of suffering of others to realize that their life isn't that bad

>teacher assigns class to prepare talks about utopian/dystopian and sci-fi literature
>free to choose books and topic
>tisgunbegood.gif
>spend the next two weeks reading and analyzing 1984, Fahrenheit 451, BNW and some of my favorite sci-fi novels from this time (inb4 pleb)
>actually enjoying working on my talk
>week of presentation
>half the class 'forgot' their presentations at home
>some faggots made 1.5 hour long PowerPoint presentation mostly filled with scenes from mediocre sci-fi action movies and plot summaries from Wikipedia
>they finish at end of the lesson
>get an A
>Teacher : "allright I think we spent enough time on this talks we start our next topic in the next lesson ”
>"b-but my talk..."
>"Im sorry anon but we really have to move on with the curriculum "
>spent the next two weeks of lessons reading newspaper articles about genetical engineering

Why did I even bother

>>5807599
If you are an american there is literally no point bothering with school, since it is so easy to get into state college, and masters programs from prestigious schools dont even care about highschool.

>>5796428
>>5796549
>>5796777
I"m in college and for the first paper in my existentialism class we were required to find two outside sources beyond the textbook.
>Mfw the professor returns the essays a week or so later and tells the class that blogs do not count as academic sources.
It's fucking college. How retarded do you have to be to get blogs?

>>5803489
Rand gets assigned to about half of english 12 classes in Canadian high schools. Mostly the fountainhead

>>5807620
It's just that I put so much effort into it just to see some teachers pets receive an A for showing Matrix scenes.

>>5807658
welcome to the real world, it doesnt change when you get a job either.

>It's just that I put so much effort into it just to see some bosses pet get a promotion for letting her tits hang out.

>>5796854
photoshop a load of buttholes everywhere and you're on the right lines

booty had medieval writers like woah

>studying A-level English at a small sixth form
>second year, most of the class drops out
>literally just me and three other students having lessons with the headteacher
>get to flex my sweet lit gains without getting ignorant comments in response

shit was so cash

>read The Kite Runner (some horribly written book about a goatfucker kid in Pakistan who needs to grow up and run a slurpee machine)
>get to the rape scene
>everyone starts laughing
>at every in class discussion, nobody can stay on task
>"I think Assef is gay and if he thinks he's not gay then he's just seriously kidding himself." from every mouth of every teenager in the class
>even eight chapters away from the rape scene, people still bring it up

God, high school was a boner.

>>5807932
that scene gave me a boner too

>12th year English (high school)
>have to choose book out of pre-selected list (we had discussion groups)
>can't decide between Great Gatsby or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
>decide to go with the latter

>1 year later: 1st year English course in university
>Gatsby is one of the 5 books we have to read

>this year: 2nd year course in American history
>divided into sections: 1st semester deals with history up to civil war
>prof designs course with several books you have to read
>last class of the year, talking about second section (which I won't be taking)
>HAVE TO READ GATSBY

I get it's the "Great American Novel", I'll admit I enjoyed the book, but this is getting shoe-horned hard

Also in high school, everyone taking English got to go on a field trip to watch the Gatsby movie

My teacher encouraged us to sneak in food

>>5794991
Fuck you too, I haven't read it yet too!

>>5799030

>>5808107
see
>>5799385

>>5795089
>>Repeated every high school grade at least once
You graduated high school when you were 22? MAYBE EVEN OLDER THAN THAT!?
Anon pls

>>5801952
That should be a compliment

Thinking about it, why do schools require their students to read classic novels, while not having the same requirement for classic music and paintings?

All are artforms that require knowledge of the art to understand/appreciate certain works, so why is literature the one that's hammered into students?

>>5808686
Because it's easier to apply awful didactic approach to literature than it is other mediums.

>>5808186

>Implying I graduaed.

I dropped out at 19.

>>5808710
that's a shame. Did you get a GED?

>>5808096
You were wise to choose One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, though. Better book.

>High school AP Lang & Comp Class.
>The teacher is obsessed with traveling, all he ever talks about
>Throughout the year he only assigns short travelogues and two novels: Travels With Charley (go figure) and Black Boy.
>Never actually discuss literary devices in class, the teacher just recaps what happened in the reading
>Everybody except for a select few bombs the AP Practice test and the test itself.
I have no idea how this man ever got a job teaching literature. He was a nice guy, but he didn't know a single thing about the subject.

>>5808771
>black boy
>novel
unless you meant native son

>>5808775
bb might as well be fiction.

>>5808775
Sorry, autobiography.
>implying Richard Wright didn't make up most of it anyway

>>5808771
>Black Boy
I read this in middle school

>>5808695
But why even cover them in the first place?

>>5808811
it's just status quo dude
books have been studied for a longer time so we study those

I'm curious, what books did anyone actually enjoy in high school?
For me, it was the Scarlet Letter and Animal Farm.

>>5808927
>Animal Farm
>Of Mice and Men
>Macbeth
>Hamlet
>The Red Badge of Courage
>Walden
>Frankenstein
>Canterbury Tales
>Julius Caesar

>>5808927
>The Things They Carried
>Macbeth
>1984
>Of Mice and Men
>The Great Gatsby
>Beowulf
>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

>>5808927
>my own choice
Of Mice and Men

>required reading
If I enjoyed anything, I can't remember what it was. I remember being bored to death by Ethan Frome and To Kill a Mockingbird though.

>>5796854

>I was home schooled for the four years leading before American high school
>Guidance counselors assume I'm retarded or something
>Put my in 9th grade 'alternative' English
>Fellow classmates are the bottom percentile of our grade
>I doubt some of them can read confidently even today
>Teacher is a young Jew lady who smokes weed every day before class
>Nice as hell to me because she understands I'm not retarded
>Her eyes are red as fuck every day
>Mumbles and grins throughout the lesson
>Tells the class 'To Kill a Mockingbird' would "take too long", so we watch HALF of the movie
>The school principal asks me if I would like to transfer to an honors section, says there's been a mistake on the roll
>Ask if I'll have to actually do work
>"Most likely the load would extend outside of class and provoke a challenge for you in class as well"
>No thanks
>Pass with 102 average

>Sophomore English
>Gave up caring about school
>Our Honors English II teacher resigns a week before the semester starts
>An assistant football coach with a minor in English is our new teacher
>He makes a valiant effort while I sleep
>Only read two assigned books
>Nectar in a Siev
>Cyrano de Bergerac
>I enjoyed them both
>The rest of the reading included 'Night', 'The Odyssey', and other shit I've forgotten

>Still Sophomore year
>Liberal SJW Civics and Economics teacher surprises us with 'A People's History of the United States'
>Mutter "Wow I was expecting guns germs and obama ballots" (this was circa 2008)
>She actually smiles and chuckles
>Write angsty final essay for that class, 8 page minimum, on how Manifest Destiny contrasts with The Holy Land 1917 and on, defined by the actions of the Jewish people toward the British and Muslims in the area since their arrival
>Get a 96, highest grade in the class
>Teacher respects me from then on, and vice versa

>Junior Year
>English III Honors
>Teacher is some ugly lady from Kazakhstan
>Soft spoken, complains about the movie Borat a few times
>I'm either doing lines of oxycodone behind my binder on my desk or sleeping on my desk at any given time in that class
>Failing miserably
>Literally turned in nothing for the first 2 months
>Start paying attention
>Read 'Of Mice and Men', 'Into the Wild', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'The Great Gatsby', 'The Sun Also Rises'
>Sleep through 'The Scarlett Letter'
>Thank you spark notes
>Pass with a 69.5

>>5809000

Trips confirm my high school days were glorious


>Still Junior year
>U.S. History Honors with same teacher as last year
>Read 'The Jungle'
>Enjoy it because I can appreciate the necessary Socialism of the 19th century, while retaining disdain for modern Socialism

>Senior Year
>English 4 (non honors)
>Same weird Slav/Turk lady
>Focus of English IV is English lit
>Beowulf
>Compare translations
>Mexican'treads and illiterate operators of lifted trucks fill the class
>No one can understand what's going on
>"But why didn't Beowulf just kill the dragon by himself?"
>"He was like 80 years old"
>"When did that happen"
>The Canterbury Tales
>We read the intro and like one pilgrim's section
>Macbeth
>I read it all day one because I'm interested/drug free
>Spend the next month bored out of my mind
>Sleep every day
>Le Morte de Arthur
>Wow Lancelot is a cock
>Back to sleep

>Somehow graduate
>Win award for "Most Improved Student"
>Ok

>>5808927
>Don Quixote
>Farenheit 451
>Brave New World
>Othello
>The House of the Spirits
>All of Moliere's plays
>Poe's short stories
>Love in the Time of Cholera

And more. Feels good to have a great literature teacher. Seriously, when i was in highschool, people who didn't care about books took literature, just because the teacher new so much about literature.

>>5808975
>red badge
I liked that one too, it was just disappointing for me to discover that Crane don't write much that was nearly as good. His poetry is ok.

>>5794908
What I learned from high school English:
-Fortunado is a drunk and a dick.
-Hercules is a wife-beater and a womanizer.
-Aldous Huxley is has the worst possible and absolutely most racist idea of paradise ever. Like. Ever.
-Odysseus spends twenty years in hell because he mouthed off to a disgusting family abusing cyclops.
-A flock of birds would own post WWII aircraft a fight.
-Fear birds for a couple years because you stand no chance to their power.
-Essays suck.

>>5809026
Shut the fuck up. Nobody wants to read your jack off green text.

>>5809000
>>5809026
yeah i think this was not interesting or worth the time it took to post/read
thanks for blogging though

>>5808927
Pirandello is the only thing in school that got me going "whoa" and actually got me reading books.

>>5794908
>The Awakening
Fuck I hated that book.
"My second affair isn't buying me shit anymore, goodbye cruel world, death to men"

>>5803163
I would have dropped out right there

>>5808927
>of Mice and Men
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>A Tale of Two Cities
>Hamlet
>Things Fall Apart
>Heart of Darkness (kinda)
>King Lear
>Macbeth
>Othello
>Romeo and Juliet

>Read Catcher In the Rye in 10th grade
>Get 10 points deducted because I included a quote containing "goddam"
>Work the teacher down to 5 points
>"Well okay Anon, but in the future, just write the first letter than use stars for the others"

>AP lit in high school (IB actually but similar)
>We learn about sonnets
>We have to write our own sonnets
>Without warning, teacher announces that we will be presenting them to the class and having a "critique"
>Panic because I'm an autism
>Most of the students did incredibly shitty ones about their girlfriends and stuff
>Teacher gives all sorts of inappropriate comments in attempts to make the other students laugh, no actual discussion of the sonnets
>I get called up
>I had written a long, abstract sonnet about my dead dog, actually tried hard on it
>Go up and read it
>Nobody says anything
>Teacher breaks the silence with "Anon, that was the most emo thing I've ever heard"
>Everyone laughs
>Sit back down
>The only sonnet he said anything positive about was a tumblr girl's ode to a fan-fiction pairing that shoehorned a bunch of vocabulary words

>>5809375
What a retarded teacher

>>5809416
>not writing a scatological sonnet

>>5797981
>he
She was a woman. Suzy 'With an Uzi' was her nickname, on account of the Uzi she carried during her services. That's the only thing she revealed about her military career, the lack of details made it somewhat frightening to imagine.

>>5794991
>I havent read either
Why do I always click on spoilers?

>>5809416
>a tumblr girl's ode to a fan-fiction pairing
Something oddly similar happened to me in my senior year. A caricature of a tumblr girl presented this "fee verse" poem (which she introduced as an "epic") about characters from Avatar (the animated series on Nickelodeon) interacting with characters from a show called Supernatural, and teaming up to rid the world of some sort of monsters.
It was fucking surreal how bad it was. Since it was free verse, she had an excuse to be as "free" as she needed to be, so it was essentially her reading page after page of a fan fiction she had written. There was this weird thing where between every few prose paragraphs, she would throw in a crudely-done couplet. The presentation took probably 25 minutes and she received a standing ovation from the teacher. All of the students were talking about how ridiculous it was.
I can't get across how horribly-written the whole thing was; I would have assumed it was a "screw with the teacher because it's your last year" satire or something, but considering that she was obese, a "feminist", had that stereotypical blue hair, and talked exclusively in tumbr jive, I doubt that's what it was.

>>5807420

>>5794908
>honors advanced English class
>first day teacher asks us what each of our favorite books/authors are
>A solid half of the class says John Green and "The Fault in Our Stars" because, I shit you not, they "enjoy his use of symbolism"
>entire literary breadth of the class consists of required high school reading and John Green
College isn't any better man, that is unless you can get into the upper level english classes, but even then it's just not worth the effort.

>>5794979

EVERY FUCKING BOOK

> "Is Huck Finn gay?"
> "Is Holden Caufield Gay?"
> "Is Gatsby gay?"
> "Are Ralph and Piggy gay?"
> "Are George and Lenny gay?"
> mfw

>>5808927
absolutely loved gulliver's travels. heart of darkness that same year was amazing too (teacher was incredible). I also enjoyed The Scarlet Letter but not as much as those two

>>5801934
ha

>>5806644
Just googled. 10/10 tits, some of the best I've ever seen.

>>5801934
Wow

>point out fucking obvious things
>get suspended

murica

>>5808719


Yeah and I went to college shortly there after.

The problem was that I had a hard time fitting in in school. I didn't learn the proper social cues and rules growing up. Now that I'm in college I think my problem was that I was just really bored in class and would be disruptive and disrespectful.

I would have gotten my GED sooner, but with the exception of my wonderful mother, I was surrounded by unsupportive nitwits. I thought there was a stigma attached to getting a GED(my brother called it a good enough diploma and a burger flippers certificate. mind you he is 40 and works security at a wal mart.) Anyways the more I talked to my guidance councilor about it the more it made sense. If I could go back and get it at 16 and go right to college I would do it in a heart beat.

>Develop a booming baritone junior year
>Senior year I take AP Literature
>The girls in class nominated me to read poems for the class
>One girl left a note in my yearbook saying she wished she had a recording of my voice she could fall asleep to

Apparently it was hot. Shame I was sexually oblivious and had crippling social anxiety.

>read Huck Finn
>class is full of white people
>my teacher tells us to not be offended by "nigger" because it was what they said back then
>teacher says how some versions completely take out nigger and other "inappropriate" words for school
>mfw

>>5810132
Why are americans so obsessed with homosexuality? Are they insecure?

>>5810464
Simpler times...

>>5809493
Was she hot?
1-10?
Pics

>>5812390
Yes.

>>5810464
Right?

>>5798553
Wrong, Tinker v. Des Moines that students still have constitutional rights.

>>5798547
>he thinks USians have rights to speech that aren't official liberalist/conservative dogma
kek gyg qiq coc xux

>In High School English
>Whole class had to read Maya Angelou's "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings"
>On a particular day for a period of class, the whole class was around this same part in the book and we had to read silently.
>We were at the part where Maya vividly describes being raped and the aftermath of how destroyed her cunt was and I couldn't help but become aroused by it

NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SCENE AFTERWARDS AND THE TEACHER JUST MOVES ON WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT IT IN DISCUSSION

>>5812961
> very sexual AP teacher
>talks about phallic symbols and sex all the time
>none of us ever want to look him in the face while he's talking about it
>"so...what do you guys think about whale sperm?"

>>5812976
he said sperm!

>mfw my art teacher was conservative

>senior year
>chick tells me she is has great interest in literature
>calls herself a "book nerd"
>the only things she reads is John Green, Hunger Games and all that other YA shit.
>Has never even heard of 1984 or any other well known classic.

>>5797315
hello there /tv/, nice to see you.

>be assigned Beloved in High School
>fuck reading this, mandatory reading is always shit
>read a couple of chapters
>her prose is whatever
>4 years later
>hmm morrison is held in high regard, maybe I should have actually read Beloved
>while having a smoke, read a piece she did for chipotle on a discarded cup at the park
>thisshitsamazing.jpeg
>mfw I was a pleb
>mfw I am now pleb squared

>>5794908
To their credit The Awakening really is a piece of shit. 1st world problems: the book.

>>5799268
Went to a US public school, we read Anthem in freshman year Honors English. I guess if we had to read her, it could have been a lot worse.

>>5797324
Why the fuck would you ever pour your milk before you cereal?

>>5806870
Ugh, I know the feeling. I'm continually shocked by how little the other students in my program have read. How can you even consider choosing a specialty when you have such a narrow perspective to begin with? It seems like the PhD students are better, though.

>sophomore year
>advanced english
>Heart of Darkness on reading list at beginning of year
>fuck yes
>only read a passage from it to compare it to Things Fall Apart and how it generalized Africans to be uncivil
I still got a 100 on the essay at least

>>5794908
>freshman year
>short story part of the year
>have to write two paper on a story
>avoid doing it until last night
>finish it at 4 in the morning
>get character analysis back
>49
I was retarded when I was a freshman lel